Canadian TV stepping up to the plate

For the longest time, Canadian actors had to travel Due South (pun totally intended) to be able to ‘make it’ – but more and more it seems that this isn’t the case. They can stay up here, freezing in the wonderful country of their birth and make it pretty big, too.

The great part is that viewers like us have more and more quality Canadian shows to view while huddled under blankets in front of the fireplace. It really is an exciting time for viewers like us. Between ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie‘, ‘Being Erica‘, ‘The Listener‘ and the now defunct but still re-running ‘Corner Gas‘, Canadians have more than enough great Canadian TV to watch (we would have even more if they would re-run ‘Due South’, but that’s a whole other can of worms). Perhaps I am biased, but I find that these shows are not only entertaining, but they still fulfill that all important role of making us think. Which, as anyone who has been reading Sahar’s Blog long enough knows, I like doing.

Right now, the Canadian shows that make me think the most are ‘Little Mosque on the Prairie’ and ‘Being Erica’. I already talked about ‘Little Mosque on my blog (here, here and here), so let’s take a little time to talk about ‘Being Erica’.

Or perhaps I should first let ‘Being Erica’ speak for itself in this promo:

I think it’s pretty obvious why I like this show, since society seems to be teeming with regret, be it about personal issues, family issues or, for the very eager, societal ones. As Martha Beck wrote for O magazine, regret is: “the forehead-slap of hindsight, the woeful fuel of country ballads, the self-recrimination I feel for eating a quart of pudding in a crafty but unsuccessful attempt to avoid writing this column.”

Not that I ever did that, trying to write a post for this blog…

Everyone knows that regret is a hard thing to get over, although it’s a vital part of moving on and (hopefully) moving up. After all, something we regret can also be an important, life-changing lesson. But how do we go about actually getting over our regrets, especially when, as in Erica’s case, they become crippling?

There are plenty of self-help tools available (including Martha Beck’s article, which you should definitely read if regret is holding you back) and now, there is a TV show. Yes, ‘Being Erica’ can be a great way of opening up a conversation with close friends about regrets and tackle some of your most crippling ones. I got together with a couple of friends recently; we put on a couple of episodes of ‘Being Erica’ (which, if you live in Canada, you can watch on the CBC website) and spent the entire night talking about our own regrets and how, not being blessed with a Dr. Tom, we were going to start getting over them.

To understand that last bit about Dr. Tom, and perhaps to start your own road to leaving regret behind, perhaps you should watch Being Erica. Enjoy!

CBC: ‘Michael Jackson dies at 50′

Legendary performer Michael Jackson, whose groundbreaking music and dance moves earned him the nickname the “King of Pop,” died in Los Angeles on Thursday after apparently going into cardiac arrest. He was 50.

In a brief news conference, the performer’s brother, Jermaine Jackson, said he was pronounced dead in hospital at 2:26 p.m. PT. It’s believed Jackson suffered cardiac arrest at his home, but Jermaine Jackson said an autopsy will be conducted to confirm the cause of death.

The autopsy is expected to be performed Friday.

Paramedics had responded to a call at Jackson’s rented mansion in Holmby Hills about 12:30 p.m. PT, but Jackson was not breathing when they arrived.

Jermaine Jackson said his brother’s personal doctor, who was in the house at the time, and paramedics had tried to resuscitate him.

Paramedics continued to perform CPR as Jackson was rushed to UCLA Medical Center, Jermaine Jackson said.

“Upon arriving at the hospital at approximately 1:14 p.m., a team of doctors, including emergency physicians and cardiologists, attempted to resuscitate him for a period of more than one hour, but they were unsuccessful,” he said.

“My family request that the media please respect our privacy during this time, and may all love be with you, Michael, always. We love you.”

Jackson had been preparing and rehearsing hard for what was to be his greatest comeback. He was scheduled for an unprecedented 50 shows at London’s O2 arena, with the first set for July 13.

Frank DiLeo, Jackson’s manager, told the Los Angeles Times that at the end of a rehearsal the night before his death, Jackson departed the stage very happy about the progress of the show.

“He just told me how happy he was and that things were finally working out the way he wanted,” he said.

Read the rest of this article here.

Pretty in Pink – how to complicate what should have been a simple fashion choice

So I’ve been thinking (a dangerous occupation when you’re walking across railroad tracks, but that’s another topic altogether). I was listening to an episode of a very interesting CBC podcast, DNTO (Definitely Not the Opera). This particular episode was about colours: how they affect us, why we like them, why we don’t like them, and why they mean what they mean.

The particular segment I’d like to address is that of the colour pink. I’m of the opinion that pink is for everyone who looks good in it. If you’re a girl with the wrong colouring, then you shouldn’t wear it. On the other hand, a guy with the right complexion should totally wear pink – and rock it.

Surprisingly enough, I tend to live in a bit of a bubble. Many are surprised, as I am also (oddly enough) quite in tune with some issues currently at hand in our society. And I hadn’t realized that not everyone agrees with my rather permissive usage of pink.

I was particularly surprised when I read about a high school bullying incident targeting a teenager wearing pink. Whaaaaaaaaaaaat? Teenagers, who are usually quite on top of fashionable trends (and, unless you haven’t noticed, pink on men is quite the rage at the moment), were teasing someone for being fashionable?

What was impressive about this story is what happened afterward:

“David Shepherd, Travis Price and their teenage friends organized a high-school protest to wear pink in sympathy with a Grade 9 boy who was being bullied…[They] took a stand against bullying when they protested against the harassment of a new Grade 9 student by distributing pink T-shirts to all the boys in their school.

‘I learned that two people can come up with an idea, run with it, and it can do wonders,’ says Mr. Price, 17, who organized the pink protest. ‘Finally, someone stood up for a weaker kid.’

So Mr. Shepherd and some other headed off to a discount store and bought 50 pink tank tops. They sent out messages to schoolmates that night, and the next morning they hauled the shirts to school in a plastic bag.

As they stood in the foyer handing out the shirts, the bullied boy walked in. His face spoke volumes. ‘It looked like a huge weight was lifted off his shoulders,’ Mr. Price recalled.

The bullies were never heard from again.” (full article here)

Never underestimate the power of a pink tank top.

So what’s with pink and boys? I decided to turn to one of my good friends, Wikipedia, for some answers.

In Western culture, the practice of assigning pink to an individual gender began in the 1920s. From then until the 1940s, pink was considered appropriate for boys because being related to red it was the more masculine and decided color, while blue was considered appropriate for girls because it was the more delicate and dainty color, or related to the Virgin Mary. Since the 1940s, the societal norm apparently inverted so that pink became appropriate for girls and blue appropriate for boys, a practice that has continued into the 21st century. (…)

That only helped to further confuse me. Pink used to be the strong colour, and blue, the weak one? I’d say that pastels, either pink or blue, are the weak colours, and gem-like colours, either pink or blue (or should I say, fuchsia or indigo), are the strong ones. In any case, what happened in the 1940s that would so drastically change the gender identity of these two colours?

Whereas Jewish people were forced to wear a yellow star of David under Nazi rule, and Roma people were forced to wear a black triangle, men imprisoned on accusations of homosexuality or same-sex sexual activity were forced to wear a pink triangle.

Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere. Wikipedia confirmed what DNTO said about pink (sory DNTO – I had to check it out), but neither answered another important question: why did the Nazis choose pink to represent homosexuals?

The answer seemed pretty obvious when I found it: pink was chosen not because it meant the wearer was feminine, but because they liked other men (Source… Wikipedia, again – tucked away under another heading).

Having figured all of this out, it makes me want to go out and convince all the guys in my life – family, friends, coworkers and readers – to go out and buy a pink shirt. Not only to have something to wear on Pink Shirt Day (part of an anti-bullying awareness day), but also to stand up against the Holocaust, to remind us that discrimination, prejudices and violence should be a thing of yesterday, and doesn’t belong in the 21st Century.

I don’t think people realise the power of simple actions. Two teenagers in Grade 12 and 50 others wore pink; they changed the life of a Grade 9 (fashionable) boy and, possibly, of at least a dozen other people. Pink Shirt Day happened in many High Schools of my area; I have a note in my agenda to promote it next year, and I know a couple of fellow bloggers who are planning on doing the same thing. And now, knowing more about the history of the relation of pink with gender, I would go even further – that wearing pink is like telling the world that we will not let the Holocaust define anything about our day to day lives.

And it also tells us that pink rocks.

And who said one person can’t make a difference?

While (thankfully) the odds of this happening to a websurfer are low, they are still (unfortunately) higher than they used to be. Apathy being one of the reasons why no one seems to really care anymore, I found it important to share this news story with you in the hopes that we all remember the truth behind the apathy: one person really can make a difference.

From the CBC: Montreal Student sounds alarms over planned UK school attack

Winnipeg native spots ominous message posted on web forum

Posted on Friday, March 20th 2009

A student at Montreal’s Concordia University says he was proud to play a role in helping to stop a school attack in the United Kingdom this week.

J.P. Neufeld, a 21-year-old Winnipeg native, alerted authorities on Tuesday after he stumbled across a posting on a web forum from a student claiming he was going to burn down his school in Norfolk, England.

“You don’t make threats like that idly. Either it was a hoax or something he was going to go through with,” Neufeld told CBC News.

Neufeld saw the threat when he was scrolling through a forum on the technology website newgrounds.com.

“I saw this thread started by this guy. It didn’t seem serious at first. It said that today at 11:30 a.m. GMT I will commit violence and other forms of arson against my school [in Norfolk]. He had posted a picture of a gas can,” Neufeld told CBC News.

He quickly looked up the phone number for police in the area and gave them a call via an internet telephone service.

“I said, ‘Hi, I’m a guy from Canada. There is someone about to set fire to a school.’ At that point I didn’t know the name of the school or the guy. I gave the police the address of the thread,” said Neufeld.

Eventually, police and other contributors to the web forum tracked down information about a suspect and narrowed down the school.

In less than an hour, police made an arrest.

Read the rest of the story here.

The Internet and the Flu

While many around me were complaning that the WHO and various national health monitoring agencies hadn’t moved fast enough to stop the spread of the swine flu, I can’t help but think of the differences between the outbreak of SARS a couple of years ago and the current outbreak we are living through right now.

The differences are very encouraging, as some news outlets have been reporting. But amidst the more sensational headlines (my favorite: 2009: The New 1918, in reference to the 1918 outbreak of Spanish flu that killed between 70 to 100 million people worldwide), it is reassuring to see voices of reason starting to take over. Because when people panic (especially for no good reason), they do stupid things – like not wash their hands correctly and continuously – and that could be the most dangerous thing about this pandemic.

Which brings me to the topic of this post: the amazing development of Internet-based technologies in the last couple of years which are making their marks on this year’s epidemic.

From the CBC: Did pandemic-watchers miss the signs online?

On April 25, the World Health Organization declared a “public health emergency of international concern” after evidence that a new strain of swine flu had begun spreading from Mexico to other countries.

A day later, Veratect Corp., a Kirkland, Wash.-based company announced in a news release that it first detected and started monitoring the outbreak of respiratory illness in Mexico on April 6. That was more than two weeks before WHO issued its first alert on the outbreak.

This week, WHO declared it was too late to contain the disease and stop its spread. As of Friday afternoon, WHO had confirmed 365 cases of the disease in 13 countries around the world.

Could the spread of the virus have been stopped if public health groups had paid better attention online earlier?

“That’s the real question,” said Dr. Kumanan Wilson, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa and Ottawa Health Research Institute, who co-authored a recent article about online disease detection tools. The article, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in March, showed that there may have been early warning signs on the internet of Canada’s summer 2008 listeriosis outbreak.

Organizations like the World Health Organization have also been using electronic tools to monitor for outbreaks, Wilson said. They include the Global Public Health Intelligence Network, developed by Health Canada, which trolls the internet for news reports about diseases, as well as similar tools that are available to the public, such as:

• ProMed, which is run by the Federation of American Scientists.
• HealthMap, which is supported by Google.org, Google’s charitable arm.

Wilson said ultimately, public health officials would like to use such tools be able to spot emerging pandemics early enough to isolate affected populations and curb the spread of diseases.

In the case of swine flu, Wilson said, “We weren’t able to identify this early enough to effectively intervene.”

At the moment, he said, it isn’t clear if identification of potential pandemics at such an early stage will ever be possible, even with access to sophisticated online tools.

Earliest reports March 31, April 1

Wilson’s co-author on the listeriosis paper was John Brownstein, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard University and former Montrealer who co-created the non-profit Health Map service. The tool mines over 20,000 websites to find disease reports, extracts the text and organizes the information by disease and location.

In fact, Health Map had received its earliest report about the Mexican outbreak on April 1, Brownstein said.

Veratect, one of a few companies in North America that track diseases and civil unrest online for paying clients such as World Vision, claims it tracked the first case of the disease a day earlier.

Brownstein said his team obviously should have been paying closer attention to the mysterious respiratory illness that had affected 60 per cent of people in La Gloria, a town in the Mexican state of Vera Cruz, but similar outbreaks are common worldwide. It’s hard to tell if such an outbreak will remain isolated or spread around the world, he added.

“There’s an information overload situation, where to decide which outbreak to respond to is very difficult.”

His organization does send daily emails to the Centres for Disease Control, the World Health Organization and other health organizations about disease outbreaks it detects, and the internet monitoring is improving, he said.

“The data we’re getting is earlier and earlier,” he said.

But it’s easy to see that public health organizations may have trouble dealing with the flood of reports they receive. (Read the rest of this interesting article here.)

So while we should continue being careful by washing our hands continuously and thoroughly, while we should be saddened by the deaths, we should also remember that this relatively benign epidemic is further proof that the world is but one country and we are slowly learning to adapt to it.

Oh, and this would be an opportune moment to give in to the Purell craze.

Going barefoot for a Cause

This is a very inspiring story – especially considering the age of the person of interest.

<!– –>My barefoot challenge

By Bilaal Rajan, Friday April 24th 2009

About: Toronto-based author, fundraiser and UNICEF Canada Ambassador Bilaal Rajan is 12 years old and has raised almost $5 million for programs worldwide. During National Volunteer Week (April 19 to 25), he spent seven days without shoes to better understand what millions of underprivileged children in the Global South go through every day.

My Take: For the past few years, I have participated in the 5 km World Partnership Walk in Toronto, which raises funds to fight global poverty. It always makes me think of what children in developing countries, many of whom cannot afford shoes, must experience. As a UNICEF Canada Children’s Ambassador, I visited countries in South-East Asia and Africa and met with children who walk miles every day barefoot to fetch water, work on their farm lands, go to school, or perform other chores.

So I decided to start the Barefoot Challenge, where I would live life without shoes for a week to help raise awareness about child poverty in our world.

On Sunday, April 19, I was featured in a documentary, Yes We Can, produced by In Sync video, that premiered at the Sprockets Film Festival in Toronto, where the challenge officially kicked off. Right before the film festival, I was interviewed by the CBC. I’d like to think I was the first person to do a CBC interview without shoes!

Read the rest of this great story here.

Be the Change: Overcoming Our Bad Habits

Here is a lovely little piece by CBC’s Heather Mallick worth the read and definitely worth the time to reflect on.

Give up your rage

A Viewpoint by Heather Mallick, posted on CBC.ca on Friday, April 17th 2009

Susan Boyle’s glorious performance on Britain’s Got Talent last week — it went wild online — was many things to many people.

Initially, it was a hideous display of the customary cruelty meted out to the homely. And make no mistake, reality TV shows are the Noughties version of the bear-baiting that kept the Elizabethans entranced.

But Boyle’s was also that perfect voice serving as antidote to the sinus-blasting belters like Mariah Carey who have ruined our morning shop at Loblaws for years now. The heart-hurting, pop love anthem is back, this time with civilization, and for that I thank you, Susan Boyle.

But what I noticed most when viewing this treat for the first time was the sudden reversal of our schadenfreude — the malicious enjoyment we are taking in each other’s misfortunes, particularly as the economic crisis endures.

The judges and audience were mocking Boyle before she even opened her mouth. How foolish they looked a few seconds later, after she began her song. They were the ugly people.

Pity the beauteous

Most people have lost money, not to mention self-esteem, in this past year. But the sinking economy has neither ennobled us nor made us worse. The judges and audience members who openly sneered at Boyle as she prepared to sing are the norm and always will be.

I’d also note that this type of venom sprays in all directions. Horrible Simon Cowell initially treated Boyle with actual revulsion. (Hey, Simon, did you know that Cowell was serial killer Ted Bundy’s real surname? You can’t help that, I know. But neither can Boyle help being poor.)

Still, it’s almost as common for homely people to deeply resent the beauteous. Boyle doesn’t, but many do. Beautiful people have a hard time of it.

Tina Fey recently wrote an episode of 30 Rock starring Jon Hamm, the unnervingly handsome actor who plays Don Draper in Mad Men. Fey’s Liz Lemon character is dating Hamm, who plays “Dr. Drew.”

Drew is a doctor who doesn’t know the Heimlich manoeuvre, a cook who thinks salmon works with Gatorade sauce, a man “who’s worse at sex” than Liz Lemon.

Because he is so handsome, no one has ever told him the truth.

Pop the bubble

Beautiful people are “in the bubble,” that protective casing that gets them ludicrous compliments, free drinks and all the sex they want. It’s nice inside the bubble. As long as you’re not aware of how much the rest of us secretly hate you.

What seems to have changed now, though, is that being hated is up for grabs. Whose downfall will have us smirking?

Yes, it’s arresting to see CEOs demonized for taking tens of millions in bonuses while running companies into the ground and it’s odd to see grown men weeping in their driveways after a bus tour of haters rattles through their gated community.

But these men are all still insulated by extraordinary wealth. As Rhett Butler replied when Scarlett said money can’t buy love: “Generally it can. But when it can’t, it can buy some of the most remarkable substitutes.”

Read the rest of this article here.

Review: Little Mosque on the Prairie, Season 3, Episode 18

There is a great gem of a show on the CBC that I have been watching almost since its beginnings that has great potential to be reviewed on Sahar’s blog. But, to be honest, there is just so much to talk about in the mere 20-something minutes that the show lasts that I can’t ever seem to come up with a short-ish, blog-friendly review. Quite the contrary; any attempted LMOTP review ends up looking like an honour’s thesis.

Not something you want to post on a blog.

But after watching this episode, I couldn’t help but wonder if I shouldn’t give reviewing LMOTP another try, especially since this episode is all about moderation and humility – two key ingredients in my writing a successfully short-ish and blog-friend review.

And so it goes.

While the theme, moderation and humility, doesn’t seem to bode well in a show that is meant to be lighthearted and funny, you’d be surprised at home the writers have managed to broach the subjects, slipping them gently and inconspicuously into the script. And they also manage to cover the subjects of segregation, propriety and friendship in there, too – plus a pretty funny wedding planning joke.

What more can you ask for?

The theme that struck a particular chord with me is that of propriety and segregation. I think we can all agree that propriety isn’t very present in today’s world. And while many might miss it – especially those of a certain non-teenage age – it doesn’t mean they have the right to impose restrictions in the name of propriety. More specifically, adults shouldn’t bind young people down with ridiculous rules in the name of propriety. This raises a very interesting question for all concerned parents: how do you teach your child propriety in today’s les than proper culture without resorting to tactics worthy of the 19th century?

Don’t ask me, I have no idea; my initial tendency would be to buy an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, move there with my husband and twenty other couples and live there, à la The Village (the movie by M. Night Shyamalan) which is, needless to say, a totally ridiculous idea (quite unfortunately). However, I do know that many of my friends, who have recently become or are thinking of becoming parents, continuously ask themselves this question. One of my friends in particular had extremely strict parents; while their intentions were good (my friend is the first to admit that his parents are loving and sacrificed everything they could for their four children), they also managed to send their children, all four of them, into years of rebellious and hair-rising behavior that got them into some serious trouble (including a stint in juvie and some liver function problems). In retrospect, my friend realizes that his parents were right about most things; but them imposing their rules on him, without in-depth explanation, discussion or consultation, made it next to impossible for him to accept. He told me that the only way he was able to accept them was to go totally the other way and when he realized that things weren’t working, he came back under the umbrella of his parents’ beliefs.

The storyline in this week’s LMOTP is seemingly simple, yet weaves in it many layers of thought provoking situations that relate to the previous paragraph. Baber, pressured by Fazel to show that he isn’t a ‘liberal’, creates a women’s only entrance to the mosque so as to ensure that his daughter Leyla’s doesn’t flirt with boys at the shoe rack. He is hoping that by segregating the men from the women, he will be able to basically force Leyla into being proper. However, there is no money to build a second entrance at the front of the mosque, and so the women’s entrance is relegated to the back of the mosque – where the garbage area is.

The women, offended at being segregated, decide to boycott the mosque, and Fatema changes her café to a women’s only café. Trying to defuse the situation, Amaar (the imam) brings the men and the women together for a meeting; he tries to use reverse psychology on the men by suggesting they should use the back entrance so that they can show that this segregation is an act of respect towards the women, who will now be allowed to use the front entrance.

Now while I refuse to tell you how this episode ends, I will tell you that Rayann had a very interesting comment for Amaar after his plan to use reverse psychology on the men backfired. She tells him that using the front entrance isn’t what this is about; because whatever door the women are using, they are being segregated against, and that is unacceptable.

Which brings me back into the whole propriety versus segregation debate: while this example might seem obvious, more often than not it isn’t so. In a world that is falling apart, it is only normal that we want to stick to rules and regulations that make us feel safe – but we have to be careful not to let these rules and regulations run amok and become irrational and erratic or, even worse, fundamentalist in nature. And fundamentalism has nothing to do with any religion in particular, but rather with human nature in general. As we try to understand what is going on in an increasingly crazy world, we tend to dig into what we know to find an answer.

Fundamentalism is the interpretation of every word in the sacred texts as literal truth. While many find their peace by digging into religion and trying to create forced harmony through a fundamentalist application, I would say that the ‘religion’ that is the most fundamentalist in this day and age isn’t Islam; rather, it’s materialism.

Think about it for a second.

Materialists are trying to create a forced harmony in the world that is centered on material things. Therefore, everything becomes about creating those material things and getting them to people at whatever cost.

And boy, have we been paying the cost of fundamentalist materialism. Because of its consequent feverish pursuit of things, materialism has brought together the disregard of human life (through the use of sweat shops), the disregard of life (through the incredible quantity of pollution making all this stuff creates), the disrespect of honor (through the accumulation of incredible amounts of debt to purchase more things, debts that can’t be paid back) and the creation of an unequal system (in which 1% of the people in the world own 99% of the world) in which we seemed destined to be stuck in unless we change things.

And, after watching the last episode of LMOTP, I have come to the conclusion that the most fundamentalist religion on earth in the 21st century is materialism.

Why don’t you watch it for yourself and see what conclusion you come up with. After all, the best cure against fundamentalism is an open mind maintained through respectful discussion, isn’t it?

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

For more information, visit the official website here. For a frequently updated list of LMOTP-related activities and events, go here. Enjoy!

Obama’s Inauguration and a post-Christmas debate

I spend a lot of time during the Christmas holidays (and perhaps some time after, too) wondering where the spirituality of the celebration went, and if anyone can find it in between the presents, the turkey and the decorations.

And it seems that I am not the only one questioning the place of religion in society. As a believer, I often talk to people who don’t believe in God and/or religion to try to understand their point of view.

In recent news: on the one hand, you have a group of atheists who want to pull religion from Obama’s inauguration. According the the CBC: “A group of atheists is taking legal action in hopes of having all religious references removed from U.S. president-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony in January. A lawsuit filed in Federal Court is trying to prevent having the phrase “So help me God” included in the oath of office. It also wants to prevent inaugural prayers from being delivered at the event.

“We’re hoping to stop prayer and religious rituals at governmental functions, especially at the inauguration,” Dan Barker, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, told Fox News Radio. “The inauguration is not a religious event. It is a secular event of a secular country that includes all Americans, including those of us who are not Christians, including those of us who are not believers.”"

My first question is, how can anyone seriously consider the United States of America as a secular country? The US government is supposed to be by the people and for the people, right? Then why can’t Obama ask God for help in a country where 92% of the population believe in God or some form of Universal Spirit?

Obama believe in God; 92% of the people he represents believe in God or some form of Universal Spirit; if a 51% proportion of votes can win a person the presidency, then why can’t a 92% support win Obama the right to ask God for help?

And let’s be honest here… If Obama asks God for help so that he can do the job the best he can, I don’t think many atheists would object. They want the United States cleaned up as much as the rest of us do. I’m sure this is, again, just a case of a minority of people who are extremists in their point of view trying to impose themselves on others.

On less recent news, I received a forward about a commentary Ben Stein made on CBS Sunday Morning. I’m very wary of forwards, and always look up their authenticity. And this one is at least partly authentic.

Here is part of the actual statement Ben Stein made in 2005: “I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees Christmas trees. I don’t feel threatened. I don’t feel discriminated against. That’s what they are: Christmas trees. It doesn’t bother me a bit when people say, “Merry Christmas” to me. I don’t think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year. It doesn’t bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display at a key intersection near my beach house in Malibu. If people want a creche, it’s just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.

I don’t like getting pushed around for being a Jew and I don’t think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can’t find it in the Constitution and I don’t like it being shoved down my throat.

Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship Nick and Jessica and we aren’t allowed to worship God as we understand Him?

I guess that’s a sign that I’m getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where Nick and Jessica came from and where the America we knew went to.”

Isn’t the fact that so many worship celebrities imply that we are looking for something bigger, better and inspiring to worship? And isn’t it sad that we have collectively decided to worship deeply flawed artists (Americans buy 7,5 million celebrity magazines each week) rather than God or the Universal Spirit?

The forward also included text that, although not part of Ben Stein’s commentary, is worth reflecting on: “Billy Graham’s daughter was interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her ‘How could God let something like this happen?’ (regarding Katrina) Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response.  She said, ‘I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we’ve been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives.  And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out.  How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?’

In light of recent events… terrorists attack, school shootings, etc.  I think it started when Madeleine Murray O’Hare (she was murdered, her body found a few years ago) complained she didn’t want prayer in our schools, and we said OK.  Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school.  The Bible says thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself.  And we said OK.

Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn’t spank our children when they misbehave because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr Spock’s son committed suicide).  We said an expert should know what he’s talking about.  And we said OK.

Now we’re asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don’t know right from wrong, and why it doesn’t bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.

Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out.  I think it has a great deal to do with ‘WE REAP WHAT WE SOW.’

Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world’s going to hell  Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says.  Funny how you can send ‘jokes’ through e-mail and they spread like wildfire but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing.  Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.”

I can understand why some people are thoroughly uncomfortable with the idea of religion; after all, so many horrible things have been done in the name of religion. But religion isn’t the only cause for horrors; just think about what materialism, consumerism and greed have done to the United States in the last couple of months. Just because there is a small number of businessmen who are incredibly greedy and will do whatever it takes to make their billions, it doesn’t mean that all businessmen are like that. The same can be applied to religious people: most of them are against the violent horrors that have been done in the name of religion. Just like business isn’t about greed, religion isn’t about violence. It’s what we choose to do with it that makes an enormous difference.

Interesting little tidbit

Canada celebrated its first coast-to-coast white Christmas since 1971 after storms battered much of the country over the last week.

Source: here.