Covid Journal, Sept 11, 2020
Canada’s Residential Schools – Hard to Watch, But Necessary
I enrolled with the University of Alberta’s ‘Indigenous Canada’. Every Canadian should take the time to review these videos and content.
This video and lesson was particularly hard to watch: Killing the Indian in the Child.
Over the last few months, I have been concerned about the state of education in Ontario and Canada, but I wasn’t even remotely prepared for what this video unveiled to me.
If, for a second, you’re not sure why so many people want to renaming with respect to some of the legacy names with Canadian history, including John A. MacDonald, you need to have watched this first before you ask any questions.
The level of cruelty and punishment imposed on the children was unfathomable.
There is no easy solution, but a good starting point would be to demand repayment for ALL of the costs and damages related to suffering and loss of life from the religious institutions involved, including the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, the Presbyterians and the Methodist Church. Their tax-free status and their wealth is directly related to the genocide of the ways of First Nations.
If a few go bankrupt along the way, I say we hand over the property to the First Nations people that remain.
In Brussels, A New Beginning
This goes into the ‘good news’ file. Brussels, aka the home of the European Union, is in the process of decided on a $3 TRILLION (Cdn) budget for the next seven years that will require a minimum of a third of that budget be spent on climate action.
It’s great to see that some people in the world care about … the world.
Here in Canada, the push is on for a ‘green recovery’, but I worry that we’ll just get talking points while Justin keeps a seat at the table for oil trolls and the likes of Jason Kenney, someone who’s all too keen to take federal dollars and sqaunder it on tax cuts for those who need them the least.
Day One, September 11, 2001
Nearly 20 years ago, I watched from afar and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The whole world was in shock.
Many years after that, I started to blog on this site on a regular basis and occasionally referred to the notion of ‘Day One’.
This should have been the day that all things changed. For the better.
We should have moved forward in a new direction that would have easily been embraced by the rest of the world as they felt the pain of the United States suffer its worst terrorist attack in history.
Instead, we turned down a dark path of implementing control after control, limitation after limitation.
TRILLIONS have been squandered on the things we need the least on this planet: guns, ammo, bringers of death, watchers of all.
Today, Covid is a global-scale attack on all of us that never seems to come with a final chapter. I fear that things will continue to devolve until we finally find an excuse to just blow up the planet.
Unfortunately for me (it seems), any concerns about actions taken by different levels of government – as stupid as they seem – put me in a massive garbage bin of humanity known as QAnon.
(And no, I don’t believe I come remotely close to this hive of ‘personalities’).
QAnon seems like a conspiracy wrapped in a problem embedded in a secret.
It seems like the corp0rate powers that be like Amazon have caught on to the phenomenon. The online giant has been selling ‘QAnon’ products on their site (some 6,000 results on Amazon.ca) for the last year or so.
But what is ‘QAnon’?
To repeat: I’m NOT.
For the record, I love conspiracies. For starters, they make for great, yet believable, fiction with stuff like Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code.
And Oliver Stone loves conspiracies. He’s still convinced that there were many players involved with JFK’s assassination.
Millions of us are fed lies every single day, sometimes every other hour. Browse around some of the streaming services and there are all kinds of show – real and fictional – that dive into the wide range of conspiracies, make-believe, UFOs, unknown creatures and more – all to make a buck.
Latch on to any of it, and you’re certifiable.
The disconcerting part of this piece with Vice is that it seems like ‘WE’ are not even allowed to question more ridiculous elements of the mainstream narrative and if WE do, we’ll be lumped in with whack jobs associated with QAnon, communists or radical right-wingers.
I don’t really consider myself as ‘any of the above, thank you very much’ but I retain the right to ask questions about some of the manure we’re fed on a routine basis. Sometimes it’s OK to question a ‘news’ story when it’s really just a journalist narrating or copy/pasting a corporate or government press release.
When someone makes a statement like ‘the science is still coming in …’ that’s a flag for them saying ‘what I’m about to say is purely speculative bullshit that has no founding based on quantifiable research and is my opinion and my opinion only’. Even when they’re a so-called ‘expert’ on Covid-related pandemics because, for the record, no one is. Some folks might be experts with studying diseases and some might be experts with managing different degrees of crises, but NO ONE can say that they’ve managed – on a global scale – through a pandemic like Covid because they’re lying.
We’re all cruising through this by the skin of our teeth and we’re all very happy when people are actually honest with us.
Given the severity and nature of the times, it’s critical that all of the key players – our governments, the media, companies with special interest and even our friends and family – be honest with us and come clean about how they’re going to help the planet emerge from this mess.