Asking for more from local media

A little letter to the FreeP:

Thank you for the work of your newsroom. Hearing how PostMedia has taken over Canada, including the major newsrooms in the largest Canadian cities, I'm proud scrappy little Winnipeg has maintained an independent free press.

If I may be so bold as to offer some suggestion/critique...

The constant air quality warnings and drought conditions we're experiencing are deeply worrying. What is equally disturbing is the general conversation around it which acknowledges the unpleasantness, blindly hopes it's temporary, and moves on, without addressing the climate change at the root of the conditions – and most importantly, that it is crucial we act in as many ways as we can as quickly as we can to do things to address it. Notably, pressuring our politicians that more pipelines are not the direction to go.

Public transit is an important climate mitigation as well – getting people out of wasteful private vehicles into more efficient buses and onto bikes. There has been commentary in your pages on the new public transit rollout but I really want to see our politicians put their money where their mouth is. Or rather put their posteriors where their words go. I'm not interested in what Councillor Lukes has to say about plans. I want to hear how she personally experiences riding the bus. I would avidly read a series that follows each one of the councillors riding the bus regularly over a sustained period of time &nash; i.e. not just during rushhour from the suburbs to downtown and back home.

Thanks again for working to keep Manitobans informed and for fighting to keep it local.

Comments

My favourite nativity scene

“There’s no accounting for taste.” That’s my dad’s favourite way of explaining personal tastes that are incomprehensible to him, like living downtown, and riding bike in winter. The inexplicable factors which determine an individual’s likes or dislikes are probably the only way I can explain why my favourite nativity scene contains a horribly caricatured black magus, a random adoring child attired – to my fancy – like a Roma person, an old shepherd carrying some sort of blunderbuss. And a haloed holy family with an 18-month-old baby Jesus. This is the "Christmas Manger Set – the Christmas story in beautiful cut-out scenes and life-like figures." See how the 1940s-era family admires the realistic flourishes, like raw wood beams and straw protruding from the edge of the roofline; the rough, broken wood of the stalls; the tasselled camels; the richly dressed magi; the woolly sheep; the Bethlehemites on the path in the background, ostensibly out to get water, judging...

Upside down economics of Jesus: household action and global change

--Presented at a CAWG event in Altona -- In Living More with Less , Doris Janzen Longacre shares a story about envelopes from Marie Moyer, a missionary in India, who was studying Hindi with Panditji. Marie writes: “From his philosophic mind, which probed the meaning of events and circumstances, I learned more than Hindi.” Just before her teacher’s arrival one day before Christmas, she’d received and opened a pile of Christmas cards and discarded the envelopes as he walked in the room. She writes: “He sat down soberly and studied the situation, then he solemnly scolded me: ‘the reverberation of this wasteful act will be felt around the world’.” Marie was stunned. “What do you mean?” she asked him. “Those envelopes,” he said, pointing to the wastebasket. “You could write on the inside of them.” “Chagrined”, Marie apologized and rescued the envelopes with the help of Panditji, who “caressed each one” as he pulled it out of the garbage. This forever changed Marie’s relationship to p...

Broken people...

After reflecting with one coworker on how often churches in all their forms really mess up and hurt a whole bunch of people in the process -- and how "we gotta do better" -- I stumbled into another conversation with a coworker which highlighted our brokenness, and I suddenly realized what was wrong with my take in the first. I wanted the church to be better at fixing our mistakes, or better yet, at not making them in the first place. But maybe this "fix-it" attitude is partly the reason we keep blowing it again and again! My friend recollected an experience when a church community was in a terrible place: compounded mistakes, hurts, and frustrations had blown up, spewing pain all over all parties. (I'm sure anyone with a long history in the church can think of one, if not several, such occasions in their past.) A new Christian who observed all these goings on responded in an unexpected way. Instead of "you people are a bunch of screw-ups! How could this pos...

kar0ling

Search This Blog