“When our kids are 15 years old, we pray they’ll see 20. Omar Khadr almost didn’t make it. But in his case, it wasn’t fast cars, alcohol poisoning or teenage angst that put his life at risk. It was his father taking him to Afghanistan.

On July 27, 2002, when the U.S. Army attacked the compound where Mr. Khadr was staying, he was shot and almost blinded, and he either did or did not kill a U.S. soldier with a hand grenade.

We don’t know how willingly Mr. Khadr fought against Canadian allies, but we do know how impressionable and dependent 15 year olds are. In Canadian law, a child soldier is not a murderer.

Omar Khadr should be repatriated and given help. If it turns out that this young man, who has now spent eight years in a cage, is embittered and a threat to society, we can put our new Canadian security czar to work. But if we don’t give Mr. Khadr a chance to begin his life again, we have to admit that Canadian justice is something we offer selectively.”

Janice McAlpine

All of our local Humane Societies are crammed with hounds cast off by their owners once the season is over. This must stop!

I began to write about the characters you might encounter here who could change your life, even that we have both a right and a duty to be downown and why it matters.

Most of all, I engaged to point out the possibilities of a reconfigured downtown, offering daily opportunity to come together and make something communal since the first days of this quirky city’s founding. Of course my focus is that new space surrounding city hall on all sides, calling for us to make it a part of our history.

Architect Robert Gatje has written, ‘Great Public Squares of the World’ in which he discusses ‘spatial dynamism,’ and the impact of such squares as ours on social and economic forces. “There is a play,” he says, “between space and structure.” That calls to mind all the squares we’ve seen in movies and how they shaped the destiny of those citizens who used them: St Peters Square in Vatican City, Columbus Circle in New York, Palace Square in St Petersburg, Tiananmen Square, even that purely fictitious square in The Music Man where the town gathers to see their new band.

Old as it is, Kingston is just beginning to understand how this works. Having a square downtown is a reminder of an assignment to make it our own. By existing it is saying that “Downtown has a centre, a heart that is not commercial, has nothing to do with shopping.” But because all that history and presence exists, businesses succeed and things get bought as the community begins to make history happen in the place where everything else goes on.

Our part is to be there, to lend our presence to the events and history that will follow, to turn our well-planned square into the magnet it is already becoming to visitors. Around the edges of our square are small tables with umbrellas and folding chairs, along with broad benches, set out to make us know the place is meant to be sat in and used. The fountain shoots and sparkles with a broad circle of stone surrounding it to sit and eat lunch, dabble your fingers and understand what it means to belong to this city.

Here is your opportunity to find out what happens when a community can come together in one large central space and own it, gravitate to it in times of wide-spread anxiety or in celebration, to be ourselves witness to our own times, to see our future. If the whole idea of D.A.R.N. were just to lure you downtown to admire the buildings and shop, it wouldn’t be worth it. We could argue forever about which stores are better or more convenient, but we all know the issue is larger than that. A real working city is a communal space of experiences and adventures, small moments of discovery with epiphanies in places we least expect.

Broken up into all the little splinter groups with labels like; ‘suburbanite,’ ‘shopper’ or ‘tourist,’ we can go on quarreling about where people might spend their time but one thing is clear. There is a single place in Kingston where we can stand shoulder to shoulder with friends and strangers and know the feeling of becoming, ‘we the people. Using and valuing our downtown, we become in the truest sense, ‘US.’

As a dedicated member of a group hoping to leave a better world for our grandchildren, I read all the expectations for protest with concern. I have only the experience of gentle, peaceable protest after first writing letters to the editor about the issues we have with the way the world is being run now. (war, grandchildren being recruited for soldiers, poverty, right wing agendas, political power struggles, human rights, women’s health, governments not listening and many others).

Generally I chose the one or two particularly on my mind, write songs about them, distribute and sing these publically. After all that groundwork is laid and no replies are received from those in authority, then, reluctantly, I get together with other older women, dressed in older women sterotypical outfits but bright, compelling and somewhat amusing. I usually have a purple-and-orange bicycle horn stitched to my hat in case someone is blocking my route.

Then as a group (we call them, ‘gaggles,’) I venture out into the mass of protesters ONLY if I think my presence will be effective and all else has failed to produce results. Last time in a gathering of twenty thousand mostly women on Parliament Hill here in Canada, I took a folding chair. Separated almost immediately from the rest, I would walk a little ways, then sit, gather folks around me and teach them the song I’d written for why we were here. Then I’d attempt to encourage whoever asked questions, host a discussion about the issues, then pick up and move on.

Yes, there are always young hotheads about but often by afternoon they’ve wound down and are interested in listening again. I’m there as a pacifier, a leavener, against throwing rocks, putting stickers on cars and bank windows, striking police officers and misbehaving, while still trying to make a point with my presence, that people of all sorts are against government highhandedness, refusal to listen, ignoring the neds of the voiceless and lampooning ridiculous expenditures.

If I had the physical ability along with the necessary funds, I might appear at more of these, again, Only If It Is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. The last local March For Peace here in my small town ended with activists who knew better, setting barrels of combustibles alight and rolling them at the police, blocking a bridge carrying major traffic.

I wrote and apologized to the authorities, once I was extricated from that volatile and unneccessary situation. None of these were actions of people who wished peace. Many of the persons on the march did not even seem interested in a peaceful demonstration.

More and more we see agent provacateurs (did I spell that right), coming down in our midst, unfamiliar and inciting the young around us to do damage for which they then can be legitimately arrested. We used to joke about looking at their footwear but now such government personnel are dressed to fit in and only can be identified by their ignorance about the issues and their provacative stances.
Basically Protests are teaching opportunities for the assembled crowd. How to have an orderly peaceable demonstation. How to get your point across to media. Does everybody know what you’re here for, what you want, what you’re against?

I have a particular problem with someone in Protest Authority attempting to use the rest of us as cannon fodder, as sheep, as foot soldiers. Everyone who attends needs to be up on the issues, know the best way to present them, should make their own signage. Homemade is so much more effective than mass produced or professionally designed. Then you should truly believe in your heart that what you are saying is true, is important, that the world needs to hear it, that it cannot be done in ANY other way. And you should have tried ALL those ways before you ever step foot onto a protest.

Which means your whole life is about what you believe and the protest is an outworking of who you are.

Posted: 04/29/09 Author: Rose DeShaw
Tune: The Water Is Wide (Old English Folk)

1)The Gaza Strip
is in the news
The push is on,
to make us choose
We have to say,
we choose the young
From every place
this war goes on

2) And we choose peace,
diplomacy
Cease fire and talk
Till all agree
The truth we know
is larger than
The chill of hate
The wrongs of man

3) The Gaza Strip’s
An acient place
A marker for
The human race
Its name is in
Our holy books
A place on which
The whole world looks

4) No war is worth
A child’s death
We say with every
Tongue and breath
And here on Gaza
Where we stand
Let killing cease
Within this land

It wasn’t much of a government
But it was all we had
It was all we had, boys,
It was all we had
And now it’s gone on holidays
(That Harper’s quite the lad)
And we’ve got no parliament to carry on!
CHORUS
Done kept this kind
Done stood behind
This government too long
No results I’ve seen
I’m no longer keen
Done with these fools
Play by the rules
Let’s tattle to the Queen
Find a better P.M. now to carry on!
2) Tune: White Wings  (as in: White wings, they never grow weary, they carry me cheerily over the sea. Night falls, I long for you dearly, I’ll spread out my white wings and sail home to thee).

Harper – he shut down our parliament
We’ve got no government till he comes back
Governor – General’s silent
Let’s call an election and dump this rat pack