Birdy

no! i just doubt that words of recognition are going to solve a problem that has existed since the plains of abraham, and arguably even before either the english or french ever bore witness to the shores of north america! our attempts to rectify this to date have fallen flat on their faces, and at their most dramatic points, have come close to splitting up our great country! i'm suggesting perhaps our ideas of how to fix it aren't the best and actually in light of the root of the problem, might even serve to trivialize the situation.

what i said above, and the more i think about it, if we are to be continuously granting special recognition to various groups, wouldn't that really take away what's so "special" about it?

it's easy to get behind you William-- ideally, i'm with you, but there's another part of me that thinks perhaps this strategy would have the opposite effect... and make groups feel even more alienated. i look at it like all these different groups are office workers... and management is government.. each office worker is doing their best, working extremely hard, hoping to get recognized for their work by management. one office worker seems to be louder and stronger than the rest about their stuff and ends up with a promotion... how do the rest of the office workers feel? while it would be proactive of them to follow those same steps as their promoted coworker, i think just as easily they could be discouraged, thinking why does he deserve that? i work just as hard! i do just as much! it has the potential to reek of jealousy and create apathy. i like your solution for it's endpoint, but i guess i'm just wondering if it would have the effect on other groups as you hope it would.

that's cool. that's the very quality i think we collectively possess that makes us 'good'. human beings have always possessed the want to do better.

i dunno either.. it all seems to me to be unnecessary paperwork! where or when does it stop? we recongize quebec as a distinct society, we recognize the natives as a distinct society, whose next? it's like "STEP UP TO THE PLATE, it's SPECIAL RECOGNITION DAY!"... while i think it's important that people feel a sense of belonging and am against the idea of the cattle herd i think the americans adopt, i don't know if continuously stopping parliament to give a special shout out to a group of people who have only really formed this sort of collective identity in it's longest stretch for 100 years. it just seems as if we'll never get it right and the more we try, the more people get visibly upset about it... rather i think we should reach out to a collective identity that recognizes peoples of allllllllllllllllllllll cultures, races, genders, etc. After all, we're all in this together.. noone any better than the other.

you yourself fit my definition of a truly good person... i don't for any second presuppose anyone to be perfect, and i think in your definition you're looking for perfection. Unfortunately i think you'll only set yourself up for dissapointment here! i think rather we're all born inherently good, and are corrupted by the tastes the world and society has to offer us... the battle here is to stay on top of that corruption, to try to be good... i think, realistically, that is all we can hope to do as humans. i think as long as there is a want of betterment, than you're AOK.

i think where the problem lies in, is that it's not really a provincial issue, but rather a french issue... it's not ontario vs. quebec, or upper canada vs. lower canada, it's french vs. english... and in that when special recongition is given, other groups of people, not provinces, pipe up and say 'hey, what about us?', 'what's in it for us'. i'm all for greater provincial autonomy, but i'm definitely NOT for special recongition to people based on culture.

i'd like a definition of what you think 'truly good people' are. from my own definition, i encounter them all the time, so i'm just wondering why you don't.

hear hear! yah, the story of this little christmas wreath had a bundle of issues waiting to jump out. it's all really a viscious cycle.. people relying on governments, governments relying on people, governments governing too little in some respects and too much in others. it's one thing to sit in this thread and gasp about how ridiculous it is to ask this woman to take her wreath down, but to understand the root cause of WHY she's being asked to take it down is another.

that's fine. i'll admit that some are evil to the bone.. you know, i really don't think there was any hope for say Charles Manson, but i'm talking about the "general" nature of mankind and in that, i have to be very 'general'.

I think on an extremely individual level there exists a want to do good amongst all human beings, and that perhaps maybe the resources we have to actually exercise this want aren’t adequate. For example, take a look at the response on this message board to things like Hurricane Katrina and how people responded. There is never a “screw that, i’m not going to help outâ€, but rather i would think, apathy grabs hold and we progress with our daily lives and don’t do anything-- sheer ‘out of sight, out of mind’. But should we blame mankind’s general nature for this? Or should we take a good hard look at what it is about our society that’s making us so damn lazy!?! I tend to the latter, mostly because it’s something we can do to better our predicament... that and it’s really damn easy to sit down to look at the last say 100 years of North American history and watch it all unfold. Basically, i think we’ve cushioned ourselves—especially in the last 50 years or so, after having to witness what the likes of Adolf Hitler brought the world. (even look at Hitler—completely a product of his environment!!) Bracing ourselves for fear that something like that could ever happen again, but in doing so, we’re taking away the reality that it very well could happen again, and if it should, we as people need to be prepared for it, not so much on a military level, but on a mental mindframe level where we could actually unite together to reach some kind of positive outcome. I just fear that as long as there is a ‘state’ who manages things for us, the less efficient we as human beings become, and what if one day something were to happen to the ‘state’? scary business. i also think it’s important to note that in all of your examples of human beings precipitating environment crises, there was a general want to do good amongst them. Unfortunately that want of good culminated in tragedy. These kinds of things, to me, are almost the necessary evils of society and how we have been able to progress from the stone age to the 21st century... experimenting sometimes reaches positive outcomes, sometimes doesn’t... but it has brought us to this point, and that’s pretty friggin’ remarkable. i, on the other hand, am all ears to anyone who wants to offer up solutions! we can sit in here all day long and discuss what is wrong, but that’s not really getting us anywhere, is it? and THAT is where the real trouble lies... the NOT DOING ANYTHING.

how glum! i think it would do wonders for everyone to sit and think of at least two positives for every negative that you mentioned up there DEM, as they do exist. you seem to want to hang on to everything bad, instead of looking at the positives of those negatives, and thinking it remarkable that as a species we have the ability to learn from our mistakes! as if that's not reason alone to celebrate! history is full of despicable tales and horrific stories of death and atrocity and war and famine and disease, almost as if they are natural occurences, born with the creation (?) of humanity. they are how we have moved and traveled throughout time, and evolved from world order to world order... they exist almost as a method of population control and just morph into a different appearance every so many years... this time it's not Hitler, it's famine, it's not Saddam, it's drought, etc. i don't think there's anything you or I can or can't do to change these things from occuring. they come just as they have always done. you're looking to avoid an unavoidable situation! optimism for me is found in my day to day life.. the love of friends and family, the want to be a good person, to have a fulfilling life, to do good for others, etc... and i hope that it would be about this for others.. and this is what i mean when i talk about individuality and how we need to return to it. i'm sorry, i just got the feeling that you weren't so open to looking to improve on the situation! i think prior to this i ownly merely pointed out the obvious with where our current system was going wrong... i didn't offer any solutions.

wowza. just to reiterate and perhaps clarify, i never once implied what you're referring to in the last part of this quote, nor would what i would want to see happen, result in that. wow! i don't see this evil world vision that you seem to see doc! i don't think human beings intend to "fuck each other over when they can get away with it"... i think human beings have been undergoing a major learning process as time goes on and along the way have had to learn a hell of a lot of hard lessons, but we're not going to fuck each other over when we can get away with it!! MANKIND is RESPONSIBLE for the civil rights movement, for progressing towards bettering ourselves so that we can ensure that we DON'T FUCK each other over! knowing this, how can you be so pessimistic about our nature?? throughout time, we have learned from our mistakes and progressed to the state we are eventually now in.. what i am saying, is that it's now time to PROGRESS even further and realize that for damn sure, the civil rights movement was a GOOD THING, but now it's time to see how we can make it even better, to look at it's flaws and expand so that we can live in an even better harmony!! that's what i'm talking about... critically examining something, even when it's so good, is necessary. i would think a person who seems to think everything as inherently flawed, would agree.

I find it's always important to remember that "political correctness" was a tag created on the left for the left' date=' to keep people's tendency towards whitewashing language in check. The right, of course, have been the ones to pick up and run with it. As Jello Biafra said, if people want to call themselves, e.g., "womyn", then let them, and respect that, "just out of fucking respect." Equality? I'd say the kind of thing you're talking about has more to do with identity, which is a destructive concept. i think it's all balled up into one these days. things like equal opportunity and the ensuing legal battles that seem to be rolling out of the courtrooms because certain groups take whatever equal opportunity is supposed to mean to entirely new levels, wherein it becomes a matter for say, the Supreme Court of Canada to handle and someone is the victim not for wrong doing, but for something they can't control, ie, their ethnicity, etc. Language police telling us what words are appropriate and inappropriate, women's groups lobbying for special recognition for women, native's groups lobbying for special recognition for natives, quebec well... it's all in the name of equality, disguised by the term 'identity'. why the need to belong to some group with special recognition? why can't you be you and me be me and we carry on merrily? it just seems that the more attention governments give these groups (even though they're attempting to do right by this attention), the worse the situation(s) become. you say yes to one group, inevitably you're saying no to another.. problems arise! this isn't to say the civil rights movement or the development of the charter of rights and freedoms, etc. was the wrong step to take... no. it's just what our response to this has been. we're playing the 'rights' card left, right and centre these days.. it's getting a little ridiculous and i think we've taken it too far. stop already with the special recognition, stop with the language police, stop with the "I HAVE A RIGHT" speech, it's destroying us.

i think it's alive and kicking... it just seems to get covered up by a cloud of political correctness. equality is a good thing, but our method of achieving it or better yet, how we all think to achieve it SUCKS! we've been reduced to a bunch of bumbling idiots who can't speak because some human rights hotshot will take case against us! equality, in a way, has stripped us of our individuality.

well at least you recognize the cheapness of it all!

please expand!

even with a definition (which i think is almost impossible), where does that leave the rest of us? what about the irish? the natives? the chinese? the indian? women? men? i could go on. it just seems all of these lines and definitions and distinctions do the exact opposite of making people feel as if they 'belong'. i so wish Harper would have never brought it up to begin with and rather continued to leave the issue in the dark... left to fall off somewhere and die. as much as i try, i can see no good in it... whatsoever.

my morning jacket's been added to the langerado bill too!

ME TOO!

i'd say 'fulfillment' is a pretty solitary and personal thing, completely an invention of the human mind... and because of this i don't think there's a 'right' or a 'wrong' in how you get it, it changes from man to man. Besides, if we're to distinguish the religious from the extremists, what does it really matter to you or I if another is happily fooled? key word: "happily"!

Bingo. Religion, for the most part, spurs a relatively peaceful existence. I think because religious houses serve as a kind of meeting group for people to come in, discuss and share ideas on serious issues like salvation, faith, death, hope, life, heaven, and hell, that it becomes a kind of breeding ground for the already crazy folk to become crazier and to garner an audience. So I kinda find your outlook on religion sad Deeps! For the most part, i look at people of faith with a certain admiration... that there's something out there that has captured their hearts so wholly and given them such fulfillment is a beautiful thing, in my eyes. It's just a shame these extremist psychos have to give that a bad name.

the little ledge that sits out on the otherside of the lighthouse in erieau, ontario on lake erie.. you sit out there completely surrounded by water and watch the sun come up or go down and you'd think it wasn't too bad either.

lol

the city! i was responding to the title of the thread! the bands are my morning jacket, the slip and moe.!!