Editorial

Yes, there is good and evil in this world.

Let’s not sugar-coat it with “unevolved”. Evil.

This morning, enjoying my drive to the gym on a fine sunny day, I was scanning the horizons for anything of interest. I saw a man wearing a black T-shirt, on the front of which was printed: “The next round is mine”. I liked that. Maybe it meant this round is mine, or it meant after you pay for this round, the next round is mine. Either way, good-hearted and funny.

Then there was the helicopter flying low, obviously headed for the Chilliwack airport. We have to be the only town in Canada with an airport right in our downtown--unless you include Toronto, where the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, also known as Toronto Island Airport, is sort of downtown. But the main thing about the Chilliwack airport is not its airport-iness: rather that it is the location of the Chilliwack Airport Restaurant which is basically a pie restaurant. And just so very wonderful. I must go there again soon. Some patrons apparently go there twice a day. Oh, the choices.

Then, a glimpse of what looked like a shred of the Confederate flag on a truck. Remember those? Remember those people who thought their rights were being trampled on by being forced to get a Covid vaccine shot? That took their trucks to Ottawa and to Coutts, Alberta--there, some with guns--to show the government that they were there to enjoy an insurrection, if it came to that? And some flew Confederate flags on their trucks. Or decals.

In the gym, one of the regulars is wearing a black T-shirt celebrating Johnny Cash. Curious, that a man with such a low droning voice is immortal--still beloved. Amazing. I have talked politics with that particular guy at the gym, and he holds views about race that are disturbing. We share a smile and a wave. Does that make me a hypocrite?

So, back to those Confederate flags. Surely the very worst crime a human being can commit is not murder, it is enslavement. To steal a person and use him or her up. It is such a cynical crime, slavery. And that is what those Confederate flags are about. It is code for “us white men are the best, the onliest, and let us just obliterate and trample upon and use up anyone who is not a white man.” And it shall be our own private joke--which, of course, we really mean, too. Up to and including lynching. Paste that decal on your truck and flaunt it. Let us also have contempt for scientists and people who went to university, while we are at it.

Yes, slavery is surely worse than genocide. There is slavery, and there is its cousin, the oppression and exploitation of other people. People with an inferior skin colour, people of an inferior sex. There is good old patriarchy.

So I got quite angry, thinking about this. How can such wickedness, such evil, such arrogance, go along, out there in the open, parading as just one political view?

By now, home, eating my delicious lunch, I turn on the CBC News channel, to see if the world has perhaps ended since breakfast. No, the world has not ended.

But here is what I learn. This comes out of the grilling Pete Hegseth is getting in Washington, DC: the top military brass that he and Trump and their henchmen have axed include notably women and African Americans. God help you if you happened to be female and black. Or Jewish. This is going on right now. Right now. The Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, all decades long past. Since then, I checked all this out on the internet, and the axed military leaders include a lot of white guys too. You always have to double-check this stuff.

Then, in the news, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew announcing that a search of the City of Winnipeg’s Brady Road landfill will continue, in the hope of finding the remains of an Indigenous woman, Ashlee Shingoose, one of four women murdered by the same individual in 2022. Remains of the other three women have been recovered, and their families have been able to hold funerals and ceremonies for them.

Also, in the news, Canada will be the home for the headquarters of a new international bank, for defence-building, for a group of nations, NATO members and “allied nations” that need to stick together for strength. So far, this is being called the DSRB (Defence, Security and Resilience Bank), and the headquarters will probably be in one of Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal.

Not Chilliwack, I notice, I imagine because our airport is just not big enough.

Meantime, back to the DSRB. It does sound a bit like the cooperative movement, doesn’t it. Working together being so effective for bees, ants and humans.

Tomorrow, something funny might crop up.  If so, I will let you know. Meantime, I guess I should just do up the lunch dishes.