Broadcaster Kaat apologizes for “40-acre” comment

Mayor Scott Gillingham would like us to phone our MLA regarding safety concerns in West Broadway, because homelessness, housing and addictions are a provincial concern.

This explains a lot.

Previously, Gillingham’s over-reliance on policing as a solution to social ills has puzzled me, in an if-you-only-have-a-hammer-everything-looks-like-a-nail way. But since the mayor seems unaware of the ways his office could lessen the harms and promote social cohesion in West Broadway, I’d like to help him out.

First up, some low hanging fruit. The streetlights in West Broadway are spaced illogically far apart. My block has two streetlamps, both on the same side of the street. Once the sun goes down, there are portions of street that are completely black. I cannot see someone approaching, let alone recognize them or assess risk.

I have been writing this column twice a week for a long time, so I have a finely developed sense for when the audience is sick of a subject. We have definitely crossed that boundary with regard to the wars currently being fought up and down the strip of land between the longitudes of 40°E and 50°E (Eastern Ukraine/Persian Gulf/Israel, Gaza and Lebanon).

It’s not just that they are stupid wars, launched by men who were too ignorant or too arrogant to realize that they could not win them (Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu), and it’s certainly not because they are harmless wars.

Not only are they killing thousands of people every week, but in every case the country that started the war also has nuclear weapons. In each case there is a small but real possibility that the leader in question might resort to using at least one “tactical” nuclear weapon as a final warning rather than accept the blame for a humiliating failure to achieve his aims.

Yet nothing much new and interesting is happening from one day to the next in any of these wars, and the audience would really like to move on. I have been trying to write about something else at least once a week, so I thought: maybe I could do a piece about Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter’s chance of being North Korea’s next dictator.