What we choose to see
Roderick Benns is the publisher of The Advocate. An award-winning author and journalist who grew up in Lindsay, he has written several books including Basic Income: How a Canadian Movement Could Change the World.
When I arrived back in Lindsay in 2017 to kickstart the Advocate, I still remember the exhilaration I felt at finally coming home.
After a 20-year absence, returning only occasionally to visit my mom, I had finally gotten back to the town I love.
While many businesses and places had changed, many remained. The Olympia was still here – a beloved restaurant anchor. The Academy Theatre, always in a constant state of reinvention. Retailers like Kent Florist, Cathy Allan, Kent Books and many more.
And as the Advocate developed its social media pages, we began to share our articles and columns online. If you want to feel insecure about the future of humanity, though, just spend some time on Facebook message boards.
We might load an article about an intersection expansion and soon people are debating the “Liberal agenda on immigration.” Or an opinion piece on defence spending elicits profanity-fueled comments about how great Donald Trump is. Then someone else will chime in (perhaps all in caps, because at this point why not?) about how the city is getting bloated and we need to get back to the good old days of three men and a snowplow.
And it remains clear – from all manner of clues – that the least qualified among us usually have the most to say.
With social media message boards, an accomplished doctor and a 21-year-old high school dropout can both comment on a post with potentially equal algorithmic weighting – but the 21-year-old’s post will generate more engagement if he’s rude. Traditional media gatekeeping may have had some flaws, but it at least created consequences for incompetence – and none better than not being published.
For me, the town I had returned to looked like a postcard, as did idyllic villages around Kawartha Lakes, from Kinmount, Fenelon Falls and others. But the beauty I saw in our downtowns and green spaces, not to mention in the efforts of community-driven people, was not reflected on online message boards. Here, Lindsay was denigrated and run down by couch commanders, agents of hatred whose only purpose in life seemed to be to tear down.
At first, I tried to engage. One regular commenter seemed educated enough, but everything was negative. He had moved here from Toronto and didn’t seem to like anything about the community. I wrote what I believed to be a thoughtful post, suggesting he get involved and volunteer to make the kind of change he wished to see.
I received no response, of course, for that would have meant engaging in civil discourse, rather than pointless agitation. We choose to see what we want to see.
During my time away, professional theatre began to flourish at Globus Theatre, near Bobcaygeon. And since I returned nine years ago, in Fenelon Falls we now have the magical Grove Theatre. Incredible new businesses like The Pie Eyed Monk, Kindred Coffee Bar (in Lindsay and Bobcaygeon), Queen’s Bistro, and wonderful non-profits like Kawartha Community Foundation and Ampere have all come into their own.
As 2026 begins, I still carry with me a feeling of gratefulness to be back. Lindsay is growing, yes.
I’m just going to choose to grow along with it.
I moved here from the UK 11 years ago and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Oh, there are the odd niggles .. potholes and labyrinthine bureaucracy at all levels, to name but two. However these are far out-weighed by the kindliness and friendship I have encountered from neighbours to staff of shops, banks and the RMH. No .. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.
a famous quote comes to mind, “be the change you want to see”, it is so easy to sit on the sidelines and complain
Mandatory adult education, education required for everyone to access social media, might be a good way to increase social media literacy (and to reduce belligerence). Social media is riddled with bots, paid agitators, and individuals who intentionally publish malicious disinformation to undermine the facts and to mobilize bias against leaders and against beliefs and ideas. Part of the problem with widespread delusion (according to Abacus, some delusions are believed by almost 50% of Canadians) is the legacy of the equity movement in education that taught a couple of generations of children their beliefs and opinions are equal to and as worthy as well-founded, well-researched, well-evidenced facts. Not only do we see dis- and misinformation on social media about the facts that underpin our reality but those who publish it are often belligerent in the demand the rest of us believe it.
Social media is still in its infancy and still learning so we can’t expect too much of it as it grows. But it isn’t too soon to educate our population about how to weigh evidence and form well-founded beliefs. That requires a population that values truth, though, and that is perhaps the bigger challenge. What is “the truth”?
Social media has a great potential to educate and to reform. One way to do that is to use the law to educate our citizens to abandon our myopic focus on how dreadful Canada is with no core identity and an abominable history of colonization to a wider view of our place in the history of the world as leaders in human rights and progress. Canada may have no ethnic national identity but we are a nation of perspectives and ideas associated with our shared place and ever evolving culture. That is worth promoting despite the mortality of everything that lives.
Lindsay’s rapidly growing society is as vulnerable to silos and ghettos as any other rapidly growing community. We should harness social media to bring people together in our public square to share with one another as much as we can. Cutting people off – by banning social media – for their delusions and their rough speak is not a good idea as that can create a hostile underclass that can grow and cause trouble. I think we need to tolerate the negative while taking steps to organize education in positive thinking and, essentially, in how to distinguish facts from disinformation. The issue is of such grave importance that the very foundations of western epistemology are at risk of crumbling. We don’t want, do we, to return to a world where superstition, scapegoating and chaos rules?
Carpe diem, Kawartha Lakes.