Catchy slogans are fun and helpful: shorthand for complex concepts — except when they’re not.

It is heartening to see Catholic clergy calling out the stream of inaccuracies and exaggerations around the Church’s responsibility for the residential schools debacle.

It has been a profoundly difficult few weeks to live in Treaty territory and the homeland of the Métis. To live in a land that welcomes people to safety but cannot guarantee it.

Somehow a story about hundreds of unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School became a story about what Pope Francis should do, not a story about the lives lost or why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau only rushed to provide money for documenting such graves when Kamloops was in the headlines, five years after he first promised to do so.

We live in a time in which truth has lost its meaning. We live in a time in which truth is replaced by feelings. When something no longer feels right it cannot be the truth. Every opinion is valid and none is greater than another.

One of the greatest gifts a human being can give is the gift of acknowledgement: a nod, a smile, saying the person’s name out loud.

The discovery of 215 bodies of children in unmarked graves on the site of the former Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia understandably triggered a national response of outrage and mourning. Less understandable is why this particular discovery has unleashed an outpouring of grief and accountability by community leaders and politicians when the evidence of these atrocities is so well known, and when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) Report highlighted this issue for special mention.

Residents of my Edmonton neighbourhood are setting up front yard signs of solidarity to honour the 215 former students at the Kamloops Residential School whose remains were found outside the school. As well, demonstrations were held in some centres regarding the detection of these unmarked graves. This discovery has moved people in a way that earlier revelations about the schools did not.

Parents generally loathe having “the sex talk” with their children. Today they will also need to have “the gender talk.” Let me explain.

Have you ever had an experience in your life and you are not sure if you dreamt it or lived it? Mine goes back at least 50 years and it is as vivid today as if it happened yesterday.