To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
4
Sep
2017
There are no statues of Benedict Arnold in the U.S. Because Arnold was a traitor. After a brilliant career in the American forces during the War of Independence, he defected to the British and fought against his former government.
On the other hand, General Robert E. Lee also fought against own government. He led the Confederate forces in the Civil War. Doesn’t that also make him a traitor? But statues honouring him litter the southern states.
Now there’s public pressure to remove statues that honour and promote the Confederacy. Mostly because they fought in support of slavery, which we – well, those of us blessed with a social conscience – now condemn.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Confederate statues, Confederacy, Robert E Lee, Lord Cornwallis, John A MacDonald, monuments
30
Aug
"I've been diagnosed with terminal cancer," the CEO told his vice-presidents. "The doctors say that I have five years to live. You three have run this business for years, but I want to hand it over to just one of you as sole owner.
"So, for the next two years, I'm giving you an extra task."
He reached into his desk, and pulled out three small burlap bags. "Seeds," he said. "I’m not going to tell you what to do with them."
Two years later, he called the three vice-presidents to his hospice bedside.
"Tell me what you did with my seeds," he ordered.
The first vice-president stepped forward....
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Parable, talents, seeds
28
Let’s give Donald Trump some credit for consistency – he has never, at any time, said that there are “some fine people” among Islamic terrorists.
He’s probably right that there are “some fine people” among the white-supremacist neo-Nazi racist alt-right Confederacy-clinging thugs who rioted and murdered in Charlottesville. If you use the right criteria to evaluate them, that is. They drink beer with their buddies. They love cars and pickup trucks. They go to church and to ball games. They may even tithe. They loan their lawn mowers to neighbours.
What’s not to like?
Trump probably considers himself to be a good father, a good neighbour, a nice guy -- when he’s not playing president.
Little wonder he found it hard to condemn people like himself.
Tags: ISIS, alt-right, fascist, white supremacist, Charlottesville
23
While I worked in Toronto, a group from our office made regular trips downtown to give blood.
On one of those trips, I saw a man I knew walking aimlessly along the street. “Don!” I called. “Come and join us. We’re going to give blood.”
I knew Don McCallum from his time as a minister in Newfoundland. I had visited him twice in Baie Verte; he had written articles for the magazine I edited, the United Church Observer. As we lay in adjoining tiltback chairs, filling our bags of blood, he told me that he had felt that he was in Toronto because he felt that God was calling him to move on.
He didn’t mention that he had been in Toronto for several weeks already. He hadn’t found a church that needed him. He was broke, despondent, and homeless. He had just 23 cents left in his pocket.
“I was about to give up,” he told me years later. “I thought I had nothing left to give. And then you showed me that I did still have something. I could give some of my blood to someone who needed it.”
Tags: blood, blood donors, Canadian Blood services, Dalai Lama, altruism
21
Once a catchphrase starts being circulated, it takes on a life of its own. And so the news media have been declaring, with unusual unanimity, that the solar eclipse scheduled for 10:23 this morning, Pacific Daylight Time, is “the only total eclipse of the sun in Canada in the last century.”
That is simply wrong.
I know, because I experienced a total eclipse of the sun on July 10, 1972, in Nova Scotia.
Perhaps there’s some excuse for the claim about this being the “only total eclipse in Canada in the last century.” Nova Scotia was the only populated part of Canada to witness the 1972 eclipse. Otherwise, the arc of totality swept across the high Ar
Tags: eclipse, Nova Scotia, Tatamagouche, 1972