How quickly you run into moral dilemmas.

 

 I had this bright idea of mining old letters and journals for blog entries, I was going to copy them verbatim. They’d be an absolutely unchanged record of who I was and what I was thinking.

 

Then I started re-typing the first one, about my time as a newspaper reporter in Williams Lake, B.C. I felt a little squirmy about the bright young thing I’d been and her arch prose. But what the heck – I kept going until I came to one part that described some of the street people, the ‘troopers’ of Williams Lake, who were mostly Aboriginal.

 

I couldn’t make myself put it in. It wasn’t meant to be mean. But it was off-hand, insensitive, essentially ignorant. I had never met a Native person in all my years in Toronto. When I thought it was romantic to find myself in ‘cowboys and Indians’ territory, I hadn’t a clue.

 

So I left that bit out. And later, took out the blog item altogether. And since then, I’ve been questioning my motives. Was it to avoid hurting people carelessly with words? Or was it so that you wouldn’t think the worse of me? I’d like to think it was for the first reason, it’s probably more for the second. Maybe it’s just a case of two different interests landing on the same decision.

 

The other question is – what will I do next time I run into the same kind of dilemma?  I don’t know.