Uninhabited Spaces

I have been struggling over the past week with how I am supposed to appropriately react to the tragedy at Virginia Tech. As someone who works at a university, this terrible event struck me much harder than I had anticipated. It brought me back to my first year of studies, in December 1989, when a similar horror occured at Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique. Of course, a great deal of that emotion was fuelled by the wall-to-wall coverage on the U.S. news programs. At one point this week, every link on the top-half of CNN's web site was about the Virginia Tech shootings. I kept expecting to learn that FOX News had scooped its rivals and trademarked "The Worst Shooting in U.S. History". I was struck how, buried about a quarter down CNN's home page, I found a link that casually mentioned that 160 people had been killed in Baghdad that day. This terrible information, for whatever reason, did not warrant the honour of being placed in the special "Breaking News" s...

25 years ago this week the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted, thus establishing a more comprehensive codification of numerous rights of Canadian citizens than the previous Bill of Rights (1960). Such rights include fundamental freedoms, democratic rights, legal rights, equality rights, and mobility rights, among others. Legal scholars (and politicians) on the right have argued that the Charter has enabled the proliferation of so-called activist judges. These are judges who use their dreaded leftist/liberal bias to make judgements in favour of special interest groups. A "special interest" group is a derogatory term referring to minority and marginalized groups (women, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, etc). You'll note that the lobby groups representing Big Business (Tobacco, Automobiles, Weapons, Security, etc)are never referred to as special interest groups by those on the right. Only those pesky citizens demanding the same legal pro...

I've been re-reading Alvin Toffler's 1970 juggernaut , Future Shock. At its heart, the book's premise is that there are limits to the amount of change that humans can absorb without being overwhelmed, both physiologically and psychologically. The state such an over-stimulation creates what is Toffler coined "future shock". The future, Toffler wrote, will present the super-industrial citizen with a paralyzing dilemma: overchoice. Toffler strikingly argued that we will like to belong to subcults as a way of handling the enormous volume of information, choice, and stimuli. Typically, these subcults will reflect our lifestyle (or rather the lifestyle we desire to reflect) and we will consume the products and the values of that preferred lifestyle. In an era of fractured society (values, families, groups, etc), how interesting that we are are flocking to blogs, Facebook, and MySpace to create our virtual subcults. We are enormously adaptive creatures and the imaginatio...