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9
Jan
2021
Here it is. The night before Christmas.
Technically, Christmas is a Christian celebration. About the birth of a baby in Bethlehem. Christian worship services – conducted mostly online this Christmas – will tell and re-tell, in story and song, of shepherds and angels and wise men from the east.
But outside of church, those songs and stories blur into a kind of emotional fog, about good wishes and gifts, a fog that envelops Jews, Muslims, Baha’is, Hindus, everyone.
It’s going to be a different Christmas this year. Thanks to the second wave of Covid-19 infections, multi-generations will not gather around a fireplace. Or a burdened table.
There will be few Norman Rockwell Christmases this year.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Christmas Eve, Blue Christmas
I think my dog is paranoid. If she thinks she hears something that might be a doorbell – such as, say, clinking pots together as I prepare a meal – she launches into a paroxysm of growls and howls, races to the front door, and barks furiously at nothing at all.
\ Her behaviour makes me suspect she’s been watching too much social media.
Most social media postings are, in my opinion, basically Pablum for adults. Bland meaningless chat. But there’s a subgroup of users who can see conspiracies under every news report.
As a journalist, I subscribe to several non-mainstream news sources. Sometimes merely following a link, to check the authenticity of a story, is enough to put me onto someone’s mailing list for a steady stream of fear, anger, and venom.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: social media, conspiracies, misinformation
We humans love to follow beaten paths. Both figuratively and literally.
But what if you don’t want to go along a beaten path? When I’m out on the local trails, walking my dog, I occasionally take side trips. To explore a rock face, perhaps. To circumnavigate a small lake. To find an alternate viewpoint.
But I’ve noticed that if I take that diversion more than once or twice, my feet leave enough imprint that other people start taking the same route. And before long there’s a whole new beaten path, that wasn’t there before.
Figuratively, too, we also like to follow beaten paths. In politics, in theology, in economics, we are much more comfortable endorsing and supporting ideas that someone else has expressed already.
Tags: paths, exploring, reforms
n all the hoopla about the U.S. election last week, a couple of significant events sneaked by. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that corporations are not persons. And the U.S. media acknowledged that they have ethical responsibilities.
First, the media. Friday night after the U.S. election, still-president Donald Trump ranted for 16 minutes of outright falsehoods and accusations without evidence, that he had won the election. At least six American networks cut him off in mid-sentence.
For the networks to pull the plug on a sitting president is an unprecedented act.
In the second piece of overlooked news, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that, in certain situations, corporations are not persons.
Tags: Trump, corporations, networks