Justin Bieber, Fame & Media

Sudden riches and fame are not a natural state and as humans we often just don't handle it well. Whether you are a young person like a Justin Bieber going off the rails or a middle aged lottery winner who blows their winnings in a few years, without proper guidance and support, the end is often a bad one.

That so that being said as much as I cannot stand Bieber, I do have to admit that I'm quite sure if I got that rich and that famous at his age (be honest, think of how you were in your teens or early 20's) I have no doubt I would say and do some stupid ass things as well. I just wouldn't have the frame of reference to deal with what fame brought on and would lack the defenses to deal with what suddenly sprung up around me. I don't think many of us would. Even respected artists today such as say a David Bowie had their period of self-destructive idiocy.

Whether we like their music or not - and I certainly don't like Bieber's - I don't find it surprising when given so much money and adoration that quickly a young solo "artist" would go so completely off the rails. However what I can't seem to get is why we pay so much attention to them.

Don't blame the media, they are ratings driven and deliver what people want, or at least what people tune in to watch. If everyone watching TMZ or Inside Edition suddenly stopped tuning in and started watching 60 Minutes, CBC's Marketplace, or the Discovery Channel, and then wrote to complain to their local news broadcaster every time they aired a Justin Bieber story then programmers would adapt. Putting it all on "media" removes any individual responsibility for their own choices, in effect saying; “I can’t help it, they made me sit and watch it”

The problem is we have become too cynical and too far removed from the decision making process to even try to effect it. Many people talk about "mainstream media" as if it was some out there interplanetary Supreme Being, and rarely if ever attempt to interact with it.

From my own recent experience twice I have written in to member of "the media" over issues I had with their reporting, one was a writer for The Toronto Star, the other was a CBC correspondent. In both cases I received back a reply acknowledging the mistake I pointed out and in the case of The Star, the columnist actually printed the correction in his next column. My feedback mattered and so will yours. Don’t believe me, ask A&E about their decision making processes regarding their response and retraction of it in reference to published quotes of a certain Duck Dynasty cast member.

So Justin Bieber - well he's acting like a lot of people would in his situation but if we didn't pay as much attention to it, then it wouldn't be in our faces so much, and maybe, just maybe he'll go away.

Canada to Kandahar, Kabul and Back

After nearly thirteen years the last Canadian soldiers are finally coming home from Afghanistan. Since the first group of forty special forces members of Joint Task Force 2 arrived in December 2001 to the lowering of the Canadian flag in Kabul today our soldiers have sweat, bled and died in that far away land.

During our time in Afghanistan, Canadians Forces were sent there under three different Prime Ministers, they fought Taliban and al-Qaeda, garrisoned and patrolled the outskirts of Kabul, and went back to Kandahar in force in 2006. There they stopped a Taliban offensive to re-take Kandahar City cold in it's tracks, causing such heavy losses the Taliban had to change tactics from direct combat with large maneuver forces to a smaller scale war of ambushes, raids and the deadly IED's. To finally in their current job of training an Afghan army that can take over and finish what we started.

Through all this the Canadian soldier sometimes had the support of his fellow citizens but he never lost the support of the majority of the Afghan people. Who when Canada redeployed from Kandahar to Kabul came out to say thank you, and to protest.., not that we were there, but to protest that we were leaving them.

You don't have to agree with our presence there, you don't have to agree with the way the war was fought (certainly there was lots to criticize), but we should be proud of those men and women who put themselves in mortal danger so that others could at least have a chance for a better life.

Canada needs to be defended, and if it's not going to be by our soldiers it will be by someone else's. Canada at times will need to stand up and back up it's foreign policy ideals with more than just talk. We have done so regularly in the past and certainly we will do so again in the future.

In many countries soldiers are paid thugs who keep a repressive regime in power, In others they're teenagers forced to serve, reluctantly pulled from home and school for mandatory military service. We in Canada don't do that, and we can never be thankful enough that we still have young people in this country who are willing to stand up, sign on the dotted line and volunteer to do the dirty and dangerous work that sometimes needs to be done.

Thank you to all who served, thank you for giving up everything to put our country's words and will in to action. Thank you for living in the dust and dirt never knowing what the next step might bring, or what threat was around the corner while we sat comfortably at home. And thank you most of all for giving everything you had for everyone of us.

God Bless the Canadian Soldier.