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.
Continue readingI’m happy to report that the rumours of my death were greatly exaggerated. I’ve only been dead to the social media world for the last 30 days.
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In the last weeks of January, and into the first two weeks of February, I was floating. I would wake each day, nearly bounding out of bed, and ready to take on the world. We were counting down the days to Biden’s inauguration, and even the horrific attack on the Capitol on the 6th was but a speed bump, easily acknowledged by both Democrats and Republicans as an obvious and seditious attack on the Constitutionally mandated work of the Congress.
The Dems impeached trump AGAIN. Biden was inaugurated without incident. And with trump silenced by Twitter, life was sweet.
Sadly, however, a few weeks sans trump had left the GOP with a bad case of amnesia, and, just last week, they yawned like teenagers through video evidence of trump’s guilt, and voted to acquit.
When I was a kid in Montreal, most of the dads (and some of the moms) were veterans of the World War II, and the Korean War, which had ended just a few short months before I was born.
Eleven days post the Biden Inauguration, and I’m still on a high. It’s not about Joe Biden per se, nor even the wonder of the first black, South Asian-American female vice-president in history in the form of Kamala Harris. It’s not even about the days starting to get a little longer, with the sun coming up a little earlier every day.
No, it’s so much more than that.
Ahead of the mob violence on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, there had been weeks of incendiary rhetoric and planning in plain sight, on Facebook, Twitter, and on far-right websites like Parler, Gab, TheDonald, and MeWe. There had been a virtual landslide of conspiracy theories, disinformation, and lies about fraudulent voting, often coming directly from the POTUS and his favoured minions.
Prior to the insurrection, Advance Democracy had found more than 1,480 posts on Twitter from QAnon-related accounts, promoting violence. When it became clear that VP Pence was unable to overturn the results of the election, and unwilling to ‘try’ to do so, right-wing extremists began to plan the murder by hanging of Pence, whom they believed to be committing a traitorous refusal to act.
What doesn’t kill us doesn’t necessarily make us stronger. Sometimes it still kills us; it just takes a little longer to do so.
I’m hearing from way too many people, from all walks of life, that they’re feeling utterly exhausted and unable to stay awake, and yet, when they finally fall into bed, they’re not making it to a good and lasting sleep place. And they’re waking up still feeling a little beat up.
Biden won, 2020 took its best shot, but it’s nearly over. Why this enervation now?
It’s because we’ve got a kind of psychic hangover. This malaise is about a long-term, exhausting, mental struggle that left our brains feeling ‘broken.’
I’m only half kidding when I say that I’m pretty sure we’ve been living in an alternate reality since 2008, created by firing up the Large Hadron Collider. What else could explain this bizarre branch of a timeline we’re currently experiencing?
Ever have, oh, I don’t know… about 6 or 700 of ‘those days,’ where you start to wonder if it’s actually possible that you just might have woken up on another, identical, but much stupider, planet?
When you are smack dab in the middle of massive change, it’s nearly impossible to parse what is going on all around you.
Baby boomers have been there a few times. The chaos of the sixties, when the world suddenly went from belonging to your parents, to belonging to you and your like-minded friends – remember that?
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Segarini: Don't Believe a Word I Say 