Covid, Cabin Fever, Protests and Riots

The news is all about ‘protest’s’ in the US.  I was in the peace movement with long hair and sandals. I had love painted on my forehead with lipstick. I miss that time. A lot of weed ,Patch and incense, you could get high from the second hand smoke if someone wasn’t already passing you a joint.  I was with the sexiest funniest woman in the world at the time. The phenomes were thick too. All that youth.  We were young. Artists. Dancers. Athletic. World class cyclists.

 John Lennon’s « Give Peace a Chance’ and the Bed In  Love In really said it. That was a protest. Great performance art.  We were against all war.  I learned Buffy St. Martie’s Universal Soldier and sang it in coffeehouses, playing, guitar poorly.  People actually asked me to sing and play, Draft dodger’s Rag, a great song by Phil Ochs, I’d learned from Jon Cowtan.   Still a funny song.  I was an intellectual but I wasn’t serious.  We were at the Strawberry Mountain Peace and Love festival. In San Francisco we shut down the city, so many of us.  It was psychedelic.  The White Room by the Cream instantly takes me back there. More so than the Grateful Dead who were playing then. It’s a bit of blur with flashes of smiles, laughter, naked bits of beautiful bodies, the Golden Gate Bridge  and bits Gracie Slick blasting out across the city. across the city. 

No one was throwing rocks. No one was attacking police. No one was carrying guns or shooting weapons at the authorities.  It wasn’t a riot. It was a protest.  

Kids these days don’t know the difference between a protest and a riot.  None of us were getting paid. All of us were living off our parents or summer jobs, casual work that paid for the rent.  There wasn’t any coke or fentanyl.  People drank beer and wine.  Some of the old geysers in their 30’s were chugging back whiskey but they were just there for the young girls. Mostly everyone was too wasted to be smashing federal buildings.  All that lovemaking, smoking and hiking didn’t make for playing baby military types in black suits and throwing Molotov cocktails.  Paisley and bright flower Hawaiian shirts were more the motif. Lots of dancing. I remember a group of us dancing  one evening in candlelight like a Winter Palace Matisse painting. It was a time of encountering zen and learning about mystical Christians like St. Theresa of Avila.  Gandhi was our hero and Martin Luther King. Non violent resistance was a protest.  We were protesters.  

Years later , long after I’d been billy clubbed and hand cuffed for ‘giving lip’ to the authorities, long after I was expelled from high school for saying fuck, the mayor would march beside me along with some MP’s in the last of the peace marches I joined in.  That was way before the Pride Parade and way before I dressed in drag and made a pilgrimage to Stonewall in New York. I was respectable , a bit peculiar, but respectable.  Like protests.  Protests were respectable. 

My parents raised me that if you broke something you had to pay for it. My parents raised me to respect the work of another man. My parents raised me to know that a man and a woman in uniform were just doing their job and that I shouldn’t make it more difficult for them than necessary.  Dad had served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during WWII and respected the men who served. He didn’t even hold a grudge against the Germans and Japanese soldiers who served against him. It was the politicians and leaders he had concerns about.  He didn’t feel they cared much for the middle classes and lower classes. I learned young that politics is about choosing the least bad alternative.  I learned also that democracy could be bad but it was never as bad as dictatorships, especially religious and communist dictatorships.  Like Phil Ochs said, « we hate Chow en Lai and I hope he dies , but there’s one things you’ve see, someone’s got to go over there but that someone sure ain’t me. ». We were humble kids compared to the narcissists today. I’m not saying we weren’t arrogant like them but we were just saying ‘Give Peace a Chance’.  There was no civil war.  Hanoi Jane was a traitor. We cared for the American POW’s up to their neck in farces tipped pogo sticks.  We didn’t like celebrities fucking the enemy.   We even knew communists lied.  They tried to continue the war in Europe after Berlin was taken.  They would always claim to be the victims ,but they built walls to keep their citizens in.  The Berlin airlift was a thing of beauty.  Non aggressive.  I grew up seeing that on tv documentaries.   Brilliant flying,   Not long after, we watched Armstrong stepping down on the moon. 

I remember it was another  miracle when the Berlin Wall came down.  All those people freed from communism.  All the folks Solzhenitzen wrote about  getting out of the Siberian Gulags. Now there’s  millions in the Communist Chinese Gulags today and  hundreds of thousands in religious Islamic Iranian prisons. 

Today I listen to the news and hear liars calling riots and looting,  protests.  I can’t wrap my head around it. A lot of people in the north go crazy with a thing we call ‘cabin fever’.  The lockdown really must have done a number on people, especially the media.  They sound so turned around they don’t know right from wrong like the Prime Minister of Canada. CSIS, the national security service, says the Communist Chinese party has infiltrated the Canadian education system, media and politics to the highest level.

I’m too old for this shit.  I like staying in.  I’m as afraid of ignorant people and the lawless as I am of Covid 19.  I don’t understand why paying more than half my income in taxes I can’t feel safe walking in the streets at night.  The elite then and now had walls around their own homes.  Now they have bodyguards and private armies and don’t want citizens to have rabbit guns.  Everyone had guns when I was growing up, before Trudeau’s father..  Then we left the doors unlocked.  I asked the police I know why the mobs keep destroying property, interrupting traffic and communications ,more and more, without anyone  suffering consequences.  What happened to law and order and peace.   They told me the  politicians won’t let them stop the riots.  

I’d like to defund the politicians.    

Psalm 32

From Psalm 32, NIV Bible,
“You are my hiding place;
You will protect me from trouble
And surround me with songs of deliverance.'
++++
“Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous,
sing, all you who are upright in heart."

I love the psalms. When people have been threatening to kill me, kill my dog, or kill my family, I have turned to the psalms for comfort. They were written by David facing all the armies of his enemies and those who were supposedly friends who betrayed him. I am amused that House of Thrones is so popular but it’s really just historic deviance and divide and conquer.
I just read a history of Armenia and that poor kingdom was under attack from either the Greek Christians or Muslems every few years all the while there was internal strife.
 Israel was an attractive e nation along the trade routes.  Armies passed through going each way.  Empires one after another attempted and succeeded in subjugate it.
Canada is a young country that has not known invasions but increasingly our immigrants come from regions where war was a constant.  Of Scottish/Irish  heritage we’d known peace within the British empire for hundreds of years with minor conflicts compared to the later great war.
In Moscow a few years ago I met with a uniform supplier for the Russian army. He said war was big business  and that Europeans had wars every 50 years on average.  All of the nations of the ‘Security Council’ are principal arms dealers and major war concerns. The purpose of the United Nations was to cement the gains and ensure the Allied Empire would remain in charge thereafter.  The “cold war’, was really not so much a war but an ‘arms race’ that culminated in Detente and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The competition between ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’ was won with the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The American model was a model of decentralization, freedom and meritocracy.  The communist model was central control, totalitarian and fear based. It resulted in the ‘mediocrity’ that haunts all socialist countries.  Stalin said that socialism was communism. Marxist socialism was a dyadic (beugeoisie/proletariat, with the aim of continual warfare till the lowest common denominator , the proletariat ruled.  By contrast there was a Scottish socialist model based on triadic principles of three class society which gave rise to the Union movement.  All economies are a mixture of capitalism and socialism.  Historically the collective agreed to serve in those areas where profit was least likely immediate so less attractive to the capitalist investor.  NAZI was socialism and called itself the National Socialist Party.  Ironically today given the propaganda and disinformation the average person does not recognize ‘central’ control as the hallmark of socialism and dictatorship. Yet Lenin, revered socialist, insisted on ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.
Even in the church there is the central control of the Catholic contrasted with the regional control of presbytery.  The pendulum swings. In Canada we are facing more dictatorship.  Pierre Trudeau threatened the country’s citizens collectively bringing on martial law against all for the action of an few individuals.  The French have historically swung from their love of monarchy or Napoleonic Empire dictatorship to their bloody French Revolution and radicalism.  In almost all the colonies of the French there have been persistent war left for generations while British colonies by comparison have been relatively stable.  As Canada has become ruled by Quebec dictatorship following the increasing reduction in ‘eligible’ political candidacy, first ‘fluent french speakers’ and now pro abortionist only we have become a centralized oligarchy.
The natural appeal of dictatorship is the ‘benign dictator’ is the most appealing efficient government yet ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ with Canada increasingly corrupt as a nation, perhaps more corrupt than ever. The Charbonneau Enquiry essentially showed that the Eastern Mafia and Biker Gangs controlled the building of Quebec and naturally as Quebec dominates Canada    the influence of corruption spreads through the nation. Not that western Canada is still “Canada the good’ , once the ‘bread basket of the world’, it’s agricultural achievement today is it’s production of marijuana.
The legal/political byzantine squabbling at the top which each corporation trying to get special deals and own the law makers who are themselves seeking special retirement havens like the world renown Canadian Senate, the best of all Old Age Pension deals for the ‘good friend’ of the wheeling dealing central socialist government, it all seems to the common man like a brawl going on in the sky between gods and goddesses of ancient greece and rome.  These Gods and Goddessess aren’t called Mars and Venus but rather Walmart, Pfizer, de Havilland, Nike, etc.  Meanwhile the Hillary Clinton debate wages to the south and Brexit has escaped from the centralized authority and cancerous bureaucracy of Brussels.  It remains to be seen if England will survive this encounter with the Germans.  The Communist experiment in Babylon fell as has the Islamic Babylon tumbled before Desert Spring.  The struggle remains in the West and China.  Always the Borg meets Captain Picard.
In the midst of all this apparent deceit, corruption and greed, divisiveness and empire, it’s good to turn to the Lord.  The psalms are a comfort.
“You are my hiding place,
You will protect me from trouble.
And surround me with songs of deliverance."
When I attended Regent College Dr. James Houston taught courses on spirituality which we were truly blessed to attend year after year.  He taught that reading all the psalms day after day till they are finished would help one to feel ‘anointed’.  There’s a recurrent theme being lost and found over and over again.  It’s the story of David.
David’s heir was Jesus.
Hallelujah.

Attack on Leningrad - Movie

In spite of myself I watched a disturbing human drama of historical significance. I picked up the DVD kind of thinking I'd enjoy watching some fast action plane fights done up Russian style. Instead I weeped at the terribly touching story of two women, others, and the children.  There were planes and tanks and bodies lying dead to be eatten in the seige of Leningrad.  But there was also this moving moment when a father tells his departing daughter, "Don't give up."  Action packed, for sure. but spilling over with humanity as well.  Not at all comic book or cut out people. Acting so real by Mira Sorvino, Garbiel Byrne and Armin Mueller--Stahl and Olga Sutlova.  In the Nazi seige a British Journalist Kate Davis is presumed dead only to be rescued by Nina a member of the Soviet militia.  With papers lost and declared dead Kate stays starving and surviving with Nina's family.  Alexander Buravsky is the director.  The movie was so much more than I imagined.
In the end I felt like I'd just watched Dr. Zhivago expecting an episode of House MD.