Why do people say such things?

Why do people say such things? In a letter published in Friday's National Post, John Kneeland of Hamilton claims that, in Uganda, numerous factors, including condom use, "played more of a role in declining HIV prevalence than abstinence . . . "

Mr. Kneeland cites a study presented at a recent international conference on retrovirals to support his claim. If any study actually did say such a thing, it wouldn't be worth publishing, never mind reading, never mind citing.

It is not logically possible for any factors to contribute "more" to the decline of a sexually transmitted disease than abstinence. It is like saying that new and improved ladders contribute more to a reduction of falling off the roof than does standing on the ground.

By definition, the thing that must contribute most to prevention of falling from the roof is not going up on the roof to begin with. Similarly, sexual abstinence, by its nature involves the transmission of nothing. How could potentially transmitting something possibly contribute "more" to the potential reduction of disease than transmitting absolutely nothing at all?

What Mr. Kneeland really means is that while nothing is more certain than abstinence in reducing—indeed, eliminating—sexually transmitted HIV, 21^st-century ideology forbids us asserting a moral burden of abstinence on those who insist on taking risks. Instead, we must euphemize the realities of epidemiology in the prophylactic language of "realism" and write letters to the editor proclaiming things that can't possibly be true.
Why?

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The demise of the daily newspaper will close the wondrous window on the world that is the letters to the editor section. The comment capabilities of web sites and blogs will never come close to matching a good letters section.

The immediacy of the responses on most web sites means they are primarily the monopoly of 37-year-old cretins wearing only stained underpants in their mother's basements. The vast majority of what appears on them is illiterate, moronic or as energetically pointless as the advice of fans shouted from the nosebleed sections of sports stadiums.

Letters to the editor, by contrast, go through filtering by, well, an editor, meaning they are the product of the citizen in the street abetted by an actively employed intelligence.

As such, they are a beneficial medium between the narcissistic blurts of professional pundits and the dregs of so-called "streeters" in which newspapers send out their greenest or laziest reporters to ask people in shopping malls what they think about the creation of the universe.

(One reporter I know, who loathed doing such "vox pop" stories, learned early to simply attribute invented quotes to members of her large extended family, taking care to re-mix first and last names so no one was ever the wiser. "I know what they all think—and they're citizens, too," she rationalized.)

It was fascinating to learn in Friday's National Post letters section, for example, that Joan Harper of Victoria, weighing in on the always-hopping topic of abortion, believes that "in a democracy, no one has the right to force their opinions on another". At the same time, in a gesture of magnanimity to her fellow citizens who oppose abortion, Ms. Harper allows that: "It is unfair to force people who object to it to pay taxes that support it."

Both her points are, if this is not too harsh, stupendously wrong. The whole purpose of democracy, after all, is to force our opinions on each other through argument, persuasion, voting and majority rule. Democracy is the peaceful way of getting our way even if others don't like it.

The catch, of course, is those "others" always have equal access to that democratic privilege. It means we end up endlessly awash in debating bombast but that is preferable to an endless series of detonating bomb blasts.

The absence of violence is precisely what makes it "fair" to expect citizens to pay taxes for the things they find disagreeable. Our power to peacefully change things in a democracy requires we surrender to paying for things we don't like as we're waiting our turn.

What's engaging about Joan Harper's erroneous thinking, though, is not her misunderstanding of the basics of our political system. It's that what she, as a citizen, believes can appear literately, concisely, prominently for us all to see through the wondrous window of a daily newspaper letters section.

I, for one, will miss it dearly when it's gone.

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On Thursday I had the chance to listen to Ottawa writer Bill Brown read his wonderful short story "Folly" to a class at Marianopolis College in Montreal. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, a reminder of the true purpose of literature.

You did not, and as he said you will likely never, see Bill's name on the Giller Prize short or long lists. He's not waiting for a Governor General's jury to notify him that he has won the literary lottery.

What Bill does look forward to is getting up at 4 a.m. to write "painfully slowly" for three hours every day, crafting exquisite short stories that he makes public through the small press, Siren Song Publishing, or through the small magazine, Front and Centre, that he co-edits.

It is the approach of a genuine amateur in the full and true and best sense of that word: one who does what he does for the pure love of doing it. It is, as Bill told the Marianopolis students, a major part of the "blessed life" he lives.

Bookish gadfly John Metcalfe was pilloried in the 1980s and 1990s for insisting this is the authentic home of literature. Metcalfe argued to anyone who would listen (few would) that literature, particularly in Canada with its miniscule book-reading public, is essentially a "coterie" activity. He did not mean the word as a pejorative but as an accurate descriptor.

This is not to superciliously look down upon prizes, writer's grants, subsidized publishing and other accretions to literary activity as somehow impure or ignoble. They're not. They're as real a part of the writing life as pencils or word processors. What they can risk, however, is a kind of teleological warping so that they shift from support to sine qua non.

The enthusiastic reaction of the Marianopolis students to Bill Brown's reading showed what hangs in the balance. They sat in rapt attention while he read, asked thoughtful and in quite pointed questions afterward, then hung around for almost 40 minutes just to chat, have copies of their books signed, find out first-hand a bit more what this writer-fellow, and this literature business, is all about. For most, it was probably the first opportunity they'd had to do so. For some, it might be the only such opportunity they'll ever have.

It's a chance that might never have come to them were Bill not part of a "coterie" of writing friends that includes Zsolt Alapi, the teacher of the Marianopolis class and the brains behind Siren Song Publishing.
Friendship begets many great things besides itself. In this case, it created an opening for a class of engaged students in their college years to learn that literature is not, at heart, a matter of economics or theory, but rather a genuine gift of the human condition.

Reading it, hearing it read, writing it yourself, belongs to a blessed life.

Love as a knock on the door

Originally published:

http://www.ilsussidiario.net/articolo.aspx?articolo=124705 (5-Nov-10)
http://www.timescolonist.com/life/Ahousaht+David+Frank+shares+healing+journey+after+abuse/3790764/story.html (7-Nov-10)

David Frank knew coming home would require attention to change. Though no world traveller, he is a man who knows what it means for the heart to shift and find its new place.

"That was my first time out of America," the community health services manager for the Ahousaht First Nation says a few weeks after his return from Rimini, Italy, and the annual Meeting of Friendship Among Peoples. "I had never really taken a vacation before."

"Over there, it was really alive, really vibrant, there was just so much. It was almost overwhelming. Coming home meant getting myself to slow down a bit."

It is the understatement of a man who has stepped off a cliff describing the need to move his arms to avoid stubbing his toe upon landing. In his mid-60s, Frank and his wife, Ginger, travelled from their reserve on the west coast of Vancouver Island across the Atlantic to the Italian Adriatic resort town of Rimini for the meeting in August.

The annual event, the largest summer cultural fair in Europe, hosts 800,000 visitors in a week. There are 1,800 people in the entire Ahousaht First Nation, which can be reached only by boat or float plane.

But Frank wasn't there this year just to observe the seven-day frenzy of political discussions, arts exhibitions and sporting events. He was there to address an audience accustomed to keynote speakers such as Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa, Tony Blair and Pope John Paul II.

A man who spent most of his working life as a fisherman off the Canadian coast, he would stand alone at the front of a cavernous auditorium, speaking through a translator to at least 500 people who needed a map projected on the wall to know where he was from. And he would be talking about himself.

No—he would be talking about his capacity to forgive the Roman Catholic priest who sexually abused him as a child, something he had never spoken about in a public forum before.

"A question I still ask myself is what did happen? How did it happen?" Frank says in the voice of a man who, even as he is speaking, is also listening to an ancient, beautiful story being told in another room. "I just said my prayer and let everything go."

The combination carried him, someone might say mystically, above the gulfs of culture, language, history, geography, to the shared place in human hearts where listeners sit in silence waiting for word to follow word.

The word David Frank gave them, above all, was love.

"I remembered that when you love all people, you have no enemies," Frank said into the silence that day. "I realized I needed to ... love the person that hurt me."

In a series of quick verbal block cuts, he gave them his history: An aboriginal Canadian raised in the Catholic and Protestant faiths, as well as in the religious healing traditions of his ancestors, sent off by government to a church-run residential school as a child, abused, devastated, enraged, addicted, suicidal. Then again, love. The love of a solitary knock on the door on the night when Frank was raising his own hand against himself to end his life.

"There was a knock on the door, a priest walked in, he'd come to see me. He asked how I was. It was at that time I realized God was alive, a loving God. I heard the teachings of my mom and my dad, heard the teachings in my heart. I heard the need to love all people," he told his listeners.

But more. He did not tell them his experience of change was the necessary and sufficient ground of redemption. He did not teach them it was the essence of salvation. He thanked them for being good and generous people. He sat down.

After his speech in Rimini, after the breaking of the silence and the swarming of the crowd wanting to shake his hand, pat his shoulder, thank him for his words, his love, he and his wife got a chance to go to Rome for a few days before returning home. The frenzy of the Eternal City in August can drive even seasoned travellers mad. What chance did David and Ginger Frank, fresh from Ahousaht, really have?

"It was amazing, all that history," Frank says. "It brought me back to some of our history from home. When I was standing in the [Sistine] Chapel, looking at the ceiling, seeing all the paintings and what Michelangelo did, all of the hard work, it made me think of here, how ours was preserved in songs and dances.

"You see that in some of the beautiful songs you hear, the old, ancient songs that come out once in a while. You can feel it, too. It made me think of that."

Talking while listening. A small voice in a cavernous place. The story from the other room. Coming home.

"I was singing under my breath," David Frank says. "Yes, I was singing quietly."