I am extraordinarily honoured and flattered to be here and to be
receiving this honour from a union for which I have had tremendous
personal affection ever since my experience labouring, with what
often seemed to be cosmic futility, in the Ontario legislature.
To be in the same category as the legendary Nelson Mandela or
Tommy Douglas is almost more than my frail psyche can endure.
In fact, I am leaving on Saturday for Mozambique to spend two
days with Mandela and his wife, Graca Machel, who is a close friend.
I will tell him that we have this faint strain of continuity we
share courtesy of OPSEU.
I am honoured for three reasons.
1. I knew and loved Stanley well.
He was a close friend and we worked together on a number of
occasions. An award in his name means more than you can imagine. My
mind turned to my father’s autobiography, in the course of which
he deals with Stanley in a reverential way. He describes a
by-election in 1942 in Winnipeg North Centre, caused by the death of
J. S. Woodsworth, where the CCF was casting around for a candidate.
The choice of Knowles was unanimous. It had also been Woodsworth’s
choice. Stanley was born in Los Angeles of Canadian parents with
roots in Nova Scotia. His natural tendency was to be abstemious in
food and physical comforts, to the point that he was always thin –
not to say scrawny. My father commented that while others became
visibly older, Stanley’s age was catching up with his appearance.
Stanley had a fine sense of humour, and a skilled lawyer’s
capacity for organizing facts and arguments.
2. I am touched to receive an award from a union.
I have never wavered for a second – it is genetically endowed,
a molecular part of my body – in my commitment to democratic trade
unions. I love the union movement. I always understood, over a
lifetime of political and related activity that unions are forces of
progressive social change and I will never join the trendy abuse on
unions from the right, and though it breaks my heart, sometimes from
the left.
Those mindless nitwits forget history and how social forces drive
the human agenda. We are all in the debt of the union movement and
one day, by god, when capitalism is finally routed in terms of the
worst excrescences it brings – probably not in my lifetime, but
maybe in the lifetime of my children – we will collectively build
a decent society again.
3. I have always thought there is something uncomfortable and
awkward about receiving a presentation when it goes to an
individual.
It feels hyperbolic and extravagant. In the scheme of the great
pageant, the contribution of any individual is microscopic. I have
been working in the developing world as a diplomat in the 1980s and
in the family of the United Nations system in the 1990s. My life at
this moment tends to be consumed by the tremendous international
struggle against the pandemic of HIV AIDS focused so dreadfully in
east and southern Africa.
The scourge of HIV/AIDS
I spend a lot of time there. I am just back from Zimbabwe and
will return there again in May. It is almost impossible to find
words to describe how that continent is shredded, its infrastructure
destroyed, by a virus of such incomparable damaging proportions. 16
million have died; 25 million carry the virus; 2 million die each
year; 4 million new people are infected. How do you deal with the
statistic of 13 million orphans? I can’t convey what it means in a
continent like Africa.
All over east and south Africa, all across those countries, are
child-headed households. They are almost always headed by little
girls of 11 to 14, with no means of support or survival, trying to
parent a family that is impoverished with no food and no shelter.
What do you do when there is no extended family? The parents, the
aunts and uncles are dead. I have watched these kids struggle. Many
of the young girls are driven to prostitution, boys to child labour.
And you watch as a whole society is shredded and you need to respond
in human terms so a continent doesn’t lose a whole generation of
people. It is perverse and racist how we deal with Africa.
It is unfathomable that we are willing to watch tens of millions
of people die and become infected with a sickness not seen since the
bubonic plague. I have never seen anything like the response from
the donor countries and global institutions. It is so pathetically
slow; so slow as to be inconsequential and inert.
And there are real things to be done. With a few simple medical
interventions, we can cut transmission around birth and
breast-feeding. With testing and counseling so people know their HIV
status, we could save millions of lives. If drug companies would
bring prices down dramatically, to make it possible to deliver the
drugs to symptomatic people and prolong and save lives, we could
rehabilitate a continent. We may be right at the point,
psychologically, of a breakthrough.
But, of course, I am speaking to people who share a similar
political analysis, which is wonderful. It means that you know, and
I know, that the moral delinquency that allowed the pandemic to rage
for more than 15 years in Africa without intervention, amounts in my
mind to something that should be seen as a crime against humanity
– as a kind of mass murder committed in absentia. If the same were
true in North America or Europe every conceivable tool would have
been mobilized overnight. It talks to our balance of ethical values.
Some parts of the world are expendable and some are treasured.
Middle of a graveyard
When dealing with HIV/AIDs it seems too overwhelming for anyone
to respond. In Zimbabwe, we tried to set up criteria for
distributing money when dealing with the pandemic. We went out to
rural districts to see what was happening. We realized the
tremendous power of women, and how women are redefining work and
saving lives in ways beyond belief and to be cherished. Sometimes it
feels overwhelming, because the pandemic is so extensive. From time
to time you feel you are in the middle of a graveyard. I was in the
Harare hospital and every bed in the adult men’s ward, and every
bed in the adult women’s ward and every bed in the children’s
ward was filled with people who were clinically diagnosed with AIDS
or who had opportunistic infections in the transition from HIV to
AIDS. The hospital staff would roll in the coffins, tin coffins, to
take away the people who had died in the night or the day to the
graveyard. It’s Dante-esque, Khafka-esque, unreal. Dealing with
that overwhelming human predicament, you get lost.
Genocide in Rwanda
For two years, I served on an international panel on genocide in
Rwanda. It was almost beyond my capacity to deal emotionally and
psychologically with the massacre sites. 800,000 people were
slaughtered in a genocide which the entire world watched and raised
not a finger. The admirable Canadian general, Romeo Dallaire, begged
for 5,000 troops to save more than half a million lives and the
world was paralyzed. And the perversity, not to say the criminality,
of the U.S. and France, made it impossible to get the troops. As I
stand here, as someone immersed in the issue for two years, I tell
you that you can’t come away without seeing evidence of a racism
so deep and profound that those people became expendable.
Seeing a way to make a difference
I wanted to find something within the Canadian experience I would
support. Let me tell you how I plan to use the money that comes with
this citation. [The Stanley Knowles Award includes a small
honorarium] There is a little Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in
Canada called Operation Eyesight Universal which works out of
Calgary of all places. It deals with ophthalmologists and clinical
eye departments in villages in India and East Africa. It works in
Nairobi with the Kenya Society of the Blind.
I went to a village school to see this NGO in operation. 275
primary students, arranged by classroom, lined up to attempt to read
an eye chart which had been erected on the side of the school. And
any who couldn’t read the chart adequately got sent to a classroom
where an ophthalmologist did a clinical investigation of the child’s
eyes. And sometimes the child needed drops, or there may have been a
more serious infection that needed antibiotics, or the child needed
glasses, and they could all be prescribed.
Sometimes everyone gets their eyes attended to. The villagers
arrive in large numbers and march in from all over. And they line up
as well. Many are quite aged and try to read the charts. Many are
illiterate, so you need a different eye chart with just the letter
E, pointing up and down and left and right, and they say which way
the E is pointing. Many can barely see at all and they go to the
ophthalmologist. About 80 per cent or so have cataracts and an
operation is scheduled for three days later and in 25 to 30 minutes
the operation restores their sight. People in their 40s to 60s, who
haven’t seen for decades, are able to see in an instant.
What attracted me to this organization was it reclaimed vision
for nearly two million people over 30 to 40 years and it struggles
to find enough money.
It’s not big like Oxfam or Save the Children. So if you ever
want to make a contribution to help the human condition, let the
governments deal with the billions that are needed, let the unions
raise the thousands in more modest and equally compelling ways. You
can feel pretty good about it.
Personal emotions
My sister Janet (Solberg) is a good friend of your union and has
done work for it many times. She has friends and colleagues in
OPSEU. Yesterday, her husband underwent a serious seven- to
eight-hour operation in Mount Sinai Hospital for cancer. Late last
night, I learned that the surgeons feel confident about the outcome
and that Henry will recover fully and be able to live a full and
complete life. I am personally attached to my sister so I am kind of
overwhelmed with the complex emotions of trauma and joy this
morning. I can’t tell you, in personal terms, how the joy is
accelerated by this award from you and being here to share some
reflections. Despite the discombobulation of the last 24 hours, the
world is coming together again.
Leah Casselman:
When I was trying to reach Stephen to tell him about this award,
he had just taken his wife (Toronto Star columnist Michele Landsberg)
in for knee surgery. I phoned at 11:30. I had never met him, but it
was like we had known each other for years; an instant kind of
connection.
He was flabbergasted. I thought, this is good. Everyone we have
honoured has felt the same way and it is an impressive list. He
asked what he should talk about, and I said talk to them about
getting their heads out of local issues (I think my actual words may
have been something more like get their heads out of their asses)
but get them out of what is happening and open their eyes and move
it forward a little step. And of course he has done that. We always
have to keep our heads up. Our debates in the last few days have
been minuscule compared to what is happening out there. Let’s keep
our heads up and ears open and contribute to the world we are a part
of.
Stephen, thank you for doing that and for your work for the human
race. You are an outstanding individual.
Stephen Lewis, on receiving the plaque
I would like to report that when Leah said, with her elegance,
she would like me to get your heads out of your asses, there was no
respect in her voice. If she will forgive me, there was no respect
for either part of your anatomy.
I appreciate more than I can say the reference to Michele
Landsberg a passionate socialist feminist columnist for the Star. I
want to invoke her name. We have been married some 37 years and I
have the privilege in life of being able to phone home at any time
of night or day and ask, "Honey, what do I believe about so and
so?" And I will invariably be told, and then I can come to
gatherings like this to disgorge what I would never otherwise be
able to disgorge.
[You can reach Operation Eyesight Universal at
www.giftofsight.com or 4 Parkdale Crescent NW Calgary, Alberta T2N
3T8.]
Convention 2001
Index
