Riots, hockey sticks and propeller hats

Four months of silence? Wow, how quickly the time goes by.

My computer crashed (virus sent what looked like acid eating through my hard-drive as I watched it on screen, horrified). Now I am working off my Netbook, without all the features of a regular computer, but I make do. It is well past time to get back to blogging (read: ranting).

So here goes:

I am all in a state of anger (and embarrassment) by Vancouver's riot after they lost the Stanley Cup. I don't care a bit about hockey, but from the city who hosted the Olympics for the world, a city I love dearly, it is an embarrassment that has reached epic and international proportions. But more than embarrassed, I am angry... that we, as Canadians, can only seem to get worked up enough to stage a good riot for hockey, of all things.

With all the injustices in the world, the unbridled power of Harper's majority and the decline of democracy: government for the people by the people, with war and famine ravaging third world nations, with children dying, and more money being spent on prisons than schools, with rampant poverty, destitution and environmental destruction, governments oppressing their own people, a lack of human rights for women the world over... with so many more important things to riot about... we... riot... about... hockey. I am angry. I am disgusted beyond measure. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

Some days I feel like giving up, giving in... if you can't beat them join them. I am reminded of one of my favourite quotes: "The world is disgracefully managed, one hardly knows to whom to complain."- Ronald Firbank. I feel surrounded by the unenlightened, the uninformed, the ignorant. Why care when most people don't? Is the frustration, the grief, the rise in blood pressure really worth it? But then I remember that I do have a small group of people around me plagued with the same rising blood pressure, and I wrap these friends around me like a warm blanket on a cold night. 

Someone I love dearly said to me recently "Speak out...Yell if you have to ...and Demand Change." There you have it. The activist inside felt that like an ember growing to flame. So there is no giving up, no giving in and certainly no joining the masses... I care because I am not capable of doing otherwise, it isn't in me.

I'm back.
Dar