Let's Get to the News

Coltsfoot Lane, Cabbagetown

For the first time since the townhouse condos at 280 Sherbourne Street were built almost fifty years ago, children have been born to families living here: Masie on October 1 and Charlie on October 9.  

Babies born in October 2020 were conceived in the month when the pandemic was among us but humanity wasn't fully aware.

 
For that first month of 2020, there were other things going on besides COVID-19, such as:

- the US assassination of Qasem Soleimani and 

- the shooting down by Iran of 176 civilians on an Ukrainian Airlines flight and

- Meg and Harry stepping back as senior members of the Royal Family and 

- Millions of hectares of Australia burning as koalas approached the brink of extinction and

- Donald Trump's impeachment and

- Harvey Weinstein's trial and

- Brexit.

Of course, January's events were nothing compared to the past week, when the fading-reality-television-star-in-chief was literally on steroids and taking crazy to new heights.

Among the ceaseless cymbal crashes of the news, every once in a while a voice breaks through with crystalline clarity. For example, this, from Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine:

The [Republicans'] premise is that liberty is a higher value than democracy, and they define liberty to mean a right to property that precludes redistribution. That is to say, the right views progressive taxation, regulation and the welfare state not as mere impediments to growth, but as oppression. A political system that truly secured freedom would not allow the majority to gang up on the minority and redistribute their income for themselves.

And

Republicans believe that the political system must retain, and ideally expand, its counter-majoritarian features: ballot-access rules that restrict the franchise to “worthy” citizens, gerrymandered maps that allow the white rural minority to exercise control, a Senate that disproportionately represents white and Republican voters, and a Supreme Court that believes the Republican economic program is written into the Constitution.

I don't know about you, but that sure clears up a lot for me.

With the pandemic, people newly isolated and unemployed turned online for their news, where Facebook lay in wait to radicalize them. Within no time, anti-lockdown rallies popped up. And Q-Anon had a line of merchandise and a candidate running for the House of Representatives.

I get that Facebook's algorithm is not a force for good in the world, feeding as it does people's preference for opposition. But that can't be all it feeds. My Facebook account swarms with puppy videos, animal rescues and the travel photography of a friend who sends this greeting every morning: "hello my lovelies." 

Congratulations to my neighbours for their impressive act of love and optimism in these batshit loonball times.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Karen

No more line ups at Ontario COVID-19
Assessment Centres,
just a record level of new cases.