test blog 5

Right now I'm so busy, between work and union, that I barely have time to hate Christmas. As I've found in recent years , a combination of circumstances - getting out of the office worker environment, streaming-only TV and movies (ad-free!), discovering the authentic meaning many of my colleagues find in the holiday - has taken the edge off my irritation. I still hate that Christmas is a national holiday in countries that supposedly separate Church and State. As our world becomes increasingly multicultural, the Christmas and Easter holidays make less sense all the time. I still hate the hyper-consumerism. The music. The assumptions about our choices. The ads. The crowds. The Santas. Now that I think about it... I still hate  all of it . I just think about it a lot less. Our library, both customers and staff, is incredibly multicultural and inclusive. Yet, out come the Christmas decorations, the cards, the chocolates, the shopping lists, the Christmas storytimes. I find it incre...

Tomorrow, December 10, is Human Rights Day . The date commemorates the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948, the first document of its kind. Every year on December 10, Amnesty International holds a global letter-writing event: Write For Rights ( in Canada ). Thousands of people around the world write handwritten letters calling for action for victims of human rights abuses, and offering comfort and support to political prisoners. Last year, I listed 10 reasons you should participate in Write For Rights. 1. It's easy. Amnesty makes it really easy to participate. Read, type, send. 2. You can do do it from any computer. No meetings to attend, no schedule to keep. Just more of something you do all the time anyway: typing. 3. It's free. No need to donate money. The most this will cost you is postage. 4. You'll feel good about yourself. Enjoy that warm buzz you get from voluntarily helping other people. There's nothing quite like i...

I rarely blog about the War Resisters Support Campaign anymore, but the war resisters are always on my mind. In fact, they're in my thoughts more than ever, now that the nightmare of the Harper Government has finally ended. With the newly elected Liberal government promising change, we have an opportunity to raise the issue again. This time we fight not only for the war resisters who remain in Canada, but for those who were so unjustly forced out for the right to return. Wmtc readers, I haven't asked anything of you in a long time. Could you spare a few minutes for the war resisters today? Here's what you can do: - Watch and share this video of Alexina Key asking Justin Trudeau if a Liberal government will allow her husband Joshua Key and other US war resisters to stay. - Phone or email Minister of Immigration John McCallum to urge him to let US Iraq War resisters stay. You can email the Minister and your MP by clicking here or write your own message and send to minister...

Barry Crimmins might be the most famous person you've never heard of. In "Call Me Lucky," a documentary tribute to Crimmins created by Bobcat Goldthwait, an A-list of comics talk about the influence Crimmins had on them and their community: Patton Oswalt, David Cross, Margaret Cho, Marc Maron, Steven Wright, among others. Crimmins toured with Billy Bragg. He won a peace award, handed to him by Howard Zinn; the other recipient sharing the stage: Maya Angelou. In his younger and wilder days, Crimmins was hugely influential in the rising stand-up comedy scene, although the word influential doesn't quite describe it. In Boston, he was comedy's midwife, and his club was its incubator. Allan and I met Barry through a baseball discussion list in the 90s, quickly bonding over our politics and, for me, a shared identity as survivors of sexual abuse or assault. We stayed at Barry's place on the Cleveland stop of our 1999 rust-belt baseball tour, and went to a few games...

When we think of gun violence in the United States, chances are we think of mass shootings. These horrific events which occur with such regularity seem, to much of the world, mostly preventable. The public nature of the shootings, and the often tragically young age of the victims, capture headlines and a good portion of the 24-hour news cycle. Yet murders occur every day in the US, and no one hears about them, except the grief-stricken loved ones and those who fear they may be next. Jill Leovy's Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America is about those murders - both one specific tragedy and what Leovy calls "the plague" itself. Part sociology and part detective story, Ghettoside is a triumph of reporting, of analysis, and of compassion. This book is disturbing and extremely compelling, and it may change forever how you view both violence and the criminal justice system's response to it. Leovy is a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times , and the plague she inv...

In library school we talked a lot about the digital divide , the ever-increasing gap between those who have access to information and communication technology, and those who do not. Public libraries are one of the very few institutions that exist to bridge that gap, however imperfectly. What does the digital divide look like on the ground? In my library, located in one of the lowest-income communities in Ontario (and in Canada), we see the digital divide in action every single day. This week a family worked on a visa application for the United States. They had to come to the library first thing in the morning, so we could special-book them a computer, as the process would take much longer than a standard computer reservation. With intermittent staff help, they worked on their application for three hours. There was no way to download and save the application, and no paper version. When they tried to save and submit the application, either the computer or the site malfunctioned (we don...

Some facts. 1.  The likelihood that you will be killed in a terrorist attack is extremely small. You are much more likely to be hit by lightning, killed in a car crash, have a heart attack, or meet your death hundreds of other ways. 2. Most documented terrorist attacks are perpetrated by people who are not Muslim.  And this doesn't count anti-abortion violence or women being killed by abusive partners, which are forms of terrorism. 3. In 2013 and 2014, more than 316,000 people in the United States were killed by guns . 313 Americans died in terrorist attacks. 4. After the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, violence against Muslim people in the US and Canada  have skyrocketed . Mosques have been burned and vandalized , women picking up their children at school have been attacked , people have been shoved, spit on, forced off planes. 5. In the UK and Europe, it is even worse . * * * * Yesterday, in my library, a woman called to alert us to a "security threat". She said s...