Fox for the ‘Fiver’

I can’t think of a better person to put on future $5 bills than Terry Fox, the most inspirational Canadian of the last half century.

The Bank of Canada is redesigning the banknote, sometimes called a “fin” or a “fiver”, and has invited nominations from the public on whose picture should appear on the front of the new bill. Nominations close March 11.

Port Coquitlam. B.C., Terry Fox’s hometown, has mounted a full-out campaign urging people across the country to nominate their most famous citizen.

“Terry has just an amazing legacy, not only here in his hometown of Port Coquitlam, not only in British Columbia, not only in Canada, but around the world,” says the city’s Mayor Brad West. “He has inspired, and he continues to inspire, millions of people.”

Terry Fox was an athletic teenager in 1977 when he was diagnosed with cancer in his right leg. The leg was amputated but he continued long-distance running on a prosthetic leg.

After the amputation and 16 months of chemotherapy Fox concluded that his life had been saved by medical advances and decided to raise money for more research and to help other cancer patients have hope and courage.

In the spring of 1980, he began a Marathon of Hope in which he planned to raise money by running across Canada from St. John’s, Newfoundland to Vancouver. He ran for 143 days, covering 5,373 kilometres before having to give up when the cancer returned, this time to his lungs.

Forty years later, many people, me included, continue to be powerfully impressed by the courage and selflessness of Terry Fox.

He is a true hero in my eyes and my memories of him have been little dimmed by the passage of four decades. One reason they remain so bright and clear perhaps is because our lives intersected at several points.

In 1980 I was a journalist working for The Canadian Press news agency in Vancouver and news of Fox’s Marathon of Hope was a story of great interest. When he dipped his leg into the Atlantic Ocean at St. John’s we journalists in Vancouver began thinking about news coverage plans for when he got close to home.

Fox was well into Northern Ontario in August when I got news that my mother was ill in Sault Ste. Marie. I went there to be with her.

She died and I was in charge of carrying out her last wishes, including bringing her body to Thunder Bay to be buried with my father. Crazy as it sounds, that included written instructions to have her body driven from the Soo to Thunder Bay because she had a lifelong terror of airplanes.

I could not ignore her wishes and her body was driven around Lake Superior, passing Terry Fox and the Marathon of Hope along the way.

In Thunder Bay, I stood on the steps of the funeral home waiting for visitors to arrive for my mother’s wake when I saw flashing red lights down the street. They were at St. Joseph’s Hospital, a place I knew well because I was born there and my father died there.

A passerby informed me that Terry Fox had just been brought into the hospital. I started running towards the hospital until I realized that being at my mother’s funeral was more important than covering a story, as big a story as it appeared to be.

Terry was brought back home for hospitalization and treatment. Nine and a half months later, on June 19, 1981, I found myself at a New Westminster, B.C. hospital with Leslie Shepherd, one of the finest journalists I have worked with. There at 4:30 a.m. we flashed the news that Terry Fox had died.

It was an incredibly sad event, even for journalists used to covering sad things. But with the sadness came the realization this was not just another passing story. It was a story that would live and inspire for decades.

It has and I hope it will continue to live and inspire with Terry Fox’s face on the five-dollar bill.

Also, putting Fox on the fiver would be a tribute to young Canadians, whose talents and achievements are not often recognized enough.

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A Clear and Present Danger

From Shaman’s Rock

By Jim Poling Sr.

The hit movie Parasite, winner of this year’s best picture Oscar, may be fiction but it reflects what is happening in real life today.

Parasite tells a story of class prejudices and greed creating violence between a rich, privileged family and a poor, low class one.

It is a story that many of us see developing around us every day. In real life, social inequality is creating class conflicts that threaten the health of our democracies. More and more people, including some wealthy ones, are beginning to blame all this on failures of our capitalistic system.

Our capitalism simply is not inclusive – not producing good things for enough people. It is making the rich more rich and the poor more poor. A variety of polls and reports show that most economic growth is going to the richest part of the population.

The development charity Oxfam says that in 2018 the world’s richest 2,200 billionaires saw a 12-per-cent increase in wealth, while the world’s poorest people saw an 11-per-cent decrease.

Ekos, the Canadian research company, has reported that 70 per cent of those it polled feel that almost all economic growth in the last 20 years has gone to the top one per cent of the population.

Anand Giridharadas, author of the 2018 book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, says that “we live in an age that has been absolutely punishing for perhaps the majority of middle and working class . . ..” 

Few could argue truthfully that the middle class is not suffering. Most of us in the shrinking middle class see our monthly bills increasing while our incomes remain stagnant, or even shrink.

Our capitalist system is broken, but I don’t think it needs to be replaced. It needs fixing, and even some well-known capitalists admit that.

“I’m a capitalist and even I think capitalism is broken,” Ray Dalio, billionaire founder of Bridgewater hedge fund, said last year. “The problem is that capitalists typically don’t know how to divide the pie well and socialists typically don’t know how to grow it well.”

A U.S. Gallup poll conducted in 2018 reported that only 45 per cent of Americans, ages 18 to 29, are positive about capitalism, a 12-point drop over two years. In 2010, 68 per cent of this age group were positive.

A 2019 Forum Poll found that 42 per cent of Canadians have a negative opinion of capitalism. Those Canadians most likely to view capitalism negatively were in the 18 to 44 age bracket.

The social damage caused by this inequality is being reported more often now, notably in films such as Parasite and in fairly recent books such as Hillbilly Elegy, Tightrope, and Educated, all of which document the damaging toll on families unable to access education and economic opportunities.

One suggested way of starting to fix capitalism is to tax the rich more heavily. Both Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Starbucks founder Howard Schultz have argued for higher taxes on the rich.

Also, reforms that would allow low-income families better access to education, health care and housing would make the system more equal.

Certainly, the warning signals of revolutionary upheaval caused by the widening crevice between rich and poor are becoming obvious.

The 15th edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report has warned that financial inequality continues to intensify, and a result could be economic confrontations and domestic political polarization. We’ve certainly seen the latter in both the U.S. and Canada.

Bridgewater’s Dalio has warned that growing inequality in the U.S. could lead to “great conflict and some form of revolution unless capitalism is reformed.”

Reform is needed, and urgently, so that our capitalistic system produces better lives for everyone, not just those who already are getting an unfair share.

The World Economic Forum warns: “The challenges before us demand immediate collective action, but fractures within the global community appear to only be widening. Stakeholders need to act quickly and with purpose within an unsettled global landscape.”

Strong leadership is required to get the fixing done. Strong leadership particularly in politics. Strong leadership by people who do what they know must be done, not what their political parties or rich friends want.

A Night at the Movies

Perusing news from the USA I learn that people now go to a library more often than a movie theatre.

A Gallup poll taken just before Christmas found that people visit a library on average 10.5 times a year compared with only 5.3 times a year for movie theatres.

After reading about and watching Sunday’s annual Academy Awards show, I understand why. I’d rather watch raccoons dining at the dump than pay to view some of Hollywood’s recent offerings.

Take for instance the ridiculous Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. How it made it to the Academy Awards defies common sense, as well as common decency. It has to be one of film history’s all-time duds.

It’s packed with star power: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margo Robbie and Al Pacino. Were they on vacation with nothing to do, so they volunteered to take part in this movie-making catastrophe?

It did work out well, however, for Brad Pitt, who won best supporting actor for his low-key performance as a stunt double to DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton, a washed-up cowboy movie star.

The movie was directed by Quentin Tarantino, and to be totally transparent, I don’t like any of his work. He has a penchant for brutal violence and racial slurs in his films.

He is not a natural storyteller and prefers to create movies that are non-linear, with scattered plots sprinkled with absurdity.

If I want to watch disjointed absurdity, I don’t need to go to a movie theatre. I can watch the evening news, or take a walk through downtown Toronto.

That’s just my opinion. Many people love Tarantino’s work, which has included Kill Bill, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.

Although I don’t like Tarantino’s work, it is good that Hollywood has it. The movie industry needs diversity, in its people and in its work.

It got a shot of diversity Sunday when the South Korean thriller Parasite became the first film not in English to win an Oscar for best picture. The film’s director, Bong Joon Ho, won best director and it also picked up the Oscars for original screenplay and best international feature.

I haven’t seen Parasite yet because I dislike having to read sub-titles, but I will get to it.  I’m told it is a cutting social satire about economic inequality.

I’m assuming that the Academy Awards voters did their job thoroughly and that it is a much more interesting flick than the competing 1917, Joker, or The Irishman.

I thought they were okay, but not on the top of my Academy Awards list, although some of the acting in the competing films was terrific.

Joaquin Phoenix was outstanding in Joker, getting a well-deserved Oscar for best actor. Rene Zellweger (best actress) in Judy and Robert De Niro (The Irishman) put in good performances but neither film left me with anything really memorable.

I would have fallen asleep during 1917 but the rifle fire and explosions kept me awake. It did win three Oscars – for sound, cinematography and visual effects.

Last year’s offerings were much better, I thought. Films like A Star Is Born, Green Book, Bohemian Rhapsody and Black Panther were good storytelling while carrying important messages.

Three of the best movies I watched this winter did not figure in this year’s Academy Awards.

The Wife, which won nominations last year, is an intriguing story of a wife (Glenn Close) who writes her husband’s books and he wins the awards. The Good Liar (2019) is about a con man outwitted by a widow (Helen Mirren) he is trying to con and Rocketman, is the biographical musical about Elton John.

I thought each of these was as good or better than some of this year’s Academy Awards offerings. But then again, I’m not a film expert. I’m just a guy who likes to sit down to watch some good storytelling and to leave the theatre having seen something memorable.

Much of the Academy Awards stuff I’ve seen this year is not memorable. Except of course for Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, which was memorable for all the wrong reasons.

However, as my dear old mother used to tell me: “Everybody to their own taste, said the old lady as she kissed the cow.”

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A lesson for America

The first week of February is a time of reflection for me. A time to remember a shocking – yet inspiring - tragedy that occurred on the North Atlantic a lifetime ago.

The U.S. army troop ship Dorchester was steaming south of Greenland, carrying 900 soldiers en route to the war in Europe.  It was just past midnight Feb. 3, 1943 when the ship was rocked by a German torpedo ripping into its starboard side.

Soldiers scrambled for life jackets and life boats as the ship began to sink. Four military chaplains, who gave their life jackets to others, stood on the Dorchester’s deck, arms locked together and singing hymns as the ship listed and went down. Seven hundred and four of the 900 soldiers died in the icy waters.

My reflections this year include a fantasy in which the Dorchester resurfaces for a day, the chaplains on deck looking out over the United States of 2020.  What they see would amaze, and likely sicken them.

There has been progress since they left for war in 1943. Average family incomes have increased substantially. The average standard of living became the highest in the world.

Advances in medicine save lives and improve the lives of those burdened with conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.

Unfortunately, the main beneficiaries of better lives are the rich and the privileged. Today, an estimated 50 million Americans live in poverty, almost 12 million of them children, or one in every six children. And 500,000 Americans are homeless, children among them.

Poor children are doomed to continuing lives in poverty because educational disparity is so huge in the U.S. The best educational opportunities are available to the rich and privileged, not those from low-income families.

Canadian children from low-income families are twice as likely as similar American children to achieve higher incomes because Canada’s educational opportunities are more equal.

The most distressing change visible to the resurrected chaplains would be the class structure. They would see their country has developed a class system as bad, or worse, than the English aristocratic structure they eliminated in the American Revolution.

The American aristocrats of today are its billionaires, who use their money, power and influence to pile up more and more privileges to pass along to their inheritors.

Authors Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn note in their new book Tightrope, outlining the crisis in working class America, that billionaires Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffet possess as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the U.S. population.

The four chaplains I am sure would conclude that America, an empire onto itself, is in decline.

It has become a country of two cultures – the rich who have everything they need and an atrophying working class whose stagnation is breaking down the country’s social fabric with growing anger, racism, political polarization and stress.

A 2019 Gallup poll found that Americans are among the world’s most stressed people. They are tied with Iranians in terms of stress, and more stressed than Venezuelans, whose country is a nightmare of poverty, hunger and bad government.

Americans have good reason to be stressed. They have health care and education crises that are not being solved because needed political action is frozen by political polarization.

The drug epidemic has ruined tens of thousands of families. And gun violence: The figures are astounding – roughly 40,000 gun violence deaths in 2019, including 418 mass shootings.

Some would pin America’s ills on the Trump administration, but the problems have developed over many decades.

At the core of America’s serious problems is its John Wayne philosophy. Individuals who are tough, independent and need no help are ‘good guys.’ The poor and the weak are ‘bad guys’ who can’t make it because of their own faults. America punishes ‘bad guys.’

To stop its freefall from greatness the United States must accept that the world has changed. It is a world requiring less hard-nosed individualism and more collectivism, which means working to help each other, even if it involves self-sacrifice.

That is the lesson of the four chaplains of the Dorchester.

It is a lesson followed by Canada and other strong democracies that provide a leg-up for those trying to get ahead, and safety nets for those who fall.

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