Woke up this morning late to the local 7 AM CBC Toronto news on our clock radio. That’s late for me. Lately I’ve been waking up at 4:30 AM with all sorts of timely crap buzzing around in my head.
The radio is an alarm – this morning it was more than that – it was alarming. There were half a dozen items – five wars and Harper visiting the Arctic to stake out Canada’s claim to part of the high Arctic – and, of course, the rights of the “Canadian People” to drill for oil there. Or, more accurately, the right of that same nebulous, convenient, idea, the “Canadian People”, to let foreign multinationals drill there and scoop up most of the profits.
On our regular 4 km walk before breakfast, I reflected on how harmful and obsolete the ideas of nation, state, race, creed, etc. have become. I had just read Otrazhenie’s heart-rending poem/post, War Is Evil, War is the Devil…. The raw emotion and deep insight in this piece touched me vividly. Otrazhenie is a person whose grandmother was Ukrainian and grandfather was Russian, as revealed in her post A Prayer for Ukraine. Her youthful summers visiting relatives in a coal-mining town in the Ukraine in the 1980’s are related in this delightful, candid and carefully crafted post, Private Mousen.
In these days of intermarriage there are a growing number of people like Otrazhenie who see the big picture. That is one of the few hopeful things on this planet.
We need to see all humans as one. More than that – we need to see all life as One. Creeds and borders must become things of the past, as must the hatreds that spring both from genuine persecution and manipulative, profit-centred propaganda.
All this made me remember John Lennon’s song, Imagine, and feel it more deeply than ever. It is truly a recipe for what ails the human spirit.
mightyturk 
A lovely post, Bob, that honors a gifted blogger and interweaves important insights about what really matters – the future possibility of living in a world at peace.