Legal Equality

I don’t want to bore you with a laborious explanation of a legal concept, so I will keep this one very short: everybody is treated equally when it come to the law. What we work towards as a society is providing equal protection and benefit from the law to each and every person.  I’m going to assume all of you, my wonderful readers, are totally on-board with this.

But here’s the catch, the rub, the fly in the ointment: any law that protects you will protect the people you detest as well. It has to protect them, or it would be useless as a law. It’s interesting to watch what happens when the law rules in favour of something unpopular. Suddenly, a small group of people who normally champion rights and equality and due process become vocal advocates for making an exception to the law. I have two examples.

There’s a piece of property in town that has been owned by a developer for 30 years, but has been left undeveloped due to opposition from the local residents. The battle was back in front of city council again, and as a part of the fight, the developer’s lawyer made a Freedom of Information act request to see all of the public record correspondence between one of the most vocal opposing residents and city council. I understand why this upset people, and I agree that it might make average citizens less inclined to communicate with their councillor, but that’s unfortunately beside the point. If we demand that our elected officials are as open and transparent as possible, and that they make all official communication available as a part of the public record, then we have to accept that everyone gets to see those records, even people we disagree with.

The second example is a little bit steamier. Strippers! Specifically, a lady who was supposed to do a zombie-themed burlesque as a part of Shock Stock, a horror convention. She was going to do her strip-tease in a local bar, but the by-law officers descended and made it clear that there would be arrests and fines a’plenty if she dared to do her act. That is because, in London Ontario, you can only do a strip-tease act in a venue designated as an adult entertainment venue. Since the bar was not one of the few authorized strip clubs, the act was forbidden. And that’s fine: they went by the book, and enforced the existing bylaw. The trouble is, the law wasn’t applied equally a few weeks after that when the fire fighters stripped down to their skivvies to raise money for cancer research. Was this all-male beefcake revue held in a designated adult entertainment venue? Nope. And yet, they were allowed to perform the show with no threat of fine or incarceration.

I’m not making an ethical or moral judgement on either of these situations, because that’s not the issue. My personal standards shouldn’t be the guideline on when a law is applicable. We should absolutely review and change any law that does not serve the public good, but that has to happen through the established process. And until the due diligence has been completed, the law has to be enforced fairly and equally.

 

Grief

You may remember this post, where I wondered if anyone would tell me if my father had passed on. Two weeks ago I received my answer in the form of a phone call from my mother. My father passed away on July 11, 2011, a few days after his 66th birthday.

Grief is one of those human experiences that we study obsessively through our stories and art, as we try to understand it and prepare for it when it touches our own lives. My fear had been that I would feel no sadness or loss from his passing, and because of that, I would be revealed as some kind of defective, emotionally dysfunctional human monster. I’m still afraid of not being normal, of people finding out that I’m broken, and yes, I know this is an irrational fear.

I wasn’t numb or unaffected. I had not seen my father for almost 20 years, and the last few years of our family life together were ugly for everyone involved, but the news of his death was a punch to my gut. A sinking sense of finality. I felt the urge to lash out and rage in response to the news, but some presence of mind kept me from that. Instead, I finished the phone call and  decided to go out for a run to process my feelings.

I set out along one of my normal routes, with no set time frame or distance in mind. As I made my way down the street, I looked up into the sky at the television broadcast tower that loomed in the distance. I grew up in the shadow of that tower, with our backyard backing onto the field that the tower stands in. The tower marks the location of my first memories, a real-life map pin that shows where my life began.

I plotted out a new route, one that took me into my old neighborhood and past my childhood home. As I ran towards the old house, I went through the scattered snapshot memories that I have of my childhood. I rummaged through those few memories for nice moments involving my dad.

I jogged down my old street and I slowed down to a walk as I passed in front of the old house. I looked at the front yard where my dad, my brother and I played ball and tag. The yard where my dad taught me how to throw a ball and swing a bat. Through the front window, I saw the living room where we had watched the space shuttle Columbia launch in 1982, and my dad remarking afterwards “hey, that’s the first time you’ve ever whistled.” And I remembered the one conversation in the basement when he told me how sad he was that I never had a chance to meet his father.  “He was a great guy. You would have liked him”.

Goodbye dad.

Somewhere between return and relaunch

Ah yes, a blog post about blogging. who doesn’t love such a thing? Anyway, you may have noticed a complete lack of blog posts for the last little while. Perhaps you’ve wondered if I had been abducted by an Amish community and therefore was unable to communicate electronically. Or, you chocked it up to powerful bout of laziness and went about your business.

The answer is neither (though the Amish are an ever-present threat). Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to improve my ability to focus on my highest priority tasks. With the increasing number of commitments that are competing for my attention, I have to get better at picking my battles and letting the less important ones slide. And not to crush the spirits of the blog-fans out there, but this blog was one of the things I let slide. The prospect of forcing myself to blog on a schedule and post up content even when I didn’t have anything to say was unpalatable.

Despite the armada of interesting but unprofitable activities I take part in, my primary focus has been my next novel. It’s gone a little bit more slowly than I hoped, but I’m plucking away and I’ve finished the first third of it. And as I’ve been toiling away on  it, I’ve still been gathering up ideas and themes for a variety of blog posts. Some topics have been thrust upon me unwillingly, as my life takes an occasional unpleasant turn or two, but that’s the cost of doing business.

You may have also noticed that I’ve changed the name of the blog to something much less interesting.  There are too many topics I’d like to cover that have almost nothing to do with parenting, and it felt like I was misleading you, my wonderful audience. “I wanted to read about his kid and now he’s talking politics? WTF!” A classic bait’n’switch. So, by changing the blog into something a little more generic, I can write about the disparate bundle of ideas that clutter up my thinking without feeling like I’ve tricked you with false advertising.