When It's All Too Much

What photography teaches me about surviving the news cycle

- WORDS AND PICTURES BY PAT KANE

I GREW UP FIGHTING BULLIES in the shadow of a steel plant in a Northern Ontario border town. That sounds dramatic. What I'm saying is that I grew up in a rough neighbourhood, where there was a lot of prepubescent schoolyard bullying. Nobody came out of it unscathed, physically or emotionally. We learned hard lessons but acquired some intangible skills from those strange formative years: how to trash-talk, when to fight back and when not to, how to make allies and lasting friendships, and how to win the respect of someone who promises to “pull your arms through your butthole at recess.”

One of those golden schoolyard rules: if a bully ever threatens you, never show up at his house uninvited while he's playing Nintendo with his friends and ask, “Can we be besties?”

Instant laughter. Automatic mockery. Cue the atomic wedgie.

You can imagine my horror (and waves of repressed memories) when, last November, I saw a photo of then prime minister Justin Trudeau sitting around a table with then US president-elect Donald Trump at Mara-Lago.

“He’s done for,” I thought. “It’s wedgie time.”

Since then, the American president’s barrage of disrespect has famously escalated to real threats to our sovereignty. He's also threatened to take Greenland by force, if necessary, and he is no doubt interested in Canada's minerals, many of which are in the North, where I live. I don't blame Trudeau for any of that, but using my keen bully radar, I can say that he didn't exactly help. His fatal error in dealing with Trump was hitting the panic button.