Christchurch mosque shooting, Twitter, and unhealthy dialogue from all sides

I occasionally but not often veer onto someone's Twitter page in the same way that someone may accidentally take a wrong turn down a backcountry lane.

What exactly is the value of the Twitter platform? Even without "fake news" it does not seem to support healthy dialogue in any way, shape, or form. It might be a great way for a musician to announce a new album, an author to announce a new book, or a comedian to hone their efficiency, but what else?

Nuance is impossible on Twitter without dribbling it out in drips to subvert the format. I have no idea what most people hope to achieve other than vanity. I would not be surprised if the polarization on that platform contributes to violence and that many people leave it feeling angry and distressed without having learned anything of value or changed their perspective about any issue other than about the state of human nature, negatively.

What reminded me of this is the recent shoot-up of a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. A terrible situation, no doubt - and there is no excusing it.

But the very next morning while listening to the radio, I heard a host and his guest saying that if you're one of those people who question the rate of immigration in your country then you are contributing to such shoot-ups because you "let it take root" ("it" being the seed that gestates as a concern about the state of their country and ends up as a bullet implanted in plural sternums).

I assume the seedling is fed with some kind of anti-depressant or other recommended mind-altering medication along the way as it often turns out to be, but that is beside the point.

I have also heard Donald Trump blamed in relation to the type of rhetoric that seems to energize much of his political base.

But there's a big piece of the root cause missing, and its absence suggests that we've learned nothing about the "why" of things like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.

I should preface this by saying that I see immigration as necessary. We need to maintain the skills we need in this country, and we need to sustain what we have built. Diversity in immigration would be appreciated - we do not want to import the biases of another culture wholesale into our own - but we have to go where the skills that we need are found and where people are willing to leave their homes to come to our own.

But when people have legitimate concerns about the direction that their country is going - the very thing we hope to expose to air and discuss in a healthy democracy - it's not right to try and shut them down with polarized political rhetoric, zings, histrionics, or other things that attempt to make them look stupid, dumb, racist, homophobic, or some other form of safe-to-ignore lifeform.

Dismissing someone concerned about the rate of immigration and therefore the changing nature of the culture and country that they grew up with and have so much affection for is as much a contributor to this type of violence as anything else, but it's not treated that way.

We are told by different sides that people don't kill people - guns kill people. Or that guns don't kill people - people kill people. As usual, the answer is in the middle and both are contributing factors to gun violence; but if you fall on the "guns kill people" side then why also try to shut down the genuine concerns and feeling of people about a country that we all have an interest in building? Do you really value diversity like you say you do? It seems not.

People do not wake up in the morning wanting to shoot up a mosque after having a great night out the night before. More than almost anything else, I wonder about the genuine trajectory that led to this point, and I wonder how much attempts to silence, belittle, and minimize a point of view played a part in this. I wonder if we'll ever find out. I wonder if that finding would be politically useful enough for us to find out.

The very people who tell us that it takes a village to raise a child, that we live in a global village, and that no man is an island, should know this better than anyone else.

A small corner of the waste problem: elastic bands

I've accumulated this small collection of elastic bands over the past few years. Actually, the bird's eye photo doesn't quite do it justice because it's a pile that is 4-5 inches deep, 5-6 inches wide, and another 6-7 inches long.

Where do these elastic bands come from? The first and most significant source by far is supermarket vegetables -- holding the broccoli heads together, keeping the head of lettuce closed, or bundling an allotment of carrots. The second source is the newspaper -- on the days that it's dry enough to toss the paper onto my front step without protecting it from the elements, an elastic band is used to hold it together in flight. Other sources are insignificant.

I think it's a pretty impressive collection, seeing as you might not notice the size of the problem if you threw them away one at a time. Multiply by the 12 million-or-so households in Canada, and the 130 million-or-so households in the US and you have a massive problem at the landfill.

If I have made my own 120 cubic-inch pile of elastic bands then the cumulative pile of elastic bands from 142 million households would be 17 billion cubic inches in size. How might that be configured? A 6-foot tall pile measuring 236 million square inches -- in other words, a 6-foot-tall pile that was 5 kilometres long and 1 kilometre wide. That's just a small dot on the map of the world, but still... it's worth thinking about. These are, after all, garbage and not purchased because someone actually had a use for them once the product they were holding together was used up.

I reuse them from this pile as needed but, ultimately, the pile will keep growing because these bands are durable and they come in far more frequently than they go out.

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