Jim Taylor's Columns - 'Soft Edges' and 'Sharp Edges'

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30

Sep

2018

Sexual predators incapable of hearing ‘No’

Author: Jim Taylor

The week opened with genial father-figure Cliff Huxtable -- better known as Bill Cosby -- named a “sexually violent predator” and sentenced to three to ten years in prison. In a Pennsylvania court, Cosby was found guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault for drugging and sexually assaulting a Canadian woman, Andrea Constand,

            The same week, Christine Blasey Ford, professor at Palo Alto University, testified before a U.S. Senate committee that she had been the victim of attempted rape by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, 36 years earlier.

             Also, former media celebrity Gian Ghomeshi published an essay in the New York Review of Bookswhitewashing his own sexual escapades. Although Ghomeshi was acquitted, Ontario Court Justice William Horkins made clear that he was not saying that “these events never happened.”

           Three threads run through this sorry tapestry.


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26

Sep

2018

Salmon and the great circle of life

Author: Jim Taylor

The conference hall was packed full. Five hundred people leaned forward to watch as an elder from a First Nations community along the B.C. coast moved down the aisle towards the microphones on stage. His red-and-black blanket cloak swished as he walked; the mother-of-pearl buttons adorning it flashed back at the spotlights following him. 

            This happened long before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called for better relationships with Canada’s indigenous peoples. But the church, my church, was making its first tentative moves towards that goal. 

            The old man – he may not actually have been old, but he was older than I was, and he had a deeply weathered face – climbed the stairs onto the stage. He took the microphone from its stand. He held it to his mouth. 

            We waited, breathlessly, for his words of wisdom. 

            “We are the salmon,” he said. 

            Then he put the microphone back, and left the stage. 


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23

Sep

2018

How to write 1000 columns

Author: Jim Taylor

This is my 1000th Sharp Edges column. At around 50 columns a year, that’s almost 20 years of writing a weekly column! 

            “How do you find something to write about every week?” people ask me. 

            That’s easy – by paying attention. To the world around me. To my own reactions. To what other people are saying. 

            Given the number of issues in the news each week, the problem is not finding a topic, but selecting which topic to focus on. 

            But there is a second step. If a local story grabs my attention, how does it connect to a larger topic? If an international story, how does it relate to life here in the Okanagan Valley. Or closer still, in little Lake Country. Or even in my own home. 

            There’s no point in raging about Donald the Dump – or lobbying for an endangered salamander in the Congo – if it isn’t relevant in some way to life here and now. 

            Macro and micro, universal and particular, belong in the same picture. I don’t care whether I zoom out or zoom in; the big picture and the small picture belong together. 


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Categories: Sharp Edges

Tags: Writing

19

Sep

2018

Learning how to learn

Author: Jim Taylor

           Of course, we did learn specifics. The inexorable logic of Euclid’s geometry theorems, for example. How to conjugate Latin verbs. Memorizing famous monologues from Shakespeare. The difference between a rabbet and a dado joint. The periodic table of chemistry elements. 

            But more importantly, we learned to learn. It was not just WHAT our teachers taught, but HOW they taught it. They gave us a safe environment in which to make mistakes, and to learn from those mistakes. They had faith in us, as learning beings, even when we made fun of them. 


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16

Sep

2018

Learning to distrust everyone

Author: Jim Taylor

The scammers are getting smarter. 

            We’ve all received those emails that tell us there is $27 million waiting for us in an unclaimed Nigerian bank account, haven’t we?

            One arrived the other day, from “Miss Vivian Ibrahim Coulibaly, only child of my late father, Late Chief Sgt. Warlord Ibrahim Coulibaly…” Miss Vivian needs my help, because her wicked stepmother – of course! – is trying to swindle her out of her father’s illegitimately acquired fortune. 

           The same day, I received a second email that assumed I had fallen for scams like Miss Vivian’s, headed FRAUD ALERT: “This letter is to notify you about your compensation as one of the scammed victims…”


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