It's been over 19 years since I created this account, and I am grateful.
You have provided a platform that has allowed me to reach out to all the world.
This was a crazy idea to me at the time. Who was I to merit such a broad audience? As soon as I hit that big, beautiful Publish button, any tripe I felt like spewing out to the world was placed upon a platter, and thrust out to whomever might wander into it, be they critical thinkers of advanced schooling, or babes in the proverbial woods, ready to be led down any candy-strewn path I artfully laid out. What fun!
O what fun indeed.
How devilishly we could now bypass all the gatekeepers carefully put in place by governmental agencies designed to keep at least a second, accountable, pair of eyes between any silly idea I might have, and the masses of media consumers.
I quickly learned that despite having completed a BA in journalism and communications at Concordia University, wherein only third-year students got to dip their toes into opinion writing - with learned professors guiding our neophyte hubris into responsible conjecture, anything I posted here was at an even keel with anything anybody else felt like posting here. All any of us needed was an email address, free for the taking on (take your pick) hotmail, yahoo, gmail, aol, and many others.
This was not normal; in fact, it was revolutionary. Before this platform existed, we had to either suck up to The Man (you must always capitalize the T and the M in that construction if you want to get ahead) and sell our souls licking enough bums to get up to the "column-writer" floor, or go punk rock to make our voices heard. And that required at least learning a handful of guitar chords and organizing a couple of people to supply a rhythm section and a PA.
So yes, thank you, Blogger (long ago acquired by "Do No Evil" Google, before they went public and eventually dropped that motto, because a little evil never hurt, right?) becoming Alphabet, much like Facebook and Instagram are now part of Meta, so it goes.
I recall in my 1988 interview with the Concordia Journalism heads, that I made a case for the need for journalistic copy to have entertainment value, in an age where television ruled and the general public was drawn more to the sensationalism and emotive reach of that medium than to the sanguine realm of the written word.
Today, I seek the written word still in my news-hounding habits, preferring the written account on cnn.com or globaltv.com or aljazeera.net to their YouTube videos or snippets on other platforms. I have no idea how many of the Websites in this blog's sidebar remain relevant, and I actually prefer to keep it that way, as some kind of modern relic to a past that changes and folds in upon itself too quickly for me to even attempt to keep up. And our legacy news media are becoming increasingly degraded by money and foreign ownership by outfits with dubious and sometimes nefarious ambitions. They are prey to the behemoth of "lost eyeballs" to newer, online-only (and largely unregulated) media known harrowingly as "influencers" despite their needing no more credence to the title than the same access to online publishing as any of us have, disastrously.
Only the non-profit LaPresse seems to have found a model of online journalism that is sustainable, and that is likely impossible to recreate outside of Quebec's distinctly French-speaking media market bubble.
Looking back, I have certainly failed to garner much of an audience on this platform, as well as on my Twitter, Bluesky and Youtube accounts, perhaps because I lack the savvy and fastidiousness of others; or perhaps because I haven't kept posting regularly; never spent any money to buy followers; never sold out to Russian or other foreign interests; never said anything here that wasn't purely from the heart, or easily read off my tattered sleeve, as it were.
But today I am in a different mindset than 19 years ago. Today I worry that too few of our younger generations give any credence to the written word. It is so hard to convince my 11 year-old daughter or her older brothers and sister of the joy and growth they can experience with reading a goddamned book once in a while. Or even getting their news from sources that parlay the facts, eschew bias and refuse to "go to print" with single-sourced information they haven't yet corroborated.
The editorial function is vital to keeping the general public informed without prejudice. And an ill-informed public has a crippling effect on democracy. And if we lose our democracy, we will live in a state of misery only past generations of Canadians, long since passed from this mortal coil, have known. I want better than that for my family. We must get everyone reading, and thinking critically, and demanding factual, second-source-verifiable information, before making a decision.
Today, I seek out these sources for reliable information:
juancole.com
aljazeera.com
bsky.social
therover.ca
thetyee.ca
ricochet.media
lapresse.ca (Quebecois French)
radio-canada and cbc news (avoiding much of the opinion stuff)
And do make a habit of reading books, gentle reader, always. I recently finished Sarah Kendzior's They Knew and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, and I am now in the throes of Crosses in the Sky by Mark Bourrie. I am re-reading The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell, who in particular, writes so beautifully it lifts me to heights I never before imagined.
Again, thank you, Alphabet, for the platform. I hope I haven't contributed too much to the crapfest of stupidity, despite needing to be my own editor. As we say here in la Belle Province, c'est plat.
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