A man and his messages

There are days when you look around and see too many mean-spirited jerks. Then you turn on the television and meet Tim Green.

Green appeared on the 60 Minutes television news show recently and provided viewers with some much needed inspiration.

He was a star linebacker and defensive end who played eight seasons with the Atlanta Falcons of the National Football League. He retired as an active player in 1993, then really got busy.

He earned a law degree, joined a New York State legal firm, became a television commentator on PBS, Fox and ABC and began writing. He has published more than three dozen books in the adult suspense and youth sports genres.

One of his books, Unstoppable, debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list. It is about a troubled 14-year-old boy who finds a real life in playing football, only to have  to face a fierce fight against cancer.  

Green has made 1,200 school visits, speaking to more than half a million school kids about the importance of reading books and getting a good education. He urges the children to read 20 minutes every day.

“Reading is weightlifting for the brain,” he has said.

His main message is: Put school before sports and think of success not as fame and fortune, but in terms of kindness and personal relationships.

It’s an important, powerful message but unfortunately Tim Green won’t be able to deliver it himself for much longer. He is dying, which is a tragedy because when you watch him for only a few minutes you wish the world had millions more humans like him.

A couple of weeks ago he made a Facebook post announcing that he is suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Gehrig was a professional baseball player diagnosed with the disease in the 1930s.

Green has a slow moving form of the disease but ALS always is fatal. It affects the nerves in the brain and spinal cord, weakening muscles and making it difficult to talk, walk, eat and breathe.

He was diagnosed two years ago after having difficulty using his hands. He had trouble using nail clippers and opening things with his fingers. A hand surgeon told him he had ALS and a neurologist told him to get his affairs in order.

The disease is threatening his voice but on the television show he was able to say that the best time of his life is right now. “I have everything,” he said.

Despite the ALS his purpose is “the same as it was before: be the best husband, best dad, lawyer, writer, businessperson I can be. And also to tackle ALS.”

“I can still write and that opens up a universe.”

He has been writing his latest books on his smartphone, typing the words with his thumbs. He has a sensor in his eyeglasses that helps him to see and type the letters.

"People will say, 'God bless you,' " Green said, "and I would say, He already has.”

Eighty per cent of ALS patients die within two to five years of diagnosis, says the ALS Society of Canada. It says an estimated 3,000 Canadians currently are living with ALS  and that the disease is responsible for two or three deaths each day.

Green is a driving force behind ALS fund-raising efforts, notably the website www.TackleALS.com/teams/Atlanta-Falcons. He appears in a video there, wearing his trademark No. 99 Falcons jersey.

Dr. Merit Cudkowicz, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, says in the ad that the number of ALS diagnoses will grow by 70 per cent over the next 20 years. She does not give reasons for that large increase, however, presumably it comes from the fact that the disease strikes mainly people ages 40 to 70 and the world’s population is aging.

Some research suggests that military veterans are 1.5 to two times more likely to get ALS. Researchers have suggested that exposure to toxins during warfare, and strenuous physical activity, might be reasons why military veterans and athletes seem more at risk to developing the disease.

Meanwhile, Green continues to deliver his messages of inspiration.

“Life can never be long enough,” he told the 60 Minutes audience.

Email: shaman@vianet.caProfile: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K8FY3Y

A world on fire

Through snowflake-speckled windows I watch stately trees sagging beneath the weight of the early November snowfall. It is a winter picture that denies the existence of wildfires.

Yet the wildfires are there, on the television screens, in newspaper stories and photos and on social media  sites. Walls of flames consuming huge pieces of California, its people and their possessions.

The images are only camera views, and they come from 2,000-plus miles away, so they are no threat and can be forgotten easily. They shouldn’t be because wildfires are an increasing threat to our country, and the world.

This year alone there have been 6,845 wildfires in Canada, more than double the 25-year average of 3,000. They burned 2.2 million hectares of land and forests. Last year 5,305 wildfires burned 3.4 million hectares.

Ontario alone had 1,325 fires that consumed 276,356 hectares in 2018, and that’s close to double the annual average of 757 fires burning 111,487 hectares. A July fire was close to home, burning 11,000 hectares in the Parry Sound area, threatening to shut down Highway 69.

We Canadians tend to think of wildfires as forest fires that burn bushes, trees, and cause grief to wildlife. In fact, they are becoming more of a threat to the places where we live, our homes and our other possessions.

A most recent and terrifying example is the Fort McMurray, Alberta fire of 2016. Upwards of 88,000 people in the city and surrounding areas were evacuated – the largest wildfire evacuation in Canadian history. Also, it was the costliest disaster in Canadian history.

No one died directly in the fire, however, thousands of lives were changed.

My own family history tells a lot about how wildfires change lives. My grandparents and their young family escaped from the Great Minnesota Fires that destroyed their hometown of Cloquet, near Duluth, in 1918. I remember a photograph of my grandmother holding my father and his older brother as she stood in water (likely the St. Louis River) as flames engulfed their town.

Hundreds of people died in the fires and many hundreds more lost their homes and jobs. The paper mill where my grandfather worked was destroyed. He moved the family to Canada to get work in another mill.

The Cloquet fire that changed my family history was touched off by human activity - sparks from a train. Roughly one-third of wildfires are started by human activity. Lightning strikes cause the rest.

The increase in wildfires is not just a North American thing. The number of fires this year across Europe is up 40 percent on average.

With statistics showing wildfires becoming more frequent, we must work harder to reduce human causes, plus find fresh ways to control fires when they start and reduce the areas that they burn.

The best way to achieve that is to listen to the experts. There are thousands of wildfire and climate experts with the science backgrounds and experience needed to find solutions. They need to have a bigger voice in saying how we can lessen the threat.

One person who thinks he is an expert, but definitely is not, is the president of the United States who says that wildfires can be prevented by raking the forest floors.

“We gotta take care of the floors, you know, the floors of the forest. Very Important.” he said during a tour of the California devastation in which he mistakenly called the burned out town of Paradise, ‘Pleasure.’

One of the scientists worth listening to is Australian David Bowman, a global wildfire expert often quoted in the world media.

 “Growing cities, poor planning, recurring heat waves, more people living closer to forests and more combustible landscapes have together created a more fire-prone world,” Bowman has said. Add in climate change, which is accelerating ecological instability.

“It is causing fire seasons to start earlier and finish later. We are seeing more severe, more intense and longer lasting wildfires causing more loss of life and property. Fires used to be seen as local, but we should see them as part of a global-scale phenomenon.”

Wildfires are a threat to our future. We need to take that threat seriously.

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
Profile: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K8FY3Y

No trespassing!

It is 6:25 a.m. opening day of the deer hunting season. Still coal black outside, so I am sipping the last of my coffee before heading into the woods.

The telephone rings. Who calls at this time of morning on a dark, rainy day in November?

It is my wife, calling from home: “The bank just called to say our credit card has been compromised. Two charges, one for $1,100 and another for $300.”

She still has the caller, who identified himself as a bank fraud squad guy, on another line. He has given her his name, and a badge number. (Bank employees now have badge numbers?)

He is asking that she go to her computer and open the credit card account to confirm a few things.

It is all very slick but she refuses and calls me.  He has told her that our credit card has been frozen, which I say is good because no one, including a thief like him, will be able to use it.

She gets rid of the guy and calls the real bank fraud unit, which confirms the card has not been comprised, the account is not frozen and there is no need to worry. The caller was just another scammer trying to weasel pieces of information that would allow him to get into our bank accounts.

All that settled, I pick up my rifle and head for the cottage door when the phone rings again. It is a woman with a thick accent and unpronounceable name. She says she is with our bank.

I have a short fuse that gets shorter when something or someone holds me back from a trip into the woods.

I launch a rant into the phone’s mouthpiece, which is answered by a click, then a dial tone. The caller was either a bank employee not wanting to listen to a madman, or a scammer who realized this was not going to be a profitable call.

Finally out in the woods I sit and reflect on what has happened. I become angry, very angry. And nervous.

Within 30 minutes during a period when much of the country was in bed, two different scammers have telephoned our home and our cottage and have identified us by name. This is either a wild coincidence or a group of criminals invested some time to find out who we are, where we bank and that we have two telephones at two different residences.

Most disturbing is the cottage call. Our lake place is precious part of our lives. It is a place where we resist the outside world. No one enters that space unless we invite them.

We all get these annoying, and disturbing, intrusions on our telephones, personal computers and mobile phones. There seems to be no end to them, and there will not be until we demand that telephone and Internet scamming be treated as serious and dangerous crime, and not simply a nuisance.

These calls are not just annoying nuisances. More and more they are a means to successful identity theft.

Statistics show scam calls on a rocket-launch rise and are the top consumer complaint received by  the United States Federal Communications Commission. Presumably they are a top complaint in Canada also, but you can’t find out for sure on government bureaucratic sites, which are mainly interested in boasting how well they are protecting consumers.

A recent Forbes magazine article said that 60 per cent of people received a scam call during one survey week. That’s a 113-per-cent increase over the same study one year before.

And, the New York Times has reported that robocalls hit an all-time high of 3.4 billion in one month - April of this year. That’s an increase of 900 million over April 2017.

Scamming is out of control and threatens to become worse. Governments and data and telephone carriers must begin taking it more seriously and create better strategies to stamp it out.

Scamming is trespassing. Farmers and ranchers, particularly out West, have a saying about trespassing. It goes like this:

“Prayer is one of the ways to meet your Maker. Trespassing is the fastest.”

We need faster ways to send the people and organizations behind high tech scamming on to their just rewards.

Voices of our times

I was so overwhelmed by bad news this week that I decided to write a column about the good news that is plentiful, if you go looking for it.

There is no shortage of happy or inspiring news. For instance:

Last week five-year-old Layla Lester was playing in a park and saw a bride in a flowing white gown having her wedding photos taken. Layla believed the bride was a princess and ran to her yelling excitedly “Cinderella! Cinderella!”

The story and a photograph spread and before long a GoFundMe page raised thousands of dollars to send Layla to Disney World to meet some of her favourite Disney princesses.

Then the story of the woman who received a long-distance call from her Army vet brother who was in extreme pain and needed help. The woman telephoned her brother’s social worker to arrange for someone to take him to hospital.

She dialled the wrong number and found herself talking to a gourmet sandwich delivery shop. Instead of hanging up on a wrong number, the sandwich shop sent a delivery driver to the brother’s house and took him to a hospital.

And, inspiring news from the Shark Tank television show on which three young people pitched a new type of cutting board their father had invented.

Their mother had died of breast cancer while their father worked on the first prototypes of the Cup Board Pro.  The father dreamed of pitching the unique cutting board to Shark Tank but died before he could do it. He was a New York firefighter who got cancer believed related to the 9/11 terrorism attack at which he was a first responder.

His three children decided they should pitch their dad’s invention. The Sharks were so impressed they reached a rare unanimous agreement: each would invest $100,000 in the cutting board business and pledged to donate their profits to charities supporting firefighters affected by 9/11 illnesses.

  

There are dozens of these good news stories out there in newspapers, on television and a variety of Internet sites. They inspire and offer hope for a society drowning in problems.

The sad news is that good news does not make the bad stuff go away. We can encase ourselves in bubbles of happy news but the drug crises, homelessness, senseless traffic tragedies, the shocking rise of fascist leaders, and the racial and religious hatred will remain.

Good news is comforting, helpful and makes good people even better. But more than happy news is needed to cure society’s wrongs.

We need, as individuals, massive change in our thinking. Many of us know the problems but think there is little that an individual can do about them.

We are immersed in our individual lives of trying to balance work and home life, raising  children, paying the mortgage and generally making ends meet. There is little time or energy for helping to solve the world’s problems, so we leave that work to the politicians and government bureaucrats.

Even if we don’t have the time to volunteer our time and services to causes trying to right the wrongs, there is something we can do. We can speak out. Speak out regularly and intelligently to friends, family, associates.

Talk to them about the attitudes and the problems damaging our society and explore ideas on how society can be changed for the better.

The late Margaret Mead, American cultural anthropologist, once wrote:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Anyone lacking the inspiration to talk about the need for change should Google the name Amal Hussain. Google will display her photo, which is too heartbreaking to describe here.

Amal was a seven-year-old who has come to represent the nearly two million Yemeni children said to be starving because of  a civil war worsened by Saudi-led bombing of civilian targets.

Unlike Layla Lester, Amal won’t be going to Disney World to see her favourite princesses. She died last week of starvation. 

Just talking about these tragedies might seem pointless. However, one voice is like a breeze. Joined by many other voices it becomes a gale. Thousands rolled into one become a storm that brings change.

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
Profile: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K8FY3Y