Post 232--Intolerant Liberals

PRELIMINARY NOTE:  You may still nurse your annoyance over Post 228. I left it in an awful mess. I am painfully aware of that and it is the reason I did not do much with this blog for some time. I am terribly embarrassed. I simply do not have the technical savvy to help me correct or understand some of the tech stuff this blog requires. Even this paragraph is not the way it is supposed to be. However, I may well have found someone who can correct some things for me and even teach me how to navigate better in this blog.  So, I crave your understanding, sympathy and patience. My next action after sending off this blog is to contact that person and see how we can work together without it costing me a fortune, which I cannot afford as a retired missionary.

...  Andrew Scheer said it best:

“When people don’t agree with Justin Trudeau, they get silenced, or they get insulted.”

---

I am not a politician, but I do pay some attention to politics. When I returned to BC after some 30 years in Nigeria, 15 in the US and a short 2 back in Europe,  It occurred to me several times that perhaps I should devote my retirement years to local or provincial politics. However, as I settled into Vancouver's downtown and read the newspapers I soon became disenchanted. So much of it seemed so either downright stupid or ridden with egoism and lust for power. In fact, a friend who served as a BC MLA bowed out after one term. He explained it is disgustingly all about power. Secondly, I discovered that an MLA or an MP is nothing but a small boy/girl to the party leader. Well, I am not cut out to be anyone's small boy, even less a small girl!

I am not particularly favourable to any of Canada's political parties. I may be somewhat conservatively inclined, but definitely not that of the Conservative Party. Nevertheless, I have voted conservative occasionally, but with a heavy heart, for they don't really embody my values. In some ways, I find them traitors.  

But a party I have never voted for are the Federal Liberals. They are totally disgusting to me, especially our PM.  He may be a nice person and I might enjoy him as my next-door neighbour, but as politician or, God forbid in the future, as a PM?  I've never seen a prouder lot in all my life. They actually think the country owes them the power to govern!  Actually, they are among the most self-ignorant people I've ever met. They are totally unaware of the basic worldview that rules them. And then to think that there are Christians among them. I do not doubt their faith, but they can be there only out of ignorance. I advise them and everyone else to read Trudeau Sr.'s book on Liberalism and you will see how deeply individualistic liberalism is; no real room for community.  It's all about ME; hardly ever about WE.

Well, here I am, throwing every pretense at neutrality over the cliff. Today I am leaving you with some campaign smear about the Trudeau clique from the Conservatives. I usually don't take such campaign stuff seriously.  They are paid to smear. But I'm a Christian: I don't smear, though I will tell the truth even if unpleasant. It seems to me that the following Conservative smear is onto something I am encouraging you to read. And feel free to share your opinion with me.   

Hear!  Hear!

... the Liberals have been ramping up their smear tactics as we get closer to the next election:

• When our Deputy Leader Lisa Raitt questioned Bill Morneau on why their government has failed to live up to their feminist rhetoric – he called her a "Neanderthal."
   
• When our MP Todd Doherty rightfully questioned Justin Trudeau about his government’s ethics – Trudeau called him disgusting.
   
• When Ontario Cabinet Minister Lisa MacLeod was concerned about the pressures and costs that Trudeau’s border crisis put on the province’s immigration system – Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen called her “un-Canadian.”
   
• And just last week, our MP Bob Saroya questioned Bill Blair about the crisis at our border – so Blair accused Conservatives of wanting to put babies in cages.

It was unbelievable, Jan / John, even for Liberals.

You know the Liberals are losing an argument when they start falsely smearing and insulting you.

It’s the ugliest kind of politics and something we continually see out of these Trudeau Liberals.

As soon as the Liberals face any kind of legitimate criticism or questions, their “sunny ways” and “positive politics” come to an end and they head straight to the gutter while trying to look holier than thou.

It’s the same old Liberal tactic of lie, slander, and fearmonger…

… while still claiming to be the party of rainbows, sunshine, and lollipops.

The Liberals can smear us and the millions of Canadians with real questions all they want.

Canada’s Conservatives will continue to put forward Andrew Scheer’s positive Conservative vision for Canada – where taxes are low, government is limited, opportunity is unlimited, freedom is shared, and people are put before government!

Post 84--—Time for Explanation and Further Introduction

I had hoped to complete this post and publish it between Christmas and New Year. In addition to all the things I write about in the rest of this post, we visited our youngest son and family in Atlanta, GA. While there, no time or opportunity to write!  Returned home yesterday and decided to post a piece I had written earlier for such a time as this, when it is high time to post but have nothing ready.

I don’t write as many posts as I would like. So many other things that keep me busy, like getting all my published books, articles, lectures and some correspondence—some trivial even or attempts at humour—onto my website at <  www.SocialTheology.com >.  The time you may have spent on Christmas shopping in December, I spent on writing and a host of other things like…. 

I am an active member of our local West End Seniors Network (WESN) here in Vancouver as well as a couple of churches. I am the co-ordinator for the WESN’s monthly Men’s Breakfast Club, while wife Fran does the calling the day before to remind people. We both love social life and often accept invitations to or organize coffee times and visits from or to various friends and relatives whom we have here in BC by the bushel! We visit especially older people who are alone.

Fran, my wife, and I love to entertain people for lunch at home over soup and salads. She enjoys making salads while I specialize in soups. We are both good at our individual specialties. Such invitations are of a “social revolutionary” type, since the people in our West End area of Vancouver almost live in restaurants and do very little entertainment in their homes. Sharing lunch with them at home seldom is reciprocated, except perhaps over a coffee in a coffee shop. Individualism and a sense of exaggerated privacy has gone amuck so that people don’t easily open their doors to each other and loneliness has become a serious malaise in the neighbourhood. 

This particular sentence was written during the early morning of Christmas Day 2015. We had invited four people to enjoy Christmas dinner with us, all of them people who have no family nearby.  In fact, all of us, including Fran and myself, are either immigrants or former refugees, except for one, an Asian born in Canada whose family lives far away in another Canadian city. I do have family near by, but the others don’t and needed a place to celebrate.

I also mentioned churches. Yes, we are full members of the Christian Reformed Church here in Vancouver, while we are “adherents” to First Baptist Church in downtown. Why two? Well, that’s for another post sometime in the future. But these take time as well. We love attending church services and participating in other stuff during the week. The why and how, well, that, too, is for another time.

In addition to all that good stuff we’re involved in, we are both from very large families. Fran is the youngest of seven while I am number five out of ten. She has three brothers, two of whom have already passed away, and after them came four sisters, one of whom passed on. I have four sisters older than me and five brothers younger than me, with one sister and one brother already with the Lord. All of these siblings have together produced an entire battalion of kids, grandkids, even some great grandkids. This battalion is scattered all over North America, with Fran’s concentrating on Michigan, where her family immigrated to back in 1942, while mine are concentrated in British Columbia (BC), where our family immigrated to in 1951. I was thirteen at that time. Being as family-conscious as we are, we serve sort of as the glue for the two different families, though more so for the Boers in BC, since that’s where we now live.  For example, we organize the annual Boer get-together on Boxing Day (December 26) in Surrey. Fran is the Boer family consultant, since she keeps track of addresses and birthdays down to at least the fourth generation.  

Our own three children and seven grandchildren are scattered—near Seattle, in Silicon Valley and in Lagos, Nigeria, with regrettably none in Canada. Well, they did not grow up in Canada but in Nigeria, while they did their undergraduate work in Michigan in the shadow of my in-laws and our mission employer. This means travel and more travel for us to all three of them. Seattle is close by. So, there we can do weekend visits. But when we visit the Silicon or Lagos crowds, we spend a lot of time; Silicon often takes up to ten days a couple of times a year, while we recently spent almost a month in Lagos. 

All of the above personals have—or is it “has”?—two reasons. One is my own feeling that when I deal with people over any length of time, I need to know who they are, where they come from and how they spend their time. I think and live wholistically. I cannot divide my own life nor that of people I associate with into little boxes that would make me deal with them only at the specific point of contact and never mind the rest. I just cannot relate that way, nor do I want to. 

We are basically social creatures more than isolated individuals. Put in another way, we are individuals in community. When either one of these is emphasized over against the other, we get social distortions, sometimes with very serious consequences. I hope to do a post on this subject one of these days. So, if you are one of my regular readers, you may be curious who I am, where I come from and what I do. Well, here it is. I have tried to satisfy your curiosity. That’s one reason for this post:  to establish a stronger connection with you. I hope I am not just imposing a personal opinion or relationship on you guys but filling a need also on your part to firm up our relationship.

The other but related reason for this personal stuff is to explain the occasional time lag between posts. Work, travel, socializing often intervene and leave me little time for blogging, as much as I love this writing activity.  No matter how short of time, my heart constantly urges me to write

So I have made a decision, a policy decision of what I have already started practicing, namely to intersperse my own writings with “guest articles.” Such guest articles-- while perhaps expressing opinions I agree with at least partially, or that I take on to undermine, or that I simply enjoy and want to share with you--, take less time to produce than fresh stuff from me. Of course, many of my “fresh stuff” also frequently includes materials from and references to other writers, something I always faithfully indicate. 

This semi-new policy will not only prevent unpleasant gaps but also create variety. My Dutch language has an expression, “Verandering van spijs doet eten,” which is to say that a change of diet increases your appetite and your enjoyment of food. Though not part of the expression, change is also more pleasant for the cook, at least, for this writer-cook. The same is true of both reading and writing.  

I had really intended to feed you a guest article about Justin Bieber, the singer, today, to be preceded by a short explanation and introduction. Well, that “short explanation” turned into a complete post!  Justin will have to wait a few days. Sorry, buddy. I don’t think it will bother him, since he is not, to the best of my knowledge, one of my regular readers. 

In the meantime, you’ve learned a bit about me, while I snuck in a bit of social philosophy on the side—but that’s also me. I am not a professional philosopher, though I wish I were, but I do like to philosophize about social stuff, especially about the relationship of religions and worldviews to culture and society.

Time to wind up. I hope you had a good Christmas celebration in the midst of family and friends. I end this post with wishing you a very happy 2016. For me, such a wish always goes together with the unexpressed silent Biblical prayer, “Maranatha,”  “Lord Jesus, come back soon.”