To thine own self be true

While bike-riding, I picked this large nasty-looking screw off the road in the entrance to my keyhole crescent yesterday. Figured nobody needed the hassle.

Taking a knee is a personal thing though some teams in the NFL and National Basketball may make group protests. Makes sense. Most players in those leagues are black and they have their reasons. But if those leagues rule to halt the kneeling during the anthem, those are rules that will apply to all those league’s players. Players would still have the option to kneel before the anthem presumably, as has already been done by some players and teams.

The National Baseball league has fewer black players and so far protests there have been fewer, though the league may eventually rule on this, too.

But I see no reason why the largely white, largely Canadian NHL should be ‘held to the same expected standard and political agenda’. If Crosby and the Pens want to go to a White House social, what’s wrong with that? If there are any black or U.S. players on that team, they may feel differently and not go on an individual basis. A free choice and way to make a stand. It seems to me like there’s leeway.

For the record, P.K. Subban of Nashville Preds is not going to kneel and he’s entitled, for the same individuals argument, to make that personal choice. Ultimately, when you get down to it, protest is up to individuals who should not force others to change their own personal positions and situations. We live in an age right now in which there is a lot of agenda-ization going on. People just trying to force, manipulate, or coerce others to take stands that don’t affect them or with which they don’t agree.

Sure, personal opinions and stands are, optimally, to be respected, especially in cases where no violence is directly involved. It is ok to share opinions, but it is not up to disgruntled individuals to tell other people what they should do in very different circumstances and situations, and to demand that everyone should automatically line up according to one espoused political agenda.

A 2 year-old stealing popcorn from Prince Harry.

The usual frivolousness and distraction at the expense of featuring hard news about Kim Jong Un and Trump getting ready to blow up the world (real hard news). Many North Americans are majorly distracted and lack a sense of what’s important and most urgently relevant to all of us and families. They’ve lost the ability to make distinctions as to the difference between real and fake news. They and the media platforms like Google of late.

Carte blanche in Canada without needing a license or  paying any taxes while other home-grown companies pay taxes. They don’t even have to declare their Canadian earnings and will be paying less than half of what they carpet-baggerly make in 6 million Canadian homes. What will Canadian culture look like after today’s government giveaway? Like American Netflix shows. They may drop some change on this side of the border, but don’t expect Canadian content in the old sense of the phrase.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation’s scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no one needs for several years.
(from “Five Ways to Kill a Man”)

’50s U.K. poet Brock’s forecast was right except we’ve possibly got two opposed psychopaths and all and everything could get blown up for a very long time.

Cutting through the myriad distractions, Andrew Cohen’s column today in the papers says it all. He figures as soon as early October. Pretty much along the lines I stated here two days ago. Lots of folks with heads in the clouds.

singles out a black man and calls him an SOB.
No ambiguity or wiggle room on that Trumpism.

Not great optics for the supposed leader of the Western world. Not a great, inspiring role model for all young kids in the U.S., especially black ones.

“The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
–Eden Phillpotts

(Installation by RD)

Nothing like turning to the Obits page of the newspaper and seeing the listing for someone one’s known in the past. The vibrations are slight for those further away from one, but increase and resonate when it’s someone you’ve personally hobnobbed with or been briefly close to.

For the latter, I’ve taken to weighing in on their memorial pages set up by family and funeral homes. I usually mention unique and special qualities of the people that evoke their presence which help remind readers and family of the presence of the deceased. Sometimes I mention things that many other contributors miss or things the families may not have known. I believe the totality of a person’s life is made up of many sides, many episodes, many moments, and characteristics. (Much as in Citizen Kane).

When it comes down to it, it is the small details and minutiae that often signify and resonate as to the essence or nature of a given person and his or her life. It is easy to say so-and-so was a good or kind person, but it is frequently more meaningful or powerful to recall a specific moment that maybe only you remember.

Stranger still, when reading obits, is the experience of seeing your own name in the obits, which gets you wondering about the deceased and his or her life, how it compares/compared with your own. This, of course, is a reminder of your own destined mortality. How long did the deceased live? Was it a natural, accidental, or serious illness death? The questions naturally arise and briefly put one in a different mental space.

So whose funeral or celebration of life would you go to? Who mattered the most to you; who would cause you to take action to attend their service? Who would you be willing to speak about or eulogize if asked? Deaths of familiar or close people calls for a response and invites participation on some level. (“Because I am involved in mankind”–Donne)

Death is with us all the way from birth to death, as I have written about before in this blog. It is a parallel world co-existing with whatever lives we have and whatever living we manage to eke out. For many people, that fact often only becomes apparent when there is a death of a friend or family member. It is then that Death forces us to realize that it has been there all along waiting for each one of us.

But as I’ve said above, we can choose our responses and do right by the deceased, and honour the presence and lives of those whose number has suddenly come up in the rotation. And we each need to resolve and finalize our own unique connections with these individual beings, to say Goodbye in our own personally chosen ways.

He has 181 protesters, many in wheelchairs (yikes! bad optics big-time) bodily and forcibly evicted from the health care meeting yesterday. Thus dividing some of the poorest, less fortunate people in the country from having their First Amendment say about a contentious issue affecting them.

6 more White House staff found using private e-mails,. The longer he bides his time, the more ammo Robert Mueller accumulates in his case against the Rube-Clown. Don’t give up hope; Mueller may still bring Trump down yet. Let’s keep hoping for a return to sanity, civility, order, and peace.