Engendered fires

Although we are far away, you can smell the smoke from the fires of Manitoba and Saskatchewan in the damp air here and there. It sweeps in on the wings of crows and curls around the rain. We are in a moment of time. That is all. One moment in eternity. One moment on an ancient planet. One moment of remembering soon to be forgotten.

All of us humans—we are dropped here randomly to live our lives. Some would say we choose those lives before we’re even born. We hope one day perhaps we’ll know the truth but we don’t. All we can really know is that we all have something that we must work out. Some failing, some difference, some sad mad glad mission. We arrive flawed and fumbling, born to construct a life that matters at least to ourselves if no one else. To God perhaps. We don’t know.

And so it is that I sometimes look at all this social noise with a primeval sadness. What do we learn and do we ever learn it? And how many go arounds will it take to learn? It is sometimes hard to be philosophical in a nuts and bolts kind of world and so I personally drift from reason to a jumbled esotericism on some subjects.

Right now I’m looking at all these “conspiracy theories” on gender with weariness. Apparently Michelle Obama and Brigitte Macron are transgenders and Starmer likes his boy toys according to the latest. Those are just two of the many gossiped about, right or wrong. First of all I think for heavens sakes people we’ve lived long enough in history to know that people are born the way they are born and that hasn’t changed and is unlikely to change any time soon. As long as no harm is done to anyone and particularly any children, accepting this is simply rational. Love is love. If your religion preaches love then acceptance and compassion are givens. If it doesn’t, carry on then learning nothing about love. It does not serve any of us. A bible may be the word of God but it is still compiled and interpreted by human beings. Fallible, agenda’d human beings.

However, given the unprecedented struggle of the 2Slgbtq+ community, so evident in the last few years, high profile individuals hiding their sexuality is a completely monstrous slap in the face of those who have fought so hard for recognition. It is up to the 2SLGBTQ+ community to judge this. Not the rest of us. Just as it is up to this community to recognize that having biological males competing in women’s sports is not a win by any stretch of the imagination for anyone. It is up to this community to put a stop to the injustice.

And the kerfuffle over women’s washrooms is absurd. I would hazard a guess, although I doubt such statistics exist, that there is more harm done to little boys in men’s washrooms than harm was ever to be conceived in a woman’s washroom used by transgenders. Or do little boy’s no longer count?

Reason and compassion wed can solve a multitude of pain. But divorced and alienated from each other, the pain goes on and there will always be more tears than rain. How long does it take us to learn? We are one moment on an ancient planet remembering and forgetting. Can we do it wisely? Just for once.