Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Bronx Is Up And The Battery’s Down

Posted on by
For some reason this article that I wrote in June 2008, never got published on my blog…so here it is:


All last week, I was in a place I’m not sure I ever believed I’d visit; New York City. The first walk from the depths of the hot, dank, underground train station up the stairs into the smells and the crowds and the noise of the street was something I’ll never forget. People, people, people…pushing, cars honking, sirens wailing, heat, smoke from the street vendors selling all kinds of greasy food. Immediately, you feel like you have to hurry…the sweat is pouring from you, you can’t hear each other speak, you keep smashing your suitcase into things, trying to negotiate it around a swarm of human bodies, all rushing off somewhere else. Nobody really gets out of your way…you get out of theirs. You don’t know where the heck you are, you’re trying to get perspective, trying to keep yourself from having an anxiety attack. Then there is the great relief of finding a cab, finally seeing a way out of the madness…you sputter the address of the hotel and, sighing, you sit back in the cool leather seats of the cab and watch a whole different world whiz by you. Cabs have TV’s in them. And GPS video image maps so you can watch yourself getting to where you’re going. How strange is that?
From that moment on, it was a whirlwind of activity…we were overwhelmed. New York is almost a world unto itself. You know it’s big because you can’t see a way out of it! Every street you look down is just a cascade of tall buildings, one after the next. You don’t really get any geographic perspective; all of the buildings are so tall that you can’t identify your landmarks even if you’re only a block away from them! It wasn’t until the last day that I figured out which way to go when I walked out the front door of the hotel.
Now I’ve lived in a city, the city of Vancouver in the West End in the late 70’s and early 80’s, and I remember the feel of it, the pace, the constant rush of white noise. So I’m not exactly a country bumpkin. But it’s been awhile, and even though I anticipated what it was going to feel like, I was still thrown for a loop. We all were.
Yellow cabs. There are over 12,000 yellow cabs in Manhattan alone. And they are always honking…honest to Pete I don’t know how there aren’t ten times more accidents than there are. The cabs are always chasing each other, twisting and turning, squeezing in between and then squeezing some more. And honking some more. They honk at each other and at everybody else if they can’t get their way. Fists come flying out windows, obscenities belch through the air, out into the streets where a person like me stands on the corner trying to figure out where the heck I am. Too late…the crowds push behind me and I have to cross the street. Damn.
Pedestrians. They don’t wait for walk signs here. They wait for the last yellow cab to peel through and then casually cross behind them, cellphones glued to their ears, oblivious of that little red hand flashing across from them. Usually by the time the walk sign comes on, there are three or four trucks jammed in the intersection. But the locals brazenly swarm off the corner in groups, either rushing between vehicles or their heads peering back and forth looking for the first hole. Then bam! A car couldn’t make it through the horde of human bodies if it barreled them all down. The sheer volume of pedestrians, especially near places like Times Square, is unbelievable.
Times Square. That’s the picture you see above. It was the first recognizable landmark we came across the first night we ventured out. We were fish out of water, just meandering aimlessly looking for food, when suddenly the whole world lit up and started buzzing and flashing. There’s a law in the city that in Times Square a majority of the percentage of the buildings’ face must have advertising. One building owner doesn’t even have tenants anymore. He makes $300,000.00 a month just from the advertisements on his building! There are giant M&M characters climbing the Empire State building on a 30 foot high screen. I saw a 20 foot high bottle of Corona, my favourite beer! Nike, Pepsi, DKNY, Broadway theatre advertisements, movies, television stars. Macy’s Department Store, Rockerfeller Centre.
What an assault on the senses!
And would you believe it, it so happened that the Tony’s were being broadcast live from Radio City Music Hall, just as we were mosying on by. Whoopi Goldberg was in there, and the limos and black Cadillacs were lined up and down every street, parked and waiting for their consorts.
Okay. That was just the first night. There is so much to tell that I’m going to have to do this in bits and pieces. But I will certainly have more to say.
“New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town
The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down”
Now I finally know what that means!
IJ

What Surprised Me About Boston (and what didn’t…)

Posted on by

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 Comes In All Sizes

Posted on by

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.