Stand Up For Canada

I missed out big time yesterday. Really, really big time. I was just a few short steps and a few short seconds away from snagging myself one of the coolest political souvenirs in history, but stupid me decided to stand out in the shitty freezing rain and wait for the bus instead. God, I’m such an idiot. Let me explain.

There was some sort of an exhibition type thing going on yesterday in the building where my radio station is, [yep that’s me, Mr. Aware Of My Surroundings], so of course there were all kinds of tables set up where different people were promoting different things as tends to happen during events like this. I didn’t pay them much attention on my way in beyond thinking to myself “wholly crap, where did all of these people come from,” but looking back on it now, I kind of wish I had.

Fast forward to a couple hours later. I’m sitting in the studio doing my usual thing when somebody comes in and says “hey, they’re handing out condoms downstairs that say “Liberal Party of Canada” on them.” Obviously the first words out of my mouth were “they are?” And of course they were closely followed by “did you bring me one?” He didn’t, but through time and distance I’ve managed to forgive him.

But even though he’s off the hook, I’m not. I’ll never forgive myself for not trying to find that table on my way out. I honestly consider it a lost opportunity, and now all I have to look back on is that lost opportunity and a head full of questions, questions that will now most likely go unanswered until the end of time. Questions such as who thought that was a good idea? Or did nobody consider that the first thing that 97 people out of 100 would think when they heard about this was going to be well, if you’ve ever wanted to be personally and directly screwed by the government, here’s your chance? And how did they manage to fit “Liberal Party of Canada” on those things? I mean that’s a lot of letters. I’m counting 20, and then you still have to factor in the spaces. Wouldn’t a slogan of that size look really funny once the guy goes limp? Or did they print it on those extra large magnum condoms that some guys like to buy to impress the girl behind the counter at the drugstore? I’ll probably never know any of this stuff now, and that’s a shame. It’s a shame and it’s my own fault.

I’m not sure if there’s supposed to be a lesson in all of this, but if there is, I suppose it would have to be don’t let opportunity pass you bye, or maybe have safe sex and vote, or perhaps even have safe sex while voting, I don’t really know. All I know is that I’m a broken man, a broken man who’s short 1 political condom.

Let’s Help a Guy Out!

Ok boys and girls, story time. Have you ever noticed that when you sign up for hotmail, or yahoo, or payPpal, or pretty much everything anymore, thanks to the spammers, *curse you all*, you have to tell the website what letters and numbers are in that little picture box thingy? I understand why the measure is there. It’s there to increase security so automated piece of shit bots can’t sign up for a million accounts and then use them to proliferate the internet with message upon message about how to make my absent weener bigger, buy cheap pills and remortgage my absent house. Perfectly cool. But what they and you might not know is that my thing that makes the computer talk can’t read those picture thingies. It just says graphic whatever they’ve decided to call it. The same goes for every blind person’s thing that makes the computer talk. They just can’t interpret pictures without captions.

So what some companies have decided to do is beside the picture, they have a link that says I can’t see this picture, and then you get an audio representation of what’s in the picture. So a garbled voice says the numbers and letters you’re supposed to type and they even are nice enough to give us a spot on that page to put them in. If we’re not lucky enough to have that, some companies tell us a place to phone or tell us to email or ask for our phone number and phone us.

However, some companies don’t even acknowledge that we might have a problem with that fuzzy picture in the box, and one of them, unfortunately, is google. I’m lucky that Steve and Matt started this blog before this was in place, otherwise there might not be a vomit comet since blogger is run by google. Although that may make some people celebrate, that would make me sad.

Alright, story time is over, here comes the help part. The people at
Blind Access Journal are trying to change this. They have started a petition over at petition online. This will be running for a few months, and once he has enough names, he’s going to send them, with a cover letter, to Eric Schmidt, the CEO of google. I believe that this petition has a lot more weight than those stupid email petitions, because for one thing, it’s on an official petition website, and second, I know this guy exists and he is going to send this thing to a physical person who might do something.

There are a few ways you can help if you feel strongly enough about it. He is asking for help in drafting this cover letter, so contact him through his website if you have ideas. He is also going to post the letter as it is being written, so you might be able to help out more with its construction as it goes. Finally, you can sign the petition. If you’re worried about what is going to be said in the letter, you might not want to sign until you see it, so keep an eye on the Blind Access Journal website.

Just trying to use the power of the net to spread the word.

Victims/Idiots Revisited

I can’t believe how easily some people can earn the media’s sympathy if they just use a few key words. I saw this episode of Sixty minutes that aired last October. It was about this guy, Charles Robert Jenkins, who because he got scared, decided to defect from the army and surrender to North Korea. Then, quelle surprise, they kept him there. He stayed there for 40 years, and when he managed to get out, he went on Sixty Minutes, talked about how secretive and dictatorial the North Korean government was, the stuff that happened to him while he was there, and how poor the country was. Again, I say, quelle surprise. What did you expect? Did you not learn anything about the country that, before you got it in your head that they would swap you with Russia who would merrily hand you back to the U.S. like some missing child, was your fucking enemy? Hell, I’m not even fighting North Korea, and I remember the bullshit they came up with a couple years ago when some trains had a nice collision and exploded, killing and wounding a ton of people. You know what they did? They refused to take assistance from other countries because they didn’t want them to know the state of things, and they ran their regularly scheduled praise the government message on TV. Doesn’t sound like much has changed.

Anyway, my point is, why are we having an outpouring of sympathy for this guy? He wasn’t even just some random private who just enlisted and then got scared. If that was the case, I could make the excuse that he did a stupud thing but he was young and inexperienced. He was a fucking sergeant commanding a squad. This was not his first battle. It sucks that he had to experience the totalitarian dictatorship of North Korea first hand, spend 40 years where he didn’t want to be, and go through hell, but he does not need a spot on Sixty Minutes to tell his story as if he was some hapless victim of circumstance. Ever heard the phrase “you made your bed, you lie in it?” The way I see it, if someone had surrendered to any country but Iraq, Iran, North Korea, or other countries deemed scary by the U.S, the media would likely look at their story and say, “Them’s the breaks, chief. You’re a moron. Next story, please.”

I’m a sap!

I don’t know why I’m wasting everybody’s time writing this, but it just felt like it had to be written. I feel like a complete wimp. I also feel a bit selfish, when people have more important things to think about, like oh, say, who’s going to be our new Prime Minister, and here I am babbling about this. I don’t know why this even makes me sad, but it does.

I’m looking through the pile of mail that I brought in from my mailbox, and my my, do I ever have a lot of junkmail. Amid the campaign crap, ads for a burglar alarm, mastercard applications and other complete garb, I get to an envelope that reads, “Humaine Society.” I open it, and what is inside is a reminder to renew my dog’s tags because it’s that time…and it makes me feel sad all over again.

For those who don’t know, this year, I got a guide dog, and then promptly had to retire her due to illness. When it happened, although it hurt like hell to send her back, I didn’t think I’d be hit too hard by losing her. After all, I’d only had her for 7 weeks. Then I realized how much a part of my life she’d become.
At first, it was hard to walk anywhere without feeling sad. Then it got easier and I thought I was done. Then the questions about “where is your dog?”/”what happened to your dog?” etc. were hard to answer, but then they got easier to take. Then came the dreams. Every night, I’d dream that she was with me and we were walking somewhere. Then I’d dream about random details about her. Those have finally stopped, and I thought I was done. Why, then, does an innocent letter reminding me to get new tags feel like the saddest piece of mail to receive ever?

Now do you understand why I feel like an overly emotional nitwit?

All I Know Is That I Don’t Know Nothin’

Sometimes I really hate democracy. Well ok, not democracy itself, but the responsibilities that come along with the rights that it affords all of us.

I’ve never been someone who could head out to my local polling station each election day and absentmindedly mark an X for a candidate who’s name I don’t recognize and who supports God knows what. So that being the case, I do my best to keep myself informed. I watch, listen to and read the news on a daily basis. I try to watch leadership and local candidates debates when I can. I talk to people around me and bounce what I’m hearing and the way I’m hearing it off of them so that maybe I can get a different perspective on the issues. In short, I do everything I can possibly do to make sure that come election day, I have all of the tools I could possibly need to make what I hope will be the right choice for me and for my country.

But there are times, like right now for example, when I stop and wonder if all the things I do to educate myself and the time it takes to do them really mean anything. Let me explain.

Up until Monday night, I was a decided voter. In spite of all of the so-called scandals and aledged corruption, I was voting Liberal, no doubt about it. Then I watched the debate and instead of making things crystal clear, it confused me. Paul Martin, as much as I like and generally agree with him and as smart as he is, didn’t impress me. Stephen Harper,who I could never vote for knowing what I know about what a Conservative government would mean and has meant in my lifetime, looked like an eloquent and somewhat honest guy and truth be told, even though he didn’t win my support based on governments of the past, he definitely won the debate in my eyes and in the eyes of a lot of other people. Jack Layton has some good ideas, at least I’m pretty sure he does. Now if he’d only stop with the “third alternative” stuff and tell me what they are, maybe I wouldn’t even have to write this. But between all of the cheapshots and rhetoric and general sidestepping of questions, I came away thinking what am I going to do? How can I possibly choose any of these people to be the face of my nation? Things got so bad that the one thought that’s stuck with me since that night is man, if Gilles Duceppe wasn’t a separatist and if he was the leader of a real, honest to goodness national political party rather than one that gets far more attention than it deserves for looking out for the interests of a select niche group of people, he’d be a pretty good choice right about now.

The local debate I listened to on the radio earlier today hasn’t been much help either. I’m not the biggest fan of our local Liberal MP Brenda Chamberlain, but she made a good case for herself. Phil Allt of the NDP made sense on a lot of the issues, but when somebody comes at you with hard numbers like our Liberal did, it’s pretty hard to dispute that. The only things that stuck with me about PC candidate Brent Barr are that he knows a lot of people, that he’s dumb enough to give out his home telephone number on his campaign literature and invite potentially crazy people into his home for coffee parties every second Saturday, and that no matter how genuine he may seem, he can’t help but take unnecessary shots at the other parties. If it wasn’t so early in the morning, I would have considered playing the do a shot every time he said “corrupt Liberal government” drinking game. As for our Green and Communist candidates Mike Nagy and Scott Gilbert, both had some ok ideas, but when it comes right down to it, Jim Harris [the leader of the Greens] is a goof who never really says anything of substance whenever he’s given the chance, and I honestly couldn’t tell you who’s in charge of the Communists without looking it up.

So what’s a guy to do? I’m not going to not vote, that’s out of the question. But when every choice you have has at least 1 thing about it that’s somewhat hard to overlook and when the guy who turns in the best performance come debate time is against just about everything you stand for, how do you vote and feel good about it knowing that the events of the next 4 years [or possibly less if we end up with another minority] are at least in part on your head? Sometimes I really hate democracy…

This Makes Sense in Whose World?

The other day when I heard about the huge suicide bombing that killed over 100 people on the news, it got me to thinking. What could possibly be going through the mind of the suicide bomber before he detonates his big pack of explosives? Think about it. He’s standing there in this crowd, knowing full well what is going to happen because he’s going to be the one causing it. Not only that, when the big bang happens, he’s going to be right in the centre, and bits of him are going to join the rest of the propelled projectiles.

First of all, he’s going to be the cause of lots of death and injury. So, has the brainwashing actually managed to erase his conscience completely or make him feel like all this loss of life is actually justified? Then, there’s that whole self-preservation instinct that I thought was inherent in all human beings. I mean a few people committing suicide is sad, but it’s relatively rare and carried out by very desperate people who feel there is no other way. Compare that to the number of people that religious leaders in the middle-east can convince to blow themselves and others up just so they can go to heaven and somehow please Allah. And they know this…because? Have they somehow done it and come back? And if they have, why are they back here? Maybe this heaven isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And if they’re not feeding you that line of bullshit, then their first line of bullshit about pleasing Allah through bombings requires a large investment of blind faith. If someone told me tomorrow that I’d go to heaven, and all I’d have to do to get there is kill myself and take as many people with me as I can, I’d have no choice but to say, “Are you nuts?” Even if I somehow believed them and was prepared to do it, I would think that at the last second, some part of me would say, “Wait wait wait. Hold the pony! What are you doing?” But that never seems to happen over there. I don’t know about you, but I have not heard about one suicide bomber unstrapping his bomb and running away. I think that would make news, don’t you? But it never happens. What kind of mind-control is going on that makes all these people carry this stuff through to the end? If there was a way to read thoughts, I’d love to capture the last things running through these people’s minds. Maybe then, I’d understand why it happens.