A New Year’s Enlightenment-
I’m going to spend more time in the Muskoka woodlands – join me

I do spend a great deal of time reading these days, when not wandering through The Bog, the woodlands across from our homestead here at Birch Hollow. I watch news programming on television two or three times each day, and at the top of the hour, while driving somewhere or other, I always lock on to a news update. I’ve been an historian too long now to change. I’ve been a book collector for so many years to date, the thought of having an empty private library is of nightmarish proportion. I’ve been a writer-reporter far, far too long to be indifferent about the day’s occurrences. Maybe I am a self abuser. Possibly I have built my own torture chamber out of the cornerstones of personal interest. Yet I feel compelled day after day, hour by hour, to pay attention to world events. Not just how these unfolding events will affect my family’s lives but how they will change the course of history; from a micro degree of evolution to full-scale nuclear winter.
There are times when even the most dedicated historian, the voracious reader, and obsessive viewer has to, for sanity’s sake, retreat from all the world-coming-to-end revelations. I’ve consumed hundreds of books documenting the rule of evil throughout history, the horrors of war, the brutality of man against man in the name of religion, for greed, power, domination. I’ve read about broad-scale injustice and the ever-faltering rights of civilization despite democracy’s best intent. I’ve studied the Holocaust by reading every book on the subject, trying to understand how madness and inhumanity can be justified, as the business of the day. I try to place myself, as an inmate in Dachau or Auchwitz, suffering with the prisoners I have read about. Attempting to re-create the profound and horrid sensation of frozen, infected limbs, savage hunger, crippling illness and the brutal lingering of near-death experience. I try to put myself in the place of an arriving prisoner, watching guards separating family members in the line ahead, and the fear, the panic, that my wife, my boys will be led away to unspeakable horror. The smell of death. What madness would consume a prisoner, on stepping outdoors to the stench of incineration, and knowing, in all possibility, a loved one, a friend had been fuel for the fire?
What would it be like, in Sudan, to watch as your family, your wife and daughters are beaten and raped….then tied-up and burned by the proponents of the new reality? How can one assume to know, what it would be like to watch your family starve to death in a refugee camp, awaiting the rest of humanity to arrive enforce, as democracy, to cast-out evil by the good graces of democracy’s cavalry?.
How would it feel to be hope-less in every day existence? To disbelieve there can ever be an escape from the brutal, unfaltering grasp of evilness; to believe there could ever be a helping hand up from slavery and poverty. No chance of liberation from the burdens of religious strife and social-economic oppression? My ability to imagine it all falters in the overwhelming abyss of false security…..the insulation of my own privileged, protected life, from the actuality of strife and wickedness that gives the ink on the newsstand the justification for its bold headline.
As much history and news that I am able to consume in a day, a week, a year, I can never re-invent myself into those horror-filled situations I have noted above. Not knowing the full thrust of injustice, and inhumanity, brutality and oppression, I must continue my life-long quest for understanding at the very least. Admittedly at times, even the reader with an insatiable appetite for revelation, can become overwhelmed by the course of history and the actuality of the moment. It would be the choice of many of my contemporaries, and they have told me so, to “just shut off the television,” or to “stop delivery of the newspaper.” Maybe sell off the books at a yard sale, a sort of self-imposed purge of all contrary ink in the house! Yet amidst what is unmistakably depressing thought, is the reality of world heroes, and the fact that despite all the negative impact of news, like taking a canon shell to the gut every single day, there are visionaries, leaders, the faithful amongst us, who despite the carnage, continue to press on despite oppressive, impossible conditions, to change the world; save man from the wickedness of inhumanity; place religious fanaticism under global scrutiny for the brutality it bestows.
And in the most fearful moments, when it appears saving the world from the excesses and rage of humanity is impossible, I can read some of Martin Luther King’s speeches during the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s, and feel a modicum of trust that we can still find the strength and resolve to instill a better plan for the future. I can watch a documentary about Dr. King, and feel the new generation of inspiration, the tingle of excitement, listening to heartfelt words about a lasting equality, and a freedom sculpted from the huge well of inspired mortal will; the mission from a man who gave his life to fight oppression and for the establishment of full democracy for all citizens. I ponder what it was like to view the challenges of the world from Dr. King’s eyes; did he wake in the morning with a profound sense of fear about the prospects of the day, or did he rise from slumber with a profound sense of mission toward accomplishment? Or had he resigned himself that his mission was destined to fail without the commitment of others to lead alongside?
I grew up in a modest income family and although we weren’t without financial concerns and limitations, I never once went hungry. I was never beaten. I always got presents under the Christmas tree, and my parents afforded me every opportunity for education, including helping to fund my three year stint in university. They were always at my side during conflict, supportive at times of personal crisis, and were only too eager to help and participate with my wife Suzanne and I, to raise our lads Andrew and Robert. I believe very much, as related to many others in less fortunate situations, I have enjoyed a privileged life. I do feel guilty in many ways because I have that disconnect in reality to those facing dire consequence. Over a lifetime I have tried, possibly in a failed attempt, to understand the conditions and events of the world then and now. I’ve embraced enlightenment and the knowledge that compassion bestowed is infinitely better than ignorance preferred. So I will carry on information seeking, and act where and when I can, to represent the critical requirement of awareness and on-going education, about the actuality of world conflicts and turmoil that endangers all our lives; endangers our environmental well being; endangers any attainable solution to all-out war.
One of the first movies I saw on a newly acquired television, in the late 1950’s, was Alan Ladd’s portrayal of “Shane,” the cowboy hero, who fought for justice and survival, side by side the homesteaders, struggling in the great American west. For about 45 years now, I’ve used Shane as an example of “the good guys winning against the bad guys!” As simplistic as this is, and I apologize for having a movie hero as my role-model, I have never read anything more into the story of Shane than the script and the actions on screen revealed. And it has been my hope against hope, for a new Shane to emerge, and pull this world from brutal inhumanity toward the saving grace of neighborliness and lasting goodwill.
It’s kind of shallow, I suppose, for a career historian and crusty, set-in-his-ways writer-reporter, to credit a work of fiction as a source of inspiration. I’ve been a shade of Shanesque from childhood and frankly I have no reason to alter a good and worthy source of motivation that has served so honorably through these decades of authordom.
There are times burning the midnight oil, or even while penning something or other at the break of day that I feel as if my work is all a waste of time and ink. I truly wonder if it is all worth the effort. I’m not Shane. I’m a mere molecule of what Martin Luther King represented of change. Yet on the very brink of tossing down this mission of self expression, begun as a student philosopher-poet in the early 1970’s, I have enjoyed a goodly number of readers all these years, who have never been adverse to letting me know whether my particular piece was insightful, engaging or a deplorable waste of published space. A few have let me know they found my columns spiritful and provocative, and others let me know they were writing letters to the editor to complain why I had been hired in the first place. But you know, I would rather be in the position of “knowing” than in the reduced dynamic of the “ignorant.” As I have wondered about what it was like being in London, England during the Blitz, or in Dieppe as the Canadian soldiers were slaughtered on the beachfront by enemy fire, I so much demand now that I involve myself in history forthcoming. I don’t want to imagine what it would be like to be part of unfolding actuality, of world events, of crisis but be instead amongst the willing participants who would sooner kiss an incoming nuclear warhead on the tip than spend the last few frantic moments of life running in fear.
I can’t stop mankind from destroying itself. And there’s no Shane big enough to resolve all the conflicts with the compassion of the good neighbor’s honest handshake. I hold onto the belief however, that being an informed citizen is the best anchor for the most productive, helpful reaction. We see this in our communities when citizens raise money for worthy causes, and extend generosity to the local food bank and Salvation Army. The media helps direct charity to help families in crisis. We offer support to countries that have been ravaged by natural and manmade disaster. When I hear someone say that they don’t read newspapers or watch daily news reports or even care-less about the history of our town, region, country and world, I can’t help but pull on the precedents of Shane, to enlighten the naysayers about the life relevancies and responsibilities of good citizenship.
Despite what might appear a negative diatribe about the failings of man and civilization, I enter the New Year 2007, in trust that “good” can prevail over evil in the final analysis. And I shall give this authorship venue another go, and hope to meet a few readers along the path.
At this point however, I shall retreat for awhile with my canine friend, Bosko, into the snowy woods of Gravenhurst, Muskoka; the greatest healing place I know. Best wishes for a hale and hardy New Year from this writer and family in residence, here at our humble homestead, Birch Hollow.