The PenOpticon

In spite of global warming, the war in Iraq, multiple murders and assorted mayhem, da boids are doing that crazy migration thing that they do. The Redwing black birds have been back for a while. We’ve seen a few Great Blue Herons and some have seen Egrets. Today we took a walk at Thickson Woods in Whitby, and found returning Phoebes, Golden Crown Kinglets and Winter Wrens. The woods were waking up with Northern Flickers, Sapsuckers and Downy woodpeckers hammering away. A Great Horned Owl — a regular at Thickson’s — dosed high up in the canopy (I included a pic of two babies from a few years ago). It was a pretty good show, a warm up act for the return of the warblers in May.

Last weekend, we headed out to Grimsby for a taste of the spring Hawk Watch and watched waves of TurkeyVultures and sporadic flights of Coopers, Rough-legged, Sharp shin and Red shoulder hawks rise up over the Niagara Escarpment. I have neither the time, the eyesight or the skill to do a full-day observing and counting the return of these creatures, but those who do are a rare breed and are to be respected. I should have taken a picture of the large crowd of people out for a day of hawk watching, but all I got was this pic of the town of Grimsby and Lake Ontario.

NB. If Grimsby does not have a sports team called the “Reapers”, they really ought to.

“Midnight justice, or whatever you want to call it” is how one resident described today’s discovery of eight bodies in a farm field near Shedden, a tiny community in south-western Ontario. Was it a psychopathic mass murder or just another example of what sometimes passes for justice under a dark rural sky? Either way, this tragedy will provide further ammunition to Canadian and American politicians who want to tighten borders, build more jails, and generally spread fear, uncertainty and doubt among the citizenry.

But what if crime rates are actually falling? What if there is a disconnect between what is really happening in our neighbourhoods and what is reported? Such a disconnect was evident in the Toronto Star’s reportage of this event. The Star included background on several other “grisly” Canadian mass murders and duly noted that “the scale of the [the Shedden murders] is unprecedented in modern Ontario history.” No doubt the “if it bleeds, it leads” approach to journalism sold a few papers today.

But, what the Star failed to note as part of this story is the fact that crime rates in Canada have been falling steadily since 1991. And, despite a growing population, Ontario, Canada’s largest province, still has the lowest crime rate in the entire country.

I don’t know why those eight people in Shedden died, but the circumstances in which they were found sound like the drug-deal-gone-bad scene in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. It’s a depressing episode that may have more to do with our Draconian drugs laws — laws which have served to foster a thriving underworld economy — than a societal meltdown.

After all, when you look at crime rates in America, you see a similar trend. All forms of crime have been falling for several decades — all except drug-related crime. The U.S. answer to the drug problem — the infamous War on Drugs — has resulted in a record number of black and Hispanic men being thrown in jail.

The ugly, dirty little secret (which is really not a secret at all) is that all crime committed for the purpose of turning a profit requires both producers and consumers. The Christian right, and various conservative movements prefer to target the producers of crime while ignoring the fact that it is primarily mainstream (dare I say white?) Americans and Canadians who consume it. We see evidence of this consumption every time a celebrity is “busted” for drug use or a politician is ousted for corruption or a TV evangelist is revealed to have a predilection for young prostitutes. When things go wrong for “mainstream” consumers of drugs, illegal gambling and prostitution, they are often embarrassed (while the rest of us are sometimes entertained). When things go wrong for the marginal, unacknowledged producers of illegal goods and services, it can often lead to something more tragic — like eight dead bodies slumped in a farm field.

* Graphs from Statistics Canada 2004 Crime Statistics Bulletin

We had a lively conversation at work today about cars and SUVs. Several of my co-workers have bought gas-guzzling cars and SUVs in recent years and now they gripe about the high cost of driving, parking and repairs. Let’s not even talk about the post-petroleum stone age. It made me think of one of those Save the Children ads — but for SUV owners. So, here’s the ad.

In the few weeks that I have been blogging, I’ve been happy and bitter, optimistic and critical — and often a bit of a pompous ass! And, as I expected, I have not been able to focus on any one subject. I wanted to play a good April Fools trick on you — my non-existent readers — but as my satirical muse, Jon Stewart would say: I got nuthin! So instead, I’ll leave you with a few home-made MP3s and two pictures of Midnight (who went to the big pond / cheese factory / squirrel-chasing country in the sky last year).

Here’s old man Midnight looking at you kid!

Midnight could always make us laugh, no matter how surreal things got. He put up with us for 15 years and we walked hundreds of miles together all over southern Ontario. This was taken years earlier at the southern edge of the Oak Ridges Moraine near Richmond Hill, Ontario. Sadly, this valley has now been cut in half by a 4 lane bridge, the paths have been eroded by ATVs and thousands of new houses are crowding in where the trees used to be.

…and a few MP3s