Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Roundup

Still being busy with a sick corgi, and waiting for bloodwork results to determine what's going on, here's a quick news / views roundup:

I thought PM Harper's address last night was excellent; he (or his team) has a gift for to the point, brief, simple language that gets his point across with minimum fluff. Such a refreshing change from his flannel-meister predecessor. Of course, the impact of the address was lost in much of the media coverage I saw; CBC in particular dressed it up in 'commentary' designed to keep pushing their out-of-Afghanistan agenda.

I don't have anything to say specifically on the 9/11 anniversary that hasn't already been said.

I heard an excellent call to the CBC phone-in Ontario Today yesterday from someone who commented that the Muslim community should strive to understand where some of the fear and alienation they might have experienced since 9/11 comes from. Not that racially based fear or dislike is right but it is understandable. I think this is a distinction that has been lost. The Muslim community (and more so the left-wing pundits and politicians) blame only white Canadians; they don't place any blame on the terrorists who created the situation in the first place. People need to understand each other before they can resolve issues between them.

As we are preoccupied with waiting for blood test results on a dog who has such a huge place in our hearts here, I am thinking of how immediate events often obscure what could be argued to be the bigger picture. It's been impossible for me to make time to blog about politics or anything else really, while I am trying to take care of a family member who I love wholeheartedly. It doesn't seem to matter as much when someone you love might be dying.

I think something similar happens in world events. The CBC, Layton, all the pundits, are preoccupied with immediate day-by-day events in Afghanistan and have completely lost the wider picture and context in which it all happens. The Afghan context of liberation from the Taliban's oppression is lost. The global context of 9/11 and its aftermath is lost. They focus only on today's bomb or today's death. Even their 'interpretation' misses the big picture completely. This seems to me to be human nature, and it's understandable. However, like the racial profiling Muslims complain of, at the level of global events in the media, it's understandable but not right. The media should try to check the instinct to look only at the immediate, and offer bigger pictures as a counterbalance.