The Chain Is Strong

Bill Clark, from all I have seen, is one great cop. The city owes him a lot. The families of murder victims that he has given answers to owe him a lot. Prosecutors owe him a lot. News reporters, who get the benefit of his unique personality and his talent at clipping up (as we would say in the TV news game), owe him a lot. He's the real thing. Like Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue.

Now, Bill Clark has convinced more than a few of us it is time to pay. :)

Bill Clark is making news these days, angry that the Edmonton Police Service did not get all it asked for during budget hearings at city hall.

Quick background: Edmonton city council granted the police service only 87 of the 136 new employees the force asked for in the 2015 budget. 

Clark made his case to the media, and made headlines by comparing the money the cops didn't get to money that is going to other city initiatives, including bicycle lanes and a suicide-prevention barrier on the High Level Bridge.

Quick background: both of those initiatives were passed unanimously by council. 

High Level Bridge
"We've got several councillors out there that just don't get it," Clark is quoted as saying. "How can you justify $8 million for bike lanes, $3 million for a net on the High Level Bridge when you can look at the Groat Road Bridge and go jump off of that bridge, are you kidding me?"

I am an all-season bicycle commuter and welcome the arrival of bike lanes along stretches of 102 Ave. and 83 Ave. And I get that you can maybe debate bicycle lanes, especially if you haven't seen them or haven't been outside Edmonton to a city, even to other northern cities, where they are in place and where they move people. I get that. I get that bike lanes are dismissed as chic by bottom-line critics.

But to suggest that if you are somehow prevented from jumping off the High Level Bridge that you can simply head over to the Groat, well, that struck me as, well, an opportunity.

To raise awareness and a bit of cash. Not for bike lanes, but, for suicide prevention. So, I tweeted out the idea to my bicycle commuter friends and kicked in $20 to start the fund and waited to see what happened. This afternoon, as I keystroke this blog, we are at $1,000. Make that $1,420. Make that $1,515.

And, now, finally, make that $2,075.

As the street cyclist/philosopher Laura Gibbs would say: rad.

The money will go to support the courageous work of The Support Network of Edmonton and their
programs for suicide prevention and suicide bereavement. They are great people and the city owes them a lot.

We have 37 donors, so far, in this ragtag effort.  If the statistics are right, most of those generous people are acquainted in some way with suicide. I am.

So, we passed the helmet and have raised a grand. Find me at @kub64 on Twitter if you want to help out. And just an idea: it might be cool if the police passed the hat and matched us. It is the season to connect.










Comments

  1. Duncan13 December 2014 at 18:23

    Where do we donate?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Glenn Kubish13 December 2014 at 18:26

    You can give me an address and i'll pick up or you can etransfer to glenn.kubish@gmail.com. I am @kub64 on Twitter if you want to DM me. THANKS for asking. If you have a twitter handle, I will give you a shoutout! Thx again...kub wow!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Duncan2 January 2015 at 10:58

    Any update on the total? Or is $2,075 the full amount?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Glenn Kubish2 January 2015 at 17:18

      yes, $2,075 was the sum total. it was a good experience. i learned a lot. and got a lot of support!

      Delete
  4. Duncan2 January 2015 at 10:58

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more