JEREMYKLASZUS.COM

Here’s my column from this morning’s Calgary Herald, about Canada, xenophobia and Tamil migrants that recently arrived in B.C. after a very dangerous journey:

It’s a disconcerting string of stories, to say the least. In April, Arizona passed a law cracking down on undocumented migrants, making it a crime for them to be in the state at all — regardless of whether they’re involved in criminal activity. Two months later, voters in Fremont, Neb., approved new rules forbidding local landlords and businesses from renting to or hiring undocumented workers.

The Arizona and Fremont laws have since run into legal snags (damn those checks and balances!), but elsewhere in the world, outsiders are being similarly targeted by states that want to thicken their borders — even though these same states rely heavily on newcomers for labour. In France this month, police have been uprooting small camps of impoverished Roma migrants, giving them two options: leave voluntarily with government help, or get deported.

It would be comforting to believe Canada is immune from this creeping xenophobia. Yet we saw it after a ship arrived in B.C. earlier this month with almost 500 Tamil migrants from Sri Lanka…

My Calgary Herald column from yesterday’s paper:

We were driving north toward Jasper on the Icefields Parkway, surrounded by majestic grey peaks, when we came around a bend and spotted him.

No, he wasn’t a grizzly (ursus arctos horribilis), a black bear (ursus americanus), an elk (cervus canadensis) or a bighorn sheep (ovis canadensis).

This was a much more common species, unfortunately — the thick-witted national park visitor (homo sapiens ignoramus). In this case, said specimen had decided to stop his vehicle in the middle of the highway alongside other stopped cars on the shoulder, and stare out the window at a bear in the bush. Or a mountain goat. Or maybe he was just gazing at Indian paintbrush colouring the ditch with its deep, fiery red…

Yes, yes, I know — I haven’t written much here lately.

That’s because I’ve been living life instead of writing about living life. Being a dad instead of writing about being a dad. Going camping instead of writing about going camping. You get the idea.

In Valentine, Nebraska.

Our summer started with a trip to Valentine, Nebraska—the “heart city” of the American Midwest, population 2,820. Two of those citizens are my Grandma and Grandpa, who we don’t get to visit very often because of distance.

In Valentine, L. danced down Main Street on painted red hearts and took in a Fourth of July parade that lasted probably five minutes. I played Grandpa’s tater-bug mandolin almost every day, trying to keep up as he played “Wildwood Flower,” “Golden Slippers” and “Red Wing” on his accordion and guitar. Towards the end of our stay C. and I and a few others tubed down the shallow and very rocky Niobrara River (believe me — I had the cuts and bruises to prove those adjectives). All told, it was a fine visit with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. It was definitely worthwhile to go down there and introduce L. to her great-grandparents.

Then came the Calgary Folk Music Festival—the anchor of our summer. It’s set in stone, that weekend. Everything else gets planned around it. There, we watched The Avett Brothers rip up the mainstage with their energetic guitar-and-banjo hoedowns. That alone made the weekend worth it, but there were other highlights: western singer Tom Russell’s wild storytelling, The Burning Hell’s hilariously upbeat songs about death and sex and the end of the world, and Ian Tyson performing a new gem of a tune, “Song in a Dream.” Folk fest was different this year, though. Before we were parents, C. and I would go all weekend, from morning ‘til night. Last year we pretty much did the same thing — we could just set L. on the ground. (Weirdly, she screamed through Iron & Wine’s set last year, but fell asleep during The Decemberists.) This year things weren’t so easy. L. wanted to move, didn’t want to sit and listen to music. So we missed a bunch of stuff and spent a lot of time in the kids’ area and didn’t even go to the festival at all on Sunday. Still, it was a fun weekend.

Opapa on his iPhone.

Besides that, we’ve done a bunch of camping in the mountains. A highlight was our recent family trip to Jasper, where my brother and his fiance live. I hadn’t been to Jasper in probably 20 years, and have only vague memories of camping in that area as a kid — nostalgic memories of being there with my parents and Omi and Opapa and aunts and uncles, all together, all having fun. I loved those trips as a kid and I enjoyed this last trip with my family just as much. It was the same but not the same at all — Omi sat by the campfire reading the Edmonton Journal on her Kindle, and from time to time Opapa pulled out his iPhone to look something up on Google Earth. Unlike my tech-savvy eightysomething grandparents, I left my gadgets at home.

Seeing Omi and Opapa pull out of the campground on the last night was very emotional for me. I have all these rich memories of camping with them as a kid, and it’s incredible that now my daughter is forming similar memories. L. has her own Omi and Opapa and uncles and aunts, and later in life, she’s going to look back fondly at family trips like these (that’s my hope, anyway!). What’s really incredible, to me, is that my Omi and Opapa are still here and present while these memories are being written. What a valuable gift for all of us. I’m very thankful.

So there you have it — life is good, and the summer’s not over yet. More to come…

Here’s my column from this morning’s Calgary Herald:

If I want to walk or bike downtown from my place, the shortest route cuts by the Calgary Drop-In and Rehab Centre. That’s always bugged me, and a while back I said as much to a friend.

People down there are unpredictable, I told him. Social justice is important and homeless people deserve to be treated with dignity and all that — sure. But the honest truth is I don’t like walking through that area.

His response? “That’s probably good.” As in, it’s probably good that a guy who has the security of a home, bed and steady income feels discomfort when walking past someone who doesn’t. It’s not meant to be a sunshine-and-rainbows experience — and if you feel fine as you walk by, there’s probably something wrong with you.

My friend’s words recently came to mind when the provincial government revealed plans to launch an anti-panhandling campaign in the fall, encouraging people in Alberta’s cities to donate to homeless-related charities instead of giving directly to people who ask for change…

My column in this morning’s Calgary Herald:

Here’s a simple request for Calgary’s municipal election candidates. Please read George Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language before writing another word.

If you’re like me, you’ll cringe when you read it. The gist of Orwell’s essay is that English is in decline and that political writing, in particular, is characterized by “sheer cloudy vagueness.” Orwell lists the easy shortcuts we English speakers use when we want to avoid “the work of prose construction” — stale imagery, lack of precision, pretentious diction, meaningless words and so on. Anyone who writes anything is guilty of at least one, and probably more, of these infractions.

With the civic election three months away, there are plenty of examples of bad writing on mayoral candidates’ websites. Here’s one from Wayne Stewart’s: “Calgary is a great city, but we cannot rest on our laurels, we must move forward or we’ll fall behind.”

It’s a string of empty cliches…

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/opinion/op-ed/campaign+gobbledygook/3264737/story.html#ixzz0tWmiGUzR