The wind is blowing leaves around like tiny ballet dancers in orange costumes. But this was written a week ago. Since this time, Sandy roared through here like a freight train with a single unwavering purpose all night and almost all the leaves are now gone. The trees stand like a forest of bare masts in huge harbour with all their sails down and put away.
Today I made dinner in our new Crock Pot starting this AM and by 7 PM when Sarah and Dayv and the kids arrived it was all done and no frantic last minute preps necessary. Hooray.
But today is also the day when the video was released showing how a troubled adolescent who threw crab apples at a postman was arrested and subjected to the most barbaric torture and violence by the Corrections System until she died and nobody in the system cared. This is the righteous colony that condemns human rights abuses in China and Syria, and a hundred other places but never here. It would be hard to find more monstrous hypocrisy than is practised in Canada. The crimes of corruption and fraud and and white collar crime go unpunished every day but a powerless girl is hounded to death by a blind and ignorant police state filled with sadists who do what they want and go free and unnoticed. Unspeakable corruption in the state apparatus. But being smug and self satisfied and whitewashing the Residential Schools systemic abuse of children seems to be fine with most Canadians. Truth and Reconciliation is a sham when there is no truth.
I am a very angry old man tonight. I am deeply grateful for what I have but furious at the complacency of white, male, churchy Canadians leaping up to yell about crime and punishment as in the very worst of British 19th Century “Justice”. Today my hero is Jonathon Swift and his “A Modest Proposal” directed to English cannibals. They are everywhere. Betholt Brecht said it clearly in the THREE PENNY OPERA: “WHAT MAKES A MAN A MAN? HE LIVES ON OTHERS. HE LIKES TO SKIN THEM FIRST AND EAT THEM WHOLE IF HE CAN. FORGETS THAT THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BE HIS BROTHERS………………”
I cannot go to bed without saying that today we sent Rachel her chanukah gift by mail to France then strangely enough received in our mail a wonderful postcard that we found tender, caring and thoughtful and made us feel close to her. What a gift a loving grandchild is! I am grateful and delighted.
Halloween is over. I don’t pretend to understand it. I did not grow up with it, so I have no nostalgia for it. Seems to me like bad training for a healthy diet.
