I had meant for this to be a weekly thing and I still hope it is, but danged if things didn't get busy. I thought I had my summer all planned out, and then about a month ago I was told I was being sent to Toronto for producer training.
I should also say that early on in the #YesAllWoman hashtag, I wrote this note for myself:
"I feel like the concerns should be shared and given voice, but I’m not sure it makes sense to match them to the event that triggered it. By placing them alongside such an extreme event, it makes it easy for people to wave the hashtag off: “obviously not allmen go on killing sprees like that, silly hashtag activists.”
"And that dismissal can be dangerous because look at all the stories being shared of much less extreme events that cause harm every day. I kind of feel like this hashtag could have been more powerful had it been started for no reason whatsoever other than the fact that it’s time to start talking about this
This is good, the whole point of the training is to learn effective management, setting priorities, that sort of thing. I have some experience with that, but for short bursts and in relatively low stakes environments. In just a few weeks I take over as the producer of a CBC Radio program (the most-listened to 2.5 hours of radio in Prince George, we recently found out), managing a team of peers and professionals.
One of the things I've starte to realize this past year is that I need to start seeing myself as someone who is in a leadership position. I tend to think of myself as a beginner which I think is a health attitude to have (I don't know it all), but at this point I do have some experience and am being give roles and responsibilities that reflect that, and so the next step is to act accordingly. So I'm looking forward to this.
So that's a week, and then we decided to add a week to that and visit Montreal and Quebec City, a trip that's been on our top-three for a while. So suddenly trying to throw that together has been time-consuming, arranging where we'll stay there and who will care for things here- it's probably not that big of a deal but it's been quite a while since I travelled for more than a few days, so it feels odd.
But I'm glad we're going for it, it will be an experience for sure.
Meanwhile, here's some thigns I've done you may be interested in:
Radio
- debate: are mosquitoes useful, or should we just get rid of them?
- why aren't there more bike racks in downtown Prince George?
- reading to cats in Fort St John
- thousands of bees swarm downtown Prince George - what happened?
Writing
What I've been thinking about:
The things that I've been thinking about the most are privilege, "check your privilege", mass shootings, and #YesAllWomen and #NotAllMen. Some writing and listening on those subjects:
Check your privilege started with a piece called, "Why I'll Never Apologize For My White Male Privilege" in which a Princeton student writes, "Behind every success, large or small, there is a story, and it isn’t always told by sex or skin color. My appearance certainly doesn’t tell the whole story, and to assume that it does and that I should apologize for it is insulting." Some response pieces I enjoyed are "To the Princeton Privileged Kid" (definitely read the part about racing someone with one leg), "You Don't Have to Apologize for Being White," "Check Your Privilege Meme and Why It's Ineffective," and this episode of the Current discussing the phenom.
On the subject of masss shootings, it's largely the media's role in covering them that I've been thinking about. Do "we" sensationalize it too much? In doing so do we create a culture of fear and lead to copycats? To that end: "Did the Media Help Pull the Trigger?," Q Media Panel on Mass Shootings, this excellent video, and an academic paper on "Ethical Problems of Mass Murder Coverage in the Mass Media."
Related to the subject of mass shooting is the #NotAllMen/#YesAllWomen discussion. It was kicked off by a shooting, but it's a longstanding discussion about feminism and gender equality. Some quotes I saved:
"When a woman is walking down the street, or on a blind date, or, yes, in an elevator alone, she doesn’t know which group you’re in. You might be the potential best guy ever in the history of history, but there’s no way for her to know that. A fraction of men out there are most definitely not in that group. Which are you? Inside your head you know, but outside your head it’s impossible to."
"We (male) nerds grow up force-fed this script. Lusting after women “out of our league” was what we did. And those unattainable hot girls would always inevitably reject us because they didn’t understand our intellectual interest in science fiction and comic books and would instead date asshole jocks. This was inevitable, and our only hope was to be unyieldingly persistent until we “earned” a chance with these women by “being there” for them until they saw the error of their ways. (The thought of just looking for women who shared our interests was a foreign one, since it took a while for the media to decide female geeks existed. The Big Bang Theory didn’t add Amy and Bernadette to its main cast until Season 4, in 2010.)"
“Not all men” also differs from “what about the men?” and other classic derails because it acknowledges that rape, sexism, and misogyny are real issues — just not, you know, real issues that the speaker is involved with in any way. The “not all men” man, at least in some cases, agrees with you and is perfectly willing to talk about how terrible those other guys are, just as soon as we get done establishing that he himself would never be such a cad. It’s infuriating and unhelpful, but in a way it represents a weird kind of progress."
"But what needs to stop right now is ascribing simplistic, headline-grabbing motives to the actions of fragmented and troubled individuals… just because they suit an agenda, no matter how worthy that agenda might be."
"It’s a strange thing. If a black man or a gay man or a Muslim were implicated in this very same scenario, and a video and writings had been found afterward ranting about whites, heterosexuals or Jews — even though the killer had taken out a mixed bag of victims — what would be the very first hashtag we’d see? It would be #Don’tBlameAll[insert minority here]. We’re all manic on the crime of negative stereotyping when it comes to every single identity group other than heterosexual males. It doesn’t matter whether the heterosexual males in question are completely crazy: If they’re crazy and misogynistic, then … well, they’re not really crazy, they’re just an extreme version of what it means to be a man."
"I feel like the concerns should be shared and given voice, but I’m not sure it makes sense to match them to the event that triggered it. By placing them alongside such an extreme event, it makes it easy for people to wave the hashtag off: “obviously not allmen go on killing sprees like that, silly hashtag activists.”
/thinking out loud
"Edit: I think the #YesAllWomen hashtag makes a lot more sense if you look at in the context of being a response to these sorts of comments in the wake of the tragedy, as opposed to a response to the tragedy itself."
It's a lot of heady stuff, but I think it's important to challenge and be challenged on these sorts of things. I don't have any grand unifying theory or final conclusions, but I'm definitely seeking out and finding a wide variety of points of view, which I think is giving me a greater understanding of... well, lots of things.
Anyways, I have to finish getting ready for a flight. Here's a Vine of a piano being smashed for the Casse-Tete Festival. It's Sunday morning as I write this, you still have time to catch some of the last day.
