Besides being the joyful feast of Saint Nicholas, the sixth of December is also the sombre anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique massacre in 1989, which has been commemorated with vigils ever since. Peruse Steyn’s take on the debacle, which did not reflect well, as he puts it, upon Canadian manhood. When Gamil Gharbi, son of an Algerian Muslim, who in adulthood took his (divorced) mother’s last name, adopting ‘Marc Lepine’, walked into that classroom, fired off a round, and demanded ‘Separez vous!’, every man shuffled out, stood in the hallway as the shots were fired and the women died, and still did nothing when Mr. Gharbi/Lepine sauntered past them. Ponder also the loss of ‘women and children first’ in recent disasters, from cruise ships to fires. Quite literally now it is every man for himself, the fairer and weaker take the hindmost. Sad. But chivalry is not dead, so long as it burns in the heart of but one masculine soul.
What’s with Nancy Pelosi? Evoking her Catholic faith, after all these years, but only as a reproof against those who claim she ‘hates’ President Trump. Au contraire, cries the Democratic harridan, she prays for the President daily – in fact, ‘all the time’ in her own words. I wonder if she also prays for an end to abortion, contraception, the travesty of ‘same sex’ marriage, of which she is a vociferous supporter, and, like the hate which she so vociferously disavows, are also contrary to her ‘Catholic faith’. We might remind Ms. Pelosi that to love is to will the good of the other, and not just any good, but the true good, that will lead to their – and our own – fulfilment, in the broad, eternal sense of that word.
Hate, on the other hand, is to will evil to another. Some forms of ‘evil’, such as punishment, are an indirect form of ‘tough love’. But what are we to say of Ms. Pelosi’s radical support for abortion? Is not willing the death of the unborn, however indirectly, a not-so-subtle type of hate? I wonder if she will be wagging her bony finger at that most just of Judges, whom we all must face. And, in the end, we will all be judged on love, and love especially to the least of His brethren.
Trudeau continues his embarrassing of Canada, as if we didn’t have enough on our plate. We’re either a laughingstock, with our minstrel Prime Minister – all blackfaced up and nowhere to go – or a place to avoid, if you want to invest – in oil or anything else – or have an ‘unbearable’ illness, or are an unborn child. Jobs are plummeting, and family-wage employment as rare as serious, insightful comments by Trudeau.
There is our boy-man in chief, smirking and giggling with other immature leaders – Boris, Macron – simulacra of true men, all of them curiously pro-abortion. Or, rather, they don’t care all that much about ‘life issues’, or much about life at all, it seems. Coddled and feted from youth, they seem never to have developed what our forefathers called ‘character’ – literally, ‘etched into one’ – their lives absorbed in silly ephemera, such as, to take but one primary example, the bogey of climate change.
Trump called Trudeau two-faced, but I think he was two faces off, for our leader is actually no-face, evoking not much at all from his blank visage. George Orwell quipped that we get the face we deserve at fifty, which Trudeau is pushing. Tempus fugit, et memento mori.
And while on blank cheques, teachers are again up in arms, ‘compensation’ being the primary beef, itself masked behind other ancillary concerns, class size, work hours, and on it goes. As mentioned, Canada is bleeding productive private employment, and every cent teachers make – along with the legion of others making a killing off the public dime – comes from this shrinking sector, which cannot remotely make enough to pay all the bills. Hence, most of their salary is from the debt piling up, to be heaped upon our children, and children’s children, to the umpteenth generation But who cares? As Keynes put it, we’ll all be dead anyway.
Do they not realize that their six-figure incomes, benefits, holidays, early retirement, more benefits, are perks that most Canadians could hardly even dream of? I say privatize education, and let the free market – that is, the free choice of parents – decide who teaches, and what they teach. Let freedom reign. Things could only improve.
So have hope, dear reader, for the world has been a fractious place since that first couple left the Garden, and will be until the finis saeculorum. In this blessed season of Advent, we await the arrival of the Christ, who makes all things new.