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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2015-01-15, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JANUARY 15, 2015. PAGE 5. Whenever I feel my spirits corkscrewing downward from despair of human folly (ISIL, Dick Cheney, Edmonton Oilers) I stop and think of all the wonderful things I never thought I’d live to see. I never thought I’d see human footprints on the moon. I never thought I’d see a black man elected to the White House. I never thought I’d hear the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world stand up and say he was proud to be gay. That’s what Tim Cook did. Specifically, he said “Let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me”. Tim Cook is the Chief Executive Officer of Apple. Can you imagine what a statement like that must mean to a transgendered kid growing up lonely and beleaguered in Wichita or Red Deer – or Toronto, come to that? We’ve come a long way, amigos. I grew up in a time when the world was at best frosty towards gays. They weren’t even called gay back then. They were homos, queers, faggots and Lesbos. The terms weren’t used with flat-out hate but there was more than a hint of scorn and derision. Gays were the “Other”. People who lived in the shadows and spoke a secret language and did God-knows-what with each other. I spent several years in a Canadian city where the only gay hangout (a café on a downtown backstreet) was trashed one Saturday night by a beer-fuelled bunch of Good Old Boys. They swarmed the place with hockey sticks, smashed the windows and threw paint on the walls. (It was after hours and no one was there.) I don’t recall anyone being outraged or marching on city hall. “Oh well,” I heard one guy say, “it was just a fag joint.” To go from that era to this in the span of a lifetime – that’s pretty amazing. And I haven’t even got to talking about K6G. That’s a section of the Los Angeles County Men’s Jail. The gay section, to be specific. Every inmate in K6G is gay. There is nothing like it in all of America’s vast industrial prison complex. It was created back in 1985 to protect gay prisoners who faced a disproportionate amount of violence from ‘straight’ inmates. What’s really amazing is how well it works. There is an overwhelming sense of community among the inmates of the ‘gay wing’. They look after each other. They care. One inmate explained, “For some people, this is their home because a lot of families have disowned them and shunned them, so we’re their family.” The irony is that K6G (through the efforts of the inmates, not the staff) does all the things for prisoners that the rest of the prison system so miserably fails to do. It rehabilitates them, gives them a sense of belonging, and provides a framework for dealing with the outside world. It is a step forward for civilized behaviour in general. Too bad people have to go to prison to experience it. Ah well...two steps forward, one step back is still a net gain. Meanwhile the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world announces he is proud to be gay and it causes barely a ripple in Apple in the notoriously macho stock market. Onward! Arthur Black Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense There are as many suggestions for a successful marriage as there are people married out there, and, given that I’m only eight months into my life-long commitment, I think any marriage advice I give might be a bit premature. That said, my wonderful, beautiful wife and I have a bit of history (actually, nearly 10 years of history) before we tied the knot, so I think I’m comfortable in saying that the best piece of advice I got was from a mentor who is no longer around and that is to find someone you can sit with and watch television for hours at a time. Now, at the time, I thought that sounded silly. I foresaw a future of paragliding and bungee jumping and yachting and… well I was young and figured I would be rich. Safe to say, television wasn’t what I was thinking. Boy, was I wrong. Between regular cable services and streaming, Ashleigh and I have watched a lot of television over the last decade and I’ve noticed a really strange, and worrying, trend: There aren’t a lot of good, new television shows and I think that’s because North American television isn’t the focus it once was. I’ve noticed an odd trend time and time again with friends and family: the television isn’t in the living room surrounded by faces bathing in the warm glow of Family Matters, Boy Meets World or Full House. The television is on in the background as people stare at another one of their screens or playing a board game. There are very few modern shows that make me want to put my phone away, shut down every other screen in the house and give my undivided attention to the story. I loved How I Met Your Mother until the last episode, but, aside from delving deep into the history of television, there are very few shows that make me want to give my full and undivided attention. After some debate and several examples being brought to my attention, I should say that this is more a critique about sitcoms than any other kind of show. Sitcoms do, however, make up the majority of primetime television slots and syndication slots in my experience. When I was growing up there seemed to be an abundance of sitcoms that people tuned into with the intent of watching the stories and getting caught up in the antics of the characters. Between Cheers, Seinfeld, Friends, Frasier and all the other prime-time sitcoms, there was a lot of must-see TV. You can say it was the writers, the characters or the actors, but the simple fact is that the shows of today don’t draw me in the way those of yesterday did. The television of my youth was good. The television that predates my youth, however, seems to be even better. I have fond memories of watching News Radio, Night Court and MASH during my lunch breaks in high school. I guess I could keep going, but the simple fact of the matter here is that television shows, specifically sitcoms, once upon a time, seem to be a lot better than they are now and have been in the past few years. Heck, one just needs to look at The Simpsons or Family Guy or any of these other sitcoms that last for more than 10 years to realize that people aren’t watching for new, entertaining storylines. They’re watching out of habit or because they want to see who this month’s guest star is. There is, of course, one glaring hole in my argument for shows outliving their entertainment value and that’s my love of Doctor Who, a British show that has been around for decades prior to my own birth and recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. I won’t cop out. I’ll admit that, like all good rules, my rule that television shows are too long has an exception. Television stories need to have a beginning, middle and end, not just in each episode but in the story itself. Some of the greatest modern television I’ve seen has been produced by the BBC and they aren’t shows that last a decade or even seven years, but last for four or five seasons at most and are then taken off the air. With an idea like that, a beginning, a middle and an end on a five-year schedule, you know we’re going to see a story come full circle. I guess that’s kind of the problem with television shows like The Simpsons: when do we ever really consider its story completed? Is it when Maggie talks? When one of the main characters dies? That’s probably why How I Met Your Mother and Boy Meets World struck a chord with me; there were definitive endings. How I Met Your Mother ended (shortly after) the main character met his wife. Boy Meets World ended after the last vestiges of boyhood were behind the main character. There are just too many shows out there that we’re watching not because we want to see how it will end but because it’s there. It gives us bright lights and noise to fill in the empty background noise. The biggest problem with sitcoms now, however, isn’t format, likability or any one of the issues I raised above, but the fact that youth may not realize how bad the stories are. Sure, they can watch old television shows, but, for me, the barometer I use to measure the success of entertainment are the books I read as a child. Whether it was J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Stephen King’s Dark Tower series (despite the faux ending) or even the Goosebumps series that I devoured, literary experience has set a pretty high bar as to what I will consider entertainment and what I will consider noise. Anyway, to bring it back to my point, sitcoms need to change and the only way to do that is, ironically enough, pull a cue from The Simpson’s own repertoire of songs from one of its nearly innumerable musical creations: “Just don’t look”. Stop turning on your television for back- ground noise. Stop watching bad television when you could be having good conversation and, above all, stop going through the motions with television shows that are long past their “best before” date. The only way that entertainment will ever change is if it’s forced to. Denny Scott Denny’s Den Fields of dreams It was truly thrilling (and mark this occasion, because I don’t say this often) to sit at the Jan. 6 Huron East Council meeting and hear the future plans for the 2017 International Plowing Match (IPM), which will be held in Walton. IPM Committee Secretary Lynne Godkin aimed to drive the point home with councillors and members of the press when she showed an aerial photograph of a number of Walton-area farms and then a picture of the 1999 IPM site in Dashwood, the last IPM held in Huron County. It is an amazing transformation that takes place. Picture it, use any farm that you’ve ever been to and then imagine it full of tens of thousands of people, hundreds of tents featuring merchants and agricultural competition going on all over the place. The IPM in 2017, as it is every year, will be a mecca for the agriculturally-inclined, featuring everything anyone with a farming background would want. The IPM, however, will hopefully be one of those few transcendent events that crosses over beyond the world of agriculture. Committee Administration Co-ordinator Brian McGavin says that the idea to host the match in Huron County began as just that: an idea. When the concept came to fruition, there was a realization that now those involved must actually host the IPM. It’s no small task. It will take thousands of volunteers to make it work and weeks and month’s worth of work. This is a story that I have been following since it began. I remember seeing McGavin and several supporters discuss the issue with Huron County Council when Huron County had decided to bid for the event. I remember when Huron County was named the host county and when Walton was named the host community (on the hottest day in the history of days at the Seaforth Agriplex). I have talked to both Brian and Jeff McGavin about the planning as well as to Committee Chair Jacquie Bishop a number of times about the match, what it could be and what organizers need to make their vision a reality. I have interviewed a number of the host families, including Jack Ryan and his children. I remember that emotional conversation around Jack’s kitchen table. Jack, his son Joe and his daughter Peggy told me that it was a family decision to host the match on Jack’s farm and that the most important family member to factor into the decision was one who was no longer with them: Marianna, Jack’s wife and the mother of Joe and Peggy (as well as Monica and Steve, not present for our conversation), who died in 2012, claimed by ovarian cancer. Plowing has been described to me many ways over the years. It was George Townsend who told me that if a young person can plow straight in the field, they’ll keep on the straight and narrow in life. For those involved, it’s so much more than a tractor in a field. So to see the organizers’ vision last week at a Huron East Council meeting, it was important to look at the host properties and the proposed layout of the site, but to look at the personalities and the families behind the match. To each property a name is attached and behind that name is a rich family history. You have to look at the properties and the fields and see beyond them; see the people, see their stories and see their potential through the prism of the 2017 IPM and then you can picture how special, on a truly historic scale, the IPM can be to this community. Other Views Sitcoms not as good as they were We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?