I was sitting in the cafeteria at my parent’s assisted living facility last Monday when I became aware of the images of the bombing in Boston on the big screen TV.  It took me a moment to realize what had happened, but my first instincts were “Oh, no, not again.”  And last night when I saw the images of the 19-year-old suspect, lying on the ground bleeding with dozens of armed police surrounding him, my only thoughts were how small and pathetic he appeared.  How could this  baby-faced, young man and his brother have been the masterminds behind such a horrible event?

That was the first surprise.  In all of the photos and video I’ve seen, they would appear quite ordinary and innocent.

Another surprise was how many internet vigilantes there are;  people were posting faces of those attending the Boston Marathon on Reddit, claiming them to be possible suspects.  Never mind how ignorant and stupid that is, but what about the poor fellow who ended up with media vans all over his lawn (I won’t even say his name because I would be victimizing him again), because a local media organization gave his name as a suspect the police were investigating.  He was innocent, of course.  But people didn’t wait to find that out.  I’m sure it would be no exaggeration to say he was frightened for his life.

Which was another surprise.  Or maybe not.  Should media organizations be allowed to release the names of ANYONE until they are officially a suspect and their names released by the police?  Honest to pete, the media is in such a RUSH to be first that they rarely take the time any more to thoroughly check their information.

I heard people calling in to a local radio station on the day it happened, complaining at how the station was constantly changing the info regarding how many had been killed or hurt.  The announcer was asking “should we not report it at all?” and callers were saying “get your facts straight first!”  Would it be a surprise for the media to learn that a lot of people out here would rather know the truth than deal with their constant speculation?

The next surprise is not a surprise really at all.  How many times can a video be looped in an hour on CNN?  A gazillion, as it turns out.  I turned it on at one point when I had heard that the video of the brothers at the marathon had been released, then turned it off, and hours later CNN was still looping the same video over and over and over and over again.  They would find different ways of repeating it, another reporter would take over and start analysing it, then it would run in the background as they threw to yet another reporter or anchor.  CNN is too blatantly gleeful when big tragedies occur, I suppose because it gives them a reason for being.  They know that people (like myself) will tune in to get the latest and so they keep reporting and reporting even when there is nothing to report.  Every show host hops the train or plane to the latest “ground zero” and does the whole show live from there.  Every show is renamed “Special Edition” as they continue to regurgitate the same information.

Lucky for them, the explosion at the fertilizer plant in Texas came only a couple of days later.  Another ratings booster.  Not so lucky for those who were killed or injured in that tragic event.

That they found this pathetic kid injured and hiding in someone’s backyard was no surprise.  With the arsenal of assault weapons and sheer number of authorities looking for him, the guy was never going to get away for long.  I’m sure he had no idea what to do next.

But what did surprise me was the bizarre display of jubilation from locals, some of them holding out their beer cans and ripping off their shirts, when the kid was caught.  “We got him!” they tweeted.  And the gleeful grins and waves of acknowledgement from the authorities as they drove off into the night;  I’m sorry, but you were chasing one kid.  Granted, he and his brother apparently had a lot of ammunition at their disposal, but the show of force to me was, for lack of a better word, overkill.  Tanks and robots, automatic weapons, helicopters with heat-seeking equipment.  There was an “America Wins Again” attitude coming from everyone whooping and hollering in the streets.  But it wasn’t a game, and nobody won.  The partying in the streets was in poor taste.

Once he recovers adequately, they’re going to interrogate this kid without reading him his Miranda rights, evoking a rare public safety exception.  Even the American Civil Liberties Association is concerned about that.  They say the exception applies only when there is a continued threat to public safety and is “not an open-ended exception” to the Miranda rule.  He is obviously in no shape to be a threat to anyone.  But in a sad way, this preferred method of interrogation is no surprise.  It’s because of his ethnicity.

I know, I know, I KNOW that what Dzhokar Tsarnaev and his brother did was horrendous.  But I’d like to know if the authorities read James Holmes, the Colorado movie theatre shooter, his rights when he was captured?  And if they did, what’s the difference?  Is it because he was American born, and therefore couldn’t possibly be a “terrorist”?  For pete’s sake, he killed four times as many people.

I know that there are probably a thousand little good things that came of this tragedy…as there often are during trying times.  People come together in ways they hadn’t before, support for those who lost loved ones and for those who were injured has probably been overwhelming.  I know that there is more determination than ever from marathoners in other cities to show up and not allow fear to ruin their events.

But I wish I had been surprised in a more positive way.

greed (gr d) n. An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth.


I recently had a phone call from a parent of a guitar student, who was disputing the amount he had paid me compared to the number of lessons I had given his daughter.  She had decided to quit her lessons so this call came a couple of weeks after our last one.  It was late in the evening after a full day of teaching when the call came in, and I had just shut my computer down.  As we spoke I tried to reboot my computer and look at my records, but I was flustered and finally I said I would send him a cheque for the one lesson he believed I owed her.  


The following day, I went through my records and determined that I had, in fact, taught her for the exact number of lessons he had paid for.  So I carefully constructed a letter, complete with all of the dates of her lessons and the total he had paid me, so that he would see that I had not ripped him off.  We were only disputing one lesson, so in good faith, I sent the cheque along with the letter because I had promised I would and said so in the letter.  A month went by and he didn’t cash the cheque, so I more or less forgot about it.  And then the other day when I checked my bank account, I saw that he had cashed it.  I would like to say that I was surprised, but in fact, I wasn’t.  I should point out that this family was far from poor, and I was paid to teach the girl in her home, so I could see they were well off.


Why wasn’t I surprised at his act?  I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve had issues with payments over my twenty-six years of teaching.  Most people are honest, as am I, and we always manage to work things out.  I have made mistakes in calculations, as others have, but in the end we find a way to agree.  But sometimes you meet people in various situations and immediately sense their disrespect, their sense of entitlement and/or self-importance.  Who knows where it comes from or why, but that is what I sensed in this man.  Over the months that I came to teach his daughter, when he paid me, he did so without looking me in the eye and with an air of contempt.


One big story in Canadian news this week was about the Royal Bank of Canada replacing their Canadian employees with foreign workers at a lower wage.  Apparently, their $7.5 billion in profits in 2012 wasn’t enough and they needed to cut costs.


It’s not only RBC, the other banks do this as well as many larger corporations.  And perhaps we should remind ourselves of the crash in the U.S. of 2008 because of corporate greed, for lack of a better phrase.  Five years later, the Occupy Movement has seemingly died out, but the greed continues unabated.  People on the right side of the political spectrum love to throw around the “less government, fewer regulations” argument, but look what happens when some companies and corporations are left unchecked.  It’s disgusting.

So what makes that corporate executive at a highly profitable company decide that it’s better to replace employees with others at lower wages?  What makes another relatively well-to-do person cash a cheque that they know is not really their money to have?


“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed” – Mahatma Ghandi

In seven separate recent studies conducted on the UC Berkeley campus “researchers consistently found that upper-class participants were more likely to lie and cheat when gambling or negotiating; cut people off when driving, and endorse unethical behaviour in the workplace. The increased unethical tendencies of upper-class individuals are driven, in part, by their more favourable attitudes toward greed,” said Paul Piff.



Other studies I’ve read in past show that often, those with less money tend to be more generous. For instance, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2009 survey of “consumer expenditure found that the poorest fifth of America’s households contributed an average of 4.3 percent of their incomes to charitable organizations in 2007. The richest fifth gave at less than half that rate, 2.1 percent.”


It seems that the more money you have, the more likely you are to be unabashedly greedy.  Of course, this isn’t true in every case, as was shown by Warren Buffet’s declaration in an op-ed in the New York Times “I know well many of the mega-rich and, by and large, they are very decent people,  Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes as well, particularly when so many of their fellow citizens are truly suffering.” I think that in many cases, this is true.  There are wealthy people out there who are also generous and philanthropic.


So the heads of the Royal Bank of Canada first tried to explain and then ultimately apologized for their actions, which was more about damage control than any real remorse, of course.  They were only sorry that they had been caught.  And had I decided to confront the fellow who cashed that cheque, he might also have felt embarrassed, or maybe even given me back the money.  My deepest feeling, however, was that I had done the right thing and that it was his decision whether or not to show his true colours, which he surely did.


I am happy, however, that the employees who were ditched by the RBC in favour of cheaper labour came out to the media.  Previously fired employees at other companies are now coming forward too, as are the replacement employees who are also being cheated and even threatened by their future employers.  


One little cheque didn’t deplete my bank account;  hundreds of people losing their livelihood due to corporate greed is another story.   But both stories highlight something in our human nature that won’t go away any time soon.  Greed is not good.

My family has always laughed at my rule of never watching a movie more than once.  I have been the same with books;  my thought has always been “I’ve already read (seen) that, why would I read (watch) it again?”

In the last couple of years, however, I’ve realized how much I miss when I only give something one run through.  You can’t possibly take it all in without a revisit or two.  And even more recently, I found myself re-watching episodes of Downton Abbey more out of desperation than anything else, because it has such a short season to begin with.

I discovered Downton last summer when I was bored and wanted to watch something, anything, online.  These days with PVRs so handy, my husband always has piles of movies and series he wants to watch which are rarely my preference.  Like that zombie series.  What is so appealing about strange creatures who want to eat brains?   “The Good Wife” isn’t bad, but ice truckers and stuff pickers and storage bidders are just not that fascinating to me.  Anyway, I don’t want to go into another room by myself and watch another TV, so I stay in the living room and watch whatever I can on my laptop, whether it be documentaries or movies on Netflix or some of my favourite PBS or CBC series that are available from their websites.

So last summer I decided to buy the first episode of the first season of Downton Abbey on iTunes because I was curious after I’d heard so much about it.  And I was hooked.  Hooked, line and sinker.  I ended up buying the whole first season, and then the second.  And then I watched them all again twice.  This past January, I bought a pre-season pass to the third series so they would download on my laptop when they were available.  And much to my surprise, my husband decided he wanted to watch it with me since we so rarely watch things together these days.  Now, I’m not sure he’s hooked like I am, but he watched the whole third season with me when they aired on PBS on Sunday nights.  Then, sometime during the week, I would watch each episode again on my laptop, because I’m just that addicted.  I am so happy that I have the three series on my laptop because I know that sometime within the next few months and before season four, I will once again go through every episode in the three series.  Maybe twice.  I’ve got it bad.

So what is it about Downton?  Well, those who are as addicted as I am, need no explanation.  It’s a soap opera within a period piece.  It’s a cast of contradictory and yet complimentary characters.  It’s a beautiful setting, Hycroft Castle, and the splendidly authentic interior sets and costumes.  It’s the delicious delivery of those classic lines from Violet Crawley, played by the incomparable Maggie Smith.  Each episode has at least two or three tasty ones.

The last episode of the third series aired last Sunday night.  I am already feeling symptoms of withdrawal.

I think TV audiences these days, especially those of us who were raised with one television in the house where the whole family gathered together to watch our favourite weekly shows, are desperate for good quality, well-written episodic television.  I know, I know.  I’m awfully close to blurting out the tired old phrase “the way it used to be” just like my parents did and their parents before them.   And of course, it isn’t easy to dissect why not enough good quality series are not being produced, because there are many reasons.  But I think one major reason for it is the fact that networks keep chasing younger audiences who don’t really care about TV, and in some cases losing those of us who are already habitual TV watchers.  And that’s the end of my rant.

Because if you don’t mind, I think I’ll just throw on another episode of Downton and escape once again…

IJ