Screeds against Catholics from the 19th century sounded just like the invective today against the Not-at-Ground-Zero Mosque. The starting point isn’t hatred but fear: an alarm among patriots that newcomers don’t share their values, don’t believe in democracy, and may harm innocent Americans.

Followers of these movements against Irish, Germans, Italians, Chinese and other immigrants were mostly decent, well-meaning people trying to protect their country. But they were manipulated by demagogues playing upon their fears — the 19th- and 20th-century equivalents of Glenn Beck.

Most Americans stayed on the sidelines during these spasms of bigotry, and only a small number of hoodlums killed or tormented Catholics, Mormons or others. But the assaults were possible because so many middle-of-the-road Americans were ambivalent.

Suspicion of outsiders, of people who behave or worship differently, may be an ingrained element of the human condition, a survival instinct from our cave-man days. But we should also recognize that historically this distrust has led us to burn witches, intern Japanese-Americans, and turn away Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.

As long time readers of this blog know we as a family are big fans of Survivorman as well as Les Stroud’s other projects so it should come as no surprise that we sat around and watched Beyond Survival tonight.  We hadn’t even gone by the opening credits before I said, “we may as well pre-order season one on DVD right now”. 

The point of the show is that Stroud is revisiting and exploring some of the ancient survival forms that he showed in Survivorman as well as showing ancient survival forms that are in danger of disappearing in an age of globalization and modern technology.

Like Survivorman, there is a lot of first person shot that Stroud made popular but unlike Stroud, there is a second camera person which ads a lot of the production.  Of course there are dangerous bugs, poisoness tree sap, and predatorial mammals.

The show is a good one and I was right, I will be purchasing the series on DVD as soon as it comes out.

Why would I possibly be blocked from this video on ESPN (about college football) because of copyright concerns.  They can broadcast to Canada but I can’t see it on YouTube?   What on a college sports show could possibly by copyrighted in Canada?  C’mon ESPN, tear down this wall.

I know school population is part of it.  While Caswell has almost no split classes, all of the classes that Mark would be in until he graduated out of there were split classes but shouldn’t all schools have access to the same quality of library, the same access to computers and the same access to educational resources?  Especially when they are all of five blocks apart.  A good education should not be geographically based.

Of course I would love to be proven wrong.  Too bad the Star Phoenix or Planet S Magazine didn’t have the inclination to compare and rate public schools and compare student – teacher, student – computer, student – teacher assistant ratios, extra curricular activities, and look at what grade students could start entering into a run of split classrooms.  It would be interesting to see.

Nice to see Telus step up and be a presenting sponsor.

After I made it public that I was looking for a new challenge, several serious job offers came in and we looked at some opportunities that would change our financial position substantially and one in particular that would give me and the family an opportunity to travel and live abroad.  Another offer was a great job in a particularly evil company.  Not quite big tobacco or working for the GOP but evil enough that I am sure that all go for supper together.  I have lived in the prairies my entire life and the opportunity to raise Mark and Oliver in a different culture and worldview was something that I wanted to do since Mark was born.  I am also getting to the age where I think a little more about retirement each year and this would give us a chance to retire with a little more money in the bank.  While the Salvation Army treats me quite fairly, as a non-profit, it can’t compare to the compensation of evil publically traded companies.  Whatever my job decision was going to be, I had planned to wrap up work here last Wednesday and start at my new job in late September.  I was asked to reconsider my decision and stay here as well but at the time, I was at peace with moving on to new challenges.

It wasn’t a easy decision to make as we balanced Wendy’s access to treatment, what was good for the boys, what our goals were as a family, and also some pretty strong ties to Saskatoon, particularly the core neighbourhoods of Saskatoon.  During this time of evaluation, there was a murder (more) that bothered me deeply.  I know both the victim and the accused from work and while I was processing that death, we had a death at work.  After hours of questioning by the police, crime scene investigators and major crimes (don’t worry, it was a death from natural causes), I drove our former chaplain up to St. Paul’s Hospital as he was off to see a dying friend.  While I tend to drive up 19th Street to avoid the traffic on 20th, I drove back down 20th Street that night.  I have never seen 20th Street like that.  I counted 14 girls clearly working the stroll.  Three of them looked to be underage.  Guys were on the street corners as I watched 2 drug deals go down.  I know that isn’t typical for 20th Street and was like that because the Saskatoon Exhibition was in town which brings in a lot of out of town customers.  As I left the Centre that night around 10:00 p.m., I turned back up 19th and as I was turning the corner, I watched a taxi complete a brazen dial-a-dope transaction at the phone booth across the street from the Centre.  Of course the prostitutes were on 33rd Street that night (Wendy later told me that there has been as many as four in the Safeway parking lot on shift).  I got home, grabbed a Diet Coke, grabbed my Moleskine and started to jot down some notes for how things had changed since I started working at the Salvation Army in Riversdale and on the west side.

What we do at the Salvation Army Community Services is both really simple in concept and really complex in how it is executed.  The concepts are pretty easy.  We provide meals, food, budget management help, and emergency assistance to those that need it.  The nuances of distributing those goods, paying for it, being paid for it, determining need and the appropriate response is what is so complex.  It takes a lot of staff, volunteers, officers, and money to make it happen.

The operational side I have a firm grasp on, it is that simple stuff that was troubling me.  The Centre does a really good job at doing what we do but what haunted me as I went to bed that night was, are we doing the right things?

I came in and talked with some other managers about what I was thinking.  I think the Salvation Army Community Services does a lot of really good things but Riversdale has changed.  While getting the Mumford House ready for it’s opening, I drove a lot between the two locations and on every corner around the women’s shelter, there are girls working on the corners… at 8:30 a.m.  Even during the opening of the Mumford House I watched girls on the corner.  While I have been complaining night and day about prostitution in Mayfair, girls are working the streets in Confederation Park and even as far west as Pacific Heights.  90% of the girls on the streets are being trafficked by a variety of sources.  They are moving out of the stroll (women can be as territorial as the men and if they don’t come up with a new territory, they get beaten if they don’t bring him the money).

It’s just not the prostitution.  It’s the drugs, the increase in violence, and the sense of hopelessness from not being able to get ahead.  13.2% of residents in the core neighbourhoods of Saskatoon don’t have a grade nine education.  (including 21.0% of those in Riversdale and 18.4 of those in Pleasant Hill).  While 11% of Saskatoon is made up of one parents families, 24 % of Riversdale households are single parents families.  Not to get all Dan Quayle on you or anything but Wendy and I have a hard time raising kids on two salaries and very little child care costs (we work opposite hours).  How much harder is it to go alone?  A sign of disenfranchisement many households feel, only 13% of Pleasant Hill residents turned out to vote in the last civic election (vs. 50% of voters in Briarwood).   Of course one doesn’t need to channel the spirit of Thomas Homer-Dixon to realize how problems can be even more complex than the combined statistical analysis… and believe me, the stats show a complex problem.

We are left with two alternatives.  During this time, I finished up an internal proposal to go to the Salvation Army for a new facility.  It’s no secret that Saskatoon needs more shelter beds.  In addition to more beds, it redesigns how we accommodate our residents so they are more comfortable and guys can have a better rest.  More youth rooms, more mental health rooms, a wing for grumpy old men, transitional rooms, a small half gym, computer facilities, a coffee shop/drop in space, and lots of green space for our guys.  It’s not perfect, I couldn’t figure out how to slide a go-cart track past the bureaucracy but will we see.

As I finished it up, I realized that what we were proposing a dam and levy system for many of our residents.  While they were at the Centre, they would be safe and secure and maybe even get ahead of the game but when many left, they get swamped by what is outside of the Centre.  There is value in creating safe spaces but eventually you have to leave and go out in the real world.  Too high of rent, too low of income, stuck in a flophouse, surrounded by drugs, forced to take a bad roommate, mental health and addiction problems and trapped in poverty.  Now don’t get me wrong, I believe that life should be hard at times but the obstacles confronting our clients are considerable.    So I was left with an architectural solution (increase the size of dorms to X number of dorm beds and even more private rooms for grumpy old men and then keep building and building and building) or we figure out a way to help our clients live back in the community amongst the alcohol, drugs, violence, and exploitation.  By doing so, we would also be changing the character of those neighbourhoods.  Of course of the two, the second option is a lot harder to do.

As I was thinking about this, I was at the Front Desk the other night when a women came in.  The Emergency After Hours worker was swamped with other clients and the women was upset and crying.  I took her into a room off the office, left the door open (and it’s on camera) and started to see what she needed.  She needed accommodation and I asked a couple of questions which she was quite forthcoming in answering.  The details aren’t that important but drugs, acquired brain injury, prostitution to make ends meet, a couple of bad tricks.  As the staff found a place for her at a local women’s shelter, I had two thoughts.  One this women in someone’s daughter and secondly as her face and neck had the signs of being beaten up by a john, will she escape this cycle first or will she end up being another statistic?

So what can I do?  What can we do?  I’ll get into this in a lot of detail later but there is a lot that we can do about this.  I think that is what kept me here, there is stuff that I can do as an individual, I can do within the organization, and we can do as an organization of other community based partners.    As Margaret Mead once said, Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. 

DAD… FIRE HYDRANT… BROKE… WATER… DO SOMETHING

This was the view out the front door.

Some kids had been jumping on the hydrant connection and broke it off.  Within 10 minutes of calling the City of Saskatoon water works, the hydrant was shut down (and Avenue E lost their water) and order was restored.  Luckily the water sprayed away from the house and I didn’t have to pump out the basement.  Still, no one forsaw the probability of kids jumping up and down on a hose a foot off the boulevard?

It goes for me as well, if I don’t have anything to say, I am not going to log in and write anything.  To paraphrase a good friend of mine who used to joke, “If you want a better sermon, get Max Lucado to write better books”, so in other words, if you want a better blog, write better stuff for me to link to.

The more serious reason is that I struggle with the distance between neighborhood/community and the church.  I have read and heard pastors say that they need to vision cast (what a geeky and churchy phrase) or sell their church on the idea that they need to be a part of their community.  This is a phrase I have heard for years but I never realized how strange it was that the church had stopped being part of the community.  Now of course with more and more churches wanting more real estate, they are literally moving outside of their cities and towns so they can create more programs that compete with and pull people away from the communities they are apart of.  The fact that we have to “vision cast”, sell, manipulate, or coerce our congregations to be part of the community, in fact, we had to come up with new church growth terminology to describe what should be our natural reaction as human beings… (I’m missional, your missional, we are all missional) that is our responsibility to make our local communities a better place for everyone to live in. 

Years ago I listened to a series of podcasts by Todd Hunter and Dallas Willard in which Hunter talked about one of the metrics his church used was how far people were travelling to get to his church without realizing the impact it had on local communities.  While that may represent one extreme of the equation, it was quite similar to what we experience as a family in finding a church in Saskatoon.   There is a pull to be a part of the church community, which church leaders tend of think of as a true or at least superior community which puts us in tension with my commitments to other things that are going on in my geographic community.  While I agree there is a need for involvement in the church, our local communities the need is often just as pressing.  So I have kids clubs that interfere with Mark taking karate, small groups that only work for people who work 8-5 (and definitely not for those who like Wendy and I who are work from 7:00 a.m. when I go to work to 10:45 p.m. when Wendy walks in the door from work).   I have prostitutes on my street, a brothel on my block, guys grinding drugs across from the local elementary school, the Terror Squad working out a local restaurant and bar and I keep hearing that my number one priority needs to be a small group in a church.

I follow some pastors and church leaders on Twitter and I realized it’s a giant irrelevant echo chamber where the tweets and retweets reinforce what they believe.  I haven’t lost my faith in Christianity, I am just in doubt that the church is an accurate representation of what it represents anymore.  I was in a room of pastors earlier this year and they were still talking about media in worship, ancient future song writing, and all sorts of peripheral things about church life with great interest and not one of them mentioned life in their community.  A friend of mine sent me a sermon the other day on YouTube to check out as it would cure what ailed my soul.  The stage looked like it was stolen from David Letterman and I am pretty sure it was meant to be a copy and after watching the sermon, I realized that he was speaking in the same style that Vince does while pitching Slap Chops.  Sadly not only did I used to speak like that in public but so do so many other pastors I know.  I realized while watching this that the church had become a parody of itself.  The Emperor has no clothes.

I realized that I no longer see most churches any differently than Kiwanas or another service club but this one has higher fixed costs.  Are all churches like this?  I don’t think so.  One of the great experiences I have had in life was spending a bit of time with Dave Blondel and the Third Space.   Both Wendy and I have said that we would be quite comfortable attending a church lead by my friends, Scott Williams, Randall Friesen, Pernell Goodyear, Kim Reid or Darryl Dash but those kinds of churches and those kinds of pastors aren’t that easy to find.  The problem for me is when I see the kind of church that is engaged in creative ways in it’s community, it’s awfully hard to go back.  When I was down in Maple Creek, I did some pastoral work with people.  We literally put on some orange Salvation Army vests, went from flood ravaged house to flood ravaged house and chatted with flood victims.  Everyone in that community knew the Salvation Army Corps officers, Captain Ed and Charlotte.  Every last person.  When he was in Saskatoon, he was everywhere in the community as well.  If he can do it, so can other churches and their leaders.  If Wendy, myself, my staff, and a bunch of volunteers can work amongst Saskatoon’s poorest, so can everyone.  What we do isn’t brain surgery (umm, except for my staff, you are all brilliant… underpaid but brilliant) but a compassionate response to the community around us.   Instead I find churches that are isolated and focused on themselves.  Too many times over the last couple of years to hear a sermon on parenting, the need for leadership, church growth or again, church growth.  Did I mention I hear a lot of sermons on the need for church growth.  Sadly I am not alone.  A good friend of mine recently left his long time church and said, “I’ve learned all I need to learn from the pulpit on the need for church growth”.  It’s like the church has lot’s it’s reason for existence and is just looking at how to keep paying the bills.  Yet sadly in a lot of communities, the need for the church and it’s redemptive message has never been greater.

The other thing is that while I hate the overuse of the concept of “a dark night of the soul”, it has been an extremely lonely time spiritually for me.  God was extremely distant and I don’t really have a lot of people to talk to about this stuff.  The praxis of my spiritual life was solid but there was no connection.  After exhausting my traditional options, I sought out a Roman Catholic spiritual advisor who I spent a lot of time talking with.  He was the one who said, “It’s not a dark night of the soul, it’s a wounded soul that I was dealing with.”  A co-worker once said to me, “We aren’t normal.  We are so desensitized by what we see sometimes, we aren’t bothered by what should bother us.”  I thought about it a lot and realized that my job had changed me deeply and for the worse and I wasn’t equipped for what that has done to me.  As an INTJ, I am already an underdeveloped feeler which at times makes it hard to fully understand what I am feeling.  Looking at life from a rather cold and analytical mind has it’s advantages but it always makes it hard to look at life when the problem isn’t a rational one and as any of the staff that I work with will say, rational behavior can often be in short supply with what we see some days.  Toss in that the amount of violence and death we have seen this summer, it has taken a toll.  It seems like every murder and suspicious death in the city has been connected to someone I know and it’s hard.  The first thing I am doing in the morning is dealing with another one.  Jaded or not, it has had an impact and those add up a little bit.

As my spiritual advisor and I have talked, I shared that when God reveals himself to me, often I feel He was disappointed in me.  I have long that was my biases, insecurities, and self worth issues coming out.  I have come to seriously wonder if maybe God was quite disappointed in me and the reason for the silence, or just lack of disappointment is that maybe He isn’t anymore.

My evangelical friends don’t really get what I see.  It actually upsets many of them when I tell them what I am seeing.  I was talking to one friend about the fact that there are 600 known prostitutes in the city (of course they move from city to city to city) and he was totally freaked out.  Our conversation ended with, “I am glad our church isn’t on the west side, I couldn’t deal with this".  Yet I talk with some of them all of the time.  They are working tonight two blocks down from where I am writing this.  Addicted to drugs, sexual abuse survivors, acquired brain injuries.   They aren’t abstract numbers but real girls with real stories and real families but the church ignores it.  They also ignore the fact that many of their congregants are the ones that are paying these girls to get them off.  While my faith seems as strong as always, I am no longer interested in a religion that is disconnected from the community it is a part of. 

I know there are reasons for that, Lyle Schaller will tell us that the idea of the neighborhood church died with the rise of the car and cheap fuel but at the same time when I hear that people are living in over crowded slum suites because of sky high rents, there are 600 known prostitutes in the city and the vast majority of them are being trafficked, gangs are taking an toll on our kids, and some local elementary schools have had to cut back to 30 minute lunch breaks to stop elementary school girls from working the street on lunch breaks… doesn’t this call people to do something other than giving away some free clothes and serve soup once in a while?  If young grade seven and eight girls losing their virginity to STD carrying john’s doesn’t call us to drastic action, what will?

Over fifteen years ago, columnist Paul Jackson wrote in The Star Phoenix that the church had abandoned it’s role of social services provider – taking care of widows and orphans – to the government during the 1960s and 70s.  As the economies in North America struggled to pay for their new obligations, Jackson felt the church needed to step up again.  It hasn’t happened yet.  In fact most trends show churches walking more and more away from those difficult tasks and instead continuing to move to younger and younger suburban neighborhoods and therefore away from the problems.  It may be great church growth doctrine but what about the neighborhood and that you left behind.  The east side of Saskatoon has twice as many churches per person than then west side does.  Guess which side of the city has the higher concentration of wealth and guess which side has the core neighborhoods in it.  I’ll let you figure it out.

Traditional book publishers use techniques perfected a hundred years ago to help authors reach unknown readers, using a stable technology (books) and an antique and expensive distribution system.

The thing is–now I know who my readers are. Adding layers or faux scarcity doesn’t help me or you. As the medium changes, publishers are on the defensive…. I honestly can’t think of a single traditional book publisher who has led the development of a successful marketplace/marketing innovation in the last decade. The question asked by the corporate suits always seems to be, "how is this change in the marketplace going to hurt our core business?" To be succinct: I’m not sure that I serve my audience (you) by worrying about how a new approach is going to help or hurt Barnes & Noble.

It reminds of some of the horrible goals I have let in over my life.   No this is worse. via

Photo Friday: The Street :: Taken on Avenue C South during the middle of a boring night shift at the Salvation Army Community Services a couple of years ago.

It costs Wendy and I about $60 to send Mark back to school each year and while we don’t really mind the cost, many kids that Mark has gone to school with are from families that can’t afford school supplies.  By helping out with this, you are ensuring that the kids are starting the school year on the right foot and take away from stress from a lot of children and their parents.  I never realized how big of a deal it was to some families until I saw some of them leave with a big smile on their face and some tears in their eyes after they came by to pick up some stuff last year.  Who knew a couple of binders could make such a big difference?

I found this ad both creepy and cringe worthy.  I am going to put it on my shortlist for the worst political ad of the year but let me know what you think of it in the comments.

The graphic tells a lot.  For more check out the background to it.

The “new normal,” as it has come to be called on Wall Street, academia and CNBC, envisions an economy in which growth is too slow to bring down the unemployment rate, while the government is forced to intervene ever more forcefully in a struggling private sector. Stocks and bonds yield paltry returns, with better opportunities available for investors overseas.

If that sounds like the last three years, it should. Bill Gross and Mohamed El-Erian, who run the world’s largest bond fund, Pimco, and coined the phrase in this context, think the new normal has already begun and will last at least another three to five years.

The new normal challenges the optimism that’s been at the root of American success for decades, if not centuries. And if it is here, the new normal could force Democrats and Republicans to rethink their traditional approach to unemployment and other social problems.

Some unusual suspects, like Glenn Hubbard, dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Business and an economic adviser to George W. Bush, are talking about a new, expanded role for the government in addressing the problem. In particular, Mr. Hubbard favors investing more in education to retrain workers whose jobs are never coming back. “If there is a new normal, it’s more about the labor market than G.D.P.,” he said. “We have to help people face a new world.”

As Frank Rich points out in his NY Times column today, “16.5 percent of America’s workers are now either unemployed and trying to find a job, involuntarily working part time, or have stopped looking for work altogether.”  The prospects look even worse when you look at the financial shape of many municipalities and civic governments.

Faced with the steepest and longest decline in tax collections on record, state, county and city governments have resorted to major life-changing cuts in core services like education, transportation and public safety that, not too long ago, would have been unthinkable. And services in many areas could get worse before they get better.

The length of the downturn means that many places have used up all their budget gimmicks, cut services, raised taxes, spent their stimulus money — and remained in the hole. Even with Congress set to approve extra stimulus aid, some analysts say states are still facing huge shortfalls.

Cities and states are notorious for crying wolf around budget time, and for issuing dire warnings about draconian cuts that never seem to materialize. But the Great Recession has been different. Around the country, there have already been drastic cuts in core services like education, transportation and public safety, and there are likely to be more before the downturn ends. The cuts that have disrupted lives in Hawaii, Georgia and Colorado may be extreme, but they reflect the kinds of cuts being made nationwide, disrupting the lives of millions of people in ways large and small.

Of course there is also the impact on the American family.  While we tend to romanticize The Great Depression, it was a horrible experience for most families.

The poor are getting poorer, and the rich, despite stock-market setbacks, are still comparatively rich. The most devastating losses in household wealth over the past two years have been suffered by the middle class. And families are fraying at the seams. The Pew poll showed nearly half of people who had been unemployed for more than six months saying their family relationships had become strained, and a New York Times/CBS poll of unemployed adults last winter found about 40 percent saying they believed their joblessness was causing behavioral change in their children.

Parents who have jobs are working longer hours than ever. Mothers are taking shorter maternity leaves. The birth rate is on the decline. The divorce rate is declining, too — it’s too expensive for people to break up their households — but that’s not necessarily a family-friendly thing, as a report from the Council on Contemporary Families noted in April: “We know from the experience of the Great Depression of the 1930s that divorce rates can fall while family conflict and domestic violence rates rise.”

The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the multiple is above 300.

The trend has only been getting stronger. Most economists see the Great Stagnation as a structural problem – meaning it is immune to the business cycle. In the last expansion, which started in January 2002 and ended in December 2007, the median US household income dropped by $2,000 – the first ever instance where most Americans were worse off at the end of a cycle than at the start. Worse is that the long era of stagnating incomes has been accompanied by something profoundly un-American: declining income mobility.

Here’s another way to look at the problem

Statistics only capture one slice of the problem. But it is the renowned Harvard economist, Larry Katz, who offers the most compelling analogy. “Think of the American economy as a large apartment block,” says the softly spoken professor. “A century ago – even 30 years ago – it was the object of envy. But in the last generation its character has changed. The penthouses at the top keep getting larger and larger. The apartments in the middle are feeling more and more squeezed and the basement has flooded. To round it off, the elevator is no longer working. That broken elevator is what gets people down the most.”

It’s not going to change anytime soon

Every now and then the Freemans invite their neighbours round to their front porch, to watch the world go by, drink beer and eat Connie’s justly renowned dish of ­Minnesota wild rice. In the best American spirit, Mark and Connie are active neighbourhood people. They are the types who shovel your snow, volunteer for school events, and coach the baseball little league – Mark has done all three.

It takes optimism to be like this. But in the past few years the Freemans have been running low on it. “I guess the penny dropped in the last 18 months when we finally realised that it’s always going to be like this – we are never going to be able to retire on our savings,” says Connie. “As for Andy,” she says, referring to her painfully shy but acutely observant son, “the future really frightens me. If you’re young, it’s bad enough nowadays. But for a kid with autism?”

The entire article is a good one, talks about how the high cost of education, rising rents and a host of other factors that have contributed to the death of the American dream.

via

I loved the shot at the end aimed at France’s soccer team.

On top of that, Dave Hutton’s article on the concentration of services in Riversdale a couple of months ago has been the ice breaker in every meeting I have had over since it came out.  Both City Councillor Pat Lorje and Riversdale Business Improvement District’s Randy Pshebylo where effective in bringing up the topic in a variety of interviews over a couple of weeks and in my circles, it generated a lot of debate and discussion.   Shortly after the article came out, I had a chance to talk with Councillor Lorje and Mr. Pshebylo at The Salvation Army Community Services open house we met with them at work later on to talk more about the topic.  After talking with both of them, Councillor Lorje gave me a couple of more articles and papers on homelessness and urban planning which gave me more to read.  I spent a couple of weeks at the cabin reading them and other material and had to endure being called a nerd more than once when people saw what I was reading on holidays (when I said that I was reading Bob Woodward’s The War Within as well, their viewpoint wasn’t changed).  I have a lot of respect for both Lorje and Pshebylo.  Both of them have contributed a lot to the life of the city and they brought up a lot of good points.  Yet at the same time their solution seemed incomplete to me and I wanted to spend some time thinking it over.  Those thoughts, ideas, rebuttals and replies started to get written down and will be posted here in pieces over the next month.  If you miss something, don’t worry, I will be linking to each piece at the end of each post. 

As to where to start, I thought I would offer my initial thoughts on part of Dave Hutton’s Star Phoenix article.

I still remember the morning the article came out.  We get a couple of Star Phoenix’s delivered each morning (by the world’s bravest paper kid) to work and I normally wander in, check out the log books, chat with staff, and read the paper.  Since we have more staff right now than normal with the training of staff for the much delayed Mumford House, I now read The Star Phoenix online in my office over coffee.  By the time I got to my office my e-mail and voice mail were flooded with people asking me “did you see what Pat Lorje said about you?”  Well know I hadn’t and I went online to see what was up.  The entire article is worth a read.  You can read the article here.

The overabundance of support agencies for poor and homeless people concentrated in Riversdale needs to be addressed in what the city councillor for the area is calling "solution by dilution."

"The simple fact is that the status quo is not working," Coun. Pat Lorje said in an interview. "We need to think about alternative models."

Many of the city’s social supports for homeless people are concentrated in the area, trapping people in negative lifestyles, Lorje said. The result is the creation of a society unto itself, from which it is harder to pull people out because they are exposed to more intense levels of the forces that cause, and keep, people homeless and addicted to drugs and alcohol, Lorje said.

Consolidating existing services and spreading support agencies throughout the city would help, she said.

"The issue is not just poverty," she said. "It’s the concentration of poverty."

Lorje is backed on the issue by the executive director of the Riversdale Business Improvement District. Randy Pshebylo says the burden of helping the homeless and drug-addicted needs to be shared by other neighbourhoods.

The concentration of any one thing — be it bars and pubs, pawn shops, retail stores, restaurants or social organizations — diminishes the strength of any neighbourhood, Pshebylo said.

Missions and soup kitchens are better suited for the avenues adjacent to 20th Street than the main business strip, he said.

"We just want an equitable neighbourhood," he said. "You don’t put your sink in your living room."

Lorje isn’t calling for a moratorium or freeze on social organizations in Riversdale — a step taken by other impoverished neighbourhoods in Canada and the U.S. — but said there needs to be less overlap.

"I would encourage organizations and church groups to start consolidating their services," she said. "It’s not a competition to see who can do it best, it should be co-operation to see who can do it most effectively to get people off the street."

The part of the article that jumped out me was this.

Many of the city’s social supports for homeless people are concentrated in the area, trapping people in negative lifestyles, Lorje said. The result is the creation of a society unto itself, from which it is harder to pull people out because they are exposed to more intense levels of the forces that cause, and keep, people homeless and addicted to drugs and alcohol, Lorje said.

It’s a frustrating quote to read.  We fight against the culture of drugs and alcohol everyday at the Centre.  We do everything we can to help people move on from the lifestyle.  Since the housing boom and the rental increases took hold and our length of stays increased, we have done a lot to help guys get “unstuck”.  We have added two full time caseworkers to help clients who don’t have a plan to find safe and sustainable housing to get one.  Than we provide follow up as they overcome their barriers to housing.  Once they are ready to move out, we provide them with household goods, help them set up an apartment, and provide support when they are out (if needed).

In addition to that, we have always taken a tough stand against drugs and alcohol abuse and it has never been popular with clients, parents, other social agencies.  As a staff, we pay a cost for that stand.  I have had the lug nuts loosened on my Honda Accord, windows smashed, clients who have tracked down where I lived and had my son’s life threatened.   Having my own life threatened is so routine that my response is often flippant.   We had to taxi a staff member to and from work for months because of the severity of the threat against him (and honestly, he was just sitting beside me having a cup of cold coffee when the guy threatened him).  We pay a lot of money for evidentiary breathalyzers (and the literally thousands of tips we go through a year), we don’t take in guys who are still actively using and have banned known drug dealers (who have moved down the street from a Narcotics Anonymous meeting where they pick off people who are heading to the meeting), we have drug tests to help us determine drug use and the best course of action for our clients, as well as non stop bag checks, room inspections, and even the occasional police dog wandering through and yet it seems like there is a bigger problem with drug use then there was ever before and not just in Riversdale (see my post on this from December 2009).

So yes, Councillor Lorje is totally right, there is a culture of drug and alcohol abuse.  The question I have is whether or not the homeless shelters and social agencies contributing to it.  That’s an incredibly hard question to answer.  The more I read about the problem, the more I was convinced that the problems in Riversdale (and other urban cores) were being over simplified.  Yes there is a problem with the concentration of services in Riversdale but it’s a lot bigger than that.  As I have been mulling the issues that affect Riversdale and other urban areas, the more I kept thinking of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book The Ingenuity Gap.  In it Homer-Dixon writes that the world’s problems are escaping our abilities to manage them.  As problems grow in complexity, so the solutions.  When I was a kid, there was always problems in Riversdale.  You could always see a drunk or two outside the Albany or the Barry Hotels.  Now there is the booze, the moonshine, the drugs, the theft, the prostitution, the gangs, the guys with untreated mental health issues, those struggling with all of it and it is concentrated in one part of the city.  The question is why and what do can do you about it?

So the plan is to first look at the problem and it’s interconnectedness.  After that, I’ll head back to what I see are the solutions.  Tomorrow we take a longer look of concentration of services in Riversdale and try to figure out their role in all of this.

While I am not a big fan of Mosaic Stadium, it would be great to see some of these ideas incorporated into a refurbishment of Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium, which I have long considered one of the great stadiums in North America.

From the beginning of the war more than seven years ago, the state of electricity has been one of the most closely watched benchmarks of Iraq’s progress, and of the American effort to transform a dictatorship into a democracy.

And yet, as the American combat mission — Operation Iraqi Freedom, in the Pentagon’s argot — officially ends this month, Iraq’s government still struggles to provide one of the most basic services.

Ms. Ali’s campaign against electricity theft — a belated bandage on a broken body — makes starkly clear the mixed legacy that America leaves behind as Iraq begins to truly govern itself, for better and worse.

Iraq now has elections, a functioning, if imperfect, army and an oil industry on the cusp of a potential boom. Yet Baghdad, the capital, had five hours of electricity a day in July.

What happened?  Well Paul Wells has the story (which is more than Newsweek has had in it lately)

Certainly, if anyone asked me what happened last week in America or the world, one piece of advice I’d offer is, “For the love of God, don’t look in Newsweek for the answer.” As a kind of bonus, the layout of Newsweek is so awesomely twee and precious, with acres of white space and elegant little button-down twill fonts for the tiny perfect Niles Crane headlines, that if you try to read the thing on paper your eyeballs will physically eject themselves from your cranium and run hiding under the nearest sofa for protection.

It’s not clear who all of this is supposed to impress, but what it’s kind of obviously not supposed to do is tell you what’s going on.

But then, that’s the sophisticated take on weekly newsmagazines, after all, and has been for decades: times are changing, the news business is changing, the internet changed everything, 24-hour news changed everything, readers are busy and sophisticated and they’re a fragmented, frazzled bunch who already know what’s happening within an hour after it happened, and it’s a waste of anyone’s time to actually bring them the news. So the two big American newsweeklies have been circling back on themselves in an enormous super-sophisticated post-post-modern what-does-it-all-mean ball of meta, with Newsweek leaping ahead ofTime in its crisis of faith because Newsweek is smaller than Time, more scared, and because it’s fallen into the hands of a fusty 40-year-old Pulitzer-winning historian, Jon Meacham, who (uh-oh) has decided he’s on a Mission.

The Huffington Post (yeah, I just linked to the Huffington Post… luckily no sharks were involved in that jump) has their take on what went wrong.

Good executive directors (ED) were also the main fund raisers and they generally loved fund raising. In fact, there was a strong opinion of many that any ED who wasn’t excited about fund raising, shouldn’t be the ED.

Fund raising is about relationships and building relationships and is very different from sales and marketing in normal for-profits.

In a non-profit, you’re not selling some good or service to a customer. What you’re doing is helping the donor fulfill or pursue a dream or a cause. In order to be successful you have to understand the donor and become part of their world view.

Many non-profits think of donors as a funding source to pay for programs that execute on their mission. In fact, donors should be part of the mission. Good non-profits integrate the funding model directly into the mission. Churches are usually MUCH better at raising money than the natural history museum because "giving" is an integral part of the church-going experience whereas the natural history museum usually tries to collect money from the outside to allow them to run their mission internally.

But Colangelo is right, and whether Bosh wants to delude himself or not isn’t our fault. Whether he likes it or not isn’t our fault either. I watched those games. Raptors fans, and there are many, saw those games. And I’m sure the bulk of them appreciated his amazing run over the first 50-plus games and can also understand why a guy takes it easy after being enervated by yet another middling season amongst a group of players who can’t defend or rebound. You’re still safer wearing a Bosh jersey in Toronto than you are wearing a Vince Carter jersey.

This wasn’t a tank job. And it certainly wasn’t every game. Maybe not even every other game. This was just Chris at about 85 percent of what we saw from him earlier that season (and his contributions agree with that percentage), and about 90 percent of what we’ve seen from him for his career. This wasn’t Carter. It wasn’t even Pau Gasol in his last year with the Grizzlies. But Bosh wasn’t going as hard in March. Especially on defense.

And when you act the way you’ve acted? Soliciting free-agent suggestions over Twitter on April 30 even though you’re still technically a member of the Toronto Raptors until July 1? Following Dwyane Wade around North America like a tagalong little brother? The Hamptons nonsense? The All-Star admission? Just being in the same picture as LeBron James, who has become public enemy No. 1?

It allows for those with long memories and nothing to do on a Tuesday night in March to recall what went down. That’s what you’re left with, Chris. And you’re best served not protesting too much. Better to let this slip away.

Kind of like you did with the Raptors’ season.