The Citizen, 2012-02-16, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2012. PAGE 5.
Ever try to make a map? It’s a tough
assignment which ought to give us that
much more respect for pioneers
like Marco Polo, Magellan, and our own
Samuel Champlain – all dedicated
mapmakers who took pains to leave a
record of where they travelled and what they
saw.
Especially given what they had to work
with, which wasn’t much. Can you imagine
trying to draw an accurate representation
of the east coast of Canada or the propor-
tions of the Great Lakes, using nothing
but 17th century technology? Champlain did
it.
Maps have fascinated mankind since …
pretty well forever, really. The oldest man-
made map we know was not of this earth at all.
On the wall of a cave in Lascaux, France there
is a series of dots that astronomers confirm
unmistakably charts three bright stars,
Vega, Deneb and Altair, as well as the star
cluster we call Pleiades. Archeologists say the
uncannily accurate map was drawn by cave
dwellers nearly 19,000 years ago. Just think:
our ancestors were mapping the night skies
nearly 10,000 years before the New Stone Age
began.
Nowadays we’re all mapmakers – or map
facilitators, at least. Anybody with a
GPS on their dashboard or a smart
phone in their pocket can instantly conjure
up the co-ordinates for a ski chalet in
the Rockies or a good sushi restaurant in
downtown Beijing.
It’s a far cry from the bulky Mercator
Projection maps that hung off the blackboard
when I was a kid. Those things gave most
of us our first look at the wide world around
us.
Too bad it wasn’t an accurate one. School
maps altered our perceptions of the planet
we call home and they left us with some
peculiar ideas. Empires were assigned
colours – The British Empire, I recall, was
pink. I still think of the long-vanished
renegade state of Rhodesia as rose-
coloured. Other misconceptions abound. The
maps depicted Norway and Iceland as
almost the size of continents and Canada,
with all those provincial borders slicing
north to south, looked like a colossal pink
salami.
A clumsily carved pink salami at that. Oh,
B.C. and the Prairie provinces looked
neat enough, but then came Ontario
with that chunk of gristle hanging off its chin.
And the Maritimes? Forget about the
Maritimes. Their borders made them look
like some preliminary sketch scribbled by
Picasso.
The most astounding map I’ve seen is
technically not a map at all. It’s a photo taken
on Dec. 7, 1972 from the window of the
Apollo 17 spacecraft as it whirled through
space 45,000 kilometres from earth.
You’ve seen the photo. They call it the
Blue Marble because that’s what the earth
looks like – a wispy blue marble hanging
against the inky black backdrop of interstellar
space.
It’s an amazing photograph – perhaps the
most amazing photograph ever taken.
It changed the way we see ourselves. There
are no borderlines on the Blue Marble.
Russia is China is the Pacific is Canada is
Earth.
Everything we’ve ever known is in that
photo. Everyone we know, everyone
we hate, and the millions upon millions we
will never know. Everyone that ever
was and everyone that ever will be. Kings
and carnival barkers; cardinals and
courtesans. Everything mankind has ever
built; everything we’ve ever sung, painted
or written. All of us together, on a glowing
blue marble. Our lifeboat in the sea
of space.
I hope we’ve got somebody aboard who
knows how to patch leaks.
Arthur
Black
Other Views
Riding on spaceship earth
Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a
different world than the majority of
people when it comes to certain issues.
One of the main issues is American R&B
singer Chris Brown.
On Sunday night Brown performed at the
Grammy Awards and also took home the
Grammy for Best R&B Album for his album
F.A.M.E.For those of you who don’t know, in
addition to his musical career, Brown is
famous for turning fellow R&B artist, and
girlfriend at the time, Rihanna into a punching
bag in 2009. Later that year he pled guilty to
assault and making criminal threats.
While Brown was sentenced to next to
nothing (five years probation, six months of
community service and mandatory domestic
violence counselling) many still associated
Brown with the assault... for a few months.
However, who doesn’t like a good
redemption story?
Later that year on Larry King Live Brown’s
mother said her son is not a violent person and
that his actions towards Rihanna didn’t reflect
who he really is. However, in 2011 after being
asked about the incident on Good Morning
America, Brown threw something through a
window overlooking Times Square, ripped off
his shirt, had several altercations with the
show’s staff and left the building shirtless
before his segment was due to end.
He has also criticized the media for trying to
“keep him down” simply by reporting his
actions. Yet another example of someone
blaming the media for spreading the word
when it was Brown who decided to beat a
defenseless woman.
He has nearly eight million followers on the
social networking site Twitter and has millions
of female supporters. On that same site, he also
has a bad habit of posting comments and then
deleting them minutes later.
Of the Good Morning America incident, he
said he was sick of people bringing up the past,
a post which he quickly deleted.
After his Grammy win on Sunday night, a
night where he was widely praised for his
“brave comeback” performance, he said that
those who reform after doing something wrong
(referring obviously to himself) can still be
role models. This post too was removed.
The sad thing is that he’s right. The man
(while I struggle to use that word to describe
what Chris Brown is) has influenced millions
and millions of young people. These people
will remember Brown for his music and not the
night he punched a 130 lb. woman in the face
multiple times and kicked her out of his car,
leaving her bleeding on the side of the road in
Los Angeles.
And here I am living in what feels like The
Twilight Zone. I have several friends of friends
who adore Brown for his music and simply
change the subject when I bring up his history
of violence.
Like many things in today’s North America,
talent trumps all. If someone can sing and
dance, they can pretty much do whatever they
want, and this is the message being sent out to
the young people listening to his albums and
watching his success unfold.
When I was young my idols were baseball
players and hockey players and now here we
are, watching musicians beat women and
praising them a year later for their brave
comeback and perseverance in the face of
adversity. From those heroes I learned to work
hard in the face of adversity and rise above
challenges, not to beat up a woman, make a
mess and then get mad at everyone else for
pointing it out.
A history of violence
Honour killings are something that is
about as foreign to me as 10°C
weather during the winter but this year
Canadians have faced both.
Honour killings are murders in which a
member of a family or group decides another
member has defaced the value or image of the
group and makes an example of them as to
prevent the dishonour.
You’ll probably know all this if you’ve been
watching the Shafia murder trial in which
three members of the family were found guilty
of first-degree murder.
Tooba Mohammad Yahya, Mohammad
Shafia and Hamed Shafia were found guilty of
killing four other members of their family; one
of Mohammad’s two bigamous wives Rona
Amir and her three step-daughters; Zainab,
Sahar and Geeti Shafia.
The reason they were killed, according to
the jury, was that they had brought shame upon
the family through their actions.
The evidence, as told by the prosecutors, is
that Hamed, working on behalf of his family,
used one of the family vehicles to push a
second vehicle with his three sisters and Amir
inside into a canal near Kingston where the
family had stopped overnight as part of a
family trip.
The four drowned in the canal and evidence
was found connecting the family’s second car
to the scene of the deaths.
Originally the deaths were considered
accidental but murder charges were eventually
laid against three members of the family.
When I heard about the accusations, I
considered them barbaric and, in my mind’s
eye, saw something I wish I hadn’t.
I saw a multitude of people being capable of
such acts simply because it was the realities
they had been brought up with, maybe in
Canada or maybe somewhere else.
It is that kind of attitude that opens the door
to judgemental lifestyles and racism and I will
always try to be vigilant against that.
Upon review I find that, by being Canadian,
this is unfortunately the reality of what we
open ourselves up to.
We pride ourselves on welcoming all races,
creeds and nationalities to our shores.
If it weren’t for the fact that so many people,
both legally and illegally, move to Canada we
would actually have a declining population
according to recent studies.
We need immigrants and we are very proud
of the fact that they can continue to be who
they were in their home country from a social
standpoint, if not a professional one.
South of the border they have a lot of
problems but their cultural ‘melting pot’ may
also solve some of these issues.
The four victims in the Shafia case were
believed to be killed because they were
‘westernizing’.
The daughters were taking boyfriends,
dressing like teens from other cultures and
these actions drove Mohammad, one of his
wives and his son to the point of murder.
These ‘western’ actions prompted murder.
While the convicted Shafia clan members
still cling to their innocence, the die has been
cast and the damage has been done.
Already statements are coming out against
other cultures’ barbarics standards from all
levels of government and from both sides of
the aisles.
I worry that, however, we will end up
throwing the baby out with the bathwater by
the time this situation is a minor fact in
Canadian history.
I worry that cases and situations like these,
where something that isn’t an oddity in
another country and culture, is paraded as the
most grievous of sins in Canada. (I’m not
saying it isn’t, I’m saying this could lead to a
fallacy).
When the next generation comes to the helm
will it be of a multicultural Canada or will we
have left them a legacy of prejudice and
cultural homogenization?
Will our current government, viewed (and
sometimes quite correctly) as overly-friendly
with the American government, lead us down
the path to a place we really don’t want to be?
Ontario Superior Court Judge Robert
Maranger had this to say of the findings of the
trial: “It is difficult to conceive of a more
heinous, more despicable, more honourless
crime … The apparent reason behind these
cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the
four completely innocent victims offended
your completely twisted concept of honour …
that has absolutely no place in any civilized
society.”
This concerns me.
Undoubtedly death is not a viable
consequence of offending a family’s honour in
modern society but to call the Shafia’s family
sense of honour ‘completely twisted’ and say
it has ‘no place in any civilized society’ is
passing a judgement on people in a part of the
world that face a completely different reality
than we do.
The charge of first-degree murder eliminates
any possible discourse on the reason for killing
an individual. There is no self-defence in first-
degree murder, there is no duress in first-
degree murder there is only the action of
taking a life which is wrong in the eyes of the
Canadian justice system. It doesn’t matter why
it happened, only that it did.
It is not upon Canadians, and especially not
the Canadian justice system, to make remarks
on the validity of any religion or cultural
beliefs but to enforce the laws that govern this
land.
Whether they committed the murders due to
honour or for some other reason, the jury
found them guilty of the murders, not the
reasoning behind it.
Statements like Maranger’s lead me to
believe that Canadians are forgetting who we
are.
In school, I learned Canada was a tossed
salad, many ingredients all part of the same
dish. America was a melting pot where
everyone was turned into something else.
We need to remember that. We are of every
culture and every country.
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
Multiculturalism has two edges