Stephen, Stephen

Last night I saw one of my former heroes displaying feet of clay, and I went home feeling so disappointed. I'm talking about Stephen Lewis, former United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. A Companion of the Order of Canada, and recipient of honorary degrees from various universities, the man has spent a lifetime raising his voice in concern over things that matter.
Last night, however, I heard him speaking for the Ontario Heritage Trust, an agency of the government of Ontario, and it was like hearing him dishonouring his own past. Walking into the Winter Gardens Theatre in Toronto, I was handed a double-fold brochure, as was every other ticket holder. It held the evening's program, but as I looked at it, the agenda was not what I was seeing. In front of me, instead, were all the trees killed to make those one-use papers that most people littered the floor under the seats with and/or ignored. Upon leaving the theatre, every guest who reached for one was given a package of more dead trees, with three booklets, two more brochures and a CD, all wrapped in a plastic sleeve. Surely, an agency concerned with preserving heritage, including natural heritage resources, as we were told repeatedly, could do better than that. Rather than endangering so much of Ontario's natural resources, would they not have done better to simply guide us to a website we could visit, if we wanted more info? The evening was one of profligate waste of the very natural heritage they purport to preserve. Seeing Lewis align his name with such a group was saddening.
The man has such a way with words. Describing himself as having just finished a time of "travelling peripateticly" around the U.S., Lewis played with multi-syllabic words, rolling them around his mouth and firing them off at his listeners at a rapid-fire rate. His innate aptitude for using words to draw shimmering castles in the air just seemed so wasted on the topic he had agreed to present.
I noted from the beginning of the evening that mention of the heritage of Ontario's First Nations' people was conspicuous only in its absence. Apparently, the Heritage Trust regards its mission as relating only to the heritage of those of European descent, although if they were queried on the issue, you could safely bet your whole life savings on a blustery denial of the accusation having any veracity.
At one point in his address, Stephen Lewis, the man of causes, did come through when he spoke of the United Nation's heritage fund being able to find millions to send to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in order to save some parkland there. Noting that the locale is the "worst place in the world" to be a woman, he said that the violence routinely directed against the women of the republic is "unimaginable". Lewis mentioned that it would be nice if such funds could also be found to help the women, but that wasn't the thrust of his talk. Raising money for an agency that wants to use it for such activities as erecting plaques throughout Ontario, the United Kingdom, Europe and the U.S. was; and so he went on to tell us that the Heritage Trust couldn't accomplish their mission without us. Mercifully, the talk did not last more than an hour. It was more than long enough to see someone like Lewis tarnishing himself by associating with such Euro-centric money grubbers who specialize in ignoring the things that really matter.