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Turning Trick or Treat on its Sweet Head –
October 31, 2007
Hallowe’en has a long and storied history – from pagan celebration
to being adopted by religion, to be shunned by some religions. As a kid,
I didn’t much like it, probably because my idea of a costume and my
mother’s couldn’t find common ground and I wasn’t allowed to eat
the candy I’d collected anyway. Oh, and did I mention that I scare
easily? When I had my own daughters, my ambivalence toward Hallowe’en
was still firmly entrenched. I might have seen October 31st quite
differently if
Global Exchange’s Reverse-Trick-or-Treating program had been around in
those days.
Tonight, thousands of children across 299 cities in
the US and Canada will be reverse trick or treating. They will be giving away
tens of thousands of samples of Fair Trade Certified dark chocolate to
address the persistent problems of chronic poverty in cocoa-growing
communities, abysmal working conditions and the use of exploited child
labor in the Ivory Coast – which produces 40 percent of the world’s cocoa. Costumes are
optional.
In the U.S., the Reverse-Trick-or-Treating program has joined human and labor
rights groups, such as Global Exchange, International Labor Rights Fund,
and Co-op America, with Fair Trade chocolate companies to raise awareness with children
and grownups about Fair Trade Certified chocolate as a solution to
poverty and labor abuses in the cocoa industry. In Canada, Engineers Without Borders, TransFair
Canada have teamed up with a number of Canadian Fair Trade chocolate
distributors.
“Chocolate connects the millions of people who
eat it daily to the millions of growers around the world who depend on
cocoa for their livelihoods,” says Adrienne Fitch-Frankel of Global
Exchange. “It is unthinkable that our children are eating chocolate
made with illegal child labor or slave labor; especially when a viable
solution, Fair Trade, exists right now.”
Posted:
2007/10/31 10:38 AM
Exporting US Foreign Policy – October 31, 2007
Boy, Canada sure is a different place these days than it was when we welcomed
thousands of American resisters to the Viet Nam war! Over the last month, two American women have twice been denied
access to Canada because they are peace activists. Ann Wright, retired U.S. army colonel
and former diplomat who quit in opposition to the Iraq war, and Medea
Benjamin, co-founder of
CODEPINK and founding director of
Global Exchange, were on their way to Toronto on October 3 at the
invitation of the Toronto
Stop the War Coalition but were denied entry into Canada due to
previous arrests for demonstrating against the Iraq War outside the
White House and in the Capitol. As a result of their peaceful protests,
their names have been added to FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC)
database – and that list is apparently dictating Canadian border
policy. The border agents at the Rainbow Bridge at Niagara Falls
who barred Medea and Ann said the mere fact that they were listed on the
NCIC was sufficient to bar them from entry. The database was created to assist U.S.
law enforcement agencies in finding fugitives, convicted sex offenders,
missing persons and members of terrorist organizations and violent
gangs. It now also contains convictions for minor offenses related to
non-violent protest.
The two tried again last week to test the border
policy, and were again refused entry into Canada. This time their invitation to visit came from members of Parliament
asking them to participate in a public forum organized by NDP MP and
former leader Alexa McDonough. The MPs sent a letter to Prime Minister
Stephen Harper informing him they’d invited Wright and Benjamin.
“This is outrageous. I’m appealing to Canadians
not to treat peaceful activists like common criminals. I travel all over
the world on a regular basis and Canada is the first country to use the NCIC to keep out people like us,” says
Medea.
Her sentiments are echoed by Toronto NDP MP Olivia
Chow. She says it was “absurd” to bar entry to anti-war activists.
“These are not terrorists; why do we have to protect Canadians from
them? We should not be allowing the FBI or Mr. Bush to dictate our entry
policy.” “I am alarmed to learn that Canadian border
police are enforcing rules that have been determined by the FBI and
other U.S.-based agencies,” Chow wrote to Stephen Brereton,
Canada’s consul general in Buffalo, N.Y. “In Canada, peaceful protest is not a criminal activity, despite how
some U.S. agencies may regard it.”
Both women have previously visited Canada
for anti-war meetings – as recently as August, sometimes at the
invitation of Canadian activist groups or political parties.
“Canada is the first country, to our knowledge, that is using this beefed-up
database of the FBI as its criteria for judging who enter, which is why
we consider this so outrageous and dangerous,” Benjamin told a press
conference. “If Canada starts to do this and keeps out people like us, maybe other countries
will do it as well. We think it’s important to stop this right
away.”
Using Canada’s criteria, even civil rights leader Martin Luther King wouldn’t
have made it into the country, she said. “We think this is absurd.
It’s outrageous. It must be reversed.”
CodePink has gathered over 15,000 signatures on a
petition, many from Canadians, to protest Canada’s policy.
Posted:
2007/10/31 10:20 AM
Undervaluing Children and the Elderly – October
22, 2007
A recent U.S. government report says that people who look after children and the
elderly are prone to depression in large numbers. Along with home health
care aides and other people who provide personal services, child care
workers have the highest rates of depression among full-time workers,
according to a new survey by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Almost eleven percent of people in child care,
personal care and service jobs said they had experienced one or more
major depressive episodes in the past year. Symptoms of depression
include various physical ailments as well as persistent sadness and
pessimism; feelings of guilt, worthlessness, helplessness, or
hopelessness; loss of interest or pleasure in usual activities;
difficulty concentrating and complaints of poor memory; fatigue and lack
of energy; anxiety, agitation and irritability; thoughts of suicide or
death; slow speech and movements. That sounds like the opposite profile
of someone I’d trust to care for my most vulnerable family members!
Unfortunately, the study didn’t probe the reasons
for the high level of depression in these occupations. But I have to
wonder if the relative low pay and sometimes difficult working
conditions usually associated with day care and elder care contributes.
Ironically, around the same time as the depression
study was released, I read another study about depression in the journal
Child Development. Researchers studied young people who had attended an
unusual daycare center – one at which staff received a “decent
wage” and benefits. They found that those who grow up in poor,
unstable homes face an increased risk of depression, but that
high-quality day care during their early years can counteract the
effects of a disadvantaged environment. Makes you wonder why our society
seems to so undervalue the personal care occupations, doesn’t it?
Posted:
2007/10/22 1:15 PM
Demolishing the Elitist Label – October 11, 2007
One of the assumptions I’ve long argued against regarding
homeschooling is that it’s elitist. When I’ve managed to demolish
all the other arguments against life-based learning, reporters and
critics who consider themselves to be too progressive to ever support
homeschooling pull out what they figure is their trump card: Well, they
allow, it might be tolerable for well-educated, upper middle class,
two-parent families to homeschool, but kids who live in poverty or with
uneducated parents need school in order to succeed academically and
socially. They’ll have to rethink that smug little generalization now
that the conservative think tank The Fraser Institute has released its
latest
research on the subject.
According to Claudia Hepburn, co-author of Home
Schooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream, 2nd edition and Director
of Education Policy with The Fraser Institute, homeschooling appears to
improve the academic performance of children from families with low
levels of education. “The evidence is particularly interesting for
students who traditionally fall through the cracks in the public
system,” Hepburn said in a statement.
“Poorly educated parents who choose to teach
their children at home produce better academic results for their
children than public schools do. One study we reviewed found that
students taught at home by mothers who never finished high school scored
a full 55 percentage points higher than public school students from
families with comparable education levels.”
It also appears from this research that some of the
factors that are commonly thought to negatively affect a child’s
school success may be based on biases inherent in school systems. “The
research shows that the level of education of a child’s parents,
gender of the child and income of family has less to do with a [homeschooled]
child’s academic achievement than it does in public schools,” says
Hepburn.
Posted:
2007/10/11 2:30 PM
Socialization, huh? – October 10, 2007
A new report of a 20-year study of children in a rural Quebec
town draws links between verbal abuse (read: bullying) by teachers and
precocious sexual behavior of girls younger than 14. Researchers led by
psychology professor Dr. Mara Brendgen found children at elementary
school who were shouted at, harshly criticized or embarrassed by
teachers in the classroom had an increased risk of early sexual
intercourse. The study, published last month in the
American Journal of Public Health and conducted by a team the Universite
du Quebec and the Universite du Montreal, also draws a link between peer
rejection and girls engaging in early sexual intercourse. Brendgen told
the media, “Basically, it’s a similar experience that they have from
the teachers as they have from peers, in the sense that they are really
publicly humiliated and exposed.” These students – who are estimated
to number as many as 15 percent of the school population – often
turn to generalized
delinquency, perhaps to give their battered self esteem a lift.
The researchers found that “disruptive”
students – those with “attention problems” and a “diminished
interest in school” – are most frequently targeted, supposedly having provoked
their peers or teachers into negative behavior. An earlier report about
the same research project, which was published in 2006 in
Pediatrics, stated that “Many adults mention past incidences of verbal
abuse by the teacher as the most overwhelming negative experience in
their lives.”
But Bregnan says we should be careful not to “lay
blame” on anyone. Parents are, instead, supposed to help their
children make new friends who will help “protect them from the
loneliness and depression that result from rejection and
victimization.” Funny that one of the main criticisms about
homeschooling is that children will miss out on the valuable
socialization experience that schools offer. Hah.
Posted:
2007/10/10 5:20 PM
Political Offsetting – October 10, 2007
Today is election day here in Ontario. As in every election campaign, there has been enough political hot
air generated to affect the climate. And that is too bad, because they haven't been talking much about global warming – except that they all have been painting themselves
as the
greenest. All four of the main parties — the Liberal, Progressive
Conservative, NDP and Green — are running what they call
“carbon-neutral” leaders’ tours and campaigns. The Green Party leader
is known for getting around on his bike and using trains
during campaigns. And the NDP leader used a hybrid SUV
instead of a diesel bus for his tour, and his party reportedly served
local organic produce on biodegradable plates. Of course, that sort of
green behaviour was very fringe back in 1996 when I was the leader of
the federal Green Party using post-consumer recycled and hemp paper for
my literature and thrusting re-usable cloth signs on anyone who would
reluctantly admit to caring about the environment. And in those days, we
didn’t have this campaign’s main feel-good carbon-neutral weapon –
offsetting – to assuage the guilt from generating greenhouse gas
emissions by donating money to tree planting or solar energy programs.
While it’s great that these guys (yeah, the leaders are all guys) are
paying enough attention to global warming to feel guilty about their
massive footprints, I am skeptical about carbon offsetting significantly
changing anything – neither consumption patterns nor carbon generation
levels.
And change is what we need. Big change. Fast. After
all, it was just yesterday that Australian climate change expert Tim
Flannery said that worldwide economic growth has accelerated the level
of greenhouse gas emissions to a dangerous threshold scientists had not
expected for another decade. That’s scary. And so our politicians are
busy offsetting while the Earth burns.
Posted:
2007/10/10 4:05 PM
The Power of Problems – October 3, 2007
“Bad times have a scientific value. These are
occasions a good learner would not miss.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
The last six months haven’t been “bad times” for
me, but I’ve certainly found them challenging. Well, when you own a
business, all months are challenging! But lately, it seems like I’ve
been dealing with one issue after another and sometimes a few at once,
both personal and work-related. There’s nothing wrong with challenges,
and my “problems” are small. In fact, my life is very good. But the
other day, I began to wonder what the universe was trying to tell me and
why life just couldn’t be a straight line instead of so bumpy and
wavy. After all, I whined to myself, doesn’t one earn some peace and
quiet by the time they reach their fifth decade of life?
And then the universe sent me the answer, in the
form of that week’s copy of an email newsletter from author and life
coach
Cheryl Richardson. Her topic? The power of problems. First of all,
Cheryl reminds us that there are very few problems that are
life-threatening. And mine certainly aren’t, thankfully. Many years
ago, I learned a similar tactic to employ when I need perspective on the
challenges that come my way: I ask myself what is the worst that could
happen. The probable outcome always seems so much better!
And that realization enables me to move into
problem solving mode, rather than stay stuck in my reflex state, which
is to rehash the details and worry about all the possible awful
scenarios. That seems easier said than done, but what keeps me focused
is knowing that even if the outcome of the situation doesn’t end up
being perfect, I will have learned something about myself and about
life. And, if I solve the problem thoughtfully and carefully, I will
have become a better person – kinder, more empathetic, wiser and
more insightful. Not to mention more relaxed. And, as Cheryl says, that opportunity for growth is the
gold that is hiding in every problem.
Posted:
2007/10/03 4:20 PM
Refusing to Test – October 3, 2007
Kudos and support go out to a teacher in British Columbia
who was given a disciplinary hearing by her employer and has been given a
letter of reprimand. Her crime? She refused to give her grade three class
a standardized reading comprehension test. A teacher for 27 years, she
said the test is stressful for young children. She told
CBC News that her job is to provide the best learning
environment possible for her students and that her decision not test her
students resulted from the tears of a little girl. The school board, of
course, is hanging tight onto its need to measure, classify and sort.
Posted:
2007/10/03 1:45 PM
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