Counting down the hours till freedom . (It's roughly 32 as I write this.) In the meantime, here's my memory-bank photo of the day.
 |
| Malaga, Spain, Easter 2017 |
We spent the first part of winter 2017 on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, then spent six weeks in Malaga on the Mediterranean coast of Spain. As with other parts of Roman Catholic southern Europe, Easter is still a huge deal here. Many local parishes invest countless thousands of Euros building and maintaining floats, some decades or even centuries old, on which they carry elaborate, richly robed effigies of the Virgin Mary or Jesus through the streets at Easter.
These things weigh tons, so it takes a small battalion of able-bodied men - and some women - to carry them. They walk very slowly with a kind of swaying motion, accompanied by a marching band playing eerily sombre music. The swaying gait is meant to make the figure on the float appear alive. Luckily for the carriers, there are frequent rest stops - the parades take hours to go a relatively short distance. There were two or three parades on our street over a couple of days during Easter week that year. These guys were just up around the corner from us, about to turn on to our street, about three blocks from the apartment. Note the people hanging out of windows and balconies at either edge of the frame.
*
I opened a Twitter account last night. Will I tweet? I don't know yet.
I did it because of an opinion piece I read in the Saturday Globe & Mail by novelist and former journalist Tom Rachman. (It's here, but if you don't have a Globe online account, you have to sign up, for free, before you can read it.) Rachman was a reluctant tweeter and, judging by his tweets, still fairly tentative. I have been and probably will continue to be similarly reluctant, and may never dip my toe in.
Part of what Rachman was talking about in the article was the notion of intellectual courage, which to him entails "offending mainstream opinion in a way that mainstream opinion will eventually endorse" - as opposed, he means, to just spouting offensive opinions. He cites Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Mary Wollstonecraft, the early 19th century feminist, as examples of the intellectually courageous, people who "got there first."
He asks whether it is possible to show intellectual courage in the Twitter universe. It's not, he suggests, or it's difficult because, first, there is no longer any such thing as "mainstream opinion." There are only two armed camps. And the intolerance on both sides means if you dissent from the mainstream opinion in your own tribe, you simply get thrown over the wall to the other.
It's also extremely risky to try because, as Rachman says, tweets are all but indelible. Among friends, we might state an opinion, sincerely hold it for a time, but then allow ourselves to be persuaded by hearing other, better reasoned, points of view, and recant. With Twitter, any briefly-held, and tweeted, position can be used against you later, even if you delete the original tweet.
There has been so much in the media lately decrying this rigidification of political opinion and discourse. I don't see how it can be all down to social media, but it has happened over the period in which Facebook and Twitter have come to play such a huge role in the discourse. Ten or fifteen years ago, I rememer regularly talking politics with work friends who held markedly different views from my own way-left-of-centre positions. The discussions were always conducted with good humour and mutual respect and ended with either some grudging shift in opinion on one side, or an amicable agreement to disagree.
I know I'm not the first to lament the loss of that kind of civility and mutual respect in political discourse. And I'm not suggesting that the opinions of the people in the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol should be respected or tolerated, but the fact is, those people were among an astonishing 74 million who voted for Donald Trump's Republicans. (And as my brother Tom laid out in an article in the National Post a few days ago, Trumpism is not just a U.S. phenomenon, there are Trumpites, and Qanon conspiracists right here in Canada.) One hopes - and there is some evidence to suggest this - that some of those voters have had their minds changed by Trumps antics. But liberals like me, and most of my friends and family, can't just hope they go away. They won't.
So how do we bridge the divide? That's the challenge Uncle Joe Biden faces now in the U.S. But it's one we should all be working on when the opportunity arises. To that end, the good folks at Pocket have put together a portfolio of articles, entitled "How to Talk to People You Disagree With." The articles cover a bunch of topics, from how to really listen, finding common ground, how to avoid being defensive and, perhaps most importantly, how to change someone's mind. I haven't read them all yet, but I will.
*
A quick nod to a quirky British dramedy series that we like very much: The Good Karma Hospital, which we get on Acorn ($7.49 a month, but with a free week-long trial.) I'm not sure if it's available anywhere else. It's about English doctors at a small private hospital in small-town southern India.
The cast is mostly Indian - or maybe some of them are Indo-Brits, but they speak with Indian accents. The name actor, who plays the hospital's de facto head doctor, Lydia Fonseca, is Amanda Redman. She played the detective chief inspector in New Tricks, a long-running British cop show about a bunch of eccentric old gumshoes who come out of retirement to join a squad set up to reinvestigate cold cases.
Some might find Good Karma a bit...squishy. It can be sentimental and cliched, but the acting and writing are pretty good and the setting is spectacular. It's possible the picture of life in southern India has been sanitized somewhat for English audiences. The series works pretty well as an ad for tourism in Kerala State where it's set (although the series is actually shot in Sri Lanka).
No comments:
Post a Comment