A book at war with itself
Tough questions get short shrift in Lawrence Scanlon's A Year of Living Generously, an account of volunteering for 12 charities in as many months.
Lawrence Scanlan’s idea was deceptively simple. “I decided I would volunteer with 12 charitable organizations and dedicate a month of hands-on involvement to each one,” the veteran Canadian journalist and community activist explains in the preface to A Year of Living Generously: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Philanthropy.
In January, Scanlan served meals at Vinnie’s, a St. Vincent de Paul Society soup kitchen in Kingston, Ontario. May? Listened to the life stories of people living with HIV/AIDS at Hogar de la Esperanza, a shelter in Costa Rica. October? Built new homes with other Habitat for Humanity volunteers in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.
Over the course of 2008, Scanlan covered the charitable/non-profit waterfront: he spent time in homeless shelters, prisons, hospices; he worked with environmental good-doers; he volunteered to teach English to troubled aboriginal kids and journalism to eager women at a radio station in Senegal.
Scanlan is an eloquent, perceptive chronicler and companion on his journey, which is as much psychic as physical. He can be amusingly self-deprecating about his own foibles and follies but also painfully self aware of the limitations of what he is doing. When he talks about the people he meets – the helpers and the helped – he writes, as someone once said of Martha Gellhorn, with “a cold eye and a warm heart.”
Still, I had problems with his “suffering sampler” approach.
Although Scanlan is a talented journalist and an experienced volunteer, a month is just too brief a time to spend and expect to come back with real insights. And, because of the writing skills Scanlan brought to his volunteer work, he often gets asked to serve his volunteer stint on communication and newsletter projects. While that gave him journalistic permission to ask personal questions of other volunteers and clients, it also distanced him from the grit-level experiences of most ordinary volunteers.
Scanlan says he came back from his year’s experience “changed.” He is more comfortable around people who are homeless, he says, more conscious of race, more appreciative of just how difficult it is to turn a life around.
I’m not sure I felt changed reading it. What I felt instead was that the year-of core of the book was often at war with Scanlan’s deeper concerns about the intersection of volunteerism, social activism, and social responsibility.
Scanlan clearly does want to tackle his subject’s darker, more difficult questions.
We live in a time when governments demonstrate an unseemly eagerness to rip the social safety net out from under the poorest and the weakest, Scanlan writes in the preface, returning to the idea in his epilogue. Policy-makers do so on the falsely self-serving assumption that armies of ordinary volunteers coupled with grand individual, idiosyncratic (and tax-deductible) philanthro-capitalistic gestures – can you say the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation “does” malaria? – will fill the void. They can’t.
In such circumstances, he wonders, do individuals doing good really do good, or do their generous gestures “only serve to prop up the status quo.” If volunteer-run soup kitchens and homeless shelters end up making it easier for governments to wriggle away from their responsibilities, “where does this leave collective action against poverty and suffering?”
But those questions mostly get short shrift through Living Generously’s month-by-month storylines. They do occasionally come up in passing. At one point during the February he spends with Toronto’s homeless, for example, Scanlan channels the “crusty” frustration of a street nurse who complains that “this whole pool of [volunteers who feed the homeless] end up feeling good about helping poor people but none are walking into the mayor’s office and complaining.”
In his epilogue, Scanlan returns to this vexing problem. We won’t solve the world’s problems simply by volunteering, he admits. The epilogue, in fact, reads like a reasoned cri de coeur for social activism. But Scanlan also understands that changing government social policy – changing the system – is daunting, perhaps an impossible challenge for most of us to take on.
So “what does one do in the face of human suffering and need?” Scanlan asks rhetorically, then answers: “All I know is this: what one should not do is nothing.”
It is an inadequate, unsatisfying answer. But it is true. Which makes it all the more frustrating.
From The Mark, posted July 26, 2010
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Is the boy better off?
Forget dueling interviews, competing psychologists, contradictory studies, even the difference between physically assaulted and “placed in a position of control.”
Ask yourself one question: is the 15-year-old Cole Harbour boy at the centre of the controversy over his care better off now than when community services shipped him off to Ontario 13 months ago?
A quick recap: the boy, who suffers from an psychiatrist’s brew of disorders, had been raised by his grandparents since he was a toddler. By November 2008, his acting out—running away, stealing cars, doing drugs, selling his body—was so out of control his grandparents agreed to put him in the care of community services.
Instead of treating him here, the province decided he needed secure, long-term facilities it couldn’t provide. Last June, it shipped him off to Ontario’s Bayfield centre.
Is he better off?
According to his grandmother, he’s on heavy doses of drugs, some self-administered (she says Bayfield wants to add lithium to his medical cocktail); he rarely attends classes; and he has been what the reports call “restrained” on at least 10 occasions. Once, he ended up at the hospital; more recently, he claims he was beaten for asking to go to the washroom.
To complicate matters, Bayfield has done its best to cut the boy off from his grandparents, refusing some face-to-face visits, limiting phone calls to two, monitored 15-minute conversations a week and even, at one point, imposing a total contact blackout because the grandmother was “negative” on the phone. How? In one report I saw, the monitor complained she “asked about his medication again, and was more assertive that he she did not believe he should just be taking medication whenever he wanted.”
Last week, Vicki Wood, Nova Scotia’s director of child welfare, claimed “we make every effort to maintain the ties” between child and family. Really?
Wood also said: “There’s a forum for the family to bring forward their concerns. That would be the court, not a press conference.”
The problem is Nova Scotia’s family court seems like an extension of community services. And father-knows-better community services isn't willing to consider alternatives to out-of-province institutional treatment.
The boy is not better off.
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Previous stories
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Mayor Kelly’s Moses moment
What to make of Peter Kelly’s Moses memo to members of HRM Council? Thou shalt not drink to excess… Thou shalt not drive drunk… Thou shalt call 9-1-1 if a fellow councilor violates #2… Thou shalt pause and reflect…
Mayor Kelly issued his I-regret-I-have-to-write-this-however-circumstances-demand-it memo July 9. The ink had barely dried before it showed up in the media, local and national; closely followed by outraged howls from councilors claiming the mayor’s broad brush, father-knows-better innuendo sullied what passes for their reputations; followed by their own temperature-inflating innuendo about who leaked the memo and why; followed by the mayor’s digging-himself-ever-deeper defence to reporters that he’d once intervened to keep a drunk councilor—no name—from driving away from a public event—no name; followed by…
First question. Do Halifax Regional Councilors have a drinking problem? How many? Who?
Metro reporter Alex Boutilier bravely named names—two of them—in a report Thursday. Veteran city hall watcher Tim Bousquet didn’t name anyone but did suggest, in a radio interview, as many as four councilors appear to over-indulge at times; he later refined that to suggest only one probably has a serious drinking problem.
From a personal point of view, one, of course, is too many.
But there are only two legitimate public concerns here. First, is alcohol interfering with the individual’s ability to do the job? Second, is the individual endangering public safety by driving drunk?
If the answer to either question is yes, councilors face the same wrenching dilemma the rest of us do: how, and how far, to intervene in the personal life of another person.
It’s complicated.
As a reporter, I’ve covered politicians who accomplished more for the public good in one night of drinking than others after a lifetime of sobriety.
Several readers who posted to Metro’s website claimed to have seen one councilor drunk at public events and said he drove away after. How many called police? Should councilors—or the mayor—be held to a different standard?
The mayor has raised a serious issue. But his hectoring memo just trivializes it. One more symptom of the sad lack of leadership at city hall. Pity.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Reading at the Port Medway Reader’s Festival
Stephen Kimber will be the featured speaker Saturday, July 31, at the 2010 Port Medway Reader's Festival in Port Medway on Nova Scotia's south shore.
Founded in 2002 by writers Cynthia Wine and Philip Slayton, the Festival is "an opportunity for readers to listen to and meet writers in an informal and friendly village setting. The Festival continues the tradition of the Tennysonian Reading Circle, started by the ladies of Port Medway in 1903."
During its eight-year history, the event has featured, among its readers, Margaret Atwood, George Elliot Clarke, Marq de Villiers, Wayne Johnston, Robert MacNeil, Donna Morrissey, Lisa Moore, Calvin Trillin and Jane Urquhart.
Tickets are $15. Proceeds will be used to support the Port Medway Cemeteries Committee for work at the Old Port Medway Cemetery, a Municipal and Provincial Heritage Property.
Readings take place in the Old Meeting House on Long Cove Road in Port Medway from 7-8pm. Readings are followed by a reception and book signing—which the Globe and Mail once described as a "down-home party"—at the Port Medway Fire hall across the street.
For more information, check out the Festival's website. Or email the organizers.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Our new governor general and the greasy Airbus affair
David Lloyd Johnston, our soon-to-be governor general of all we survey, is, I’m sure, a fine fellow. Even if he does fit—right up to his blue button-down—every stereotype known to boring, old white guy governors general of the pre-Adrienne Clarkson, pre-Michaelle Jean era.
But hey, I’m a boring old white guy too, and it’s nice to be represented once again in the corridors of ceremonial powerlessness.
Johnston is, of course, a lawyer. Better yet, a legal scholar. A specialist in securities law, something happily impenetrable to the rest of us.
He played hockey at Harvard. Of course Harvard. Better yet, he captained its hockey team. At 69, if you believe his gushing friends, he still possesses the speed and finesse of a young Yvan Cournoyer.
He is a former principal and vice-chancellor of McGill University, one of Canada’s most venerable institutions of higher learning, and now a soon-to-be former president of the University of Waterloo, one of Canada’s most leading edge—can you say particle physics?—groves of academe.
Of course—of course—he is an excellent family man. Married to the same woman forever. The same woman, it should—and will—be said, who is accomplished in her own right, but will not seek her own limelight like… well, no need to mention John Ralston Saul or Jean-Daniel Lafond.
And the kids? Five of them. All girls. All grown. All overachievers. Did we forget the seven grandkids?
Lovely.
Uh… but there is this one nagging footnote to his resumé that’s hard to forget—or forgive.
David Johnston is the person most responsible for the fact we wasted $14 million on a public inquiry to discover what we already knew about Brian Mulroney—that he is a pathological prevaricator of the first order—but not what we actually wanted to know—which is who really got how much of that $20-million in Airbus grease money?
That Prime Minister Stephen Harper chose Johnston—among all the boring old white guy academic overachievers available—to set the sharpened pencil-point-narrow terms of reference for the inquiry into the Mulroney-Schreiber affair says much about Stephen Harper’s prescience.
And perhaps too much about David Johnston’s willingness to go along.
Which is why he will make an ideal governor general... for Stephen Harper.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
We want answers; they offer hype
I don’t necessarily oppose the new convention centre proposed for that gaping hole in the heart of downtown Halifax.
And I don’t completely subscribe to the too-tall, edge-of-the-wedge principal objections raised by the Save the View Coalition.
The preservationist group argues the convention centre’s twin 18 and 14-storey towers will obliterate much of the iconic Citadel Hill view of George’s Island, which is true, thus threatening our historic city’s world-renowned tourist-postcard calling card, which is significantly more debatable.
While I appreciate the battles earlier generations of activists waged to preserve as many views as possible from the Citadel, I personally like the idea of a tightly packed, eclectic downtown that mixes historic and modern, tall and squat, ugly and beautiful, commercial and residential in a funky, lively urban stew. With some great views.
It is the coalition’s back-up argument—that there is no solid business case for a huge new convention centre that will necessitate at least $100 million in taxpayers’ dollars to make happen—that gives me pause. And the dismissive, don’t-worry-be-happy Commonwealth Games-all-over-again response of convention centre boosters to legitimate questions that gives me more pause.
Those questions begin with those commissioned, fore-ordained-to-be-favourable consultants’ reports. While they acknowledge the key issue—declining numbers of major conventions coupled with ever increasing competition to land them—their conclusions either ignore or dismiss it.
Convention centre boosters organized a website forum, supposedly to discuss issues “relevant to the proposed new convention centre.” But when Coalition organizer Bev Miller questioned what she claims will be a $6-million annual shortfall between how much it will cost the province to borrow funds for the centre and how much in new tax revenues it will generate, her post was “removed by the moderator due to a violation of the Code of Conduct.” (It was later reposted, but only after Miller objected.)
Last week, convention promoters released a poll they claimed showed locals support their dream. But the questions—“Governments should invest in a new convention centre if there is a strong business case showing the centre will attract visitors to Nova Scotia, create new jobs, and generate economic benefits and tax dollars”—were clearly skewed to create the desired result.
Now chief booster Trade Centre Ltd. promises to release results of yet another commissioned study—this one on the economic impact a new convention centre will generate—before the developer submits his final plans July 19.
One hopes this report will be more honest—and helpful—than previous ones. We need answers, not spin.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and eight non-fiction books.