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16
Oct
2021
Sunday October 17, 2021
We who live in the enlightened western nations tend to heap scorn on the Hindu caste system. We don’t recognize that we have our own caste systems.
Indigenous communities scattered across the boreal north are our Dalits, the outcastes, the untouchables. “At any given time,” writes the Council of Canadians, “there are drinking water advisories in dozens of First Nations communities across Canada.”
Most recently, Iqaluit residents were assured their water was safe, even though it smelled of diesel. Then this week that assurance was reversed – it was now unsafe even when boiled.
Can you imagine an entire city, like, say, Regina, being told its tap water was unsafe for drinking, for cooking, for washing, even for washing your hands in? There’d be hell to pay.
But this is Iqaluit, not Regina.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: COVID-19, Iqaluit, castes, Molokai, Damien
15
Thursday October 14, 2021
On Friday the 13th of October, 49 years ago yesterday, a plane crashed in the highest peaks of the Andes.
Thirteen people died instantly; five more died soon after of injuries and cold. Another eleven died when an avalanche buried the remains of the fuselage.
In the black and freezing night, Mando Parrado sometimes talked with his friend Arturo, slung in a makeshift hammock to ease the agony of two broken legs.
“What good is God to us?” Parrado said. “If he loves us so much, why would have leave us here to suffer?
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: love, Parrado, Andes, cannibalism
10
Sunday October 10, 2021
A rising tide of people in this country apparently believe – body, mind, and spirit – that they are called overthrow the established powers-that-be. By any means. Including physical insurrection.
They seem to buy into some kind of conspiracy which they – and they alone – know about.
I have a deep suspicion of all conspiracy theories. I find it far simpler to blame basic human emotions –greed, anger, ignorance, even stupidity – than to imagine vast numbers of people somehow collaborating in a mass movement to take over the world.
But that works the other way, too. I do not believe that the mainstream media – television, radio, newspapers, and magazines – conspire to censor negative information about masks and vaccines.
Tags: algorithms, Facebook, conspiracies, Haugen
Thursday October 7, 2021
I grew up in the United Church of Canada. It’s a rational church.
So it was a new experience for me to attend an all-black evangelical congregation in Barbados, back in my working journalist days.
My host, the Rev. Kortright Davis, a senior staffer at the Caribbean Conference of Churches, was sent to encourage The United Holiness Church to support the CCC’s social justice program – which was, I would guess, anathema to a denomination deep into personal-salvation theology.
As we drove up, I could hear what sounded like a riot down the street.
As we got closer, I could see that the riot was at the church.
Tags: Caribbean Conference of Churches, Barbados, Holiness
Saturday October 2, 2021
Today happens to be my old schoolmate David Bryson’s birthday. It prompts me to venture deep into nostalgia.
Our childhoods were so different from anything anyone might experience today, that occasionally I have to write my memories down. Otherwise, I fear, the day may come when I won’t believe them myself.
For one thing, we went to school in India. In one of the hill stations where the British Civil Service and other expatriates fled to escape the heat and humidity of an Indian summer.
The school was – and still is – Woodstock, 7,000 feet up in the foothills of the Himalayas. It was also a boarding school. In Canada, think of the infamous residential schools for indigenous children. Unless our parents came up to the hills for a holiday, we children lived the entire school year in dormitories.
Tags: India, Woodstock, Himalayas, boarding school