It is Monday, August 1: Civic Holiday (in southern Ontario, old Ontario, some call it Simcoe Day) and Haweater Weekend and the Island’s other giant celebration, the Wikwemikong Cultural Festival and Powwow, are behind us for 2016.
These events were successful community celebrations and captured people’s time and attention for a while in their respective communities and this will happen again this coming weekend with the Manitoulin Country Fest country music event, in upcoming powwows at Zhiibaahaasing and Whitefish River First Nation and at country fairs in Providence Bay, Manitowaning and Wikwemikong.
These are happy times for our small Island communities.
But in less than one week the 2016 Summer Olympic Games will begin in Rio de Janeiro, the first time the international sporting event has been held in a South American city.
Many, perhaps nearly everyone, will watch superb athletes compete for supremacy (or for personal best place finishes) in their respective sport.
And yet, in contrast to the happy celebrations that are a very important part of the summer cycle of activities on Manitoulin Island, the Olympic Games begin against a backdrop of the suspicion related to the increasing difficulty in targeting athletes taking performance-enhancing drugs, a practice which is completely contrary to the ideals of fair play and level playing field sportsmanship on which the modern Olympic games were founded over a century ago. It is becoming more difficult because, we are led to believe, the level of sophistication and subtlety of these drugs is keeping just ahead of methods of detecting them in cheating athletes.
Hopefully this controversy (that has already seen some entire classes of athletes banned from Olympic competition from particular countries) does not overshadow people’s enjoyment of this much-anticipated spectacle of excellence. It is inevitable, however, that the suspicion of drugs, not discovered in the screening process, may give some champion athletes an unfair advantage and so the whole notion of pure sport is very much spoiled by the cheaters, some of whom are apparently supported in their deceit by their home countries as part of the quest for medals for domestic political advantage.
This is unsettling as has been the last two weeks of political conventions in the United States that, while they were convened to formally nominate presidential candidates for the two main parties, they also served to demonstrate to the rest of the world the level of political divide that exists south of the border just now as bigotry and vitriol seep into what should be discussions and debates on the most prudent way to move the nation forward both at home and abroad.
These conventions, because of the attention Republican Party frontrunner and now candidate for president Donald Trump has garnered this late winter and spring, in the primary cycles, came to dominate not only the American but Canadian front pages and news casts over the past two weeks.
This is not typical. Canadians who enjoy knowing all about the political spectrum as well as “news junkies” are the people who, traditionally, would follow the ebb and flow of the U.S. political scene in the years when the president’s job is on the line.
But this year is different and most of us know more about Mr. Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton than we would previously have ever thought necessary.
It is inevitable now that the mean-spiritedness that is bound to characterize at least some of the election rhetoric, especially after the controversial Olympics wind down and from then on until Election Day in November, will become part of the daily news diet.
A young man from Georgia visiting our region last week (his spouse is originally from Espanola) observed that he felt he was living through a second Civil War in his country. The high stakes, levels of anger, one side is directing against the other that is defining this race for the next American president he felt was increasingly defining his homeland.
So the message for us all is to revel in the benign community activities on Manitoulin like the ones already referenced and the ones that will fill out the summer and early fall and to absorb as much goodwill and community spirit from these positive activities by way of an emotional buffer against the suspicion and negativity that will certainly cloud aspects of people’s enjoyment of the Olympic spectacle and to help us guard against the northward creep of suspicion of “the other” that will surely be a hallmark of this fall’s U.S. presidential election.
Adding our own Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s commitment to “sunny ways” to the positive feelings engendered by events like Mindemoya’s Homecoming Weekend, Gore Bay’s Harbour Days, Lions Summerfest in Manitowaning, Kagawong’s Summerfest, Haweater Weekend, the Wikwemikong Cultural Festival (aka the Wikwemikong Powwow) and the traditional powwows that take place in Aundeck Omni Kaning, M’Chigeeng, Sheguiandah, Sheshegwaning, Whitefish River, Zhibaahaasing,and the rotating powwows of Kaboni, Rabbit Island, South Bay all the other cultural activities is surely a partial antidote to the pervasive culture of negativity to which we will certainly be subjected this summer and fall from events over which we have no control.
