Posts

The Plague-Ground – What Happens When You Finally Leave Your Abuser

Every expert says this is the most dangerous time. You have crossed the man who has stolen your life. His rage is volcanic; his hurt, vast and eternal. You flinch at every sound; look back at everyone walking behind you. Is it him? This…

The Plague-Ground – Virus and Vaccine: Charting our death and resurrection

Back on Friday, March 13th, we were all so doe-eyed and naive. COVID was killing thousands in Italy and in Canada we’d all just been sent to our rooms. It took only that weekend for most of us to frantically look for ways to divert ourselves. This…

The Plague-Ground – You’re at a movie in a packed theatre. You smell smoke.

You see flames flicker up from an empty seat in front of you. You’re tempted to stand up and yell “Fire!” But you don’t because that may cause a stampede and trample people. In fact, isn’t that why it’s against the law to yell “Fire!”…

The Plague-Ground – I Scream. You Scream.

You’d think political conventions were created in order to analyse what those conventions mean. Of the eight opinion pieces on the home page of this morning’s New York Times, six are about Trump and the Republican Convention. As for…

The Plague-Ground – Is the cavalry coming?

The fate-of-humankind question isn’t “When will a vaccine arrive?” It’s also: “Who will take the vaccine?” Two things happened last week to help us answer both. Last Tuesday, the heads of five Big Pharma companies offered…

The Plague-Ground – Justin Not-So-True Though

I won’t write about the loucheness of Justin Trudeau, his need to feather his mother’s nest, his whac--a-mole conflicts of interest; nor the conflicts of his Minister of Finance and Chief of Staff; nor forcing his officials to be economical…

The Plague-Ground – The herd has moved.

You can scratch and claw and fight and hope and despair, and for years nothing changes. Then one day, everything changes. We are living one of those days now. Malcolm Gladwell called it The Tipping Point, “the moment of critical mass,…

The Plague-Ground – Plants Have Ears Too

This week in Barcelona, a string quartet played to a full house of plants. The 10-minute concert was put on to reinforce how important art, music and nature are as life opens again across Europe. It was a weird and brilliant idea to give…

The Plague-Ground – It’s an “and-and” thing.

Toronto is one of the last places in North America still largely closed by the pandemic. Good. Because saving our lives or saving our economy isn’t an ‘either-or’ thing, though we seem hard-wired to think that way. And lord knows,…

The Plague-Ground – What We Didn’t Know

Today is 13 weeks exactly since millions of us were told not to come back to our offices and stay home. Three months exactly. One quarter of the year exactly. A quarter of the fiscal. A season of the year. On Friday, March 13th, Jean…