On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Naomi's funeral was held this morning.

I attended via Zoom, like some two dozen other friends and relatives. The Pandemic in Progress was certainly part of why. The travel time to and from the cemetery was also a factor. Ottawa is a very large city, so local public transit's current limitations meant a two-hour-in-each-direction travel time between where I currently live and the cemetery.

Anyway...the service was short, and I have a sense of her family and other friends being robbed of precious things by the Pandemic here too. siderea has discussed such things at some length in recent weeks and months: the loss of ritual, of community, stolen away by the need to protect one another. So have others, be they friends, family, or strangers to me, across the world. The rituals of shiva in particular, in this funeral's context, came to mind.

It's not the tradition I was raised with, but I don't much care about that. Unearned pain has been suffered here by too many already. And in order to move past my resentment, to master it and cast it out, I must first admit that it is here. In my heart.

And I miss my friend. One more among several, already gone.

Thank you, Naomi, for bringing what you could and what you did to my life.

Yeah, so that last five minutes broke me.

A lot of people are going to a lot of effort to produce this result by design, as we know from the news.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/25/health/gallup-world-emotions-index-scli-intl/index.html

Ashby, like Spider Robinson and others since his arrival, is an ex-American (or in her case, in the process of becoming so). I've been paying some degree of attention to her opinion columns in the Ottawa Citizen, particularly in the last few months.

This column is one of the root causes of my worry about "annexation or blitzkrieg?".

And then there's this one about how we use - and react to how others use - the Internet.

You may want to look at some of her other columns.