Turtle time

I'm sitting on the stoop tapping away on my laptop. Once in a while I'll hear a car. There's one coming down the Burgess side-road right now.

Most of the time all I hear is the birds. Frogs too. A mourning dove has been particularly vocal this evening. Probably a pair of them, talking back and forth. Various hummingbirds visit the feeder hanging over my head. A pair of sandhill cranes sound pissed off and fly away.

What you never hear is turtles. You sometimes get to see them though. Here at Falling Downs it's turtle time, when the mamma turtles come out of the marsh to lay their eggs in the gravel shoulder of the road.

This morning when I walked the hounds there were three in a row on the south shoulder of the road. Tonight the raccoons will dig up what they can. Only once have I met a newborn - about the size of a toonie and completely soft to the touch. The birds must have a field-day with them.

Picked up a book today that I've had lying on the kitchen table for a few weeks. The Farm Manager's dear mother lent it to me; Elizabeth Bettina's It Happened in Italy: The Untold Story of how the People of Italy Defied the Horrors of the Holocaust.

It's quite the story. Lots of Italian Catholics chose not to say something when they saw something during the Nazi era, often at considerable risk to their own well-being. As a result many Jewish lives were saved. At a time when Canada closed her borders to Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis, they could still get into Italy without a visa.

I want to believe that there are many people of all faiths who would chose not to rat out the vulnerable in their midst. In fact, I think it's an innately human drive to help your fellow humans, but it's become ensnared in the miasma of contemporary me-firstism.

Heard a news story a year or two ago about the funeral of a much loved priest who worked most of his career in indigenous communities in Saskatchewan. Ya right! A much loved priest on a native reservation? Get outta here! But no, dozens of car-loads of folks from those reservations drove hours to pay their respects. He must have been one of those people who still had that inner light that drove him to do good rather than ill, a light we well know was not universally shared among his kind.

As we all know whenever we open a paper or turn on the news, it's a fucked up world. There are pressures on all sides that push us into being nasty rather than kind. We don't have to go that way.


My neighbour has a theory about those three mamma turtles. She figures they've got a Moms Support Group happening. Hey girls, let's climb that embankment and lay those eggs! Then we can go for lunch...

Canada: half a million temporary foreign workers but no room for refugees

Big Steve and his side-kick Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander have seriously misread the Canadian street viz the European refugee crisis.

Seems most Canadians just want to help hurting refugees, especially those who find themselves in the headlines now, thanks to the tragic death of three year old Aylan Kurdi.

The Syrians.

Thanks to the photo of Aylan that went viral, Syrian refugees are the cause du jour.

Mr. Harper addressed the issue by re-announcing talking points that he has announced several times before; that Canada will accept up to 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next three years.

In the three years since he first made that promise, the number of Syrians who have actually arrived here has been negligible. In fact, government spokespersons get downright huffy when that question is posed.

It might be 2,000.

It might be 2.

We don't know because the Harper gang won't tell us.

This niggardliness with providing sanctuary to refugees is the worst performance by Canada since the refusal to accept Jews during WWll, documented in Irving Abella's book None is too many.

Since then, every Canadian government, Liberal and Conservative, has atoned for that by offering compassion and generosity to the world's huddled masses.

Hungarians arrived here in their tens of thousands after the 1956 uprising.

The "boat people" of Viet Nam also came in by the tens of thousands in the seventies.

Clearly Canada can accommodate and successfully integrate tens of thousands of refugees in a relatively short time.

The think tank here at Falling Downs has a draft plan pencilled up; we send home half a million temporary foreign workers at the end of their contracts, and replace them with refugee immigrants who are going to make a commitment to Canada.

Not just from Syria, but from Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Eritrea and Somalia.

Sounds like a win-win to me.

Neglecting the future, celebrating an imaginary past; Canada goes koo-koo for monuments and memorials

The paint is barely dry in the brand-spankin'-new Canadian Museum for Human Rights, when the next memorial to the suffering of others is already creating a flap. Apparently victims of communism were not adequately represented in the Museum for Human Rights, and are therefore due to get their own memorial in Ottawa.

As the article points out, the architect community is somewhat divided re the merits of this monument to Canadian self-importance. Frankly, I'd like to see the tax-payer community get riled up about building politically motivated memorials all over the place.

And why a memorial in Canada for victims of communism? Yes, people suffered and died under communist regimes. People have suffered and died under many types of regimes, including our type. When is the memorial coming for the Vietnamese victims of America's war in Indo-China?

Anyway, after the victims of communism get their own memorial in Ottawa, it only stands to reason that the Chosen People get their own Holocaust memorial in Ottawa, and sure enough, that's coming too!  Nevermind that virtually the only connection between Canada and the holocaust was our denial of refugee status to Jews fleeing Hitler; we're all aboard the Holocaust Memorial bandwagon 75 years later! (approximately 250 Holocaust Memorials or Museums worldwide and counting...)

But wait! The Harper brain trust has fabricated a personage called "Mother Canada," who is scheduled to get her own 10 storey memorial in Cape Breton!

I can just see how this is gonna fly with the locals...  Lard tunderin Jeezus! The fuckers got a hundred million to piss away on a gawdam statue and meanwhile theys cuttin back me pogey check the gawdam fuckin bastards... fuck Ottawa anyways!