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I'm not, I'm not, I'm not a clown

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  Prelude Like you, I’m appalled beyond words at stories of child neglect, abuse and particularly trafficking. How can any man or woman risk their very soul by gratifying their physical lusts and greed at the expense of a child?? What justification could there ever be?                I decided to try expressing my disgust in a poem; the rhyme and metre would imitate children’s rope-skipping chants. ( Ap ples, peach es, pears , and plums / Tell me when your birth day comes .) To make its reading most effective, I envision ten-year-olds, a girl and a boy, twirling a rope and reciting in rhythm while another ten-rear-old girl in a red dress skips. A voice would be added at each verse making a chorus of protest. A film maybe?                I would value your reaction, criticism, advice. It’s a first draft.   I’M NOT, I’M NOT, I’M NOT A CLOWN ©   “go t’ y’r room!” her papa said “what’s gotten inta y’r woolly head” but she sneaked out through the back instead over the
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Stories We Live By

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  David Brooks, writer, philosopher and journalist, said in a recent speech to the Aspen Ideas gathering that the current divisive, belligerent mood among the people of earth can’t be attributed to our real-life situations. We have space, food, water, shelter, healthcare enough for everyone, and more. We don’t fight because we need to, he said, but because we carry stories in our heads to which we respond. It's clear that he doesn’t mean story in the same way I meant it when I published a collection of short stories , but there’s something to be gained in connecting the two, particularly when behaviour is guided by, for instance, The Holy Bible , or the Quran , each telling a story by which adherents understand life and by which their actions are governed. Scientists, as a rule, act according to a very different story of life, their exploration guided very much by the saga of evolving nature and the incontrovertible principles that govern all things. Our stories —I think Broo
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Democracy or bust

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  Politics . You can tell how people relate to this word by the way they use it. “I’m not much interested in politics,” for instance, equates it with the day-to-day news about our current government, elections, party dynamics, etc. A narrow definition.                By whatever word we use, it’s clear that the setting and enforcing of the principles under which we form community—and function as community—existed before the word was coined. In families, in schools, in workplaces, on the roads, in the economy, the making and respecting of agreed-to behavioural expectations in a community is the necessary defense against chaos.                How behavioural expectations come to be, how they are altered, how they are enforced … and most importantly by whose authority … is fundamental. The “benevolent dictator” model has a long history: give all authority to the smartest and/or the most powerful person or group and trust them/him/her to rule for the good of the community/nation. For
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Prodigals, mountain climbers and you (me)

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  The story of The Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) is familiar to every practicing Christian, I presume. It’s one of Jesus’ most powerful parables, an allegory illustrating important truths. We may not always agree on what truths are most important there, but the allegory popped up again for me when I read that hopes are high for rescue personnel and helicopters to search again for three missing climbers in very difficult terrain. (CBC News, June 08, 2024) Put crassly, how much risk and effort do we owe others when in self-inflicted danger? The obedient other son in the parable is appalled at his father’s embrace of the one whose demise followed his own—eye’s open—bad choices. His, “All my life I’ve been a model son, and you’ve never thrown a banquet for me!” is an eminently logical accusation. Nobody has ever staged a celebration to honour me for not climbing precarious precipices, never taking illicit drugs, not abusing alcohol or disobeying driving rules either. We know by now th
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Something there is that doesn't love a wall

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  “… Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.”   Robert Frost’s iconic poem, “Mending Wall,” takes us into the New England countryside and two properties where two owners get together every spring to repair the stone fence between them. Had they livestock, the narrating owner conjectures, the adage, “Good fences make good neighbours,” would suit. But here, one has fruit trees and the other a pine orchard, so why keep the fence/wall? Clearly, those who constructed the Berlin Wall had a good idea what it was they were “walling in or walling out.” Or attempting to. Visiting a family in East Berlin in 1988, we learned that the wall was much more than concrete, machine guns and guard dogs. Through the legal system, the wall cut through the school curricula, through personal freedoms of religion, movement, thought and speech. But the
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A Country of Morons

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  An episode of Real Time with Bill Maher  included commentary on a “man in the street” survey of   American adults. The question, “Which country is home to Queen Elizabeth?” yielded answers of “Egypt?” “Brazil?” The question “Which is the largest city in the world?” brought answers of “Asia,” and “England.” Clearly any such a survey report would have been edited and, conceivably, just the silly answers included in the published version. Surely a few would have known that Elizabeth is (was) at home in France! Maher’s comment was something like, “The USA is a country of morons!” Clearly, we’re not equally endowed with whatever equipment and experience allow one to be knowledgeable and “intelligent.” We used to have words in English to scale a person’s level of mental endowment: genius at the tip-top, moron at the bottom and between the extremes: idiots, imbeciles, and the mass of the average. Another measure used a number scale for scores achieved on a standardized test where 100 w
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Earth Day, 2024, April 22

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  Environmental researcher Tony Walker: “When the cost is a disincentive to do an activity, people change their behaviour.” She was talking about reusable bags when shopping.                 It’s a bit disconcerting to speak of people—or to be spoken of—as if one were a member of an enormous flock of sheep. It implies that reason alone won’t be enough to get individuals to break habits, to cooperatively join in a campaign to save the planet, for instance. But we need only look to ourselves to see how tenaciously we cling to present patterns of behaviour, even when our reason tells us the sloppy use and disposal of plastics, for instance, is like a poison to sea life on which so many people depend for food.                  It’s this tendency in human nature that makes Pigovian punishment/reward incentives like the carbon tax necessary. When tobacco-caused lung cancers overburdened oncological healthcare and cost thousands of lives annually, tobacco was heavily taxed, as is liquor. W
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