First slide of winter, 2009

I love taking advantage of little bits of time, especially during this hectic pre-Christmas whirl.

Saturday morning in the fresh snow and cold the little red-haired girl and I headed with the wooden sled to the Elbe riverbank near where we used to live when we first came to Hamburg.

We were only out there for an hour or so, but every time we do a childhood tradition like this I savour it, thinking: this might be the last.  She’s growing up so fast, how much longer will she feel like going out with her old man for a bit of fun in the snow?

Translation of the end:

How you supposed to steer?

You gotta lean!

But I did!

Oh…

Ah…

New Age musician Oliver Shanti convicted and sentenced to nearly 7 years in prison for sexual abuse of children

Why am I posting about this?

Because I’ve written twice on this subject and promised readers an update whatever the outcome of Shanti’s trial.

Because I was vilified by some of his fans, some who saw my posting about this as some sort of self-glorification, others who just didn’t want to hear about it.

So, to be clear:

German new-age musician and sect leader Oliver Shanti has been convicted in 76 cases of child sexual abuse and sentenced by a Munich court to nearly seven years in prison.

From the article:

Shanti was charged with 314 cases of child sexual abuse against two girls and four boys. But only 76 of these cases could be proven in court and the testimony of the girls was not found to be strong enough for a conviction on their complaints. The children were aged between seven and 13 at the time.

Shanti confessed to abusing the four boys during the trial. (Article in German only.)

By first pointing out how I discovered about a year and a half ago that this guy was still widely selling his music despite being wanted by the Munich police for more than a half decade (Pointing that out was my one and only Wikipedia edit, ever…)

And then updating that with a post about how he had finally been apprehended in Portugal…

…a few decided to play shoot the messenger.

One guy from Russia stuck my photo up in a forum.  God knows what he said – I couldn’t be arsed with Google translate, it’s so useless – but he also spouted off in the comments on my blog about how by publicising this fact, all I am is some jealous no-talent guy trying to bring down some spiritual leader.  Blah-blah-blah, the internet.  Why should I care?

I care because there are still too many out there who think that journalists, bloggers, whistle-blowers and other people who spread the word are somehow guilty of crimes worse than those they are reporting about.

Funny thing, that sort of thing happens in Russia all the time.  Reporters go missing, get shot on the street, whatever.  I didn’t even have to get up off my chair to post what I did – it was already out there on the Internet -  and I got dumped upon.

I’m sorry if all of his fans couldn’t deal with the fact that someone whose music they listened to and even loved was under suspicion of being a sexual abuser of children.

I’m even more sorry for them now that that they will have to deal with the fact that he has been found guilty in open court of sexual abuse, and has been sentenced to prison.

But you should have seen the comments I didn’t print from people who convicted him in the court of public opinion before the trial got underway.  Some of them said he should burn in hell, have his lungs ripped out, but I didn’t publish those comments because the matter was still before the courts.

Because the trial is over I now consider the matter closed.  You can comment in English, you can comment in Russian, you can comment away in God-damned Barcrapistoli for all I care, just don’t come bitching at me if you’re a fan and your beloved musician is behind bars.  He got there through his own actions.  A court of law convicted him.  I wrote about it, and so did major newspapers and television media.  Deal with it.

on not giving a pig’s arse about swine flu

The little red-haired girl is getting over swine flu.  Well, I say swine flu because it’s the hysteria du jour, but it could have been anything that lays a kid low for a few days.

She is one of 16 from her grade 7 class of 28 at home instead of school right now, though we don’t know how many of those kids have simply been taken out of school because their parents got the jitters, or whether they’re genuinely ill like she was.

We also don’t know for sure if it was swine flu, but the symptoms seem to match.

Temperature about 38?  She got up to 39.3C – or nearly 103F – at one point, though thankfully she’s now back to just above normal.

Headache? Runny nose? Sore throat? Lethargy? The British National Health service says if you’ve got only two of their laundry list of symptoms you may have swine flu, so with five already, she had more than a double dose, I guess.

Never mind that most of us have headaches, a runny nose, sore throat and feel like crap when we have a common cold, too, but we’ve got to keep the worry up, right?

The other day the headlines in Germany screamed that a healthy 15-year-old girl died of swine flu within a few hours of her first symptoms, that 14 in Germany have died so far, that we’d all better get vaccinated or the numbers will only climb, and on and on.

Tell you what, people.  When the headlines start to blare about how dangerous it is to go outside and move about in traffic, I’ll start to take swine flu seriously.

The number of people in Germany who die in traffic accidents – that includes cyclists, pedestrians, bus riders, car drivers and passengers, the works – was a little under 5,000 last year, or around 13 – 14 every single day.   The annual death toll is always framed as GOOD NEWS, because the figure has been falling steadily from a high of around 20,000 per year four decades ago.

But if we’re all potential victims of swine flu, and are told we should get a vaccination, we’re also all potential traffic stats, against which there’s not much you can do but try to follow the rules and hope for the best.

Every morning when I haul the little red-haired girl’s bike out of the basement to carry it up the stairs for her, I try not to think of the dangers  she faces in rush hour traffic, armed with only a good light, reflectors, reflective vest and helmet.   I shake my head and imagine her steering well clear of those roving one-tonne tin cans of death she has to make her way through, arriving at her destination safely.

Just before the kiss good-bye, I always slip in a “be careful” in as many ways I can think of spread out over each month, a verbal talisman to pin on her as her rear light fades from view, round the corner and out of sight.

I remember rolling my eyes a bit whenever my own mother said that to me.   Every time, without fail: You be careful, now!  It was her standard send-off, though she’d often tack on short summaries of her more harrowing shifts at the Lion’s Gate Hospital emergency intake.

Ya shoulda seen this guy on a bike who came in lass week, I tellya, he was a mess! Car smucked him going down Lonsdale and they brought him in within five minutes, but his head was so bashed in you couldn’t tell what he looked like.

If I was headed up to Whistler skiing I’d hear about everything from torn ligaments, spiral fractures and quadraplegic cases to ski pole impalements and guys getting lost in the woods, their corpses recovered the following Spring.

Anything to ward off a parent’s worst fear, the fear that came true when her first-born was killed in a car accident at 18, and the constant worry that it might happen again to us.

No, we didn’t get swine flu vaccinations, and don’t plan to.  Too late for our daughter anyway, who got hers the hard way.

I know it’s only human to fear a new disease whose final impact is not yet known more than it is to cower at the daily sight of a throng of traffic at an intersection, but I wish there were a vaccine to protect cyclists.  A pill to pop that would shield us from the dangers lurking around the corner.

I wonder if it would sell, though.  First you’d have to whip up the hysteria, but all we do is take for granted that 5,000 people will die a horrible death in this country every year, and hundreds of thousands  more around the world, and hope to hell it isn’t us.

Are we raising our kids to be wimps?

The incoherent ramblings of a clearly disturbed individual aside, most parents would agree that defending a decision which resulted in sending a seven-year-old would-be airplane pilot plunging to her death is pretty stupid.

On the other hand, we don’t want our kids to grow up to be wimps, afraid to take risks, push themselves, put themselves in a little danger to see if they can come out of it OK.

See that cliff? The little red-haired girl climbed it as part of a five-day Extreme Adventures camp we booked her into before leaving on holiday in Canada.

It’s a good thing she had that day of rock climbing, one day where with good instruction and the right gear, she was tested to do her best in a risky situation.

Because the other four days of this camp were anything but Extreme Adventures.

On day one, the kids walked about 2km to the Squamish Adventure Centre, played some games, and watched a movie.

Day Two was for mountain biking, though it really wasn’t. They had them riding along crushed gravel trails.

Whoa.

Day Three was for wakeboarding, a sport like water skiing. They spent most of the day getting to a lake 50km away to bob about in a boat as each kid took turns pulling the one single wetsuit on and off, and then trying to wakeboard.

The last day they took them to a lake for swimming. Swimming! Not exactly Extreme Adventure, but at least it involves getting a little wet.

Ah, but before swimming in the lake, they had to put on life jackets.

What??? I know about lawyers and liability, but life jackets to go swimming?

I clearly remember having checked the box beside FISH on the form which asked Does Your Child Swim Like

a Rock

a Dog

a Fish

And if she swims like a FISH, she doesn’t need a bloody LIFE JACKET!

She’d been in a day camp with them before, so I knew the first few minutes of Day One I’d be filling out release forms. But this time? They handed me such a stack of papers to sign, paragraphs to initial and have witnessed to fully absolve the District of Squamish of any and all liability should harm come to my child, it took nearly 20 minutes to get through it.

“It’s because there are private companies teaching the rock climbing and the wakeboarding,” they said. “It’s for their protection.”

But even after virtually telling them they could dangle my kid by the ankles from a cliff before dropping her head-first into a bear pit and I wouldn’t sue – couldn’t sue, because I’d signed that right away – I still went away happy, eagerly anticipating great tales of Extreme Adventure.

Instead she got one good day of rock-climbing and four days of pissing around, topped off by five hours on the final day sitting on the beach for five hours because she refused – and rightly so – to swim with a life jacket.

Not that she minded pissing around. At the end of the five days there was an evaluation form to fill out, and she was generally positive about the atmosphere at the camp, the counsellor and the other kids, so what the hell.

I couldn’t help thinking, though, that if this is the benchmark for what passes for adventure in a child’s life these days, we’re telling them it’s OK to be overly cautious in life, it’s OK to coast along without taking risks, it’s OK to be afraid of getting yourself in a little danger.

Life jackets.

I would start in on how hrrrmmmmfff when I was a kid before mountain biking, wakeboarding or bloody factor 45 sunblock was even heard of we’d tear out the back door without so much as a bottle of water, scamper up through the forest to find paths up through the rocks to the lake to go swimming and the only life vest was sitting miles away at the bottom of somebody’s boat under lock and key because who even bothered to wear one at all anyway?

Ah well. Even adults wear helmets skiing these days. Now that’s wimpy.