Every so often you see a news story or two that make you do a double take. Case in point: this CBC story about the city of Toronto banning kite flying in a park. I saw the headline, and thought it was a crazy idea. The gist of the story? Apparently some people don’t just fly kites with plain old string. There are people who indulge in the hobby of “kite fighting,” in which two fliers try to cut the string of each other’s kites.

And there’s the problem: the string can apparently cause several problems — birds can get caught in the trees with it, ducks and geese can get the string wrapped around their legs in the pond and lose a limb, city workers find the string tangling their mowers or weed-whackers, and apparently the councillor has had reports of people being injured by the string.

So the city banned kite flying in the park where the kite fighters congregated.

The comments on the news story are entirely unsurprising. “Moronic government”, loss of freedom, “why not take on some real problems”…

But this story got me thinking about two things. Number one was how you balance sensitivities.

To me — a white Canadian guy who grew up in Cape Breton — kite flying was something did once in a while on a windy day. If your parents made you, you’d make a kite like the one in the picture, and fly that. Otherwise, you’d go down to Woolworth’s, blow a buck or two on a plastic one, and fly that.

But to others, this is a big deal. Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Korea, Japan, and the Caribbean all have long traditions of kite fighting.

Here’s a story from AlJazeera about how it’s done in Afghanistan (or at least was done before the Taliban and is now done, after the Taliban:

So while some are upset by the effects of the kite fighters on the park, for others this is their sport — their ultimate, their running, their dogwalking. Does this turn kite-flying into a culture clash? I hope not. But if I use a park for dogwalking and someone else uses it for kiteflying, whose interests are more important, more valid?

Second, one commenter made a really interesting point: “So a few birds are hurt by string, but tens of thousands of song birds in Toronto are killed each year by cats. Cities should ban outdoor cats.” I’m not arguing for such a ban. But I think the commenter underlines an interesting point. That point: nothing is risk-free; no solution perfect.

And surprisingly enough, it made me think of the Chalk River NRU nuclear reactor, which began to make medical isotopes again this week. When the NRU was shut down a couple of years ago, it became a cause celebre, leading to emergency sittings of Parliament and the passage of a bill to keep it open. Then it shut down again, and that time it didn’t seem to create any great public concern.

At the time, Dr. William Leiss wrote a short essay for me about risk and the decisions being made. It occurred to me then that the situation was one in which shutting the reactor was a decision with a high probability of negative effects on the patients who needed its medical isotopes, while keeping the reactor open had a low probability of a catastrophic negative effect. It reminded me that almost nothing is ever clean-cut.

Same thing with the kite-flying (on a different scale, of course):

• Allow kite-flying:  adds a likely source of harm to birds, a possible source of harm to people
• Disallow kite-flying: removes one source of harm to birds and people; removes fulfilling activity for some.

One more example: I’m on the board of the Ottawa Folk Festival, and we had an absolute downpour last  Sunday. Suddenly, a million decisions had to be made. What got cancelled? What got moved? Was the site safe? Which stages could be used? Do we discount tickets? Do we refund tickets? And on and on… Every decision (with the exception of site safety) was not black and white. Each one had to be hashed through (in this case with extreme time constraints). And no decision pleased everyone. You never do. At least our festival director found an opportunity to get a great photo taken.

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