Category Archives: Lifestyle (MC Archive)

Lifestyle-related columns that appeared on Jason Menard’s previous Web site, Menard Communications.

Unwilling to Pay the Price for Empathy

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By Jason Menard

Sometimes no matter how badly we want to feel – or think that we should – we just don’t have the emotional or intellectual wherewithal to do so. And for that, selfishly, I’m thankful.

Recently, every time I turn on the news, log onto the Web, pick up a paper, or listen to the radio I’m bombarded by the horrors of what’s happening in Lebanon. To add my wife has a friend in the area, and another of our friends was to have a wedding ceremony in Lebanon this summer.

Obviously, we have more than a passing interest and we watch the news with interest. Yet, while the idea of rockets passing over my head and threatening my very existence is terrifying, the magnitude of the horror just doesn’t resonate with me.

I don’t know where to stand on the Israeli-Palestinian issue – we have friends on both sides, and most commentators, while professing neutrality, display a bias – but I do stand firm on my revulsion for the fact that it’s the average citizen that’s bearing the brunt of this ideological war.

These are battles designed in backrooms and boardrooms, but played out on the streets of Israel and Lebanon. As North Americans, we’re familiar with the concept of war, but foreign to its realities – a reality that’s all too present for too many of our counterparts throughout the Middle East and in other places around the world.

Absence doesn’t just make the heart grow fonder – it smoothes out the rough edges and romanticizes things. Living in Canada, we’re so far removed from the horror of any conflict. A car backfires and we jump – for many in other less-stable countries, the sound of gunfire is part of the ambient soundtrack of their lives.

How can we relate? How do I, who feels safe in all parts of this wonderful country of ours, empathize with people who live with the knowledge that today could be their last day – that their lives could be cut short by a rogue missile, a suicide bomber, or some other implement of destruction deployed by unseen leaders standing at the back lines of the conflict. The front isn’t a line on the map – it’s a real area that can, at times, run through a village street or residential neighbourhood.

I have never had to evacuate my home. The closest thing to a hardship we endured was living through the Ice Storm in Montreal. But even then we were lucky in that we didn’t lose power. We welcomed some friends into our home as they lost power, but it was more of a festive atmosphere filled with wonder than anything resembling fear.

How am I to relate to our friends who will be packing up a few belongings for a ship that will bear them to a strange land, until they can be flown back to Canada? When we see them in Montreal, where they once lived, it will seem like old times, not war time.

What must it feel like to leave your home, not knowing whether or not you’ll return – or even whether there will be anything to return to? How does one deal with the waiting for a passage to safety – the worry that anything can happen in a day?

The fact is that we don’t live in a country that’s torn asunder by war. Our petty political and social squabbles pale in comparison to the real-life drama that’s playing out overseas, not just in Lebanon and Israel, but also in Iraq, Afghanistan, and countless other strife-ridden regions. But each and every one of us can step outside our homes and feel safe that missiles, bullets, and bombs aren’t going to be a part of our Canadian experience. In fact, the idea is completely foreign to us.

A popular target for those who like to assign blame is that the media, whether it be video games, television, or film, is responsible for our desensitization towards war and violence. However, that’s wrong. It isn’t overexposure to war, but rather an underexposure to its reality that dulls our emotional response. Watching a firefight on TV will not send shivers up your spine and send you cowering in fear like being physically caught in the cross fire.

It’s hard to feel with the appropriate depth of feeling without relevant experience. Before I would watch televised vehicle accidents with nary a flinch. But now, over three years after a horrific head-on collision, I recoil involuntarily to a screech of tires or the sound of popping glass. And televised representations of accidents bring back the sights, sounds, feelings, and smells of that day behind the wheel.

We can be told fire is hot, but it doesn’t register until we get burned. Pain is a concept that can only be measured by experience. Happiness, joy, excitement can only be appreciated once they’ve been experienced — and so too is fear.

As much as I want to empathize with the innocents who are plagued by the fear and terror that war brings, the fact is that I’m deliriously happy that I can’t. And that’s one deficiency, as Canadians, we should be forever grateful for having.

The price for empathy is experience – and that’s a cost I’m not willing to bear.

2006© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved

Let Monumental Mistake Go

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By Jason Menard

What’s that adage about people in glass houses? Many Canadians are in an apoplectic fit over a few drunken morons who relieved themselves on the national war memorial – but aren’t they just doing physically what we’ve been doing symbolically for years?

Now that the suspects have been identified, average citizens and talking heads will be calling for the maximum punishment that the law will allow. They will be vilified in the court of public opinion and held up as all that’s wrong with the youth of this nation.

People will trot out mantras of respect for the veterans and the actions that they’ve undertaken – and, in a few months, we’ll have forgotten about the incident. And, unfortunately, we’ll have forgotten about our veterans – again.

What these kids did wasn’t an immature expression of political dissent – it was a dumb mistake. And, in fact, I’m willing to forgive both because of the fact that we live in a free country and we have to take the good with the bad.

Is urinating on a monument any more of an affront than burning a flag? Both can be graphic acts of protest and both can be repellant to the majority of Canadians at large. But our veterans didn’t just fight for respect, they fought for our right to speak and express ourselves freely.

And if, as it appears, that this is just a drunken act of foolishness, then I don’t think there’s too many of us who haven’t done something while under the influence that we regret after the fact. Fortunately, for the majority of us, those actions weren’t caught on tape.

We need to get over ourselves. These kids – two 18-year-olds and a 21-year-old – should have known better, but made a mistake. They’re probably terrified and embarrassed and they should simply come forth and make a public apology. Let them make reparations – something like community service or, more appropriately, cleaning out bedpans at a veterans’ hospital – and then let them get on with their lives.

Because, once we move on from them, maybe we’ll take a few moments and take a look at our own actions. The fall is precipitous from this high horse we’ve decided to perch ourselves upon. Yet our behaviour towards veterans, while not as overt, is in many ways just as despicable.

Every November 11 th we pay lip service to our veterans. We wear the poppies and watch the “so-sombre-so-we-must-be-honest” retrospective documentaries about our veterans. And, before the flowers wilt on the cenotaphs and monuments, we promptly shuffle the veterans to the recesses of our mind.

Where does our threshold for disgust lie? To me, a drunken mistake is less offensive than the idiots who disrespect our national anthem during a sporting event to bellow out “Go Team Go.” To me, a foolish action by kids who should have known better is more forgivable than those people who don’t know the lyrics to our national anthem or stand at attention in respectful silence when O Canada is being played.

In fact, I attended a junior hockey game around Remembrance Day last year where a couple of our few remaining veterans were being honoured. In what could have been a touching ceremony, some idiot was unable to quell his Neanderthal urges and decided to use a quiet part of the anthem to make a grab for his 15 seconds of fame, shouting out “Go Knights Go!”

Now tell me how that’s any more respectful? Tell me how a conscious decision to disrespect the song that represents this country – the song that represents the country that these veterans fought for – shouldn’t be held in less regard than what these kids did?

To me the issue is clear. In general, we don’t treat our veterans with the respect they deserve. We trot them out, in ever dwindling numbers, every November as a panacea to our guilty consciences. And then we shuffle them off again to be called upon when it’s time to make ourselves look good.

How many of us go and visit veterans during the rest of the year? How many of us pay the proper respect at our cenotaphs and monuments? How many of us ensure our children are aware of the sacrifices and efforts that their grandparents and great-grandparents made so that we could have the opportunity to enjoy the life we do today? How many of us make sure that the horrors that these veterans faced are never forgotten by passing down the memories to future generations?

Sadly, not enough. As a society, we love to make big shows of our faith – naming streets or highways after veterans, having big ceremonies on Remembrance Day. But it’s not the big displays that matter – it’s the little efforts we take each and every day that really count. And it’s those efforts that a significant number of us don’t do enough of.

So let’s lay off these kids, who obviously made an egregious mistake. After all, we’ve been pissing on the veterans for years ourselves.

2006© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved

The Last Words

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By Jason Menard

As a man who values the English language, let me put this sentiment into a form that the American Literary Council will understand: I want tu beet yue with a shuhlaelee.

For those who aren’t fluent in idiot that translates to “I want to beat you with a shillelagh.

There is a movement afoot to simplify spelling and make it more phonetic, stating that it would help young children learn to read more quickly and would reduce the rate of illiteracy. And it’s a movement that’s been around, south of the border, for over 100 years.

Apparently, writing the way that I am and reading the way you are, is too much of a challenge and leaves English-speakers at a disadvantage to those speaking other languages, such as Spanish and German, whose words are spelled phonetically. According to the ALC, English has 42 sounds that are spelled in 400 different ways.

And that’s in the U.S. Can you image how they’d react to our extra u’s?

Empiric evidence is showing that the English language is being assaulted every day. Instant messaging has created its own sub-dialect of short forms and acronyms designed to save a few keystrokes – and long-term carpal tunnel syndrome – and those terms and phrases have entered into the mainstream.

Of course, the youth aren’t the originators of the acronym. Business has created its own jargon of FYI, ASAP, and QED!

Here’s a few more letters for all of you – STFU! Sorry, this is a family column.

It appears that more and more of us aren’t taking pride in the simple beauty of language. The ability to spell is rapidly going by the wayside as people rely on the bane of a writer’s existence – spell check. And grammar? Forget it – computer versions are often wrong and modern writers don’t have the background knowledge to know when to trust their electronic overlord and when to resist!

Forget people enjoying the beauty of the English language and the way it can be used to draw out emotions from plain text — the ability to string together a sequence of words into a coherent sentence is an ability that’s going the way of the dinosaur.

I’m not a stuffy grammarian – I will end my sentences with propositions from time to time if the text reads better. I appreciate the need for language to modify and change to meet the needs of the modern and future generations. However, there are lines that need to be drawn in the sand – and spelling is where that line is, uhm, spelled out.

If you dumb down your language because it’s too tough for those who speak it to write, then you are, in effect, lowering the expectations of your populace. Instead of challenging them to be better and raise the bar, you end up lowering the bar so that everyone can feel good about themselves – and it doesn’t matter if an ant couldn’t limbo under the threshold that you’ve set.

And why are we so liberal with language? Why is dumbing down the very way we express ourselves acceptable, when no one would ever consider applying a “close-enough” standard to science, medicine, or technology? The world around us continues to grow and require more knowledge, ability, and skills – so why shouldn’t the world within us, and our ability to express ourselves, follow the same path?

This is not a new battle. Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin were early advocates of simpler spelling, and they were followed by Andrew Carnegie and Theodore Roosevelt. Others continue to champion the cause of simpler spelling and perhaps now they’ve found a generation who will find their crusade more palatable.

After all, in a world where BRB, LOL, and Gr8 are commonplace terms, why should they not be included in the mainstream text? Are their inclusions any more offensive than the modern-day executive whose inter-office memo is riddled with errors? Or are they any more grating than the person who misappropriates figures of speech during a conversation?

No, but a society that limits itself through speech limits its ability to grow. Like Quebecoisjoual, this dumbed-down language restricts the capacity of speech to explore new territories – only existing in its own familiar sphere. By refusing to challenge ourselves to be better through speech, we retard our ability to improve through thought. We eliminate a tie to our history, as when the etymology of words gets broken, so too does their connection to our past.

A simplified language would only exist in the here and now, whereas a fully formed and constantly adapting language not only retains its connection to the past, but it also offers the promise of continued refinement in the future.

After all, like Elvis sang, “they’re only words, but words are all I have to steal your heart away.”

2006© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved

Buying into Concept of Freedom of Choice

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By Jason Menard

The Sunday Shopping debate in Nova Scotia is so 15 years ago – well, at least that’s the case for those of us in Ontario. Unfortunately, after all this time, it still appears that people are unwilling to buy into the concept of freedom of choice.

Don’t let anybody fool you – the Sunday Shopping debate has nothing to do with promoting the family or mandating a day of rest for harried workers. It’s all about religion. Plain and simple.

More specifically, it’s about one particular religion, Christianity, attempting to assert control over something that it should truly have no control over. After all, we’re only discussing the evils of shopping on the Christian Sabbath, not the Jewish Shabbat now, aren’t we?

Allegedly Canada is a secular society – not that the Church would mind if that wasn’t the case. And if we are secular by nature, then religious holidays and observances have no place in the defining of how and when we live our lives or buy milk.

But beyond what side of the debate you are on in terms of religion, the fact that there is even a debate at all obscures the fact that this is just another example of religion refusing to allow people to exercise the ability to choose to lead the life they want. Instead the Church is attempting to squeeze its fist tighter around a rapidly dispersing flock – and the problem with that mentality is that the more one squeezes, the more likely people will slip through the fingers.

The Church, in its zeal to mandate that everyone – regardless of whether or not they’re Christian – follows its rules are happily advocating restricting people’s rights to personal choice. And, in fighting so hard against a world that it can’t abide, the Church is missing the most effective tactic in the fight against perceived evil.

Personal choice.

The very thing they’re trying to restrict is the one thing that could be its salvation. But by fighting so hard against the concept, not only is the Church fighting a battle it can’t win – it’s running the risk of alienating not just those who are spiritually curious, but also those already within the congregations of Canada.

Religious or not, we all have the ability to chose. And, when it comes to deciding what’s good and bad for the masses, none of us are ever going to be right. However, when it comes to choosing what’s good and bad for ourselves… well, then there’s no better authority than Numero Uno!

Find a TV show offensive? Turn it off. Believe that pornography is evil? Don’t rent it and stay out of the sex shops. You find that classic literature is crossing the line of decency? Put down the match and leave the book on the shelf.

Simply put, there is no better filter in the world than personal choice. Nobody is forcing anyone else to do anything they don’t want. There is no Atheist Army rousing you out of your sleep to drag you to Wal-Mart. Nor is there anyone forcing you to keep your eyes glued to Fear Factor over a bowl of Spaghetti-Os.

We can make our own choices. If you think that your God doesn’t want you to go shopping on Sundays, then by all means stay at home, go to Church, or do anything else. But, as you’re enjoying the freedom to choose how you live your life, ensure that you allow others to engage in that same freedom.

For many people, Sunday shopping is a necessity considering the hectic lives many of us lead. With school, work, family time in the evenings, activities, and the like, often Sunday is the best day to go shopping. And for others, working on Sunday is a blessing – no pun intended. Those on fixed incomes, students, and other casual labourers all benefit from the fact that the wheels of commerce continue to spin on Sundays.

As well, there’s really no one-size-fits-all approach to life, now, is there? Not everyone works 9-5 between Monday and Friday. There are people that work shifts, those with schedule challenges, those with a myriad host of other reasons as to why a “traditional” lifestyle does not apply.

Should these people, for whom a day of rest on Sunday doesn’t work, be subjected to one based upon one group’s religious beliefs?

The Nova Scotia Sunday Shopping debate just proves again that nobody should be forced to do anything – anything except being forced to respect each other’s right to live the life we want, free of harassment, judgment, and scorn.

2006© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved

Taking a City’s Pulse

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By Jason Menard

Noted poet El DeBarge, before he plunged into the particular circle of Hell reserved for 80’s pop Jackson-wannabes, implored us all to feel the beat of the rhythm of the night. But how do you feel the beat when the city you live in has no pulse.

Recently I had the pleasure of spending two days in Toronto on a conference. Now, Hog Town’s not my favourite city in the world, but being in the heart of downtown for two days reminded me what a real city is like – and what I’m missing where I currently live.

No, I was not dancing ‘til the morning light – in fact, my dancing machine’s in bad need of an overhaul. But I did take the opportunity to walk – a hell of a long way, if you ask my feet. It was a practise that I used to engage in quite frequently living and working in Montreal.

There is a pulse to the city and you can tell the tourists not by the gaudy clothes or the slack-jawed, gaping stares as they look heavenwards at the steel and glass monstrosities that rise up before them. You can tell who they are by the fact that they don’t engage in the dance of the street. They’re unable to walk any distance without bumping into people, the become confused and double-back on their steps, and they generally get in the way of those who feel the rhythms of the city in their bones and march along in time.

Unfortunately, absence doesn’t just make the heart grow fonder, it makes one forget the notes that sing so sweetly for city dwellers.

Once I was able to walk the busy downtown streets of Montreal, along with thousands of dance partners as we emerged from our underground transportation blinking into the light of day. Huddling our jackets about us in winter or trying to catch our breath stolen by the oppressive humidity of summer, we would steel ourselves for the march and move in time – one harmonious, intertwined mass that would only break apart as we would reach our destination.

In fact, many of us, myself include, would do this while keeping our noses buried in a book or newspaper. The morning and evening commute danced along the city streets, through the cacophony of horns as we regarded streets signs as a suggestion.

Yes, this time I noticed I was one of “them.” I was one of those unfortunate few who appeared to be dancing with two left feet. The notes, although familiar, weren’t coming back to me as quickly as they once did. And the reason is because where I live now just doesn’t play the same tune.

Oh, sure, there’s a rhythm to London, Ontario – unfortunately when it comes to the downtown it sounds more like Taps. And where I work it could be the theme to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. My day job is in an industrial park area, near a residential section, but certainly not conducive to an engaging walk. It’s an area where one doesn’t walk for pleasure – it’s an area where you have to force yourself to walk. But, more often than not, we all pile into our cars, shut out the great outdoors, and drive to whatever destination and errand awaits us.

And that’s one of the biggest thing big-city dwellers miss about big cities. It’s not the events, it’s not the size or diversity – it’s not all that external stuff. What’s most missed by those that leave is something more organic – something internal. It’s not the style, it’s not the flash that you miss, it’s the heartbeat of the city. It’s that factor that you can’t fake, that you can’t just feel in a one-week visit, but rather that slow and steady pulse that’s made up of all those who are a part of it.

I’ve felt it in Montreal, Toronto, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. These are not cities built upon foundations of steel and glass, but rather they’re nexus points where millions of souls converge to engage in a dynamic dance of life.

For those two days, even though I can’t consider myself a fan of Toronto itself, I have to admit that it was nice to feel the rhythms and remember how I was once able to dance those steps. Perhaps it will happen again, but at the very least I know that when I’m back in a city with a true pulse, I’ll be able to feel it, slowly, reassuringly. And in large cities where people often feel alone despite being surrounded by millions of people, that pulse, that heartbeat is what makes us feel a part of something bigger.

2006© Menard Communications – Jason Menard All Rights Reserved