Winnipeg day 4

Day 4

It was a slow day yesterday, so here are some more mostly random thoughts:

- Manitoba has it going on when it comes to license plates. There are a bunch of different designs that look great. That's not a lot to hang your hat on when it comes to to provincial pride, but it's something.

- There's a good line from the Simpsons that they don't hand out Nobel prizes for Attempted Chemistry. I've done some useful work out here, but most of my value here is in what I could have done. The nature of wildfires is that they can change quickly, and you don't want to evacuate a community until you absolutely have to. So you need to have your resources lined up on the ground ahead of time. But if the fires turns or you get some rain, those resources aren't used. A lot of the inefficiency I see is just trying to mitigate a very bad outcome, in which case it's not actually inefficient at all.

- Mohammed Ali once had a great comment about going to a church and noticing that all the angels were white, along with Jesus and God himself. What does that do to a black kid? Lots of homeless people where I live are white, but it doesn't impact me much because lots of people at every socioeconomic level are white. But most of the homeless people I see here are Indigenous. I don't know what that does to an Indigenous kid.

- There are two dangers engaging in an activity like this. One is turning into a wannabe army guy, the kind that wear 'tactical' everything, speak in acronyms and lingo, and consider the urban downtown of a Canadian city to be a war zone. I think about it because we have bulky vests with CB radios to communicate, but I feel silly using it to inform the team command that I'll be handing out snacks at a canteen. Seems like overkill.

The other is voluntourism, the goal of which is an adventure for the person doing the volunteering, not so much helping people effectively. Picture a white person taking a selfie with some kids in a poor village in Africa. If you find yourself saying something like 'I learned more from them than they learned from me', that's a sign that maybe you shouldn't be there. Is it worth it to fly someone like me (not me specifically, I'm amazing, but like me) to do the work I'm doing, versus just hiring someone locally?

- What is the space you take up in the world?

If I'm walking along a sidewalk after dark, I've learned to cross the street if I'm catching up with a woman going in the same direction. Why should I be the one to make an effort in this situation? It's not my fault I might scare someone. I haven't done anything wrong. But not intending harm isn't the same thing as not doing any harm.

In a better world, this wouldn't matter. A better world would be one where women wouldn't feel legitimately scared by strange men passing them on the sidewalk after dark. But that's not our world.

I'm reminded of this watching the security folks at the shelter. There are two kinds of security services. The first are the folks who monitor access to the site and consist of skinny university students in high vis vests. They are very polite, mostly bored, and don't scare anyone. It's hard to be intimidating when it looks like you'd blow away in a stiff breeze.

Then there are the Protective Services folks who hire mostly ex or off duty cops. They're a lot bulkier and wear black Kevlar vests. They might be, and I'm sure mostly are, kind hearted good people. But they are the incarnation of a disparity in power.

I was in a grocery store in Colorado once, and a couple of farm boys came in, with one having a hand gun in a holster on his hip. This was in America, after all. They were just going about their business, but I was on edge. They didn't mean me any harm, but they could have easily killed me. That's what handguns do, and have. I've never hurt a woman, but men like me can and have.

Those protective services folks don't mean any harm and have a job to do. But in a better world, they wouldn't.

Wes