Month: June 2017

Still waiting for summer

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DSC00297

My “cool” garden. Not doing too bad. Those are potato plants in the foreground, mulched with straw to deter potato beetles, and add organic matter to the soil.

My “cool” garden is doing okay despite the unusually cool, wet weather. After all, up to a point that’s what early-season crops like peas, potatoes, onions, kale, and lettuce like – up to a point. But they won’t thrive either without their good, old-fashioned share of sunny days and warm weather.

I’ve lived in southern Ontario for a good many years (indeed, I’ve got another birthday coming, and that will make me of an age that surprises even me) but I’ve never seen anything like this: Continue reading →

A good year to speak and do truth

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150th

I admit my initial reaction to the criticism heaped on Canada’s Governor-General David Johnston for referring to Indigenous people as “immigrants” in a CBC-radio interview was that he had walked into a thorny patch of political correctness.

But a moment of reflection soon set that knee-jerk reaction aside as I realized the absurdity of what the Governor-General had said on the recent the weekly episode of The House:

“We’re a country based on immigration, going right back to our, quote, Indigenous people, unquote, who were immigrants as well, 10, 12, 14,000 years ago.” Continue reading →

Sickening

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chickens

Anyone who says that life matters less to animals than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight, without reserve.” (Elisabeth Costello, in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals)

I had just left Owen Sound and was on my way home after the weekly trip to run a few errands and do some shopping when I first heard the news about an animal rights group having released a video of alleged abuse of chickens at a poultry factory-farm near Chilliwack, B.C.

The radio-news report said the alleged abuse involved people hired as “chicken catchers” to gather up chickens, and pack them in shelves of plastic cages for shipment by truck to plants for slaughtering and further processing.

Before he continued the CBC reporter warned the description of the details might be difficult for some people to hear. And so they were. Continue reading →

Power in high places, and the tragic failure of a lack of self-awareness

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FDR memorial

U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s great words remembered at his memorial in Washington, D.C. As true and timely now as ever, perhaps even more so.

I’ve said it before, but it’s well worth repeating because of recent, bull-in-a-china-shop events in world affairs: self-awareness is a really important thing. Continue reading →