Last year, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick decided that he could not stand proudly for the U.S. national anthem played before every game. During a post-game interview, he explained: "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.”

            Kaepernick himself has experienced profiling. Although he is wealthier than any of the officers who have pulled him over on suspicion. 

            For black people, America is not the “land of the free.” Never has been.

            This year, he chose to kneel during the anthem – kneeling being a symbol of respect – instead of sitting. Many other athletes joined him. “Taking the knee” during the national anthem spread throughout the league.

            The President called the athletes “sons of bitches” and wanted them all fired. 

            Which would probably reduce NFL telecasts to referees blowing whistles at each other.

Writing about the quagmire of lies, distortions, allegations, and denials that beset the news media these days, William Rivers Pitt, syndicated columnist and Senior Editor for the alternative news agency Truthout, commented, “In this line of work, despair is not an emotion we can indulge ourselves in.”

            He’s right. Despair leads only to a desire to pull the covers up over our heads and hope the world will go away.

            But his advice applies to much more than just despair.

            Because a number of emotions are cancerous. They tend to destroy their host.

            Anger, for example. And hatred. Hate generally harms the hat-er much more than the hat-ee. Contempt, too. Jealousy. Helplessness.

My last few columns have been heavy-duty stuff -- planetary consciousness, divine intervention, the nature of reality. This week, I want to tackle a more lightweight subject: Infinity.

            Granted, most people have never thought much about infinity. Except maybe in astronomy, assuming loosely that the universe goes on forever. In fact, we don’t know where the outer edges of the universe are, because those outer edges are now moving away from us faster than the speed of light. If their light, or radio waves, or whatever, can never reach us, we can never know if there’s anything out there at all.

            A few religious people profess a belief in infinity, although they’re more likely to call it “eternity” -- endless time, rather than endless space.

            My cousin the mathematician will probably disagree with me, but it seems to me that infinity is a logical impossibility.

You’ve probably seen pictures of human nerves – a central neuron with axons and dendrites radiating out from it like the roots of a tree. (If not, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron)

            The neuron is the trunk, the central core, that contains the cell’s nucleus. The axons and dendrites are the extended arms that connect with other nerve cells to transmit information.

            The resemblance to tree roots may be more than coincidence. UBC-Okanagan forest ecology professor Suzanne Simard has proven conclusively that trees communicate with each other through their roots.

            Dig into the soil of any forest, and you’ll find a network of tree roots, overlapping, inter-weaving. You probably won’t see the second component of communication, the invisible filaments of fungi.

            Simard’s research demonstrates, beyond dispute, that trees send messages, and food, to each other through their roots, with those fungal filaments bridging the gaps in much the same way that synapses work in the human brain.

I forgot to set my alarm when I went to bed on Wednesday night. I woke up Thursday morning, too late to go to my usual Rotary breakfast meeting.

            I took the dog for her morning walk instead.

            And on that walk, I met a neighbour who was just taking her dog Jessie for what she was afraid might be its last walk. In a few minutes, the two of them were going to visit a canine specialist, to get the verdict on something filling her dog’s lungs.

             Her dog normally moves on an invisible trampoline, touching the ground just long enough to launch another sub-orbital trajectory. This time it walked. Slowly.

            “I’m a nurse,” my neighbour said. “This sounds terminal to me.”

          If I had gone to Rotary, I would have missed that encounter.

            Some, I’m sure, would explain those coincidences as evidence of divine planning. God intended me to forget to set my alarm, so that I could be there at that moment, on that morning.