I look at the G20 coverage and that’s all I see. We had people marching peacefully for good causes, whose messages will now never be heard. We had the riot-helmeted cops marching in rows. We had idiots who like to break things and nobody stopped them despite 900 arrests — at a billion dollars of security, that’s $1,111,111 per arrest, never mind that the vast majority had charges dropped and were released in short order. We had media covering the people who break things instead of the people with interesting things to say. We had protest-tourists who stood around uselessly watching things go pear-shaped, tweeting and snapping photos. And we had millions of us who just stayed home and let it all happen.

I hate it all — well, all except the folks who were marching peacefully and using their democratic right to have their say. I’m fully in support of peaceful demonstrations.

But how can the Toronto police, who normally let small children pat the noses of horses in riot gear, who line Yonge and high-five a million people and politely confiscate open beers whenever we win any sort of sports thing, who happily close off part of University Avenue for two weeks while Tamils have their say in front of the US Consulate, have allowed themselves to be such immense jerks?

How can anyone — dressed in name-brand black outfits (note Fila pants) and Kevlar body armour — have such an overwhelming sense of entitlement that they think randomly smashing up other people’s stuff is either fun or OK?

How can anyone — given the presence of fifty or more other nearby observers — stand there blinking like sheep and watch someone smash stuff up? I mean, look at these people in the background; they’re pretending it’s TV:

Shame, shame. Also, as we would say in college: WEAK. Dudes, whatever kind of society you’re advocating for, count me the hell OUT. That kind of crap is why I stayed home.

I think that was probably our collective mistake, giving in to the imposed fear and inconvenience and failing to say “eff it, I’m a Canadian, this is my city, and I’m going to continue to live my life,” going to our offices and restaurants and shows and walking our dogs and generally continuing life downtown despite the lack of transit or the presence of eleventy-gazillion police in riot gear or whatever. After all, what’s the point of inflicting house arrest on ourselves in the name of security? Would this all have unfolded differently if we-the-people in our millions didn’t collectively abdicate our responsibility to be ourselves, thus leaving downtown a howling wasteland / combat zone where everyone present fell into one of four or five stereotypical roles? What if we kept the focus squarely where it belongs in a democracy such as ours: on freedom-to instead of freedom-from?

It makes no sense. None of it makes any sense. And it’s all very disappointing, to put it mildly.

THIS is my Toronto: police marching WITH today’s anti-brutality protestors.

This is also my Toronto, courtesy of a friend on Facebook (and if anyone runs across a link to the video, which was apparently on tonight’s news, I’d love to add it) edit – here it is:

…just saw what is probably my favourite video of the mayhem in Toronto this weekend: Some guy in a black shirt & bandana smashes the window of downtown electronics store and grabs something. This Joe walking by in a polo shirt & knapsack tackles him, takes away the thing, throws it back in the store, then just gets up and continues walking the direction he was going.

Thanks, Joe. You may have been the only honorable person in Toronto this weekend.

I gave birth at Women’s College Hospital, and of all places I fully expected them to support my midwives. But they were unspeakably awful to them — rude, dismissive, demeaning, the whole gamut of bad behaviour. They topped it off by ignoring me (I was admitted unplanned, following a complication; midwifery patients usually go home shortly after the birth) as totally as they could, unless they were calling me by a name I don’t use and rolling their eyes at me. I was, to put it mildly, unimpressed that a hospital that purports to support women’s health behaved so badly to an entire profession that not only purports to, but does, support women’s health..

Nursing moms need more support: Toronto

A study by Toronto Public Health of 1, 500 first-time mothers in this city found that while most new moms try breastfeeding in the hospital, only about 63 per cent are still doing it exclusively by the time they’re discharged from hospital.

Six months down the road, only 17 and a half per cent of moms are not supplementing their child’s diet with formula, the study titled Breastfeeding in Toronto – Promoting Supportive Environments found.

Breastfeeding takes support. Serious support, from the new mom’s partner, family, and all health practitioners and support staff. If you have a hospital that cares so little about women that it rolls its eyes at midwives and ignores their patients, how well supported in breastfeeding do you suppose women who give birth there tend to feel? And that’s the hospital that’s theoretically most sensitive to womens’ needs.

Yeah. No surprise there. No wonder that only 63% are breastfeeding by the time they leave hospital — probably less than 36 hours after giving birth. Shame on the hospitals.

(For the record, with my midwives’ support, I breastfed my daughter for a year.)

Her post ends with a poem. I’ll also offer a poem, although not such an optimistic one. This one’s by Susan Griffin:

An Answer to a Man’s Question,
“What Can I Do About Women’s Liberation?”
Wear a dress.
Wear a dress that you made yourself, or bought in a dress store.
Wear a dress and underneath the dress wear elastic, around
your hips, and underneath your nipples.
Wear a dress and underneath the dress wear a sanitary napkin.
Wear a dress and wear sling-back, high-heeled shoes.
Wear a dress, with elastic and a sanitary napkin underneath,
and sling-back shoes on your feet, and walk down Telegraph Avenue.
Wear a dress, with elastic and a sanitary napkin and sling-
back shoes on Telegraph Avenue and try to run.

Find a man.
Find a nice man who you would like to ask you for a date.
Find a nice man who will ask you for a date.
Keep your dress on.
Ask the nice man who asks you for a date to come to dinner.
Cook the nice man a nice dinner so the dinner is ready before
he comes and your dress is nice and clean and wear a smile.
Tell the nice man you’re a virgin, or you don’t have
birth control, or you would like to get to know him better.
Keep your dress on.
Go to the movies by yourself

Find a job.
Iron your dress.
Wear your ironed dress and promise the boss you won’t get
pregnant (which in your case is predictable) and you like to
type, and be sincere and wear your smile.
Find a job or get on welfare.
Borrow a child and get on welfare.
Borrow a child and stay in the house all day with the child,
or go to the public park with the child, and take the child
to the welfare office and cry and say your man left you and
be humble and wear your dress and your smile, and don’t talk
back, keep your dress on, cook more nice dinners, stay
away from Telegraph Avenue, and still, you won’t know the
half of it, not in a million years.

Perhaps the problem needed to be approached from a different angle, she thought. What if you actually wanted your child to be kidnapped by a stranger and held overnight? How long would you have to leave him outside, and unattended for that to be likely to happen? When she asked people to take a guess, the most she ever heard was three months. Some people ventured a day, an hour, and even – implausibly – ten minutes.

…

The answer to Skenazy’s question was… 750,000 years. By reframing the way the risk was framed, she took the focus away from one, and placed it on what the chance was in real time – and 750,000 years is a far more arresting and reassuring number than one in 1.5 million.

…

“I haven’t seen horrible diseases sweeping the country as a result of any child rearing technique that we’ve been using, whether it’s drinking baby formula or using a sippy cup,“ she says. “So, rather than worry about these, I worry about cars. They are the number one way children are killed.”

There are lots of interesting statistics down the side of the article (because it is STATS, after all). I would’ve like to see similar “one in” and “x years” numbers for other forms of child mortality, particularly car crashes and injuries from toys. They do give either numbers or rates-per-million, but without numbers you can compare directly it’s hard to grasp how many orders of magnitude there are between the various risks. Some sort of graph or image, even, might help, since our brains are notoriously bad at relative risk analysis.

Anyway, great interview with Ms. Skenazy. Her blog Free Range Kids has much more.

• Unnumbered form about the Safe Arrival program, requiring my signature, the name, room and grade of my kid. Rendered useless by the need to return the form, thus removing any reminder of the Safe Arrival procedures from my house.
• Form 511H, Walking Excursion Form – Immediate Community. So they can take my kid outside the school fence. Requires kid’s name (twice), teacher’s name, my name and signature, date.
• Form 511K, Physical Education Information and Intramural Information/Permission. Two pages long; summary: sometimes kids get hurt. It’s not like gym is optional, so what is the earthly point of this form? Requires name (twice) and grade/class of my kid, my name (twice), signature (twice) and date (twice).
• Form 511E, Medical Information Form. Endless detail, mostly about allergies and Epipens. (Is it the school’s business if my child sleepwalks?). And yes, of course the school may call a doctor in an emergency. Sign, date.
• Unnumbered form lecturing us about lunch hour procedures (“Lunchroom supervision is provided only for those students from grades 1 to 8 who cannot go home or make other arrangements” [like what other arrangements??]). Oh, I’m so terribly sorry my kid is inconveniently present all day but you know what? The school day overlaps most people’s work days and watching the kids over lunch is a perfectly normal part of the school deal. Rather contradictorily they point out that if kids who do go home are late coming back they may be required to stay for lunch. Make up your mind, folks! Requires kid’s name, schedule, grade, teacher’s name and room number (surely one of these would do?), and my signature signifying that I’ve read their snarky lecture.
• Unnumbered Code of On-line Conduct form making me responsible for upholding the school’s policies, which are not provided for me to review. Sorry, but I am not signing this one. What my kid does during school hours on school computers under school supervision has nothing whatsoever to do with me. Also, it isn’t specified whether or not the kids are expected to follow these mysterious policies outside school, and what I let my kid do on our own computer is not the school’s business. I leave the line acknowledging that my kid will be using computers at school (like they need my permission for this) and cross out the rest.
• School year calendar listing PA days and holidays, separately.
• Class newsletter. In Comic Sans. WHY? Reiterates school hours (which seem to change every year) and which exits the kids use, as well as lecturing us about how to make a healthy lunch, lecturing us on the importance of reading, lecturing us on the importance of the mandatory ($6) planners, lecturing us about appropriate school supplies, and more. Lecture lecture lecture. Pthtththbbbbt.
• Another calendar, very hard to read. Oh good, the kids are on a 7-day cycle this year so things like gym and library are even harder to keep straight. Of course, gym and library are not marked on this calendar OR the other calendar. Eventually I find them hidden in a corner of the class newsletter. I foresee a boring half-hour with this calendar and some coloured pens.
• Unnumbered form requiring $6 for a planner. What, no signature required??
• Unnumbered general Contact Information Form, in case my name wasn’t clear enough from the previous five billion forms. Comic Sans again makes me wince. I yet again cross off Mom’s Name and Dad’s Name and replace them with Parent/Guardian 1 and Parent/Guardian 2, and add yet another short note pointing out that there may be kids in care or in gay families, and inclusion never hurts. I do this every year (I can’t possibly be the only one) and yet there Mom and Dad remain on the form. There’s just no excuse for schools to have Mom & Dad on their forms in 2009. For shame.

And that seems to be it for the moment. It seems choir hasn’t started yet so I don’t have the form for that — as if it’s any of my business if my kid wants to join a school program during school hours — and apparently the Pizza Day folks haven’t quite got things together yet, so we still have those forms to look forward to. Whee.

The thing that bugs me most? I fill out these forms every.single.year. So do the other 950 parents at M’s school and probably thousands and thousands more across the city. All this paper and all this wasted effort! What did they do with the other four years’ worth of forms I’ve filled out? Why on earth isn’t all this information kept in a database for the duration of my child’s stay at the school? At worst it should be printed and sent to me each year to initial or update, but really it ought to be online for me to review and update. Remind me what year it is again? Or maybe what century we’re in?

The thing that bugs me almost as much: These things are SO badly designed. Why do I have to fill out my name and my kid’s name twice on many forms? Why (at the very least) is this not all one multi-part form? If you’re going to send these things to hundreds or thousands of people, put some effort into effective design!

Thing that bugs me quite substantially: The tone. The patronizing condescension. The air of mistrust and hints of disapproval. Please. Talking to me as if I were both six and slightly prone to misbehave does not make me want to fill out your forms.

Another thing that bugs me quite substantially: The unnecessary jargon. A whole page describing a Safe Arrival Program, which I can sum up as: call the school if you’re kid’s going to be absent? Two pages for the Phys Ed/Intramural one, which is: kids sometimes fall down? And these are the people who are supposed to be teaching my child how to communicate? Gaaah! Speak like normal people already, and if you’ve forgotten do that, hire a plain-language specialist.

Thing that also bugs me: Comic Sans. Let’s ban it. Nobody over the age of ten or so should find Comic Sans even slightly acceptable for formal communications.

This pile of forms is due tomorrow, as at least three forms plus the class newsletter remind me. By now I am in such a cranky rebellious temper that I am sorely tempted to hold on to them until Tuesday, just because. But I suppose it’s a little early in the school year to be that openly antagonistic, so I shall dutifully send them off tomorrow.

And now I shall have a beer and blow off my antisocial crankiness with an extra-loud belch.

What I have to say is this: do not ever swim without a qualified lifeguard watching you. And if you do, quite literally the last thing you may do is jump in to save someone. By doing so you are worsening the emergency: now there are two people in trouble instead of one.

Drowning people don’t look like the stereotype, with lots of thrashing and waving arms and shouting and all that. People who truly can’t swim often are just below the surface. You might see their arms — they might look like they’re climbing a ladder — but they don’t come far out of the water. They’re quiet, not calling out. They’re using all their effort to try to reach the surface. They are desperate and they are not rational.

And these folks are dangerous. Unless you really know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t go anywhere near a drowning person. They are so freaked out, so detached from normal perception, so focused on their own survival that they will do anything — ANYTHING — to keep themselves at the surface. They are incredibly strong from adrenalin, and they will push you under and keep you under the surface of the water if climbing up your body will help them stay on the surface. Even a small child can drown you this way, even if you are a grown adult and a good swimmer.

Sometimes, drowning people don’t struggle. In a certain percentage of cases people just quietly slide under the surface. Even then if you jump in and try to grab them, if they’re still conscious they can push you under and kill you. They don’t mean to do it, but they will.

Treat drowning people like you would a wild animal you were trying to rescue. Pretend they have fangs and claws and poisonous barbs.

The usual algorithm to follow when considering a rescue is (with variations, but this is the simplest to remember):

1. Talk - sometimes all the person needs is a calming voice, reassurance and guidance to help them reach safety.
2. Reach – reach out to the person with an object — reaching pole, flutterboard, towel, paddle, pool noodle, piece of clothing — anything! If you absolutely must use your own body, lie down on your stomach so the drowning person can’t pull you in.
3. Throw – throw the person a buoyant object such as a flutterboard or ring buoy and talk them in or pull them in. If you’re using a ring buoy, don’t forget to stand on the end of the rope when you throw it so it doesn’t ALL head out to sea (I always forget this important point).
4. Row – use a boat to get to them, have them grab the stern end of the boat, and row them to shallow water,
5. Go – swim out to them with a buoyant object. Stop a few metres away. Push the object to them with your foot. Keep well away. Talk to them reassuringly and guide them to shore.
6. Tow – swim out to them with any object — a buoyant one if you can get one, but otherwise anything – piece of clothing, towel, whatever. The point is just to keep some distance between you. Have them hold one end of the object. Hold the other end and tow them to safety. If they start to come at you (by crawling up the object, for example), let go and swim a short distance away. Talk to them and see if you can get them to calm down and stop trying to kill you.
7. and then if all else fails, Carry, which you should only ever do if you are trained to do so. If you aren’t trained in how to safely touch a drowning person, don’t do it. Run for help instead.

In a pool situation, such as the one referenced above in which all three people died, there is virtually never a reason for someone who is not a trained lifeguard to go in the water to rescue someone. Pools are always equipped with reaching and throwing assists. Always. More than one. There will probably be a reaching pole on a wall, a ring bouy on another wall, and various pool noodles, flutterboards, and other buoyant objects around. Use these. Don’t lose your head and leap in.

If you have children, or if you cannot swim yourself, as a first step for everyone I recommend the Swim to Survive program, because you can never tell when you may end up in deep water. It pays to be prepared, even minimally prepared. The Star has been promoting this program recently.

As the Kaianad/Yasmin family so tragically demonstrated this week, non-swimmers should never, ever be “supervising” non-swimmers in the water. Even if you are a good swimmer, you never know when you’re going to bonk your head, inhale water unexpectedly, get tangled in seaweed, get a cramp, or any number of other minor issues that could become fatal if no help is available.

So swim only in places where you know a trained person is watching. Please.

Although anything over seventy or so works with reasonable credibility, really.

(h/t to Jan)

Why did 90 children die?
Ontario’s child advocate was appalled to learn how many in the province’s welfare system die each year and is equally shocked at how difficult it is to get answers

First, I think we can all agree that the province’s unwillingness to cough up any useful information about the relevant cases to the child advocate’s office is inexcusable whatever the number of deaths or other issues. It’s hard to advocate effectively when you’re being stonewalled by those ostensibly working toward the same ends and I don’t blame the child advocate’s office for one second for using whatever numbers will get them the attention and cooperation they may need.

I think — hope — we can all also agree that any greater than zero number of deaths of children is very sad and horrible and such deaths are most urgently to be avoided.

What is not in this article or — just so it doesn’t look like I’m picking on this one piece, which I’m not — in any of the coverage I’ve seen, is any information that puts 90 child deaths in context for proper comparison and evaluation. How many children are there in Ontario? How many die each year, in what age groups, for what reasons? How do those population-level numbers and rates relate to the numbers and rates of deaths of children in care? Is it disproportionately high (or low, although that seems wildly unlikely), or are the rates not significantly different from rates in the population as a whole? Do the rates vary between groups — are, say, babies in care more (or less) likely to die than babies in the population in general? Small children? Teenagers? Disabled children?

I haven’t read the whole report yet so this may merely be a complaint about its media coverage. Still, if I were the child advocate’s office, I would be speaking loudly in my initial press releases about both the raw numbers and, if it’s relevant and useful, the rates. Ninety instinctively seems like a big number (awful thought, to think of ninety children dying) but it needs context to have real meaning. Perhaps something like this: “90 children in care or within a year of being in care died in 2007. This is n times the rate of death for all children in Ontario. This is inexcusable; children in our care deserve better. Wouldn’t it be nice if the government shared more information about at-risk children with the Child Advocate’s office so we could help bring down this rate?” etc.

I don’t mean to disparage the great work the advocates are doing in this case. I do regret that there are numbers being thrown around for shock value with no way to assess their real meaning.