Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - January 2, 2025, Winnipeg, Manitoba THINK TANK COMMENT EDITOR: RUSSELL WANGERSKY 204-697-7269 ● RUSSELL.WANGERSKY@WINNIPEGFREEPRESS.COM A7 THURSDAY JANUARY 2, 2025 Ideas, Issues, Insights Ephemera has more value than we think A CCORDING to the history of printing, what you are now reading is “ephemera.” Newspapers are intended to be read, but not kept. After all, as the old industry saying puts it, “today’s news is tomorrow’s fish-wrap” — and day-old digital versions are even less useful. Books, however, are different. They are written (and printed) to be kept — and hopefully read, more than once. Bound and shelved, they are con- sidered more permanent, something intended to bridge generations of readers, especially through the libraries that preserve them. As an academic (and book collector), this understanding of ephemera was hard for me to accept when I worked in production during the early days of the Winnipeg Sun. Every typo was a dagger through the heart, especially if it was on a page I had made. When my own writing occasionally appeared in print, the trauma of such mistakes was that much greater. It was a legacy of error left to amuse future generations and I would stew about the shame of it all, to the amusement of former Tri- bune colleagues who had been in the newspaper business much longer than me. Unfortunately, I have not outgrown this feel- ing. Responsible now for eight printed books, I probably feel as much chagrin for the typos and mistakes they inevitably contain as any pleasure in the accomplishment. But I have also had to confront the literary reality that more people will read this single column than all of those books of mine combined, forever. I only have the privilege of writing in this space twice a month, but over the past nine years, that has amounted to more than 200 columns and 175,000 words. And, while there might be an odd printed column stuck on a fridge or buried on a bulletin board, all of those words have vanished with the wind. Ephemera. If the goal is to leave a legacy for future gener- ations, bound up in books, then this seems a waste of time and effort. But if the goal is to change how people think, to change the way they understand their world, writing becomes more of a perfor- mance, instead. I live with a family of performers, producers not of books but of other kinds of ephemera. Whether the words are spoken or sung or prayed, or the music is conducted or played, each time, the performance is unique. Long hours of practice lead to a single performance, perhaps just to a small crowd, who only catch a glimpse of all the time, effort and passion that led to such a fleeting creation. Ephemera. Of course, in the material world there are “performance indicators.” So, we count the house, determining the size of the audience through ticket sales. A national bestselling book generally requires 5,000 copies to be sold in a week. We tally the downloads of a song, regarding physical copies of albums as quaint musical relics. But none of those numbers can ever measure what that performance actually means. Many years later, I can still remember Yehudi Menuhin playing part of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto as an encore with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Money was tight and the tickets were expensive, so my parents had rolled Christmas and birthday together and given me a single ticket. Another example of ephemera? Absolutely — but my mother told me I would never forget it and she was right. There have been other times, without number, where the performance I witnessed changed my world in ways almost too insignificant to notice at the moment. But small changes, over a lifetime, can amount to major shifts in the trajectories of who we are and what we do. Small acts, whether of kindness or of misery, can transform people. So, I hold doors open when I don’t need to and smile at random strangers or let vehicles merge in front of me when I have the right of way — just because. That very small gift may change their day in ways that bring a blessing to others I can’t foresee and will never know. Life, after all, is ephemeral. It is a performance — not a rehearsal. As long as we live, we have the opportunity to offer something of who we are, both to the universe and to other people, every day and in whatever circumstance. Those other people may not appreciate or understand our gift. They may sit through the concert playing games on their phones or posting “I wuz there” to their social media. But I remain in awe, as I watch and listen to the gift of your art, catching a glimpse of something beyond the merely human, in that special moment seized from time. So, I write ephemera. While I still grieve the books inside me I will never have the opportunity to complete, I trust that these few words written here might divert a thought and then perhaps a life, into some other, better pathway toward a future where love, art and peace may flourish. That is a legacy that matters. Peter Denton writes from his home in rural Manitoba. Has Iran reached the end of the line? SIX months ago, at the end of Iran’s presidential election, I finished an article by speculating that the long-lived theocratic dictatorship in Iran may be a lot closer to its end than its beginning. That observation was triggered by the fact that the ‘reformist’ presidential candidate, Masoud Pezeshkian, unexpectedly won the July elec- tion. The previous president had been killed in a helicopter crash and the regime had fumbled in setting up a snap election to replace him. Pezeshkian was the only token ‘moderate’ in a field of four candidates, but he managed to make it into the last two for the second round — and then, in the runoff vote, something remarkable happened. Fewer than half the voters had bothered to show up for the first round of voting, because they assumed that the fix was in. Suddenly, however, the moderate candidate had a chance of winning — and seven million extra voters showed up for the second round and carried the ‘reformist’ to victory. It was only a small victory, because Pezesh- kian is very timid (otherwise he wouldn’t have been allowed even to run), but more importantly because Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khame- nei has been the real and absolute ruler of Iran ever since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died in 1989. It just showed that the public would prefer somebody else. That doesn’t count for much in a theocracy. It just allowed for a bit of speculation about the long-term future of the country. But much has happened in the Middle East since last July, none of it good news for the Iranian regime. First, the vaunted “axis of resistance” that Iran had created to keep Israel on the defensive and boost its own power has been largely dismantled in the past six months. Hamas in the Gaza Strip has been mostly de- stroyed, the Hezbollah organization that dominat- ed Lebanon is disabled and the recent overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria has eliminated Iran’s strongest supporter in the region. That was a homegrown revolt by Sunni Isla- mists backed by Turkey and it’s part of a broader decline of Shia power in the region’s politics. Shia Iran no longer has any allies in the Arab countries that border on Israel and there is little chance that it can win them back. Worse yet for Tehran, the tit-for-tat missile strikes between Iran and Israel over the past few months showed that Iran’s missiles for the most part cannot get through, while the Israeli Air Force could and did destroy most of Iran’s air de- fences. The country is virtually naked militarily. Even more dangerous for the regime is the accelerating decline of the economy. It was undermined by decades of overspending abroad to spread its radical religious message, but equally by under-investment at home since Iran’s attempts to sponsor revolutions elsewhere led to stringent international sanctions against it. The damage has been extreme. Iran’s per capita gross domestic product in 1976, a couple of years before the Islamist takeover, was US$7,600. Now it is only US$5,700, despite all the oil and gas. Per capita GDP in next-door Turkey, similar in size, resources and population but with little gas or oil, was only US$1,270 in 1976. It is now US$13,000. Which one would you prefer? Most Iranians don’t know those exact numbers, but they do know roughly what happened and why — and the result, now unfolding for all to see, is a ruined economy. Iran has the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves and third-largest oil reserves, but the rot has gone so deep that it cannot even keep the lights and the heat on. There were frequent brief power outages last summer, but this winter the electricity is going off for days at a time. Factories, steel plants and the like are shutting down; schools and univer- sities are teaching remotely. A lot of people are unhappy or downright angry and they know who to blame. There have been three episodes of prolonged mass protests against the regime (2009, 2019 and 2022), and despite the cold winter weather an- other one could be on the way now. Or not; these things are unpredictable. But we can probably now say with some confi- dence: “Someday soon this will come to an end.” Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. Food security in Winnipeg schools THE news on conflict, poverty and crime is so bad and so overwhelming that sometimes we forget that good things happen, too. On Dec. 13 at Hugh John Macdonald School on Bannatyne Avenue in Winnipeg, one of those good things occurred; students, parents, teachers, philanthropists and repre- sentatives from the federal, provincial and municipal governments met to celebrate the installation of a renovated kitchen designed to ensure that no student at the school would ever again begin the day hungry. My wife and I were privileged to attend the event and were met at the door by enthusiastic members of the student council who escorted us to the kitchen. Hugh John Macdonald School is benefiting by being included in the Winnipeg School Division nutrition program which, in turn, has been able to expand with support from the prov- ince, federal government and philanthropic sector. “This is huge for us. Huge,” said Jennifer Scott, principal of Hugh John Macdonald, about the nutrition program. “This is going to allow us to really scale and feed all the kids that are hungry.” There is a vast amount of research on the multiple benefits of school breakfast and lunch programs: the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, for example, reports that school food programs improve cog- nition, enabling students to be more alert, pay better attention and do better in math and reading scores. A 2012 study by the Toronto School Board, Feeding our Future, in a large sample of Grade 7 and 8 students showed that 61 per cent of students who ate breakfast achieved or exceeded provincial reading standards, compared to 50 per cent who did not. Investing in school nutrition programs is therefore as close to a universal good in education policy as one is likely to find. And the need is great: Food Matters Manitoba re- ports that “Over 14 per cent of Manitobans, 60 per cent of Northern residents living on reserve and over one in five children across the province experience Household Food Insecurity.” Harvest Manitoba, for example, provides food security programs to over 100,000 Manitobans every month in 50 com- munities across the province. Teachers and principals have long known about the debilitating impact of hunger in their classrooms. Many I know used their own money to buy granola bars and fruit for their neediest students. But help is now on the way; 79 schools receive funding from the nutrition program, for school kitchen construction or renova- tion, hiring chefs or grants for food purchas- es. Senior governments have come together, often a rarity in our federation, to contribute to this critical initiative. In January 2024, the province announced it would invest $30 million to expand school nutrition, much of it going directly to school divisions. As Premier Wab Kinew stated, “kids can’t learn on an empty stomach.” The federal government announced, in June 2024, a National School Food Policy to provide meals for up to 400,000 children a year, and in October, Manitoba signed an agreement with the Government of Canada to expand school food programs even more to include thousands of additional Manitoba children. This is co-operative federalism at its best. Also present at Hugh John Macdonald School were Maria and Walter Schroeder, whose foundation has also partnered with the Winnipeg School Division in providing grants for food security and education op- portunity programs in North End schools. The Schroeders told a story about grow- ing up in the area and how an individual act of a caring educator changed their lives. Maria Schroeder faced the prospect of being forced to leave school until the principal at Daniel McIntyre Collegiate paid a visit to her home and persuaded her family that she was one of the school’s most promising students. What made this story especially meaning- ful to the Hugh John Macdonald students was that the daughter of that principal, now in her 80s, was at the opening of the kitchen to recall her father’s impact. There is meaning for all of us in that story. Individual acts of kindness and engage- ment can have an enormous ripple effect on future generations. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” said Martin Luther King Jr. “but it bends toward justice.” In Manitoba, that arc is finally bending to- wards ensuring that no student goes hungry. Thomas S. Axworthy is public policy chair of Massey College and volunteers as an adviser to the Schroeder Foundation. THOMAS S. AXWORTHY PETER DENTON GWYNNE DYER SUBMITTED The power of the press: more people will see this picture than will ever read all of columnist Peter Denton’s books, combined. ;