The other day I took a precious few minutes off from my day job as a lackey of the corporate media to drop my son at a downtown church, where he was starting a hunger strike in opposition to the G-8.
This should have been hard for me because, according to an activist Web site, I am an arch-villain of the corporate press.
After blasting me, this Web site says we in the media think young people "are all stupid sheep who would be better off if they did not worry their pretty little heads thinking about politics."
The writer obviously hasn't been touring the Herald newsroom, where many of the reporters are under 30.
And he certainly hasn't been listening in on my family.
At our place, we have no sheep, only tigers. Political debates rage and everybody gets a say. Age has nothing to do with it; knowledge is everything.
Recently, I've lost many rhetorical jousts to Gabriel Cardenas-Sharpe, my college-student stepson who at 20 has the mind of a political philosopher and firm convictions about what's wrong with the world.
The G-8 leaders, he says, have done nothing to cure the problems they created in Africa through colonialism, installation of corrupt leaders, and supply of arms to their regimes.
Gabriel considers G-8 attempts at aid to be hypocritical window dressing that will do no good until the whole system changes to allow genuine social democracy in Africa.
I'm inclined to think the G-8 leaders are really trying, but every time I say it he flattens me with another blast of facts about Somalia or Nigeria or Sudan.
In sympathy with Africans, and to raise the profile of the enormous tragedies of HIV/AIDS and starvation, Gabriel is willing to go without food for more than a week.
If you think that's easy or trivial, just try it.
How could I believe Gabriel is a "stupid sheep?" He's a tiger of conviction and passion, like many other young people who will be in Calgary this week.
The huge majority of G-8 dissenters don't want trouble, only solutions.
We won't do ourselves credit as a city if we close our minds because a few idiots are out for trouble.
In our family, the impact of the G-8 would be almost comical if we weren't so concerned about Gabriel.
I'm being shredded as the ultimate government goon, he's in the third day of his protest fast, and his mother, Sydney Sharpe, has just been denied G-8 media accreditation.
Many of you know Sydney. Until last year she was an editorial page columnist at the Herald.
She's written three best-selling books and right now is finishing one on the oil industry and the environment.
With full backing from her national publisher, Key Porter Books, Sydney hardly seemed like a candidate for rejection.
When she was refused her media pass she said: "Hmm -- is it because I once ran for the University of Alberta student council with a bag over my head?"
Toss a fiercely opinionated 15-year-old daughter into this mix, and nobody is ever taken for a sheep around our house.
Unfortunately, anxiety over the G-8 is already demonizing and dividing people as the event approaches.
That isn't going to happen in our family; it shouldn't happen to the city, either.
Call 235-7236 or e-mail to dbraid@nucleus.com
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