The Point

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Some things just stick in your mind

Sorry to have been incommunicado for a while. I've just started school out at Trent U in a little city halfway between Toronto and Kingston called Peterborough. If you've never heard of it, or have only heard someone's parents talking about how they met at a party there, it's okay.

Although I shred leaflets from Jack Layton with equal relish as those from Dion or my own Conservative MP, Rahim Jaffer (if I get one more pamphlet with a picture of him flipping pancakes...), it would be fair to say I share more than a few "lefty" views. So when I slowly began discovering I had landed myself at the mother of all hippie schools out here in Ontario, my reflex was to automatically start disagreeing with people. I don't know, I just can't let a room get too agree-y without wanted to stir it up a little.

For example. A perfectly well-spoken and reasonably thoughtful girl in one of my classes started talking about how "we" white feminists in the West needed to take into account the opinions of the locals before going over there and pushing our views on them. Putting aside anything I might have agreed with in her statement, I told her to take a longer look around the classroom before presuming we all fit into that "we" and essentially called her an unconscious racist. Things like that. Making friends.

It seemed appropriate to me, then, that I recently stumbled across a copy of Some People Push Back by Ward Churchill - a man whose extensive shit-disturbing demands respect, if not agreement - right here on the internet. You might not have heard of this essay by name, but this is the one his book on "chickens coming home to roost" is all about, the one where he says the people who died in the World Trade Centre in 2001 were essentially "little Eichmanns" who were simply reaping their just desserts for their complicity in the United States' imperial misadventures abroad. Yeah, that guy. If you're interested, it's available here.

And since I've outed myself as away from home again, I might as well ask if any of you live in the Edmonton-Strathcona provincial riding. I'm getting my absentee ballot sent to me soon I hope, but I have to admit ignorance about any of the candidates for this election but Rachel Notley. Anybody have an insights to offer?

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posted by Christopher at 9:52 a.m.

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