Skip to main content

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

Popular posts from this blog

Living stones in the holy land

I met Jesus in Israel-Palestine a few years ago. I found him not in the rocky, desert ground he trod, nor in the ancient stones of the towns and cities he visited; not in the subterranean grotto in the Church of the Nativity, nor in the mammoth Church of the Holy Sepulchre, encompassing the traditional site of his death and resurrection. No, I met him in the lives of Palestinians who incarnate his spirit, in humble, passionate people who are convinced that love is the only way. I met Jesus in people who spoke like this: “We need to be soaked in the love of Christ. Love is not a hug and a kiss. Love is to seek the life of the other that the cost of one’s own.” --Labib Madanat, coordinator of the Palestinian and Israeli Bible Societies “Love is not an opportunity to overlook justice. Love is an opportunity to pursue justice…. [But] we want to resist any form of evil with the heart and mind of Jesus Christ.… There is no love without justice. And there is no true justice without lov...

Electioneering again

Climate anxiety has entered the lexicon. For the last few years, it’s been talked about more and more in news articles, science discussions and even in spiritual care contexts. I shrugged it off as overly sensitive people, but the shoe has dropped for me now too. Extreme weather or one sort another everywhere all at once for the past few years has brought home what I always acknowledged intellectually but didn’t really synthesized emotionally: climate change is actually coming and it will be bad. I feel so angry and impotent in the face of these massive systems working against my small efforts to reduce waste and burn less carbon. So I went to the climate forum for this provincial election. It felt really important just to be in the room to declare “this subject matters!” The room had a remarkable number of grey hairs in it. This brought up terribly mixed feelings for me. On the one hand, good of them to continue to care about these issues, even as they can anticipate it won’t ...

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...