Another successful night

This Thursday night, Vancouver was yet again witness to the growing determination of its citizens to meet face to face, without any formal mediation, without pretense of hipness or foreknowledge of some millenial event, without ironic posturing, sincere expertise, or grim resolution, but simply with good humour and faith in our struggle to share as equals in the media by which we know the truth of our experience and the world around us. The young woman who serves us coffee has come to know us and her smile grows more radiant every week; again she was genuinely sorry to have to kick us out at closing.

We discussed our strategies for provoking the government to pass judgment on the bureaucrats in the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade who have presumed to initiate an unprecedent relationship with the Umma (if only those public servants reading our blog would drop us a line and let us know their minds!) Charles kept us up to date on the situation in France and our hopes to increase communications with out blue scarf comrades there, and to tell their story here. We pondered the future of this blog, how we might find and engage more readers, find the time and discipline to write the great posts that are presently in the works, and justify your interest in us, hoping that we will hear more from you to guide us in our plans.

We were sorrowed to note the prevalence of anti-American and anti-western sentiment among the young today, and wondered how to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the millennial fantasies of the trans-national left. How will we be able to communicate a positive vision in an open-ended future of nations and market society, about which we can promise nothing utopian, but only show our faith that out of the inevitable struggles and conflicts of the human condition, we need never lose sight of that which guarantees the inexhaustability of human creativity, our ability to forever refigure our shared sense, both univeral and particularly Canadian, of the transcendent goodness in the world. Such goodness was apparent in those we saw about us tonight, from the old man entranced and reading alone that rumoured-to-be-silly book, the Da Vinci Code, to the legions of students streaming in and out of the library, to the immigrant getting advice on his resume, and the youngsters coming home from training with the British Columbia Regiment, proudly wearing their pixelated camouflage.

We determined that in our fights to come with the ideologies of western guilt that rob us of the moral confidence to quickly defeat the enemies of freedom, we will always keep in mind the need to struggle to act as if we are prefiguring the transcendent signs that will emerge in future from present conflicts and justify our present faith in our religious and political traditions and their inexhaustability. Conflict, unfortunately inevitable, will reward good faith with a strengthened knowledge of who we are and what we may possibly become, and thus help serve the cause of redefining the covenantal signs around which all Canadians will be united in future.