A LETTER OF JUSTICE...
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Posted:Jul 7, 2020 10:38 am
Last Updated:Feb 12, 2021 6:38 pm 3147 Views
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A Letter Justice and Open Debate
July 7, 2020
The letter below will be appearing in the Letters section of Harper's Magazine
Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of deb whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.
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MEN WHO SEW
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Posted:Jul 4, 2020 6:00 pm
Last Updated:Jan 1, 2022 12:17 am 3083 Views
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I just read a blog by a woman who thinks only women and "Queens" sew.....I thought it an odd prejudice in a blog that complains that she feels as if she lives on another planet, yet can't even imagine a man at a sewing machine.
The first man i met who sewed was a custom tailor....an Italian immigrant. I was given the task by my father, to bring his favourite tweed jacket there for repairs. In - sewing, I chose to make myself a Vogue-pattern wool suit sculpted using hand-stitching, interlining and steam-sculpting......I went to the same tailor to get some expert advice........
When I was part of a theater troupe in Vancouver in my early 20's, there were several men who worked in wardrobe.......some of them were hoping to start their own couture line......
Then, when I got into sailing, I met several sail-makers and they made sails as well as other accessories and some also made custom valences and seat-cushions........When I was on the board of an arts council, I was in charge of having all the banners sewn. The banners hung on frames from all the street lights downtown and were hand-painted by local artists.......They were sewn by men.
The upholstery shop I have used for years, is run by Vietnamese men.....
I have known men who sew as a hobby, making clothes for themselves and their families..One man I knew made gorgeous dresses for his wife.....
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PINK ROSE-BUD......
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Posted:Jul 2, 2020 5:23 pm
Last Updated:Jan 1, 2022 12:22 am 2953 Views
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Yesterday was Canada Day, which I spent frolicking in the family compound orchard listening to my favourite Viking Metal band while watching grandkids, raccoons and deer dancing....eating good food, greens, potatoes and strawberries from the garden.......a lovely repast......I wore a pink rosebud in my hair to remember my first , a beautiful pink girl.....even her hair was pink.....She was born on July first......I missed the Canada Day parade that year.....I was in labour and the doctor was at the festivities, eating BBQ when someone fetched him........He was very jolly when he helped me give birth, but when he came in the next morning, he was very serious......My baby had a serious heart defect.........Nowadays it's an easy fix......Then, not so much. ........Every Canada Day I wear a pink rose.......
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CANNED HEAT
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Posted:Jun 19, 2020 10:27 pm
Last Updated:Jan 1, 2022 12:30 am 2697 Views
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I started commenting on Sandy's blog about what music we listen to, but I've been watching the USA steel itself for the violent and cruel insanity of a Trump Rally in the midst of a pandemic and civil unrest and I'm thinking of the band Canned Heat and their song "Going Up The Country".....Of playing that song on my silver flute accompanied by bongos and acoustic guitar in a field with with dandelions and daisy chains dancing and laughing and I'm reminded of the American youth at the time, protesting the violent and cruel insanity of the Vietnamese war and wondering how they got here once again......And it all seemed too much for the music blog, so here I am.......
Back in the day, when I was playing Canned Heat songs, I was helping Young American men who had fled their home and families in the US because they were so strongly opposed to the slaughter and maiming in Vietnam and refused to participate....And last week, one of those sweet, gentle boys, now an old man, was injured by police and accused by the president........of falling harder than he was pushed.
Full circle.......A madman reigns in America.....an evil ruler who uses Nazi symbols in his re election ads.....who is so evil that he is manipulating hundreds of thousands of Americans to participate in a mass suicide-murder event for no reason other than his own demented, insatiable hunger for attention and power-mongering........
As I listen to Canned Heat playing their joyful music, my fingers and mouth automatically responding to a silver flute, I see the flower grown old, watching in horror......grieving for their country.
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Paradox
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Posted:Jun 17, 2020 8:31 pm
Last Updated:Jan 1, 2022 12:32 am 2780 Views
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I entertain the concept that ancestral memory is inherent in environment....The voices waiting to be freed from granite bluffs, the ocean and the wind......Here we are, inhabitants of this land, yet still intellectually/spiritually dependent on what was developed on other continents....in other environments.......Let's open up to the reality of the land we inhabit and those who lived and loved this land before the European arrogance claimed it.
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FOXGLOVE MUTATION......
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Posted:Jun 17, 2020 10:18 am
Last Updated:Jan 1, 2022 12:34 am 2969 Views
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These Foxglove flower mutations have been showing up on the island this year, We haven't seen anything like them before......
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A SECRET ADMIRER
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Posted:Jun 15, 2020 4:13 pm
Last Updated:Jan 1, 2022 12:48 am 2524 Views
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I've been reading my old journals lately, ... shocked how many people that appear in my journals as close acquaintances, I can no longer identify by their first names...I search my memories for these people who played such important roles in my life 20 years ago and have been completely erased from my memory. Yesterday, I came across this story about a man who was my lover for many months.
He lived in Victoria, 300 miles away. I met him through mutual friends. He had gone back to university for a degree he had abandoned 30 years before when his first wash born...I drove to Victoria most weekends to see him....he was still overseeing his business and couldn't get away......We had fun..I was seriously thinking about moving to Victoria and taking some courses in the Arts department. My 's grandparents were there too.....A good friend wanted us to share her huge house...and, I found a job at the UVIC 's Village...
So I was on the UVIC campus to meet with the director and other teachers and see the facility...I spent the night with my boyfriend and told him when my appointment was and he told me that he had an exam at the same time.So he knew I was going to be on campus at the same time as him..
When I was walking through the parking lot to get to my appointment, I came across my boyfriend's vehicle.I thought it would be fun to say hi by leaving a message on his car.....So I wrote "from a secret admirer" on a Post-It, renewed my lipstick, kissed the note and stuck it to his windshield. Then I went about my day.I went to an animation festival with a friend and got back to my boyfriend's apt. after midnight. He was sitting in his computer chair staring at the wall above the computer where my pink "Secret Admirer" note was stuck to the wall.He just stared and stared at that note.....Then he told me his theory of who his secret admirer was. He was sure it was the 19 year-old in one of his classes.the one he had been admiring all semester.....and his eyes glazed over again.I suggested that maybe a man had left the note and he got very angry at me.I fell asleep alone and left next morning before he woke up, leaving a replica of the first note on his computer screen.
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