Spelling bees and air shows

For me, Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition is a touchpoint, reminding me of my childhood, and a sign that summer is coming to an end. When I was a child, my parents, siblings and I would come to the CNE, as we called it, several times during its three-week season.

Showing my age, I will tell you that the cheap spaghetti we got in the Food Building then cost $0.25 a bowl, and that one reason we had to return to the CNE more than once was that a couple of times I won the daily Encyclopedia Britannica spelling bee, and had to come back on the final day to compete for the big prize. I never won the full encyclopedia, but I still have the thesaurus I was awarded as the daily prize.

The final day of the CNE was also the last day of the Canadian International Air Show. We would get our spaghetti, spell our words, see the horses in the agricultural building, visit the lavender cart, walk past the midway with its lights and sounds and smells, and then we’d settle on a blanket to watch the planes doing tricks over Lake Ontario. All this with school the next day looming in the backs of our minds.

Apparently, every year the air show draws nearly a million spectators to Toronto’s waterfront.

This year, school didn’t start the day after Labour Day, and though there was a CNE and a Canadian International Air Show, it just wasn’t quite the same.

The night before we went, I saw a post on social media that said, “We’ve spent 10 months seeing exactly what those war planes do to tiny children.”

That same night, the late August humidity broke over my house with wild winds and loud cracks of thunder and blinding flashes of lightning.

I loved it. My mother, however, grew up in an area known as Tornado Alley, and she always feels more than a bit anxious when storms come rolling in because she knows exactly what they can do.

This is privilege: that my childhood was tornado-free. That at no time in my life have I feared fighter planes strafing the place where I live. I’ve been free to enjoy the intensity of wind and thunder and planes that rumble in my chest. I associate them with cheap spaghetti picnics with my whole family.

It was sunny on Saturday when I went to the CNE—the Ex as it is now called. As I felt the boom of the planes in my body, I watched them fly straight up into the sun.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there really is no good purpose for fighter jets.

A friend of mine—a Toronto-based Mennonite pastor—also attended the Air Show, although he was quicker to spell out the truth of the show than I was.

He was part of a coalition that joined together at the Labour Day parade to hand out flyers and engage in conversation with spectators about their Stop the Air Show/World Beyond War campaign.

That group describe the Air Show as “blatant advertising for militarism, war, and violence; it re-traumatizes victims of war, and its deafening noise disturbs residents across the city over the Labour Day long weekend.” They also note that the 2023 Air Show was sponsored by Lockheed Martin, the largest weapons producer in the world. In 2022, the federal government announced a non-repayable investment of $250,000 for the Canadian International Air Show as part of post-Covid tourism initiatives. They note the huge waste of fossil fuel by the planes in the show.

I write to my friend to “confess my sins” today. He writes back, “I wonder if there's a piece to be explored to find a basis for a Mennonite response or perspective—certainly the reactions on social media to anti-airshow protests run the whole gamut but have not, to my knowledge, engaged the ethical or theological questions (probably because they are the hardest to present).”

I mentioned that the fighter jets seemed to fly right into the sun. Someone else did that—in a story. The Greek myth of Icarus tells of a man who flew so close to the sun that the wax of the wings he made melted.

The last few years of COVID and climate change and war and invasion and discovery of graves of Indigenous children have made too many of us turn away, grateful it isn’t our wings that are melting, saying it’s really too bad for those others.

I fear that was me on Saturday, trying to recapture the good feelings of childhood. And yet I don’t think that I can simply excuse it as nostalgia and pick up my sense of care for others the next day when the cotton-candy sugar high fades. I don’t want to live in guilt-ridden abstinence—I do like the idea of soaring and zooming through the sky—but the story of Icarus makes me ask myself who I think I am, whether I’m the one flying too close to the sun with my unchecked privilege or whether I’m applauding those who try to make themselves gods by choosing who lives and dies.

I’m still conflicted. I still had a good time, even if the spaghetti now costs $1.99. I still think it’s okay to go to the Ex and have fun, but we have to figure out how to spell the hard words of the ethical and theological questions, or there will be no winners at the end of the fair