All tagged Gavin John
On May 1st, 2023, with little fanfare, the World Health Organization declared the end of the COVID-19 global emergency. The virus that had ravaged the world for just over three years, forced many into isolation, devastated workplaces, and took loved ones from us, has now faded to background noise of booster shots and broken trust. Should we not be happy? We made it…?
July 25th, 2022, was a historic day. When Chief Wilton Littlechild placed a headdress onto the head of Pope Francis following the pontiff long awaited apology for the Residential School system, the response was immediate. A cacophony of cheers and applause radiated from the thousands in attendance at Ermineskin Cree Nation. Yet almost immediately, a single voice would rise to challenge the act. A Cree woman from Winnipeg by the name of Si Pi Kho, with tears in her eyes and a song on her lips, marched forward to confront the Pope.
I’m sure I’m not making a huge controversial statement when I say we’re living in a hyper polarized society today. There’s lack of trust in the media, our elected officials, and one another. It’s increasingly evident that many are just not willing to listen, let alone speak to, those on the “other side”. Similarly, I don’t think it’s too controversial to say we’re all guilty in varying degrees, myself included, of propagating toxic narratives of those who we feel stand across ideological divides than us. The faceless crowd of those who oppose our completely rational beliefs, with their completely irrational beliefs of their own.
When I graduated from SAIT with a Diploma of Journalism in 2013, my parents gave me a book, Flight of the Hummingbird. It tells a story of a raging fire threatening a forest, where animals of all shapes and sizes flee the wall of flames. Every animal, from the bear to the eagle, lamented on their helplessness in the face of such a tragedy and each proclaimed why it was hopeless to try and fight the fire. Throughout this, a single hummingbird flew from the river, carrying a bead of water in its tiny beak and dropped it on the towering inferno. The bird repeated this until the other animals asked why the hummingbird was doing this, to which it replied. “I’m doing what I can”.
