I have a confession to make: I am an addict. 

Not tobacco. Not drugs. Not alcohol.

I’m addicted to a television show.

It’s odd, because I’ve never particularly liked television. Too many annoying commercials. I mean how many times can you watch some bozo telling a client that his competitor’s car mats are not as good as his butter tarts?

I think he said butter tarts. Maybe he said his car mats. I’m not positive because when the commercials start, I turn off my hearing aids.

At any rate, I am addicted to a TV show. 

It’s a cop shop show. Not your typical bad guy, good guy, shoot’em up drama. It’s an artful ongoing drama that shows cops as human beings and often carries a message about life today. 

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is the longest running live-action primetime series in American television history.  It recently surpassed 500 episodes and I’ve seen most of them. 

I love the show because it dramatizes the ugliest sides of human nature while recording the toll that ugliness takes on law enforcement people. It has serial rape, pedophilia, unthinkable crimes against the disabled and elderly, and sexual crimes most of us cannot imagine. 

While telling these awful stories SVU gets viewers thinking about issues such as racism, gender identity, sexual preferences and equality rights. Many episodes are taken from real life crimes.

The acting is consistently sharp with detectives like Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T) and John Munch (Richard Belzer) providing one-liners and acerbic wit that help lighten the heaviness of the crimes they encounter. 

The premier star of the show unquestionably is Mariska Hargitay, who plays Olivia Benson who over 23 seasons has risen through the detective ranks to become captain of the Special Victims Unit. She is an uncompromising detective with a compassionate side often seen in her deep brown eyes.

Hargitay, 57, had a tragic past, as do many of the young victims in SVU. She is the daughter of Jayne Mansfield, the 1950s – 60s blonde bombshell celebrity killed in a car crash in 1967. Mariska was in the car with her mother and was injured but survived and was raised by her father, former Mr. Universe Mickey Hargitay.

Acting as Olivia Benson on SVU has had an impact on Hargitay’s personal life. Benson is a strong advocate for sexual abuse victims and in real life Hargitay has become a trained counsellor for rape victims. 

She has received much fan mail seeking autographs but over the years more letters came from women sharing their stories of sexual abuse. These moved her to form the Joyful Heart Foundation, which says its mission is “to transform society’s response to sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse, support survivors’ healing, and end this violence forever.”  

What makes SVU better than other cop shows is its attention to life issues linked to crime. For instance, the traumas caused by mental illnesses are shown in an SVU episode in which a bipolar disorder lands the daughter of SVU Detective Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) in jail.

The only way to save the teenage daughter from a long prison term is to show a judge and jury that she has a serious bipolar disorder inherited from her grandmother Bernadette Stabler, played by veteran actress Ellen Burstyn. It is an outstanding show that provides information on a serious disorder, which can be controlled if diagnosed early and properly treated.

Past episodes of SVU run on a couple of different channels and I tape them. That way I fast forward through those annoying commercials, which take up roughly one-third of the show’s airtime.

Taping past episodes makes it difficult to follow the SVU timeline. Tonight I might see an episode from 2004 and tomorrow one from 2018. The characters change over the years but I manage to keep track of who’s who and what’s happening to them. 

I like to think SVU is great because of a Canadian connection. Ted Kotcheff, a long-time SVU director and producer, was born in Toronto, graduated in English literature from the University of Toronto and early in his career was the youngest director on the staff of CBC.  

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The kids are back in school, which is a good thing. Excellent education without COVID-19 infections is the hope of all.

Canada has good education systems with teachers dedicated to giving students the best education available. However, curriculums established to guide teachers on what to teach are outdated and do not address what our children must learn to face the future.

Their future will be challenging, to put it mildly. Realistically, their future could be catastrophic.

Today’s children, and tomorrow’s, face a future of more COVID-like viruses, devastating changes brought by global warming, and massive political upheaval. They will encounter crises that will test the limits of human capabilities and require the dynamic leadership not seen today in many countries, Canada included.

Most serious is climate change that can bring diseases and people migrations, which can worsen current political instability. And, anyone questioning why we should worry about political instability close to home should look to the United States where talk of civil war has moved out of the shadows and into everyday conversations.

Presumably we are teaching our children about global warming, its causes and the impacts on our weather, and therefore our lives. But is our education system providing a thorough understanding of biodiversity and its critical importance to future life?

A United Nations study has reported that one million animal and plant species face extinction over the next few decades because of climate change, habit loss and other human activities. Loss of species lowers biodiversity, which leads to changes in landscapes and creates conditions for new diseases to attack animals, including humans.

There is probably no better lesson on the importance of biodiversity than the story of the Yellowstone National Park grey wolves. Wolves were exterminated in the park because humans hated them and refused to acknowledge their important role in nature.

The Yellowstone wolves fed on elk which flourished without them. Growing elk populations destroyed river bank willow stands, which beaver need to survive. Fewer beaver changed the river systems.

Wolves were reintroduced the park to balance elk populations. The threat of wolves kept the elk on the move, leaving them less time to browse riverbank willows. Willow stands recovered, beaver populations grew and nature’s balance was restored.

A full story of the Yellowstone wolves can be found at: https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/nature/wolf-restoration.htm 

Today’s children need new mindsets, knowledge and skills that will help then find solutions to the problems they will face. They will be charged with finding how humanity can occupy the planet’s spaces without dominating and degrading them.

To achieve that they will need to learn how to live differently, ensuring that biodiversity does not continue to be degraded. Without strong levels of biodiversity there is no future.

They also will need to learn life changes required for the future. So much of life today is focussed on the individual and individual things such as money and status. The future will demand more collective thought and collective action.

Individual actions always will be important for creating change but the issues looming for the future demand dedicated collective action – people working together on critical common goals.

They also will require strong leadership focussed on collective goals and free of political thinking. 

Collective thinking and collective action, directed by strong, unbiased leadership, have helped to find solutions to other serious human problems. 

In the 1950s smoke from burning coal was destroying life in London. The air was made cleaner by finding alternatives to burning coal.

In the 1970s, smog was destroying life in Los Angeles. The invention of catalytic converters for automobiles helped to clear the smog problem.

Today’s children can live in a safer future world if they are taught the importance of how all lives are critical to nature’s balance. Even small, seemingly useless lives.

One life no longer aiding nature’s balance is the ivory-billed woodpecker. The bird is believed to be the inspiration for Woody Woodpecker, the iconic cartoon character with the famous Heh-Heh-Heh-HEH laugh.

The ivory-billed woodpecker was declared extinct in September of last year, a victim of industrial logging. 

Woody Woodpecker gone from our world forever. And that’s no laughing matter.

 How sad that the sweetest dreams never last long, or come true.

Just the other night my fantastically happy dream evaporated into the shrill ring of my mobile phone. The sleepy smile and warm, fuzzy feeling generated by the dream went with it.

Cruellest was the fact that this wonderful dream was ruined by a cell phone. Cruel because the dream was about not having a cell phone, nor other electronic devices such as laptop computer, tablet, television, or so-called smartwatch. 

Not to forget the automobile smart screen that tells me 1,000 things I don’t understand, don’t want to know, and don’t need to know.

When my cell phone’s screeching ruined it, my dream had taken me back to ancient days of pens and paper, real time visits to a library and research done with hardcover books. Those days when you needed to communicate with someone, you got up off your gluteus maximus and spoke to them face to face.

My dream of life without electronic devices was set off by a magazine article I was reading about a tiny Italian place without the signals that feed cell phones and the Internet.

Galliano di Mugello is a medieval village in northcentral Italy, somewhere between Florence and Bologna. It is listed as a “very white zone,” an area without reliable cell phone signals and Internet service.

When the 1,300 village residents want information, they resort to activities abandoned by much of the rest of the world. They read newspapers, and talk to each other.

They live lives free of digital toxins spilling from the hyperbolic social media world. None of the Twitter nastiness, nor the silliness of Facebook. No YouTube videos of people saying the Jan.6, 2021 armed insurrection in Washington was a normal tourist event.

And, no pets in funny hats on Instagram.

Not only were digital devices absent from my sweet dream, so were the geeky annoyances that accompany them. When you have digital gear, you have to suffer the aggravations of an increasingly omnipresent geek culture. 

Geek talk. Geek thinking. You know the stuff. Like when you call a techie line looking for help and 10 minutes later you are staring into your telephone and yelling: “What in God’s name are you talking about? Speak English!”

Many Galliano di Mugello citizens are happy living without cell phone service and the Internet. Their lives are less complicated and more peaceful without them. In fact, some are promoting the village as a tourist destination for people who simply want time away from the digital world.

Others, however, are starting to protest not being able to make a cell phone call, text friends or search for something Google. Many have cell phones but can’t use them because of weak service signals. 

The village mayor is campaigning to get the place fully online, suggesting that Italy’s federal government pay mobile phone companies to provide service to the community. Those companies haven’t wanted to provide reliable service because they don’t think it is worth the cost. Too few people, too little profit.

The mayor and his supporters say that digital communication is a basic necessity. They say it is must have, especially in case of emergencies like earthquakes or floods.

I suppose they do have a point. Digital devices improve our lives in many ways, but there are days when the exasperations seem to outweigh the benefits.

The nights following those days are the ones when I have the dream about not having any digital devices. Having true liberty from all the time-consuming frustrations they carry with them.

The mayor of that little Italian village notes, however, that total freedom from the digital world is not about not having digital devices or the signals that light them up.

“When I went to the beach for 15 days in the summer, I turned off my phone,” he said in the magazine story. “The true liberty isn’t about not having a signal, but about being able to choose when to switch off.”

Point taken, but too many of us are so addicted that we can’t summon the nerve to click the things off and spend some time with life as it used to be.

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 There was no finer sight for a New Year’s morning.

At the edge of a freshly snow-covered clearing behind my place stood a whitetail doe and her fawn. 

The white camouflage spots Nature gave to the fawn for protection at its June birth had faded. Its protection now was mom and it stood close beside her, ears twitching nervously as it awaited her signal on how to react to my intrusion

Then they bolted and disappeared into an evergreen thicket.

Our meeting was very brief, only a few seconds, but long enough for me to recall lessons for living written by Felix Salten in his classic Bambi: A Life in the Woods.

Everyone knows the heartwarming children’s story of Bambi, mainly from the Disney film. Disney’s Bambi, although it has some sad and dark spots, is a lightened, whimsical adaptation of Salten’s original book.

Salten wrote the book 100 years ago as an adult story about life. It is packed with scenes of danger and death. Animals, notably Bambi’s mother, are killed by hunters. The leaves on the forest oaks ponder their inevitable deaths as autumn approaches.

Salten knew something about living in times of danger and death. He was an Austrian-Hungarian Jew born at a time when Jews were not allowed to have citizenship. Nazis burned copies of Bambi in the 1930s and Hitler banned all of Salten’s books in 1936.

Bambi’s life in the woods was filled with threats. To survive he had to learn to recognize and navigate them. He too was shot by a hunter but survived and grew into an adult stag, a strong example of how to overcome life’s difficulties and dangers.

We humans live in times of unprecedented difficulties and dangers, which have left us confused, unhappy, and angry. The result has been deteriorating mental health, increased domestic violence, abuse of medical workers, fist fights on airplanes and plenty of general unpleasantness.

Overall, our world has become less tolerant and more critical of everything. We are less friendly with each other - and less compassionate - than we used to be.

So, we stagger into a new year with one leg stretched forward in hope of better times, the other leg dragging the weight of the troubles and worries of the year just passed. 

There is much to hope for in this new year, but plenty to worry about. Covid is not going away, creating uncertainty compounded by the lingering issues of racism, social inequity, and political and ideological conflicts.

Leadership, political and social, is floundering. And, without strong leadership many of us have been overcome by fear, negative thoughts, contempt and irrational anger.

Thankfully, there are signs of social leadership, some of it coming from unexpected sources.

Lady Gaga, the flamboyant singer-actress, has become a strong promoter of the belief that kindness is a powerful medicine that can lift burdens and heal mental wounds.

“I’ve been searching for ways to heal myself,” she has said. “And, I’ve found that kindness is the best way.”

Simple acts of kindness can ease the anxieties of our times and show us that perhaps things are not are bad as they seem. Slowing down in traffic so someone can merge in front of you, giving an unexpected compliment or paying for the coffee of the person in line behind you, are simple kindnesses that create smiles that soften distress.

From my point of view the best thing any of us can do is to stand at the edge of the woods, take some deep breaths and think about the lessons of Bambi: A Life in the Woods. 

Bambi learned not to allow fear and anger to control his life. He listened to his elders and friends and learned that in times of danger, cautious actions are better than rushed conclusions.

Being cautious and thinking things through can help us get through our current difficulties. Simple acts of kindness can draw us closer together to engage our difficulties as a united force.

Bambi’s lesson is that all beautiful forests contain inherent dangers. Our lives are forests filled with dark spots. How we accept them and deal with them decides what kind of society we are.