Coucoumellisms

(Un travail que j'ai rédigé pour un cours de rédaction l'automne dernier.) L’euthanasie est légale au Canada depuis 2015, mais est-ce qu’elle est un bien moral pour la société? Il ne suffit pas d’être légal pour qu’une chose soit morale. L’euthanasie n’est pas un soin, elle est une fuite. La personne qui veut mourir fuit la souffrance et une société qui voit la personne comme un fardeau fuit la responsabilité. Ce qui commence par le « droit » de mourir peut très bien devenir le « devoir » de mourir. La souffrance insupportable, qu’elle soit physique ou psychologique, doit être adressée de manière convenable. La douleur physique incontrôlable est rare avec les avancées considérables des dernières années et est souvent due à un manque de formation. Il faut comprendre les facteurs qui peuvent influencer la douleur. « Heureusement, le système nerveux peut changer et devenir moins sensible et réactif […], mais cela prend du temps, des répétitions fréquentes ...

 Born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, Long Island, New York, Walt Whitman is a controversial figure in American Poetry, considered by some to be “America’s Poet” and by others a self-centred windbag. Contrary to poets like T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, Walt Whitman does not look for meta-narratives to find meaning in the world. Instead, he finds meaning in what is in front of him. All the mundane things we see and do give just as much meaning to life as the mystical epiphanies we experience. The physical is just as important as the spiritual. Walt Whitman challenges the polarization of both Gnostic religious ideas in a society still influenced by puritanism and the idea of democracy as uniformity of thought and expression within the context of a young republic.  Whitman was born towards the end of the Industrial Revolution, only 36 years after the end of the American Revolution. At 13, he learned to set type in a printer’s officer. At 16, he was spending summers along the coast of...

(An essay I have to write for an English Composition class - I need to chop off almost half of it, reduce it to 600 words, but I wanted to post it here before I do.) Interpreting the signs of the times is just as important as reading history if society desires to avoid repeating the same errors. On the eve of 1984, in response to George Orwell’s Dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (first published in 1949), Isaac Asimov wrote Asimov’s New World (Toronto Star) which looks 35 years ahead to 2019.   Looking ahead once again to 2055, three themes that have the power to influence the world for good or for evil need to be taken into consideration: technology, ideological  polarization and a desire for human perfection. The kind  of  technology that is being developed and put into our devices and homes gives us the both the potential to learn and to control things around us. Alexa and Siri will turn l ights on, help us find resources for homework and lock the front door. S...

I read through this document called Catholic Social Teaching and Racism. I want to comment on the following bits of it. The Many Faces of Racism: "Catholic teaching “emphasizes not only the individual conscience, but also the political, legal and economic structures...”[6] Racism is about people and about group behaviors and societal organization. Individual racism includes conscious acts, spontaneous attitudes, “the tendency to stereotype and marginalize,”[7] indifference, and “the triumph of private concern over public responsibility…” [8] "Laws such as U.S. segregation or South Africa’s apartheid [9] represent blatant systemic racism. More subtle racism treats groups as “second-class citizens with regard, for instance, to higher education, to housing, to employment and especially to public… services...”[10] Even more subtle racism is now masked in appeals to equality that guarantee that past inequalities are perpetuated by blocking corrective efforts. “At times protestati...

I don't know if any of this might also pertain to African Americans in the States, but I grew up in Northern Canada, among Cree people. Many of them had problems with alcohol, broken homes, depression, etc. No one talked about "intergenerational trauma" back in the '70s and '80s or the effects of residential schools. I've only started to hear about that in the last 10-15 years or so. But it makes sense to me. Generations of children were taken from their parents and brought up in institutions designed to strip their language and culture from them, turn them in to "Europeanized", good, Christian "Indians" whereupon they were returned to their communities - where they were lost because they did not know how to live out on the land, did not know the ways of their people anymore, did not have the proper means to support themselves because a European education was worthless in a community that didn't have European style jobs. Their people we...

(Originally posted on thinkspot)              I'm going to try to put some perspective on the Wet'suwet'en situation here, to the best of my knowledge, (which isn't perfect and this may need to be tweaked later - if anyone sees anything that is not exact - let me know).              To begin with, you should understand that First Nations people (or Indigenous peoples) are separated into different cultural groups (similar language and social structure. ) For instance, you have the Iroquois , who are not a nation, but a group of nations including Cayuga, Cherokee, Huron, Mohawk, etc. You also have the Algonquians , another group of nations which include Cree, Ojibway, Algonquin, etc.               Within these groups or families, you sometimes have smaller families. And within these smaller groups, you have the different nations (or tribes,) and within those nations, you h...

Nosotros, las mujeres, somos hechas para amar, para dar, para acoger, para hacerle placer al otro.  Es lo que hacemos cuando amamos a alguien.  Este deseo a darlo todo, hacerle placer al otro, acoger al otro es nuestra fuerza, pero también nuestra debilidad. Es por estos mismos sentimientos que somos facilmente manipuladas. Me acuerdo muy bien como era cuando tenía 21 años.  Quieres estar con un hombre porque te gusta mucho.  Quieres pasar un rato con él. Pero no quieres sexo, no todavía.  Quieres hacerle placer, pero no quieres sexo.  Quieres un poco de afección, pero no quieres sexo.  No quieres rechazarlo, pero no quieres sexo. No quieres enojarte con él por insistir, porque tampoco no quieres ser rechazado por él, y no quieres herir sus sentimientos, porque lo quieres, pero no quieres sexo.  Terminas en aceptar más que lo que te deja cómoda, porque lo quieres, pero no quieres sexo. Antes, la sociedad tenía reglas para proteger a sus hijas ...

We women are made to love, to give, to be welcoming, to want to please.  It's what we do best when we love someone.  But this desire to give all, to please, to welcome in, also makes us easily manipulated by our emotions. I remember very well how it was when I was 21.  You want to be with a man because you really like him.  You want to spend time with him.  But you don't want sex, not yet.  You want to please him, but you don't want sex.  You want affection, but you don't want sex.  You don't want to reject him, but you don't want sex.  You also don't want to get mad at him for insisting, because you don't want to be rejected either, and you don't want to hurt his feelings, because you like him, but you don't want sex.  So you accept a little more than you're really comfortable with, because you like him, but you don't want sex. Society used to have rules in order to protect its young, open-hearted, giving, loving daughters.  Be...