Left to our own devices
Welcome to this week’s issue of The Jumpstack! This week, we’re on our own. Let’s jump in!
You said you didn’t give a fuck about hockey
The conversation around hockey continues across Canada, after a week of accusations, acrimony, and apologies.
And yet, a Saturday night without Cherry’s two minutes of bluster has come and gone, and so has a controversy over The Social co-host Jessica Allen venting about the hockey culture she experienced in high school.
What remains is the fact that there are issues with entitlement, wealth and race that are contributing to hockey’s decline as our national pastime.
As the middle class hollows out, and austerity practices emaciate institutions and social programs, hockey has become inaccessible to those who don’t have the ever-increasing means required to play.
So, this three-year-old article resonates even more than before:
It hasn’t always been this way — particularly when it comes to hockey. As recently as the 1970s, most professional players came from families in which fathers worked in farming, fishing, logging or blue collar trades, adds Gruneau, a professor in Simon Fraser University’s school of communications. For example, the father of Wayne Gretzky—the widely acknowledged greatest player of all time—wasn’t an executive, but a Bell Telephone repairman. “Few families in similar circumstances are likely to send a player to the pros today.”
In his Saturday night address to the nation, Ron MacLean was clearly still processing what had happened, had no easy answers, and hoped some good would come out of the situation.
Perhaps it is the fact that we can now grant attention and time to issues in hockey other than Don Cherry’s latest gaffe is the unexpected benefit to the game itself.
True Grit
Michael Ungar takes self-help to task in this interview with CBC’s Tapestry, arguing that the focus on self-help and do-it-yourself personal improvement as an individual activity and not a collective one is ultimately limiting:
We’ve really got to open this conversation. Otherwise, we slip into this dangerous territory where we think that our individual grit, our individual perseverance is all on our shoulders and our responsibility. There’s been this real push to ask people to heal themselves, and yet I [found] that we are better when the world around us makes it possible.
He also discusses the impact of helicopter parenting on the resiliency of children, and how the inability to attempt and fail results in a lack of confidence and anxiety.
While we need to be able to achieve things on our own, we also need to be able to access supportive systems so that we know we are not alone.
Let’s get bored
“Turn off and tune out” may sound like simple advice, but it’s harder than it seems.
In this interview with Rebecca Jennings, author Chris Bailey argues that the distractions we indulge in on social media erodes our self control and personal productivity as those companies profit from it:
Social media companies are just so good at predicting our behaviour and what we want to do with our time, and they present us with the most prescient thing in that moment. I think there is a point at which we begin to lose control of our behaviours, especially when they hijack the mechanisms of our mind and cater to our basal desire for novelty and pleasure and threat.
As a society, we need to be very concerned, because companies such as Google and Facebook and Twitter are making money off of the fact that we lose control of our behaviour when we use their applications. Our attention is theirs.
Bailey suggests putting down your phone for two weeks—not as a way to increase your productivity, but to experience focus without distraction.
Allow yourself to be bored. You might get something out of it.
A word after a word
Last weekend, I met up with a friend at Hot Docs Cinema for a screening of Margaret Atwood: A Word after a Word after a Word is Power, with tickets provided by Firefly Creative Writing.
The documentary follows Atwood as she makes her way around Europe, reviewing her life and focusing primarily on The Handmaid’s Tale and how the novel is resonating decades after publication.
For a Canadian audience, much of this is well-worn territory: many of us had Atwood as required reading in high school. But for American audiences, she’s far more of a mystery.
The film capitalizes on this through segments on her childhood in the wilderness and her rise as a feminist voice in the CanLit of the ’60s and ’70s, giving us a glimpse into the Toronto of that era and the people who would become giants in the scene.
When I was a teenager in the 1990s, I was discovering Atwood’s earlier work, while Alias Grace was ascendant. Starting with The Edible Woman, I devoured one work after another, delighted when she touched on something I identified with—and uncomfortable when she prodded at it.
These books dealt with relationships between men and women, women with women, and children with each other that recognized the casual cruelty exchanged, and they were refreshing.
A Word after a Word after a Word is Power touches on Atwood’s own relationships, and there is a slight bit of whiplash as focus switches between her family to the dystopian themes of The Handmaid’s Tale: you kind of want the film to just follow Atwood around as she dances from one event to the next.
And that’s the real takeaway from the documentary: that Atwood has more energy at 80 than you do, and even if she had never received the acclaim, her boundless enthusiasm to her work would have remained the same.
(Margaret Atwood: A Word after a Word after a Word is Power airs tonight at 9 p.m. on the Documentary Channel.)
And that’s it for The Jumpstack this week! If you enjoyed it, how about hitting that heart and rewarding me with a hit of dopamine? See you next week!