Choice. Action. Resolution. Isn't this what the civilized world is waiting for? What keeps more citizens from taking control of their own lives and blaspheming that they should have a say in their destinies?
Every week we meet at the Vancouver Public Library to review the choices that present themselves before us. What needs doing? What can be done?
This week's main topic centered around the disgraceful presence in our city of some abomination called the "World Peace Forum".
Corrupting our language is the least of the left's sins, and calling the objectives of this organization "peace" is par for the course these days.
Some of the events include presentations on a "Global Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons" (a panel discussion to be chaired by Mayor Derek Corrigan, of Burnaby, B.C., no less!), "Climate Change" and the Landmines Treaty.
Wanting everybody to live happily ever after is, certainly, a worthy objective. It is the means to that end, with which sensible people part company with the World Peace Forum.
Surprisingly, one participant at the related World Urban Forum, also taking place this week, does seem worth courting, as he urges the slum dwellers of the world to unite:
.....Jockin Arputham challenged delegates to join the slum-dwellers movement that is saving its own members.
"We will no more be taking it lying down. You are trying to design our lives. We are not going to quietly sit and say, 'Look at us and try to decide the way we should be living,' " said Arputham, a tiny man who has received awards for 30 years of work in his own slum neighbourhood and others to improve services, education and housing.
"That is why we decided we will no more take the help of these kind of lip-service people."
.....
Arputham urged governments and non-profit groups to get behind what slum dwellers are doing instead of just having conferences, which he said appear to be designed mainly to keep the poverty-conference industry going.
"What are all these words? Two hundred conferences, 600 documents, 700 seminars," he mocked, provoking laughter among the 2,000-some people in the ballroom at the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre. "While you are doing this, our people are poorer and multiplying a hundredfold."
Every week, we gather at the Vancouver Public Library to echo M. Arputham's lament against the left: we will not let those that do not have our best interests at heart, decide for us the way in which we must live. We will participate in that choice, by taking the actions we deem will result in the kind of nation we wish to be living in.
We were there again tonight, and will return again next Thursday night.
Where will you be?
1 comment:
As best I can tell, these people coming to the World "Peace" Forum are a bunch of Israel and America haters and a person cannot be at peace with his humanity if he is in resenful opposition to the first and the leading nation in human history. So, let's get out on Saturday and tell these hate mongers to go home. Conflict is inherent to humanity, and is best mediated if we admit to the fact. Fancifully calling for world peace, dreaming of utopias, is a way of denying reality, and the hard work of building order through an inter-national order of self-confident and self-respecting nations; and trying to criminalize war out of hatred for this reality is actually a path to totalitarianism and mass killing. THese "peace" people still haven't digested the huge death toll of twentieth-century Communism in which the older among them are deeply complicit. Let's not let the left repeat the sins of their parents in this century. If you're in Vancouver, we'll be protesting Saturday, so email me, truepeers@gmail.com, to meet up with us.
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