I was reading up a little more on the Biafran war on Wikipedia for this book we’ve been reading in one of my classes — Half of a Yellow Sun is an absolutely fabulous novel, by the way, that I highly encourage you to read — and you know how one thing leads to another on Wikipedia.

From there I learned that this was the event that started Médecins Sans Frontières, and then I read James Orbinski’s speech upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize for MSF in 1999. It’s an interesting speech that differentiates between the humanitarian and the political, in what is in itself, I think, a curious mixture of the two.

I found it particularly interesting because I’ve been having conversations lately with folks about the Responsibility to Protect, and it’s fascinating to see the many different, nuanced opinions that a group of apparently similar people have…

Dear China,

I am not impressed. 南天一柱 was a perfectly good name and it was pretty; “Hallelujah Mountain” is just a kind of cultural appropriation that is not out of sync with all the other appropriations going on in that movie.

And then, of course, I feel bad, because who am I to prevent someone who may be desperately poor benefitting from the little extra cash that this might bring in?

Though I have my doubts as to whether that’s what the tourist officials were really thinking…

In less than ten years’ time, Avatar will be largely forgotten, remembered, perhaps, as the first 3D movie of what has now become the norm.

I only hope you’ll change the name right back.

Love,

Lillienne

So back during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, the media thought it was a wonderful idea to bash China on its human rights issues.

Now what I want to know is why we aren’t doing the same to Canada. Is the way we treat First Nations peoples any credit to our so-called human rights record?

This is written more out of frustration than because I think there’s any real literary merit in it. There isn’t. But I’m so angry it has to be expressed somewhere.

—

I hated the news running up to
the oh-eight Olympics—that need to search
in the crevasses of another language,
or the stretch across an ocean
for the English papers back in the old
home, for the simple acknowledgement
of the pro-China protests happening
next to the anti-ones. What happened to
reporting both sides of the coin? A feature
never seen in the media of this country
that I so want to proudly call mine.

This was supposed to be about sports,
not politics. So I believed until my
Canadian friends persuaded me
otherwise. Here was a forum for speech,
a chance to hang the dirty laundry
and maybe make some change!

Except now it’s oh-ten, and everything is again
lopsided, now in the other direction.

No one points a finger at the plight of our
First Nations, the one that we put them in.
No one questions the state of the homeless
in the host city of the most beautiful place on earth.
No one calls us out on our hypocrisy of being
a peacekeeping nation refusing to stop pumping
the greenhouse gasses destroying our world.

CTV anchors keep asking me, with smiles
on their faces and merchandise on show, do I believe.

What can be said but that I tend
not to commit myself to unstated blanks?

I’ll believe when we hang the dirty laundry.