To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
3
Jul
2021
Sunday July 4, 2021
I wanted to be the first person to donate blood plasma at the new Donor Centre in Orchard Park.
Over the 12 years that my wife Joan had leukemia, she received a plasma transfusion every month. She had no immune system left. So she needed what they called intravenous-immunoglobulin, IV-IG for short. It comes from blood plasma.
Plasma is the clear fluid left after a centrifuge filters out all the solid stuff circulating in your blood stream – red cells, white cells, platelets, etc.
In Joan’s case, she needed the antibodies that she couldn’t produce for herself. It can take 1,000 plasma donations to get the right mix of antibodies for particular needs.
Twelve years, at 12 transfusions a year, times 1,000 donors, meant that I owed a debt of gratitude to around 144,000 people for keeping my wife alive.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Canadian Blood services, plasma, blood donations
27
Jun
Sunday June 27, 2021
When parliament recesses for the summer, members who do not expect to run again have an opportunity to speak about their experience. Most of them praise the institution and their colleagues effusively.
Nunavut MP Mumilaaq Qaqqaq didn’t.
Ottawa’s only Innu MP, she launched a blistering attack on the racism and prejudice endemic in a system built around aging white males in suits.
“Every time I walk on to House of Common grounds, speak in these chambers, I’m reminded every step of the way I don’t belong here,” Qaqqaq began.
Even as an MP, she said, “I have never felt safe or protected in my position.” Security guards follow her, suspicious about a seeming outsider – young, female, and non-white – wandering in those hallowed halls.
Tags: parliament, racism, Mumilaaq Qaqqaq, Innu
25
Sunday June 20, 2021
Father’s Day feels somewhat hypocritical.
On the one hand, we’re supposedly praising fathers for all the contributions they make to children’s growth and emotional stability.
And on the other hand, fathers are the only social group that can safely be ridiculed, scorned, and denigrated without inciting some kind of mass protest.
Tags: Father's Day, Father Knows Best, fatherless
13
Sunday June 13, 2021
Last Sunday evening, a young man who doesn’t deserve to have a name aimed his black pickup truck at a family taking their evening walk along a sidewalk in London, Ontario. He bounced over the curb and smashed into them.
They were Muslims. The women were wearing hijabs and traditional shalwar kameez -- loose, pleated trousers with a long shirt. “They were visible,” said a family friend.
The grandmother died on the spot. Father, mother, and daughter died in hospital. Only the boy, nine years old, survived his injuries.
What that young man did seems abundantly clear. But the motive for his actions remains (as I write this column) unclear.
Why?
Why them?
Why there, at that particular time?
Tags: Muslims, Islamophobia, London killing
Sunday June 6, 2021
Something snapped inside me when I heard about 215 bodies, buried in mass graves, on the grounds of the former Kamloops Residential School. The news ripped apart any veils of excuses or equivocations, revealing the residential school system as an atrocity.
I have to admit that in the past, although I considered the residential schools genocidal in intent, I have nevertheless not condemned them utterly and totally.
That’s because I have known many who served in those schools. Generally, they were dedicated, caring, self-sacrificing individuals. My church celebrated the commitment of its doctors, nurses, teachers, matrons.
Granted, some of them held colonial attitudes towards their indigenous charges. But in the 1950s, who didn’t?
I failed to recognize that good people might work within a diabolical system.
Tags: Residential schools, Kamloops, burials, 215