May 2024 – OneDadWithABlog

When did expressing an opinion become an offence? – Sanity takes a holiday

So, I have been following the Harrison Butker controversy and frankly, I don’t understand the outrage. People are losing their shit over what Butker said. Don’t believe me? Well, just check out the online petition demanding the Kansas City Chiefs “dismiss” Butker for “discriminatory remarks”.

Harrison Butker petition

First, let’s understand, that the petition characterizing what the Kansas Chiefs kicker said as “remarks” is just a little misleading. This wasn’t some post-game interview or even an appearance on one of the many podcasts out there (not, that this matters one iota to me). Butker had been invited by Benedictine College, a Catholic post-secondary institution located in Atchison, Kansas City, to deliver the graduation address. It is important to note that this is a CATHOLIC institution, promoting CATHOLIC values. Anyone can disagree with these values but remember… context matters. The audience was… CATHOLIC. Butker wasn’t speaking to anyone else.

The fact that the speech went viral does not change the audience. Just because some people viewed the speech (or in many cases, just excerpts) and were outraged speaks more about those individuals than Butker. To be clear, anyone can be offended but it’s what individuals do after they are offended which interests me.

Any reasonable person would conclude that Butker – a devout Christian – is walking the walk of the faith in which he believes. I wonder if this school were, say a Muslim school promoting Islamic values if the outrage would be as pronounced? My guess is that with terms such as “Islamophobia” being used pretty liberally by media, politicians and the public the response would be muted.

How did we get here? When did our society become so polarized that we cannot just disagree with another’s opinion? Now, the collective feels the need to silence opposing voices and deplatform the speakers. Harrison Butker is just another in a long list of targets of these attempts at censorship.

This is just an opinion but the cancel police appear far more prevalent on the left of the political spectrum than on the right. Don’t mistake me saying this with any possible support I may have for opinions on the far right or far left. I find both equally problematic. It just appears that the silencing of opinions calls are coming predominantly from the left.

Now, on the Butker brouhaha, I have heard the same old arguments like “free speech doesn’t mean speech free from consequences.” While this is true what exactly does that look like? What are the “consequences”? Who is the arbiter of “acceptable” speech?

Increasingly, the answer to the second question is that taking away someone’s professional career is the required “consequence”. To the latter question, the only answer appears to be… the left. And not just the sane/reasonable left formerly known as liberals, but rather the radical left.

For anyone who believes I am over-reacting I give you the case of Nobel laureate scientist Tim Hunt. The esteemed UK scientist had his decades-long career ended so swiftly that it defies logic. The 39 words he said at a conference have “haunted” him. He apologized for saying them but that was not enough for the cancel mob. He had to be “ended”, from a career perspective. That happened effectively during his flight from the conference to his next destination. When his plane landed he was already cancelled.

Keep in mind, this is a 2001 Nobel Prize winner and his crime was saying something that, although offensive, was nothing more than a clumsy mis-step at a speaking engagement of fellow professionals in his industry.

Here are those 39 words.

“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry,”.

Offensive? Yes. Worthy of the vitriol Hunt (and his wife, a fellow respected scientist) received as a result? Worthy of him losing his job and his career? You can decide but in my opinion if there is ever a punishment that didn’t fit the crime in the crazy world of social media/online cancel culture, this may be the best example.

Despite the fact that Hunt and Butker are involved in professions which probably could not be more different they share three things in common which make them an easy target for cancellation. They are both male, they are both white and they are both straight. The leftist mob loves to cancel those from this so-called “privileged” group. With Butker, throw in the fact that he is a Christian and the cancel feeding frenzy on the left becomes fever-pitched.

There is no consistency to the rules the left applies to cancel an individual. The goalposts are constantly moving and in some cases they have been removed altogether. The only rules which apply are that you are more or less of a target based solely on your group identity. As mentioned above, the left cancel mob delights most in figurative trophies of white/straight/males. Give them an opportunity to cancel a POC/LGBT person and the mob loses their taste for blood. According to the unwritten rules of cancellation for the radical left, certain individuals fall under the oppressed category due to their group identity and cancelling them is seen as a leftist sin.

One thing that is heartening is the number of people with a platform who are jumping to the defence of Harrison Butker. Many of those have pointed out that, like me, they don’t agree with everything that Butker said in his speech. However, like 18th century french writer Voltaire pointed out, you can disagree with someone while still defending their right to say it.

There is one thing all of us should remember (well, maybe some more than others based on whether the radical left views you as oppressed or oppressor based on your group identity) that should you tolerate the type of cancellations we see with more and more regularity what happens when the cancel mob comes for you?

One Dad With a Blog

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

The road is long
With many a winding turn
That leads us to who knows where, who knows where
But I’m strong
Strong enough to carry him
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother

Bob Dylan from He Ain’t Heavy, He’s my Brother

Happy International Brothers Day everyone! Yes, today is the day when those of us lucky enough to have a brother or brothers (whether living or deceased) should all stop and think about how our brothers have enriched our lives. We can also look back on some of the funny and not so funny moments with our brothers and reflect on how all of these experiences helped in small or maybe big ways to shape who we are as adults.

To my older (and less handsome) brothers David and Kevin I thank them for the memories of growing up as the youngest of three boys. We lived in a household that had a “rub some dirt” on it mantra which was largely passed down to the children from our mother more than our father (if you ever met my mom you’ll understand).

I remember the good and bad of being the so-called “baby” of the family. The good being that when I was very young my mom would often shield me from the verbal and often physical onslaughts of my older brothers. The bad was that this protection had a finite timeline – eventually my mom would cut the cord (if memory serves it probably ended around the time I was ten) so-to-speak and it became survival of the fittest; the law of the jungle; natural selection; welcome to Thunderdome or whatever other term you like to invoke the idea that you have to fight your own battles.

I have too many stories to tell about growing up as the junior member of the Shapiera clan so I will just share this one. Just remember, no persons were harmed (well, not that much anyway) in the story I am about to tell. I call this story…

The Clothesline

My parents decided when I was about five years old that the suburban life was not for them and their young family so they packed up the Nobleton homestead and moved the clan north to Haliburton. (just an aside, our home in Nobleton stood across from what would become Nobleton Lakes Golf Club. Back in the early 1970s when we left the area there was nothing but farmers fields for as far as they eye could see.).

Adjusting to a new town and school was pretty much standard stuff for three young children – it sucked! However, like most kids we survived and were none the worse for wear (well, almost as you will see from this story) as the saying goes .

My parents were extremely busy trying to run a small resort (which they had zero experience in doing when they took it on) to be the doting parents. This was great news for me and my two brothers! This meant we became like feral children after school and almost 24/7 in the summer months. “Look after your little brother” were words spoken by my mother that my brother Dave probably got tired of hearing. I was like a shadow to my brothers when we lived at the aptly named Paradise Lodge on, you guessed it… Paradise Lake.

Remember this is the 1970s. There was no internet; no malls (at least not in Haliburton – population 1000, give or take); no cell phones. Should a kid want to have fun it was up to their imagination… and nothing else. We learned very soon that having fun may often involve taking risks. Sometimes those risks were in the form of engaging in an activity which could cause bodily harm, or dare I say, without exaggeration… death. Now, sometimes the harm (both real or possible) caused by the activity would pale in comparison to the harm our mom would inflict upon us if she ever discovered what mischief we were up to – but that may be a story for another time.

Me and my brothers were always looking for new and more risky forms of entertainment. Some of these activities were destructive, others may be viewed as cruel by today’s standards and still others were just straight up zany kids being kids fun. The other category was of the thrill-seeking variety. Think of a 6-10 year-old’s version of base-jumping or sky-diving.

My brother Kevin was always the kid among our small group of young ruffians who was looking to one-up anyone else on the risk-o-meter. If one kid did a front flip off an elevated platform into the lake he would surely set up for a back-flip. He was not always successful when he pushed the envelope but it was almost always worth the price of admission for all in the audience of usually pre-adolescent boys.

One day in the summer when I guess we must have exhausted all the fun in our world for that particular day, Kevin decided to step it up a notch. A summer neighbor who was conveniently not at their cottage that week offered the perfect staging area for Kevin’s latest death-defying (at least it was in the eyes of an eight-year old) stunt.

Back in our youth, clotheslines were almost as common as an electric dryer is today. Every backyard had one. The chosen method of drying clothes came in various formats. Some were at ground level and easily accessible. Others were situated in higher positions, usually set up off a balcony so that they took up less valuable backyard space which was often used for family entertaining and activities.

The aforementioned neighbor owned one of these elevated clotheslines. One end was on a second floor deck and the other was attached to a backyard pole. Like clotheslines, telephone and hydro poles were extremely common. This particular clothesline was tailor-made for a young boy to enjoy a little adrenalin-pumping fun! What a waste to use this device for something as mundane as hanging clean underwear (yes, mothers hung out our unmentionables for the whole world to see. We just prayed that our mom didn’t purchase the ones with seahorses or teddy bears. It would mean some serious ribbing from our buddies if they caught a glimpse of our gitch dangling from the family clothesline)!

You can probably guess what the imagination of an eight-year old boy dreamed up to use a clothesline for which was probably 10-15 feet off the ground. This was not a clothesline in our eyes at all – it was a zipline! How cool would it be and how much of a legend would Kevin be with the local hooligans… I mean boys. He was still only eight so impressing girls never probably crossed his mind yet. Being the man with his friends was far more important.

So that is how my brother Kevin discovered that a thin piece of wire encased in plastic which was used to hold a few pounds of wet clothes was not designed to hold the weight an eight-year old boy. The idea was a great one but the equipment and the execution of the stunt was what was lacking.

My memory is of Kevin barely getting clear of the balcony when we all heard a discernable “snap” as the clothesline broke under his weight!! With legs and arms flailing for what must have seemed like an eternity my brother crashed to the ground below. Writhing in pain he probably didn’t notice the gathered throng (ok, I use the term “throng” loosely. There were probably six or seven of us present) of neighborhood boys were howling with laughter, initially unaware that our local pint-sized Evil Knievel was in a degree of distress.

After we composed ourselves and wiped away the tears from laughing so hard one of us (probably my brother Dave. he was usually the responsible one- plus he was the oldest so he would catch the most heck from mom if one of his brothers was injured on his watch.) ran and told my mother.

I am pretty sure my mom was not thrilled to be dragged away from work during the busy summer months. However, my memory is that mom was far more reserved than she often was once she realized her middle child was hurt in a way that looked more serious than the typical “rub some dirt on it” scrape.

My mom gathered Kevin up and carefully put him in the family car to take him the ten-minute drive into Haliburton presumably for medical attention. We had no idea what the extent of Kevin’s injuries were. Boys are prone to exaggeration so I am sure more than one of us speculated that he would return with a missing arm. I do still remember one of our group saying wouldn’t it be funny if Kevin returned with a cast on his injured arm (Kevin had the sense to use one of those flailing arms to break his fall or surely his head would have bounced off the ground like a super ball). Well, maybe that kid was Nostradamus because that is exactly what happened!

The stunt had gone awry but hey so had numerous ones attempted by the aforementioned Evil Knievel, right? Despite the failed attempt Kevin still achieved legend status – at least for that summer – among the local boys. The moral of the story today would be to show caution and don’t take risks. Back then it was that legends break bones too!

Happy International Brothers Day Dave and Kevin! Love you both!

One Dad With a Blog

The pussy-fication of male athletes

I think back to my days playing different sports at various levels of competitiveness . The lessons I learned have been carried on through my life and I have passed many of these lessons on to my kids and as a coach to young competitors. Mantras such as always having the backs of your teammates and never pointing fingers when mistakes are made but rather raising up your brothers/sisters in arms are just a couple of these lessons.

However, one that I have strongly conveyed seems to be getting pushback in the world of safe spaces and trigger warnings. That is the belief that words are just words and they will only hurt you if you allow them to rent space in your head. How one responds in a sports setting will likely be reflected when a person is faced with similar circumstances in the real world.

The recent suspension of Landon Sim, the son of former NHL player, Jon Sim was in a word… ridiculous. The star centre of the London Knights was handed a five-game suspension after an on-ice incident in his team’s Ontario Hockey League conference final match-up with the Saginaw Spirit.

Hockey is a physical game and often players cross the line. Liam Arnsby – captain of the OHL’s North Bay Battalion – was suspended for six games for delivering a hit to the head of Linus Hemstrom during an April 3 game. The hit saw Henstrom taken off on a stretcher after spending several minutes prone on the ice.

Mississauga Steelheads defenceman Stevie Leskovar was suspended four games for an on-ice incident. The blueliner slashed Evan Konyen in the face during a battle after a face-off. Fortunately, Konyen was able to return to the game but the suspension recognized that the possible outcome of such a reckless act could have been much more severe.

So what was Landon Sim’s transgression you may ask? He must have done something worse than slashing an opponent in the face and slightly less egregious than laying out a player with a dangerous hit to the head – the kind of hits that have led to the end of player careers (see former NHL star forward Marc Savard as an example), right?

Well, as it turns out the London Knights forward never actually laid a hand on his “victim”. He made the cardinal sin of inflaming the sensitivities of the woke mob by using a word that the language police deem as “misogynist”. No, he didn’t use the “C” word (as in C-U-Next Tuesday) or even the less offensive but still taboo twat (an aside, I love watching British comedy because both of the aforementioned words are sprinkled in liberally to the dialogue by both men and women). He called his opponent a word commonly used as slang for a cat. Yes, for those of you fellow Gen Xers he used a word that we had as part of the competitive verbal tool kit and used often. He called Saginaw Spirit captain Braden Hache… a pussy.

As I often say context matters. Sim, who had recently recovered from a shoulder injury was responding to a comment made by his opponent. Prior to a face-off Hache said to Sim that he was going to “break your shoulder”. Sim’s response? “No you won’t, you are too much of a pussy to do that”. Really, that is what gets you five games, in the midst of the playoffs no less?

Maybe I shouldn’t admit it but I would have served an unending/overlapping suspension in every competitive sport I ever played. What was said on the ice or on the pitch, where I played a lot of hockey and soccer respectively, was left on the ice or pitch. Usually we said something that may have gotten your mouth washed out with soap at home in my day (yes, this was a thing and I still can’t get the taste of Irish Spring out of my mouth) but was totally acceptable within the confines of the game.

There were two reasons to dig into our urban dictionary of the day during a game. One was because you were angry, which probably meant the other team was winning. The other was because you wanted to get under the skin of your opponent, which probably meant your team was winning.

We were taught that words were just that… words. When an opponent said something a little offside to you your response was under your control. The player delivering the insult was hoping to illicit a response, preferably a physical one, which would lead to a power play for your team , a yellow card or possibly an ejection/red card.

When you returned to the bench after drawing a penalty or getting a player tossed by using nothing but your words you were greeted with pats on the head from your teammates. You had helped the team. Conversely, if you were the player who allowed something as simple as a word (or words) to get you to lose your cool the coach usually found you a not so nice spot at the end of the bench for an undetermined length of time. Your actions were “undisciplined” and “selfish”. You had hurt the team.

What makes the situation involving Sim which led to his suspension even more disheartening for those who believe the world has lost its collective mind is that the player who threatened to break Sim’s shoulder went to the official to report this unforgiveable verbal act. In the world in which I grew up that person would be known as anything from a tattle-tale to a rat. What’s next, telling his mommy so she can call Landon’s parents and tell them what a bad boy he has been?

For clarity, we never saw the word “pussy” as meaning anything other than soft… like a house cat. When we began using the word I would hazard a guess than none of us boys knew that it was also a slang word for part of the female anatomy. Even if we did know, so what? We called each other dicks all the time.

Do you see the problem here? When we start policing words in sports we will be playing a game of whack-a-mole. My kids use words which may be deemed offside that I have never heard before. Should we choose to police language, we will need to establish a full-time arbiter to keep track of words and deem which are acceptable and which will get you banished.

I am going to say something controversial here. I believe this also applies to race and sexual orientation slurs. I say this as someone who has been subjected to slurs. Yes, white people can be the victim of racism as well.

The difference for me is that I was taught to ignore the words. Sometimes I did – sometimes I didn’t. I learned that choosing to ignore the attempts to get me off my game was always more preferable given the potential penalties and the spot in the coach’s doghouse.

No, I am not saying that calling someone a racial/gender/gender identity slur is acceptable. All I am saying is that eventually the referee or the teacher or your mom won’t be there to protect you from the words. What we learned is that eventually the words really didn’t matter to us. Now, instead our kids are being sheltered from the realities of the big bad world where there are people who are jerks. Learning that there are people who will say things that are hurtful is a valuable lesson.

In today’s upside down world we are not teaching our children lessons like stand up for yourself; words are just words but rather we are saying be a victim; words are violence.

For the record, the snowflake culture which wants us to believe that words can be equally as damaging as a punch in the face – we can try that experiment if you want. I have been punched in the face and also been called names like pussy, I will gladly take the latter.

One Dad With a Blog

What does Mother’s Day mean to me?

My mother passed away over four years ago and I still miss her to this day. Mom was in her own words a “tough broad”. She enjoyed life and raised three pretty good boys. I was the youngest of the three brothers and I learned a lot of lessons from my mom. I think the hope of every child is that the lessons they learned from their parents will make them better parents if they ever are lucky enough to be a father or mother.

Many of the lessons I learned from mom were of the positive variety. She was always quick to point out that people who have been on this planet longer than you should be afforded a level of respect. With this in mind I am always the first to hold a door for an elderly person or to lend a hand should I see the need. Thanks mom.

Mom also made it clear that men should treat women differently they would treat men. It isn’t that women aren’t capable it’s just that chivalry was a real concept to my mom. Opening doors for women was a staple in my household. I still remember a time when as a young teenager I was met with a good swift slap in the back of the head from my mom when I dared to open a door and walk through it without holding it for her. That never happened again and I still hold doors for all women to this day. Thanks mom.

I also became very aware that my mom was far more street smart than me or my brothers gave her credit for as we navigated adolescence. Mom gave us just enough rope. Sometimes we did not test the limits of that rope and sometimes we figuratively hung ourselves with the leeway we were granted. Helicoptering was not a parenting style with which we were familiar – sink or swim was more the style adopted by mom. I did appreciate that because boy, did me and my brothers have fun growing up under those rules. We were free range kids long before some pointy-headed academic coined that term. Thanks mom.

One other thing I learned from my mom was that sugar coating moments in life will not really be a benefit. Don’t get me wrong, my mom was my biggest cheerleader. However, if I needed a reality check she would give me one. I played a lot of sports growing up and I heard the positive from mom when it was deserved. However, if I played poorly or blamed others for my shortcomings she was not going to let me off the hook. Pointing fingers when I should be looking in the mirror was not something that went over to well with mom. Thanks mom.

Mom also taught me the importance of having your family’s back, no matter what. As the saying goes “you can pick your friends, you can pick your nose but you can’t pick your family”. There was one incident when a 16 year-old version of myself did something that i should not have done and would have faced pretty dire legal consequences (no, I did not murder or assault anyone. No people were harmed in this story) had I been discovered. Let’s just leave it at mom covered my ass and I avoided the formal punishment that would have been a certainty. Thanks mom.

I say “formal punishment” because I still did face other consequences for my actions. You see, my mom was very old school when it came to raising kids – spare the rod and spoil the child and all that tough love parenting stuff.

Mom grew up in a household in Saskatchewan with 13 children (there would have been 15 but two of my mom’s siblings apparently died in some type of fire when they were very young) in an environment which, to put it mildly, did not include the creature comforts we enjoy today. There was no electricity nor running water in depression era Saskatchewan. Life was hard on the Baraniski clan and that experience made my mom tough as nails.

So back to my mom and her tough love approach. Me and my brothers were subjected to some fairly harsh punishment. When I say punishment, I don’t mean the kind like where parents of today take away your cell phone privileges or send you to bed without dessert. No, I mean the good old corporal punishment that most kids today probably have never experienced.

Does this mean that my mom beat us as kids? Should you wish to characterize it that way then I am OK with that framing of how we were punished. My mom had a temper and we knew not to push her to the point where it made an appearance.

Another lesson my mom taught me which still sticks with me is “don’t speak ill of the dead”. I do not bear any physical or emotional scars from any of the physical punishment handed out by mom. Notice, how I never used the word “abuse”. I can’t speak for my brothers, but I never viewed it as abuse. She was doing what she thought was best to help mold us into better people. I think she did OK. I would say I forgive her but I don’t think my forgiveness is necessary. My mom loved us unconditionally. It may not have been the idyllic upbringing but without my mom I would not have learned all the lessons I learned. Thanks mom.

Happy Mother’s Day. Love you mom – miss you every day.

One Dad With a Blog

And then they came for my hockey cards – how woke has jumped the shark

Watching the NHL playoffs one can’t help but notice how the advertising landscape has changed. Same-gender couples are not only featured in ads they appear to be the dominant representation of relationships in these ads. Oh, there are still heterosexual couples featured, they are just usually purposely mixed-race couples.

The shift in individuals featured in advertising while not representative of our population does not really bother me a great deal. It has given me and my white male friends an opportunity to engage in a new game – spot the white guy. There is a hierarchy of points in this game to spotting a white male.

The point system is below:

gay and single: 1 point
gay and in a relationship: 2 points
heterosexual and married or in a relationship (biracial): 3 points
heterosexual and married or in a relationship (non biracial): 5 points
heterosexual single male: 10 points (1 bonus point if the white guy in this ad is intelligent)

I am not going to march in the streets, post protest TikTok videos or boycott these companies to condemn the obvious virtue signaling advertisers are part of by checking diversity boxes. (full disclosure, I have boycotted all Gillette products since this ad went viral). I can recognize a diversity agenda in advertising but if it doesn’t really have a major impact on me or society I will chuckle at the obvious and move on (note, I still take delight by the result in over-the-top attempts to pander to people who are not even part of a company’s target audience while simultaneously alienating their core customers. The resulting decline in sales could be predicted by a first year marketing student. I am looking at you Bud Light and Target!)

Now, notice I said if something doesn’t impact me (or my family) I am not too fussed over how companies all are in lock-step with this woke agenda. Well Tim Hortons, you have stepped into that world. No, it’s not the fact that most of your ads are not really accurately representing our population. Tim’s has made the egregious error of messing with my hockey cards for no real reason other than to promote an agenda! Big mistake!

To what exactly am I referring? Well as the saying goes “a picture is worth a thousand words”.

This week I ordered my one milk/no sugar medium coffee and as I often do when they are available, I also buy a pack of hockey cards. Now, I already find it annoying that you only get three cards in a pack. I also am further ticked off that Tim’s has upped the price from $1 to $1.50 for the current series. However, the final straw may be that the company, in a far-too obvious attempt to show how virtuous they are, have started including more and more cards featuring PWHL players. When I opened my pack, I was quietly optimistic that I may find a card featuring McDavid, Bedard or maybe just maybe Gretzky. Instead, I was greeted by three cards with PWHL players. I was more than a little disappointed. I was ticked!

Now before anyone reading this goes to the typical tropes and starts calling me a “sexist” or “misogynist” let me explain my annoyance with this agenda being pushed by my go-to coffee spot. First, remember the cost for these cards. Paying a buck was bad enough but increasing the cost by 50 per cent is a bit of sticker shock in this current economy.

The cost could previously be at least partially justified because of the collectible value of some of these cards. I have been lucky enough to open packs in the past with single cards which have a retail value in the low three figures. Most of the cards are worth less than what I pay but at least there is the hope I get one of those higher value cards.

Here is my beef with the PWHL cards. Each pack features an insert card. These are the most valuable cards. With all due respect to the women players, the collectors are looking for McDavid, Bedard and Matthews (well, maybe not Matthews ;)) not Nurse, Poulin and Knight. The former trio are the cards which will hold their value, long term. Truth be told, I have checked the current value of the PWHL cards and some have shockingly high values. That said, any collector knows this value has been artificially inflated and they will drop like the value of an Auston Matthews card after another first round playoff exit.

Tim Horton’s should have proposed an all PWHL set (maybe with a few NHL legends included to increase interest). Shoehorning the PWHL cards into a set which, as previously stated, are more than a little overpriced will only sour collectors. The collectors are the people who drive the sales of these cards and like it or not I predict a backlash in the form of reduced sales of the current set. I am sure Tim’s braintrust will never admit their error but the proof will be in sales.

I know people will say “you should support women’s sport and just suck it up.” Why in the ghost of Guy Lafleur should I have to spend money to support anything, including women’s hockey? I don’t support AHL hockey. My money – my choice.

So in closing, I have one piece of advice for Timmies. Stop screwing with my hockey cards and stick to making coffee!!

One Dad With a Blog