Hallelujah! Happy days are here again.
Or will be soon. Karen and I were able to book our first Covid jabs today. We'll get them April 9.
Friends let us know that Perth County - Stratford, Goderich - was accepting bookings for people in our 70-to-75 age group. We booked appointments in Stratford, but had to accept two different days, April 15 and 16.
It occurred to me that changes to age eligibility were supposed to be province-wide, and maybe I should check our local Middlesex-London Health Unit to see if they had now changed their requirements too. They had. So I booked us into the Agriplex, about a ten minute drive from here. And cancelled the Stratford appointments.
It means I'll be able to go back to hockey before the end of next month. Yay!
*
As I listened again today on my morning run to David Blight's biography of mid-19th century black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, it brought home both how little really has changed in America in almost 200 years, and how 'modern' Douglass and his fellow activists were.
In one passage about an anti-slavery rally in Indianapolis in the 1840s, Blight describes how a pro-slavery mob - Indiana was a free state - attacked and badly beat Douglass and some of his white American Anti-Slavery Society colleagues. In a telling detail - I'm not sure why Blight even thought it worth including - one of the witnesses is quoted as noting that the pro-slavery thugs were led by a man in a coon-skin cap.
This immediately made me think of the videos of Trump supporters attacking the Capitol in January - led by a man in a coon-skin cap (albeit in his case, with horns.) I would say that man, Jake Angeli, who was arrested and charged days later, is a direct philosophical descendant of the fur-hatted guy and his cohorts who beat Douglass and his friends in Indiana. If such people can be said to have anything as sophisticated in mind as a philosophy.
Then I read an article in the Globe this morning about jury selection for the trial of the cop who killed George Floyd, and all the issues around whether the guy can get a fair trial given the intense public-opinion pressures on both sides. The defense argued, unsuccessfully, that, because feelings were running so high in Minneapolis where the crime occurred the court should change the venue .
The article cited the cautionary case of Rodney King in Los Angeles in the 1990s. White highway cops beat King, a black motorist, to death. They were charged. The defense argued, successfully, that the venue should be changed to avoid inevitable bias. The trial was moved to a suburb, where an all-white jury was selected and eventually found the cops not guilty. Riots erupted in Los Angeles in response.
It just never seems to end.
*
Got out for a short walk about 4, by which time the temp was up to 8 or so and the sun was shining. I wandered over to the library and picked up a title I'd seen recommended at a website as one of the best recent books of nature writing: To The River: A Journey Beneath the Surface by Olivia Laing. The place was practically deserted so I did a little browsing and also picked up a book about Harry Callahan, one of my favourite mid-century American photographers.
Took a few pictures. I'm trying to take at least a few every day.
 |
| Clarence St. between Dundas and Queen's Ave |
 |
| One London Place on right |
 |
| A slightly different angle |
 |
| St. Paul's Anglican cathedral |
 |
| Self-portrait with mask |
*
I also re-worked a few photos from my winter 2016 archive.
 |
| Street somewhere in Carmen |
 |
| Waiting room at Estación del Norte |
 |
| Silk exchange |
No comments:
Post a Comment