B.C. Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson apologized to NDP candidate Bowinn Ma. So did Liberal candidate Jane Thornthwaite, who had portrayed Ma in an uncomplimentary way.
At a roast for former colleague Ralph Sultan, Thornthwaite implied that Ma had used her sexuality to get close to Sultan: “very close together…cuddling, a bit of cleavage there…”
The reference was, as columnist Les Layne wrote in the Victoria Colonist, “a wildly inappropriate anecdote that violated political norms about gender, sexuality, and taste.”
At the time, Wilkinson laughed.
Then he waited a whole day before apologizing on behalf of his party and his candidate.
An abundance of apologies
So what’s with apologies, anyway?
Over the last few years, we’ve heard lots of apologies.
In June 2008, then Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a formal apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools, on behalf of the government and people of Canada.
The United Church of Canada formally apologized – twice, in 1986 and in 1998 – for failing to respect traditional indigenous values and beliefs. All other major denominations have done something similar, confessing their complicity in an unjust system that they failed to question.
Maple Leaf Foods apologized for producing meats tainted with listeriosis.
Not confessions
An apology is not – or at least should not be –merely a confession. A confession can be made in private, to a third party who has nothing to do with the situation. Indeed, in the classic Catholic confessional, the priest is duty-bound to take no action about whatever he may hear.
An apology cannot be private. It has to be made to the wronged party. And to be meaningful, it must include a commitment to change.
I remember when my church recited a General Confession every Sunday morning. “Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of All Things, Judge of all men, we acknowledge and confess our manifold sins which we from time, have committed, by thought, word, and deed, against The Divine Majesty….”
Impressive words. Clearly directed to a deity accustomed to communicating in sonorous polysyllabic abstractions. (Something, incidentally, that God never does in the Bible.) And, to quote Macbeth, “signifying nothing.”
Because it neither expects nor defines the change needed.
A current Roman Catholic Missal updates the language, but not the principle: “I confess to almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned in my thoughts and my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do…”
Not a word in those confessions – polysyllabic or not – about what we intend to do to make amends. That calls for a turning around – what theologians call metanoia – from the old ways.
Uneven effects
What difference have those confessions made?
Maple Leaf’s confession saved the company. CEO Michael McCain told the Globe and Mail, “I paid no attention to… the lawyers and the accountants.” McCain accepted responsibility – despite the lawyers’ fears it could leave the company vulnerable to legal action – kept the public informed, and made the company profitable again.
I don’t think governments have done as well.
Government apologies seem to imply monetary reparations are sufficient. About $5 billion to the victims of residential schools. For Japanese Canadians deported from the coast in World War II, $21,000 to each living survivor.
The B.C. government issued a “statement of regret” in 2004 for forcibly incarcerating about 200 Doukhobor children between 1953 and 1959 at the Japanese internment camp in New Denver. No further action.
The government of Newfoundland and Labrador apologized for arbitrarily relocating two Inuit villages. They got a memorial monument.
Are we, in fact, treating people who have been wronged any better?
Yes. And no.
Canadian law now states that you cannot discriminate against people simply because they are indigenous, black, Asian, gay, or female.
And Canada has officially adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
But schools for indigenous children on remote reserves still receive less funding per pupil than urban “white” schools.
Indigenous communities still lack safe drinking water.
The prison rates for non-white minorities remains far out of proportion to their percentage of the population, whatever the reason.
Alcoholism and drug use remain rampant.
Individual churches have made valiant efforts to right old wrongs. But in the bigger picture, I don’t see them doing much better than governments.
Their apologies didn’t have any teeth.
Will Wilkinson’s and Thornthwaite’s apologies change the tenor of political discourse in this province? As the election countdown heats up, we’ll wait and see.
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Copyright © 2020 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
To send comments, to subscribe, or to unsubscribe, write jimt@quixotic.ca
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YOUR TURN
My column on pain, last week, apparently touched a lot of you. I even had people talk about it at Zoom-church.
Some of you shared your own stories of pain.
Deirdre Strachan wrote, “I’ve been relatively fortunate in that my surgeries have not been the sort that leave a terrible amount of pain (though having a large chunk of flesh carved out of my breast took some recovering from).
Rob Brown has lived with pain for years: There was a time, some years ago, when I was working on an S.T.M. in ethics through St. Andrew's College here in Saskatoon. My thesis was on pain and pain management. I never finished my degree because my own pain caught up on me in a very significant way. Even though I didn't finish my STM, I learned some really important things, along with doing post-graduate training in ethics.
“At one point, pain was being considered as a fifth vital sign, along with temperature, pulse, etc. That fell out of favour because, as you note, "there is no objective way to measure the pain someone is feeling." So that as that; a useful tool was lost.
“Like you, I don't agree with any correlation of pain and gain. That is pretty phoney baloney stuff: "Pain itself has no beneficial effects."
“My goal in my STM was to find a way (or ways) of helping people deal with their pain, through a multi-disciplinary approach. Medication is useful, including opioids (which are a very two-edged sword — I found that from taking them, and getting off of them). Other things may be helpful as well: physical therapy, massage therapy, etc. And some of us simply have to learn to live with our chronic pain, no matter how we describe it. (In my case, it is a degenerating back -- lots of arthritis and compressed discs.)
Diane Robinson also has back issues: “Very timely given that my back is experiencing severe degeneration.
“I tell people that pain is highly over-rated -- and it is. While my statement is my poor attempt at making light of the topic, the truth is: pain is anything but a light topic. In my experience:
--Pain completely drains one’s energy.
--Pain is emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually debilitating.
--Pain is completely and intensely personal.
“On the other hand, as you mentioned, pain lets us know that something is wrong with our bodies. So in that sense pain is a blessing (albeit a slap-up-the-side-of-the-face kind of blessing).”
On the other hand, Steve Roney disagreed with both Rob Brown and me on the lack of benefits from pain: “In this column, you are going against the fundamental Christian concept of redemptive suffering. Jesus died for our sins; blessed are those who mourn…
“That is true in two senses. Nothing beautiful is ever created except through pain. Wordsworth called poetry ‘a spontaneous effusion of emotion recollected in tranquility.’ He did not specify the emotion; but much art is the effort to pull a shattered world back together.
“It has also been often noted that times and places of general turmoil seem to be times that produce the best art. Why have the Irish dominated English letters, despite a small population, over the past 200 years or so? Why have African-Americans dominated American music over the past 250 years? While the post-Civil War South has dominated in literature?
“And, yes, pain builds character. Behind every great leader, as well, there seems to have been a personal history of pain. Nelson Mandela’s years in prison; Theodore Roosevelt’s sickly childhood; FDR’s polio; Lincoln’s childhood abuse.”
Michael Jensen also felt that pain had benefits: “No one wants pain. Only the foolish ask to be knocked down. Yet, I believe that challenges do give us opportunity to become a better person: more empathic like you are with others in pain, stronger knowing that you survived the pain the last times, and more prepared for whatever challenges come your way because you overcame them in the past.
“I watched a dozen episodes of ‘You Can't Ask That’. I was impressed that nearly all the disabled people who appeared on the show said that they would not get rid of their disability, whether it was deafness, disfigured face, or an illness. One woman summed it up neatly by saying that she was a better person for it, a stronger person and that her disability was part of her personality.
“Not everyone learns from their challenges, but those that do are better and stronger for it.”
Tom Watson: “I know all too well about those basal cell spots...from all those years of working in the fields on the farm when I was a young person. In those days. We didn't know, or didn't realize the harmful effects of the sun's rays, so we pay for it when we get older.
“When my wife Janice went regularly for radiation treatments, one of the check-in questions was to define her pain on a scale of one to ten. She detested that question. ‘What difference does it make?’ she would say. ‘You won't understand it from my perspective anyway.’”
“Pain,” Bob Rollwagen noted, “affects each of us differently. Some people suffer greatly from migraine headaches to the point of being shuttered in a dark space for a day or two. Others have never had a headache. As for too much sun in our childhood, that is what we all did. Remember the Coppertone child bill boards on the highways. It is not unusual for my dermatologist to do something to my head every time I visit her and this has been going on for 15 years. It hurts every time. She says that she is dealing with my youth and that wearing a hat and putting on sun screen is like wearing a rain coat. It keeps me dry but does nothing to change me.
“We are so fortunate to live in a time when there are cures and preventative medicines. As for parts of the world that are privileged but refuse to put on rain gear, the Mark Twain quote put forward by one of your readers last week sets the proper tone: It is easier to fool a lot of people then it is to convince a few people that they have been fooled! I still see many friends out in the full sun without a hat on. As for those suffering great pain south of the border, I hope they put a hat on soon.”
At least three readers appreciated my advice about not trying to apply reason to reduce pain:
Isabel Gibson wrote, “I've had pre-cancerous bits burnt off with liquid nitrogen and thought that was quite enough. May it be better soon.
“Thanks for the personal testament to the folly of trying to reason away another's pain. All we can do (and sometimes it's more than we can do) is to be with the person where they are.”
Similarly, Laurna Tallman wrote, “Your pain sounds much worse than the similar surgery that cut my face open, crossing the midline of my nose. I felt that if the surgery had been on only one side OR the other, I might have found different ways to distract myself. I thought more rationality, such as reading or focusing on a crossword puzzle, would help to override the right-side pain. Or, that soothing music and friendly voices would help to distract from the left-side pain. You must be in the same predicament. Thank Heaven for pain-killers.”
And Ruth Shaver: “I constantly remind myself that the pain my brother, who lives with my parents, experiences when one or both of them are hospitalized is different from the pain I experience living so far away. His need to vent isn't because he's mad at me; it's angry pain at the situation that the whole system is experiencing.
“I'm thankful I have a supportive network of friends to get me through these times, that I know will be more frequent as the years pass. Even if they can't experience this exact pain, they can sympathize in various ways from their own experiences with parents in declining health...and some can remind me of my brother's burden when I can't get past my own to understand.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns.