Tag: church

How Low Can We Go

Well there is this:

Kingston union warns teachers they can be disciplined for “right-wing” views, or saying “boys and girls”

And this:

Church Burnings Continue in Canada Long After ‘Residential School’ Horror Story Fizzled

ALBERTA, CANADA - JULY 01: A view of the Roman Catholic St. Jean Baptiste church destroyed

Canada’s National Post noted on Wednesday that church arsons “never stopped,” with at least six new church fires reported in the past two months, but the media gives them little coverage and rarely discusses the debunked reports of mass graves at a Christian boarding school for indigenous children that touched off a wave of church burnings in the spring of 2021.

Perhaps this:

Toronto: Pro-Hamas protesters target Mount Sinai Hospital.

Why? Because it is Jewish. Never mind it is a hospital and that many HAMAS and Palestinians are treated in Israeli Hospitals.

Maybe this:

Bankers verified Fake Chinese Income mortgages for banned money laundering suspects in Toronto: HSBC Leaks.

One Chinese woman bought 5 houses in the GTA without any record of mortgage compliance. And our current housing crisis and affordability is not the fault of government policy??

And this:

Canada’s CSIS admits to monitoring parental rights activists, compares them to neo-Nazis. Our Liberal government in action.

And furthermore:

Canada’s ‘Islamophobia czar’ defends antisemitic pro-Hamas rally at Mount Sinai hospital.

Does anyone in Canada remember Kristallnacht? Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

Canada has a minister responsible for Islamophobia in Canada! Are they kidding me?

Nigeria: Muslims sack Christian villages, rename them, murder over 200 people in January alone.

Islam? The religion of peace?

Another 5 Christian churches have been set ablaze in Canada.

Or this. The Canadian grand deception and lie:

Louis Riel now recognized as first premier of Manitoba.

He was insane, a religious fanatic and had an Ontario man executed without due process. But that is ok because he was Metis.

Toronto changes name of Dundas Square because Lord Dundas was not fast enough in his abolitionist action to ban slavery everywhere in the then British Empire. The new name (??) honors the Ghana slave trade.

In summary:

And Liberals as well as all Progressives. Anything that could undermine our values and way of life is fair game.

Enjoy the silence:

Let’s get out of the UN before we lose  our sovereignty and our sense of our Canadian identity.

 

Rabid Dogs…2

….That particular trip to the wet coast was a bust. Don’t really know why I went. We stayed with Timmy at Mrs Redfern for a while but I soon left, never to return to that abode ever again. I do know that I decided to drive back by myself, late September. O’Grunts stayed out there for a short while returning on his own at a later date.  It was raining hard, of course. The rain then turned into snow, which morphed into a blizzard just as I was heading into the mountain passes. Surviving on nicotine I drove for hours through that blinding blizzard. Finally, after what seemed an eternity I could take no more. I had to stop so I parked the car outside of a flop house on the main drag of a small mountain town where I stayed the night. In the morning I couldn’t find my car as it was under about 6 feet of snow. Finding it then digging out, I headed east through the foothills and into the western prairie landscape where my car broke down just outside of a small prairie town due to a faulty voltage regulator. It was about 20 below zero. First week of October! Yikes.

It took about five days to fix that car as they had to order the part from back east. On my way again I picked up a hitchhiker on the outskirts of another prairie town who I had hoped would be able to share in the driving. That was fine except he didn’t quite grasp the finer points of driving, no licence per se, as I found out the hard way in a multi-circular spinout while he was driving that almost killed us. Shaken and stirred but recovering from the shock I drove the rest of the way dropping this lad off somewhere in the northern expanses of the wilderness at a highway crossroad. It was in the same area of trees and lakes, and trees and lakes with more trees and more lakes. Finally, I arrived home and back to the normal grind of a normal living with a normal career and a resume worthy job cleaning out subway cars in the subway yard at night, which was located just down the road from a local Subway sandwich shop. Serendipity do dah!

We cleaned these cars at night, 11 pm till 7am. Four cars from top to bottom. Four, as it took almost the entire shift for two of us to make these cars shine. Four per day, 20 per week, 80 plus cars per month. Funny what goes through one’s mind when employed in such a mind numbing career enhancing occupation such as this. But the pay was good for the time.

My partner in this endeavour was a young man from India. He was probably in his mid to late twenties, and considered himself upper class within the stringency of the Indian caste system. Why he stooped so low as to work here, or live here, was beyond my comprehension given his arrogance and holier than thou attitude and superiority complex. Yet he conveyed to me a disclosure that I would not soon forget. In my mindless Catholic indoctrinated but naive mind I perceived India, Pakistan, Bangladesh as extreme poverty stricken nations. They needed our help, our financial largess and our compassion.  Yes, he agreed, they had their social ills and problems that were for the most part insurmountable. But he and his kind couldn’t have cared less. The Indian aristocracy, middle classes, governing cadre, the caste system couldn’t give a rat’s ass as to the societal plight of the majority of their countrymen. The peasants were just that, peasants; peons who were lower than the lowest on their social ladder. They were for the most part dirt, vermin, scum, societal scabs, the great Indian unwashed, to be avoided at all costs.

Worse than the Catholics in this shit city of ours? I thought to myself

I was shocked at this admission. But he just laughed it off and told me that western countries such as mine and other western nations were being duped by the rhetoric of the United Nations. For the most part they were ill informed, idiotic, and delusional to think that our collective good will was being directed to where it was needed the most. All of that money and foreign aid coming into the country to help the poor was being siphoned off for other things. It had to be that way because the biggest threat to the survival and longevity of the Indian, Pakistani, Bangladesh caste system was compassion.

“Yeah, but what about that lady on TV?” I asked him. “You know the one wearing the brown army uniform, Unitarian Church of Canada I believe, asking, no pleading, for donations to alleviate the wretchedness of the slums in Calcutta”

“A huge scam.” he said “But keep on giving because we sure as hell won’t! In fact our government doesn’t have to do anything but keep the illusion alive in countries such as yours.” It’s a business this poverty thing.

That was that. Wow. All that talk about the poor over in India! Just talk? Or the starving people of Bangladesh? Just talk? Was I growing up or was I being conned by this disgruntled immigrant of Indian migration? Was this the beginning of my indoctrination to adulthood, real life and all the cynicism that goes with it? Or was this the slow but steadfast erosion of my innocence? The end of my sunny ways? Don’t know but a scary, uncomfortable feeling nevertheless.

Finality…2

…Mr Bowner decided to put together a school play.  It was a musical, or more precisely, a musical revue. It was based somewhat loosely on Porgy and Bess. There we were, the entire Grade Six class in black face, singing and dancing, carousing and carrying on. Can you imagine that happening in today’s politically correct charged atmosphere? Nope, yet in those days it was all just innocent fun. People focused more on the entertainment value than the shock value. They didn’t think otherwise, or read between the lines, or over expostulate as they seem to do today on just about everything.

I do find it interesting that as one progresses through academia and the scholastic ranks, and the bolder, cockier and less enthusiastic one becomes with respect to scholarly pursuits, rebellious perhaps, that the male student requires the firm hand of discipline that only a male, Sister Mary Bernice excepted, can seem to provide. Worse yet if that male class of teacher is comprised primarily from the various religious orders of the day. Some were the worst, some a close second, but tied with all the others. The worst may have been highly intellectual but they were as firm and as dangerous in their physical and psychological prowess as their international reputation would suggest that they excelled at in the intellectual sense.  No, ours were the others: an order born out of the French Revolution.  When it came to discipline they could give it out as bad or as good as any one religious law and order could. The only difference being was that they generally had a smile on their face as they were dishing it out.  Jokingly they would say: “This, my young (insert name here), is going to hurt you a lot more than it is going to hurt me.” Then the customary whack, whack, whack and more whack.  At least they were honest. The worst ones, on the other hand, in some form of intellectual mind game or bait and switch logic, would try to convince us that the physical punishment about to be unleashed was going to hurt them a great deal more then it was going to hurt us. Intellectual existentialism perhaps, pedagogically speaking, but pure unadulterated nonsense nonetheless…

Itchy Woolen Pants and Leggings

…Anyone who attended the Sunday 0745 mass at Our Lady of Peace got to know who the O’Neill family was.  Into the church they’d march, like a rosarian fashion statement: the father, the sons and the holy goats.  Looking back on those days I am sure the father took stock prior to entering church and with strict military guise established a right marker, then had the whole clan line up and dress themselves off accordingly. All that was missing were the barking orders and the march past. I say this because when they marched into their pew, always third from the front, they were always poised. When sitting behind them and looking forward toward the alter, one could see that the tallest – the father – the one with the longest arms and the longest reach was to the right while the smallest O’Neill was to the left. Mother was somewhere near the middle but strategically placed so when Art, Gerard or one of the other boys began to squirm from the death gripped itchiness of those woollen pants an arm would somehow appear, mysteriously, spiritually, as if by heavenly chance, to box the ears of the offending culprit.  No one in the church was shocked at this display of affection for in those days discipline equated to what some would term as child abuse today.  Whatever is was it worked and built character, so they said.  At least that was their story. Until polyester, cotton, acrylic, rayon made its debut that church congregation resembled a giant seesaw to someone who was detached from it all, as if in some out of body experience, looking down at the congregation from the rafters above.  For the younguns like Art, like Gerard, like the rest of us squirmed relentlessly in those open pews: restless and suffering from unimaginable torture from the maddening tentacles of those grey woollen trousers and leggings.  I am sure, though I cannot be certain of this, that when a good Catholic boy or girl is born, immediately after that life giving slap on the ass, that they are assigned and fitted out with grey woollen trousers or leggings to be worn prior to their first communion.   Only then will they be accepted as really good Catholic boys and girls. After all, psychological suffering through fear and guilt and physical suffering through self flagellation, or in this case, itchy woollen pants or leggings, are all part and parcel of the pillars of the founding creed of the Catholic faith…