On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Okay, Bob Hepburn at the Toronto Star has been arguing for the better part of this past ten years - actually all the way back to May 2008! - that we need to get rid of Victoria Day. Not that we need to rid ourselves of a long weekend at the end of May each Gregorian-calendar year in Canada, because we don't. We really don't. But rather, Hepburn argues that the name of and reason for such events needs changing up. His latest such reminder of his opinion was published on 20 May 2021.

After all, we're supposedly celebrating a fictional birthday for the very real British monarch who signed off on setting up Confederation in 1867 after all the drinking contests, under-the-table mutual blackmail and whatever else was going on at those three negotiation sessions that the "fathers of Confederation" put together in the middle years of the 1860's.

Does Queen Victoria - specifically - really count for a lot with most Canadians and Canadian-adjacent people these days? Our local Monarchists aside?

One of his suggestions for the change, Peacekeepers' Day, is already officially observed by the authorities, but is not a statutory holiday. It's observed by the UN on 29 May, and by the Canadian federal government on 9 August. Maybe we need our feds to harmonize with the UN on this? Maybe not?

Some other options were mentioned, too...I'm trying to get at Pressreader via OPL's website in order to refresh my memories of those. And I found them: "First Nations Day" and "Prime Ministers' Day". National Indigenous Peoples' Day is already set for 21 June each year. The latter option...is not appetizing to my ears.

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.

It's been fifty years since Lester B. Pearson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his solution to the Suez Crisis.

We still haven't gotten much further since then, have we?

To quote the man himself:
"The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants, and for peace like retarded pygmies."