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Short track speed skating is easily the greatest of all the sports the winter Olympics have to offer.

However, the first thing that we have to address are the catsuits worn by the athletes. It’s the elephant in the room, the resonant fact that simply cannot be ignored. Whenever we’re talking about speed skating—the strategy, the danger, the speed, the sheer ridiculousness of it– we’re also talking about how goddamn sexy the competitors are in those outfits. And yes, it is true, I’m not at all against sexually objectifying beautiful athletes I’ll never encounter. In fact, it’s pretty much the main reason I watch the Olympics these days. The human form– full of potential and ambition– performing stunning feats in it’s most perfect earthly manifestation? Yes, I’ll take two helpings please!

Make no mistake, this is the subtext to every speed skating viewing experience you have.

Beyond that there is the fact that the speed skaters, with their helmets and visors, armed with a razor sharp foot knife that’s about as long as a forearm, look like superheroes come to skate for truth and justice.

These people are weaponized, and the fact that it’s short track speed skating ( to say nothing of the positively insane short track speed skating relay) means that they’re CONSTANTLY wiping out.

It’s so unpredictable that luck is almost as important as skill. It’s a last-person-standing kind of sport, one that’s so cruelly constructed you’d think it was invented by a sadistic gym teacher.

No matter, the fact that a wipeout is almost a certainty, and that a wipeout is usually a tangle of kicking razor blades, a crash could have very dire consequence. And so when you see one of the athletes cross the finish line, know that they have just skated through death, and when they take off their helmet and throw back their head, elated and forever, know, too, that they are one of us, and that for a moment at least, we are all beautiful and immortal.

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Well Michael Murray you may enjoy watching sexy athletes court death (because?!) but give me a performance I can watch later via Robyn Doolittle’s tweeted emojis any day.

Or night.

Because we don’t have cable and I don’t want to watch sexy athletes court death, but I don’t want to watch English villagers disappearing one by one on TVO either.

We get it, TVO. English villages are full of old people and old people are murderers so do not move to an English village unless you’re old and want to murder people. The end.

But speed skating? Seriously? Speed skating?? What’s that – one emoji? Done. Well I’m sorry, Michael Murray, but that’s not a story. So not sorry. Figure skating, though, figure skating is a sportstory (yes, that is so a word!) that a reporter can emoji (yes, that’s a verb – I emoji therefore I amji) for people who can’t watch the Olympics BECAUSE OF THE COURTING DEATH THING, MICHAEL MURRAY!

And it’s just like being there on your couch watching Patrick Chan do his short or long or whatever – but faster. My emotions totally ran the gamut, but like in one second.

Don’t believe me? Here it is.

Ms. Doolittle called it, “Watching Patrick Chan: An Emoji Journey” – so right away a heads up that it might be a bumpy ride. Fortunately, I had a cup of mint tea right here beside my computer, just like I do now. Then there was a Canadian flag, which, you know, I’m actually a down-with-borders type but okay. Then a pair of ice skates (well duh, Robyn). But then, oh my Gord – a laughing emoji! Yay! Wait… what? A grimacing emoji!? Nooooooo! Not again! Too soon! Too soon! Oh sweet Jes – a crying emoji? Already? What the – SWEATING?! Oh now come the eff on – screaming? Really? We’re screaming now? In agony? Or maybe… Ah, never mind. Looks like we’re weeping buckets.

Okay. Well. Glad that’s over. <schhhlurp> Ah, mint tea. So refreshing. And just one more week…

It’s hard to know where to start.

Leah McLaren is a well known Canadian who writes a weekly column for the Globe and Mail (likely the country’s most influential and prestigious newspaper.) She was hired young and beautiful, roughly 20 years ago, supported not just by her ability, but also her impeccable connections within the Toronto media and downtown culture. Her columns have always been highly personal, dealing first with being single in the city, and then morphing into whatever stage of life she had entered.

It’s been easy enough to dislike, or at the very least, resent her.

Attractive, affluent and sophisticated, she was the kind of WASP archetype that hovered above the rest, and each week as she unearthed some small epiphany buried within her culture of privilege, the column managed to read like an invitation to a party you would never be asked to attend. As such, she’s always been a lightning rod for reader discontent, and this week it flared up again.

The column which sparked it was a weird one.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170322214423/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/leah-mclaren-the-joy-and-politics-of-breastfeeding-someone-elses-baby/article34386363/

In short, when she was about 25 she was at a house party where everybody was little bit older than her. They had children and spouses, these people, and Leah, single and childless, probably felt unusually peripheral. Out of sorts, she found herself drifting through a sort of Lost in Translation remove,

ending up alone in a bedroom where a baby was strapped into a car seat. At this point, an invincible curiosity about breast feeding overtook her, and in spite of the fact that she was not lactating and had no idea whose child it was, she reached into her bra to remove her breast for the infant, at which point the startled father walked in and politely took his child away.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

The first thing I see is blind privilege– the unexamined belief that the world is full of things for the author to act upon. But I also get her curiosity. I understand having a weird thought and nearly acting on it. I mean, Christ, everybody has to understand that, don’t they? But still, the story really caught fire. It was taken as evidence that breast feeding is still seen as something shameful and perverse. That men had to attack a successful public woman just for being a woman. That the patriarchy must be broken. That women had to support other women. It went like this, and so from the real story, which was just a dimly remembered non-event, all sorts of other stories caught fire and burned through social media.

Funny that.

Regardless, the Globe and Mail immediately retracted the story and Leah McLaren was suspended for a week. What this shows us, as if we needed to see it again, is that newspapers care more about their readers than their writers, which is another way of valuing the advertiser over the consumer. As far as I’m concerned, the newspaper, which is responsible for vetting, editing, shaping and publishing the story, should have had McLaren’s back, they should have supported a weird, potentially very interesting story, but they did not. And so, writers need not bother themselves to look out to the oceans of comments for enemies, but can just take a quick glance at their own offices, instead. Your column, as I was once told by an editor, is the thing we put between the ads.

In March, over 200, 000 students marched in the streets of Montreal. That’s an awful lot of people, and it warrants some respectful consideration. Personally, when students protest I pay attention. I’m middle-aged now, and I like to know what they think, how they experience the rapidly evolving world, to which we (those generations that came of age before the Internet) are cultural migrants. Because of this, I try to move toward them when it comes to understanding an issue, I want to see it through their eyes rather than try to get them to see it through the eyes of my peers. I want to understand where they’re coming from rather than tell them where they’re going, and I do this for all sorts of reasons, but primarily because I think it will make me a better, more empathetic person.

In the last 15 years the world has changed more than it has in all the centuries it was built upon. The Internet is a more important invention than the wheel, and it’s entirely reasonable to assume that the model by which we’ve successfully lived for 100 years, might not be the model by which we’ll successfully live for the next 100 years. The seeds of a movement like Occupy, that seems so disorganized, loud and dirty to many, will very likely bear revolutionary fruit, and I think that this seismic shift in the way we think about our society, is a wave that’s breaking right over the heads of those who dismiss it as aimless, bongo-playing dilettantism. As Fran Liebowitz said, “ In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country capitalism triumphed over democracy.”

We need to think about that, and perhaps respond to it.

My cousins are students in Montreal and they’re brilliant and so well informed that they’ll make your head spin. And what they are doing in striking and taking to the streets is a purely democratic act. A lot of their money is invested by the government in a way that they don’t agree with and they’re asking the government to redirect that money toward something that they agree with—education.  I want to live in a country where post-secondary education is affordable to people. They think of that as a core value. What is wrong with that?

As Dave Eggers said, “The truth is not two-sided, it’s round.”

The mocking tone of certainty issuing forth from elders on this issue lacks grace, empathy and hope, and perhaps even worse, it lacks imagination. I think that we should see what happens, how the students proceed and what goals they might achieve, before jumping in and telling them that they’re wrong and that when we went to school we had to walk 15 miles in the snow.