Those 8 minutes and 46 seconds Derek Chauvin spent crushing the neck of George Floyd reveals another police problem that’s hiding in plain sight in Toronto as much as in Minneapolis and New York. How many policewomen have killed Black people in suspicious circumstances? I doubt many, if any at all. How many non-white police […]
The Plague-Ground – As white as the driven snow. Read More »
Doctors and lawyers have liability insurance. So do hairdressers and barbers. In fact, so does anyone who owns a car. Get a few speeding tickets and suddenly your premiums rocket – and either you slow down or you stop driving because the cost is prohibitive. Why can’t we do this with rogue cops? Why can’t
The Plague-Ground – What could stop rogue cops? Insurance. Read More »
Back in 2007 some Apple engineers fiercely resisted adding a camera to the new iPhone. “Who would ever take a picture with their phone?” It seems of the 1,436,300,000,000 digital photos and videos shot this year, enough of them are of Black people and members of minorities being shot by police. Or suffocated. Or merely
The Plague-Ground – Take your picture, mister? Read More »
Georges Clemenceau said that war is too important to be left to the generals. But civil war? Or even civil unrest? Not if General James Mattis has his way. When Mattis resigned as Donald Trump’s hand-picked Secretary of Defense in 2017, he said nothing (and I mean nothing) beyond “I had no choice but to
The Plague-Ground – Generals Read More »
I was raised on politics and the English language. Or rather, on Politics and the English Language. That’s the title of George Orwell’s essay on how thought may corrupt language, but language also corrupts thought – and now more than ever it seems. Orwell is best-known for his dystopian novels Animal Farm and 1984 which gave
The Plague-Ground – All issues are political issues Read More »
I’ve been on both sides of an intervention. Once, back in 1990 when my two great (and sadly late) friends, Arthur Gelgoot and Charles Fremes, staged an intervention that stopped my steep slide into addiction. Since then I’ve taken part in half a dozen interventions, not as the person in freefall from alcohol or drugs,
The Plague-Ground – It’s time for an intervention Read More »
I haven’t read a book in well over a year. Sure, I dip into books, extracting what I need for work. Often and ironically, this involves writers whom I invite to Ramsay Talks to speak about their . . . books. I also listen to books feverishly, gobs and gobs of them. If it’s an
The Plague-Ground – Why can’t I read anymore? Read More »
One million fewer people live in New Zealand than in the Greater Toronto Area. Yet as of last night, New Zealand has 1,504 cases of COVID-19 and 22 deaths. The GTA meanwhile has 10,726 cases and 801 deaths. Just as New Zealand’s success in fighting the pandemic is far greater than most any other country,
The Plague-Ground – A New Kind of Political Leader Read More »
The awful news out of our long-term care homes punctures whatever myth of exceptionalism we held about ourselves. It will be harder to claim: “We’re better than that” when cockroach infestations are a feature of how we care for the very old, and not a bug. I was going to write about this inconvenient truth,
The Plague-Ground – What part of “now” don’t you understand? Read More »
My wife Jean and I once trekked 1,000 miles on the Appalachian Trail. It took us three months with our 45 lb. packs strapped to our backs as we slogged our way up and down the peaks of North America’s oldest mountains from Georgia to West Virginia and beyond. It was the summer of 1992.
The Plague-Ground – It is solved by walking Read More »
No other public library system in the world is bigger and busier than Toronto’s. Not New York. Not London. Us. Nearly 70 per cent of Torontonians use the Toronto Public Library. During the pandemic, with every one of its 100 branches closed, online demand has more than doubled. The Library has even launched a digital
The Plague-Ground – Librarians are first-responders Read More »
I’ve always wanted to write a fund-raising appeal that starts with that question. You have money. We need money. Give it to us. Please. What this lacks in subtlety it makes up in reality: rich people have more of the very thing you need than unrich people do. So if you can focus on them,
The Plague-Ground – Are you rich? Read More »
