To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
9
Jul
2022
Sunday July 3, 2022
One of my former computers had an operating system that allowed me to recover my settings and data if I made a catastrophic mistake. I could “restore” the system to a date before the mistake.
Recent news suggests that Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and the U.S. Supreme Court run on a similar system. They want to restore America to a previous time.
Donald Trump’s preferred “restore” date is fairly evident. His “Make America Great Again” campaign wanted to go back to the 1950s, when America was the world’s uncontested and most prosperous superpower.
He hasn’t rebooted his mind since.
The Republican Party, equally clearly, wants to reset America to before the Civil War. When white men still exercised authority over women and other lesser beings.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: abortion, Supreme Court, originalism, Roe v Wade
Sunday June 26, 2022
“Forgive us our trespasses,” says the most familiar prayer in Christianity, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
If those words are so important, why, in 80-odd years of attending worship services all over the world, have I never once heard a sermon connecting them with colonial peoples’ treatment of Indigenous inhabitants?
Indeed, I doubt if any preachers focussed on those words from the Lord’s Prayer even this week, which marked National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada.
Because there can be no doubt that we are trespassing on lands that did not originally belong to us.
Tags: Indigenous, Trespass, settler, colonial
24
Jun
Sunday June 19, 2022
“The best laid plans o’ mice an’ men,” wrote poet Robbie Burns long ago, “gang aft agley.”
Canadian Blood Services and I laid plans for celebrating the one-year anniversary of opening the new Kelowma plasma clinic, this coming Wednesday, June 22. Alas, life had other plans. Things went agley.
I wanted to be the first plasma donor, when the clinic opened in 2021. My wife had been receiving plasma transfusions for 12 years, while she had chronic lymphatic leukemia (CLL). The plasma contained immune-globulin, antibodies distilled from about 1000 donors per transfusion, to supplement her weakened immune system.
I wanted to repay some of that debt, if I could.
Tags: Canadian Blood services, plasma
17
Sunday June 5, 2022
England is having a grand party to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s platinum anniversary – 70 years on the throne. (TV doesn’t tell me how enthusiastically the Scots and Welsh are joining in.)
“Lillibet” and I don’t have a long personal history. Minimal, in fact. Our life stories intersect at only two points.
Tags: Queen Elizabeth, 70 years, A, .C. Taylor
Sunday May 29, 2022
Yet another school shooting in the U.S. Nineteen children and two teachers dead -- plus the shooter himself.
As I write this column, authorities are still trying to fathom the teenaged shooter’s motives. Was he influenced by extremist ideologies? By prejudice? By social media?
I suggest that the terms we use, in examining motives, are themselves part of the problem. Traditional interpretations of “right” and “left,” liberal and conservative, get in the way of understanding.
We need to start again.
Try these definitions on for size. The right worships the individual. The left worships the group.
Tags: politics, labels, right/left