kar0ling

CAVEAT: I fired this off quickly at the end of a long day. So I'm probably going to come back over the next few days to sharpen and refine it -- or at very least, correct a few inevitable typos. But I wanted to put the pressure on myself to get it out there and not leave it endlessly in draft status.  My weekend has been dominated by human rights. Mostly, I was hanging out at The Forks, enjoying free concerts held in honour of the opening. And I watched the tail end of the ceremony streaming online, and kept tabs on the Twitter discussions, and read articles about it in the local paper. Even the Sunday sermon was -- coincidentally, I believe, since it simply came in rotation of our series on 1 Corinthians -- on Paul's teaching on the rights of a Christian (1 Cor 9). And to round it out a bit, I attended a Palestinian cultural celebration dance event. The paper reported our premier describing the protestors at the grand opening ceremony -- who succeeded in being disruptive w...

Or, what these four walls say about my city The Free Press is doing a Saturday feature series on the architectural history of Winnipeg which I find speaks uncannily to its current social state. After regaling the reader with the ambitious, lofty, exciting plans for this upstart city -- bursting with promise in the days before the Panama Canal killed freight rail traffic and social unrest spawned a defeatist mindset that still hampers efforts at progress today -- the authors come clean about "the real Winnipeg" the "City Beautiful" plans were trying to banish. There were pawnshops filled with weaponry, and bars and brothels galore. And slums to call home for the hopeful immigrants lured with false promises at the end of the journey.  "In a book entitled A Social History of Urban Growth, [Alan F.J.] Artibise concluded Winnipeg's shortage of housing, inadequate water and sewage disposal services [in the ever-poor, overcrowded North End] -- combined ...

The tower of the Canadian Museum of Human Rights was lit as I came over the Norwood Bridge today. That got me thinking of how impressed I was by the architecture when I had the privilege of touring the place in the final months they offered interior tours. At the time, I was awfully tempted to purchase a membership just to hang out in the building. And it wasn't only the architecture that was compelling; the vision that our tour guide expressed of a living museum with lectures and theatre pieces and discussion groups or Q&A sessions with experts broke through my wall of skepticism that the Holocaust would dominate in this rights museum which violated Aboriginal sensibilities by building at the Forks. I pondered this inclination now as I consider the growing furor about the museum's emphasis (mostly its exclusions) from various groups wishing to boycott the place. However, besides the fact that the museum isn't open yet so we don't actually know what is in it (or...