When I was a kid, growing up in Alberta, I encountered precisely two black families. One family, that ran a boarding house near my school, had a little girl about my age. When I went to L’Academie Assomption, which was a private girl’s school, the daughters of football player Rollie Miles were the only students of colour.
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Kids really know how to push their parent’s buttons. As a smart-ass teenager in the sixties, I pushed quite a few myself. At one family dinner, while I silently pondered the lyrics to Janis Ian’s song, Society’s Child, I suddenly announced to the table, “I’d marry a black man, if I was in love with him.”
“The further society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it” – George Orwell
The world is a fucking mess!! It’s a like a huge ball of dirt that can no longer be swept under the carpet. We’ve been doing that far too long and the carpet just isn’t big enough to hide the dirt anymore. Online news, social media, newspapers, all littered with the horrific happenings from around the world but with a particular focus on the U.S. A runaway virus, isolation, unemployment, too many deaths, hate crimes, looting, brutality, murder…..the list is endless. Any kind of optimism is taking a beating and beginning to fade as I sit typing this. I fear for what could possibly happen and how it will all turn out. It’s like we’ve all lost our collective minds!
America was never ‘perfect,’ despite the first settler’s early claims that ‘manifest destiny’ made anything Americans wanted to do, in the name of ‘a more perfect union,’ perfectly fine and utterly legit.
But while they might have contended that the special virtues of the American people and their institutions made colonialism, slavery, and the unchecked and wholesale, uncontested, swallowing up of the country ‘god’s will’ for the benefit of the powerful, these presumably lofty ideals, and ‘an irresistible destiny to accomplish this essential duty’ never held much water to the people whose lands were seized in the name of ‘the divine.’
A reaction to America’s president telling four Congresswoman of colour to “go back to where they came from?”
For baby boomers, on whom the shadow of World War II fell the darkest , the post war years teemed with possibility. Our future lay before us like a shimmering landscape, designed by the brilliant minds now free to bring us sci fi and fantasy tales of a world filled with scientific and technical advances beyond our wildest dreams.
ENOUGH already with this daylight saving nonsense. The cost to the country, and it’s citizens, has been recorded and shown to be of little to no benefit to the nation.
This column was supposed to be about London Bluesfest and a final wrap-up of Mariposa and Summerfolk but I’ve ended up down the rabbit hole, waaaaay down the rabbit hole on a totally different tangent. My apologies to those waiting for any of the above but occasionally, when I get stuck on a thread I’ve got to go with it. So….I woke up yesterday morning with a particular FB post and the subsequent thread traipsing around in my cranium. Bear with me. First the post….
There is a very nice house on the corner of my street. The back yard is surrounded by a tall fence, but as you walk by, you can peep through, and see that there is a lovely garden inside, with a deck, and a nice patio seating area. It’s all very well kept and tidy.
Plants peek out through the fence, as plants will. There are some flowers, and a few weeds, and some of those long, brambly, blackberry stalks, the sort that seem to go from manageable to ‘ow! that long branch just scratched my arm!” in a matter of seconds.
I already had a column drafted and ready for editing this morning, but my muse took a hard left turn and demanded a re-write.
I wanted to talk about how important it is to be true to yourself; in your own life, in the way you present to your loved ones, and the realities of pursuing the path by which you pay your bills. But all of that sounds rather pretentious, in the face of current events.
What I came to realize is that the only reason that old, white women like me can spend any time at all dreaming of improving themselves and their surroundings – never mind assuming that anyone else would be interested in reading those thoughts- is that we have ‘privilege.’
Bullseye Records of Canada
Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 