Tumbler Ridge

There’s an old adage that we see a person’s true colours when times are most difficult.

If that’s the case, the unimaginable tragedy that happened this week in the idyllic hamlet of Tumbler Ridge says we can be extremely proud to be Canadian.

The coverage has been wall to wall on CBC. I must say that makes me somewhat uncomfortable at times. Microphones and cameras shoved into the faces of community members who are only just beginning to process their enormous trauma are hard to watch. At moments it feels exploitative. You want to give people in shock some space. Some decency. Some time.

Yet undeniably this is a story of national concern. And it’s heartening that our political leaders have set exactly the right tone.

Across party lines they have come together to emphasize unity and support. Their speeches on the floor of the House of Commons were heartfelt and moving. Together they drove home the message that this is not a time for politics. It is a time for caring and grieving.

It is also heartening that our national media has honoured the victims — two adults and six innocent twelve-year-olds. We have been told who they were, about their interests and passions, about their promise and their stolen futures. The effect has been to magnify the loss for the entire country.

There seems to be a quiet acknowledgment that this tragedy belongs to all of us. Yes, there was a perpetrator. But not a word of blame has yet dominated the public conversation. From the coverage, the people most directly affected — members of the Tumbler Ridge community who knew the shooter and her family — appear as saddened for them as for the victims.

I don’t follow social media. I’m sure some of what is being posted is regrettable. I’m glad I don’t have to see it. But overwhelmingly the public response thus far has been respectful, sympathetic and appropriately somber.

I can’t help thinking about how Americans and American politicians have handled similar tragedies in their own country.

Admittedly they have grown accustomed to such horrors with tragic regularity. Which may explain the typical response: media fascination with the perpetrator, the motive, the police response, the calibre of the weapon. The spectacle takes over. The victims recede.

And within a day, the familiar narratives begin — the rehearsed lines about guns and freedom, about mental health, about partisan blame. Whether the shooter was Republican or Democrat, Black or Hispanic, cisgender or trans — the tragedy is quickly absorbed into an existing script.

None of this has happened in Canada. Not yet, at least. We are not saints; some of that will come. But I doubt it will reach the fever pitch it so often does in the United States. More likely, the tone will remain earnest — a collective effort to understand, to mourn, and eventually consider appropriate steps to  prevent.

Leaders from around the world sent condolences when they heard about Tumbler Ridge. Many of those messages came from our neighbours to the south.

Just not from their president.

The old adage that we see a person’s true colours when times are most difficult — it seems — is certainly true.

The Epstein Rosetta Stone Redux

By calling the files a kind of Rosetta Stone, I don’t mean they allow us to decode every relationship or act contained within them. They don’t. But they do reveal a pattern.

A better metaphor may be an MRI. An MRI does not tell a story; it renders structure. It exposes connective tissue—nerves, vessels, hidden systems beneath the skin. It requires interpretation, but it shows what is there. The Epstein files function similarly. They expose the underlying networks of a transnational elite: the social, financial, and political circuitry through which influence flows.

Much remains sealed, and that concealment is itself informative. Even so, what is visible suggests a class bound less by nationality than by wealth and access. Their loyalties are horizontal, not civic. They protect one another because their interests align.

Those interests are straightforward: expand wealth, shield assets, minimize constraint. Public institutions—tax authorities, regulators, prosecutors—are obstacles to be navigated or neutralized. Capital, deployed strategically, purchases discretion, delay, and sometimes effective immunity. Within these circles, information about tax avoidance and asset protection travels as easily as gossip.

If impunity is central to maintaining position, then systems that weaken accountability become attractive. Constitutional democracy, with its equal application of law, is friction. Personalized power structures are more efficient. The rule of law is admirable in theory; in practice, it is inconvenient.

They live in a different ecosystem and intend to preserve it. Extreme wealth breeds insulation; insulation breeds entitlement; entitlement hardens into contempt. [If you wanted to see a public demonstration of that contempt, all you had to do was watch five minutes of Attorney General (or should I say trump's mouthpiece) Pam Bondi's disgraceful 'testimony' before the House Oversight Committee yesterday.]

Sex in this environment is not an aberration but an instrument. It is transactional, traded like stocks and bonds - rich men comparing their 'girls' as they would their investment portfolios.

Why is the Epstein scandal proving to be so politically potent?

It is not primarily moral outrage. Public standards of sexual conduct no longer determine political survival. Nor is the sustained political energy driven solely by concern for victims—who must continually insist they not be forgotten, as we saw at the Bondi hearing.

What resonates is impunity. “Pedophile ring” operates as shorthand for something larger: a closed network of privilege operating beyond consequence. The sexual crimes are monstrous. But politically, they symbolize asymmetry—rules that bind downward and dissolve upward.

The scandal strikes a nerve because it makes visible the humiliation embedded in inequality. The wealthy can dangle access, opportunity, and money before the less powerful, then retreat behind lawyers and influence. For those outside that world, the files do not merely describe exploitation; they confirm suspicion. The system is not neutral. It protects its own.

And yet there is a limit to what these files can show. An MRI reveals structure, not cure. Exposure is not reform. Networks adapt; elites recalibrate; outrage dissipates. Without institutional will, transparency hardens into spectacle and then into memory. The real question is not what the files reveal, but whether societies possess the capacity—or the appetite—to translate revelation into constraint.

What I Will Accomplish Today

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It’s not wake up, brush my teeth,

look in the mirror and pinch my fat.

It’s not check the weather on my cel.

It’s not get dressed, take a statin pill

and an adult multivitamin.

It’s not make a tuna fish sandwich

with extra mayonnaise, packed with a V8

and three chocolate cookies for lunch.

It’s not take out the garbage

and drive ten kilometers in heavy traffic to work.

It’s not switch the radio station five times.

It’s not stop for gas.

It’s not make a pot of coffee,

pour a cup, one sugar.

It’s not text the plumber

that I have the cash I owe him.

It’s not answer emails,

and make a deal on the phone.

It’s not make a buck

to put some away for retirement.

It’s not check my news feed

and wonder if any of it is believable.

It’s not get angry

at the corruption, scandal, inhumanity.

It’s not drink a second cup of coffee, one sugar.

It’s not eat my tuna fish sandwich

and wonder if I’m getting enough protein.

It’s not finish the quarterly sales report,

a week past deadline.

It’s not avoid the boss.

It’s not check my news feed again,

and rage, again.

It’s not fantasize about having sex

with a cute coworker.

It’s not think about visiting

my sick brother this weekend.

It’s not sit in a management meeting

and take a few notes.

It’s not pay my daughter’s school tuition online.

It’s not wonder if I’m wasting my life.

It’s not slip out of work early.

What I will accomplish today

is write a poem.

The Epstein Rosetta Stone

It turns out the Epstein files may be the Rosetta Stone of depravity and corruption among the global ruling class.

You probably know what the Rosetta Stone is: a slab of rock dating from 196 BC, inscribed in three scripts—ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Ancient Greek. Because the text was essentially identical in three languages, it became the key that allowed scholars to decipher hieroglyphs and, in doing so, unlock Egyptian civilization.

What we are now beginning to understand about Jeffrey Epstein is that his story is not merely about a wealthy sex trafficker, serial pedophile, and probable extortionist. It is something far larger.

The Epstein files function as a legend—a map—of global networks of power, personal connection, and influence.

Networks of wealth, power, and privilege are nothing new. In pre-industrial societies they were organized around monarchy, hereditary nobility, land-owning aristocracy, and religious institutions such as the Church. Power was usually exercised within relatively limited geographic boundaries—local or regional, if not national.

The political, social, and economic revolutions of the post-Enlightenment, post-industrial world challenged those rigid and well-defined systems. One measure of modernity’s success was that societies became less formally stratified and access to wealth and power was, at least in theory, open to far more people. Social classes persisted, but mobility became possible.

What we are now realizing—perhaps belatedly—is two things. First, that the modern aristocracy is far wealthier and more powerful than any ruling class in history. And second, that in the age of global capital, the reach and depth of their influence is vastly greater.

The Epstein scandal exposes that, at bottom, they remain much what they always were: entitled, debauched, privileged, selfish, grandiose and above-the-law. Only now they travel by private jet instead of by ship and are more globally interconnected than any elite before it. 

Another unsettling implication of the Epstein material is the degree to which global-interconnectedness of elites fostered national security risks—not only in the United States, but across the world, including the UK, France, Norway, Russia, and farflung geopolitically marginal places like Djibouti.

It is therefore unsurprising that a substantial portion of the roughly six million files remains unreleased—almost certainly the most damaging portion.

Yes, these revelations will inevitably fuel dangerous conspiracy theories about world order, particularly antisemitic ones, and that is deeply regrettable.

More troubling still, for those of us who are not inclined toward conspiratorial thinking, is the further erosion of already-fragile public trust in institutional democracy.

Now that we have the Epstein Rosetta Stone, we can better decipher the networks of transnational elites. What remains unclear is what societies can realistically do about them. In the US, the political impact so far appears quite muted. In the UK, it is more volatile, threatening even the survival of a fragile Labour government. Yet even that would not guarantee meaningful change.

The recent past offers little reassurance. After the 2008 financial crisis, systemic failure was exposed in full view, yet high-level accountability amounted to precisely nothing. Elites have long proven adept at absorbing scandal while preserving the structures that protect their privilege.

The urgency cannot be overstated. Mechanisms of democratic accountability were designed for national institutions, not for transnational elites whose wealth, influence, and loyalties operate beyond borders. Exposure does not equal reform, and transparency does not reliably produce action. The Epstein files may clarify the architecture of power, but clarity alone does not tell us how—or whether—that power can be constrained.

Love Transactional

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I loved you for your body,

This cannot be denied.

As I do with everybody,

Both open and implied.

There cannot be another way,

But to forsake transcendent love.

A body is, what a body may,  

This I'm certain of.

Trust me, love, this is no game, 

Of hifalutin minds.

Love yearns not for any name, 

But for one whose body shines—

The glory of our very being,

For love is love exchanged.

Desire is a psalm we sing,

In bodies not the same.

Love, my love, is to transact,

Believe not in love transcendent. 

I loved you once then held it back,

Then grieved for love that went.

A Grammar Mistake Mistaken for Metaphysics

You are given life. You are not given purpose.

This is a hard pill for many of us to swallow. We struggle to digest it.

Purpose, at best, is something people assemble after the fact. For some, it is personal and idiosyncratic—a loose mixture of desires, experiences, temperament, and luck. For others, purpose is said to preexist: assigned rather than discovered.

In this latter view, purpose comes from God, embedded in some vaguely defined “Divine Plan.” Any purpose not derived from it is considered inferior or mistaken. Failure to accept this purpose is framed as a moral defect; acceptance, as virtue. Everything that happens—joy, suffering, success, catastrophe—is declared “meant.”

A divine purpose must be absolute. If it comes from the creator, deviation is impossible. Such a purpose is important enough to justify killing and dying, which is why it also requires an afterlife. Without eternal compensation, the arithmetic fails.

I enjoy talking to religious people. I have several ultra-orthodox tenants, and every Friday a group of Lubavitch boys comes to my office to bring me closer to my faith. Our conversations usually end the same way, with the question that matters most:

“You really believe this is all there is—and then we die?” They mean it rhetorically.

I always feel strange answering yes. It sounds incomplete, almost arbitrary.

But I have no other honest answer.

The purpose of life is to live. This is not inspirational; it is tautological. Life does not require justification beyond itself.

We often describe life as a journey—birth, progression, death. But a journey implies a destination. That implication may be nothing more than a habit of thought: a grammar mistake mistaken for metaphysics.

Life may not be linear at all. It may be self-contained. The organism that is born and the organism that dies are not moving toward a goal; they are undergoing a process—growth, maturity, decline. No different in principle from plants, insects, or any other living system.

Life engenders process, not purpose. Minds invent purposes.

Hence the familiar substitutes: an afterlife for the righteous, spiritual missions, the Kingdom of God, tikkun olam—the repair of an imperfect world designed by a perfect creator. Or their secular equivalents: wealth, status, credentials, legacy, family. All serve the same function. They place life at a distance, something to be earned or completed, rather than something already happening.

But the only purpose that does not collapse under scrutiny is the one that does not need to be pursued. It is not ahead of you. It is not earned. It is already occurring. It is part of your very nature: the fullness of being alive.

Life persists even in cracks in pavement. It does not wait for meaning, permission, or explanation. Psychological constructions—expectation, obligation, narratives of purpose—often interfere more than they help.

Reduce the distance between mind and body. Reduce the demand that life justify itself. As the barrier drops, so does anxiety about purpose.

What remains is not meaning in the grand sense, but something simpler and harder to refute: being alive, fully, and without judgment.

A Rat In My Garbage Can

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Lifted the lid as I do

every Friday to drop in

the week’s sack

for the truck’s prehistoric jaws

to devour and disappear.

There it was 

at the empty bottom,

lifeless, lying on its side

like a deflated football.

Not like looking down

a cavernous wishing well—more like

a jack-in-the-box ambush.

I reeled,

my labyrinthine mind scurrying

for an answer:

it tumbled in while

sniffing for scraps

and couldn’t climb back out.

Small furry survivor

of the T-Rex-killing asteroid,

done in by a dumb

plastic bin

from Home Hardware; thump.

I imagined the frantic,

futile claw-scratch scratching

against the bin’s

smooth cylindrical walls.

Had to smirk.

Next thought: 

where there’s one,

there are many.

I peered through the fence

at my neighbour’s yard,

rows of containers

behind his shiny,

brand-new black Porsche.

It wasn’t the first time

I’d surveyed his trash

like a detective scrounging

for clues of ill-gotten gains.

While I stuck conscientiously

to a one-bag-a-week quota,

he always had two,

sometimes even three and four—evidence

he was an uncaring waster,

always a bit of a jerk, really.

And a menace.

My empty bin trapped the rat,

but it was my neighbour

who invited it

with his extravagant

consumption.

That’s when I heard

the inevitable truck’s roar,

rusty brakes screaming.

Darkness crossed

my sunny soul

like an omen eclipse.

We’re all doomed.