Sunday, January 31, 2010

updates

Further to my posts about the lack of remuneration in my business, I'd like to tell you about the end-of-the-year royalty statement I just received my from Syracuse University Press, my publisher. I don't think the taxes will be too devastating on last year's royalty payout, which amounted to 74 dollars and eight cents.

American.

Good thing the book only took me twenty plus years, not more.

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Went last night with my friend Anne-Marie, who worked previously with Development and Peace and is now with the Jesuit Forum, to an event full of good people doing work on social justice issues, like her. We ate an enormous potluck feast, and then an activist priest nicknamed Hobo reported on a recent trip to Cairo with a group of Canadians, to an event organised by an American feminist action group called Code Pink. In Cairo they met up with activists from around the world, determined to march through Gaza to demand peace and freedom for the area and its people. He showed slides and talked about the trip, which didn't get out of Cairo - only a few were permitted by the Egyptian government to get as far as Gaza. So they demonstrated and made speeches about freedom for the Palestinians in the Egyptian capital. Hobo spoke with admiration of the Jews who were part of the campaign, including a rabbi called Lynn who did much of the organising.

I understand and support their concern, 100%. Terrible injustice is taking place, Israel is behaving like a vicious bully, and I am grateful, as a human being and a half-Jew, for those who are trying to bring light to the issues and demand justice for the oppressed and dispossessed. But when they passed around flyers asking for support for "Israeli Apartheid Week," demanding that Israel be sanctioned and isolated as was South Africa during apartheid, I felt defensive and angry. Apartheid was hideously unjust and many aspects of Israeli behaviour are similarly indefensible, but the black population of South Africa was not supported and supplied with tonnes of weapons by wealthy Arab states, was not sworn to obliterate the white population, did not deny its right to exist. There is a vast difference in the cases.

Another man began to talk about how some Jews have claimed the word "genocide" for themselves and try to prevent Armenians or Ukrainians from using the term. What an irrational and foolish statement. What a complex issue, where to criticise a nation's behaviour is also to sound as if you're attacking a people who have been attacked enough. Insoluble, I think.

Enough already. Obama did really well in his State of the Union address. That's my boy. Stephen Harper's poll numbers are down. That's my Canada.

P.S. JUST FOUND MY EARRING! What are the chances of that? The tiny diamond stud could have fallen out of my ear anywhere, on the street, at the Y, on the streetcar. Instead, I just bent down to feed the cat and there is was, without its butterfly backing, beside the cat dish. It must have dropped out when I bent to feed her the other day.

Once again, thank you, universe. To celebrate, I'm going out to buy daffodils.

4 comments:

  1. Good to hear that Hobo is still out there working as a witness for the oppressed. He is always great to listen to and he is a wonderful inspiration. Please say hi to Ann-Marie for me!

    Paul McG

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  2. Now I am expecting your "jerk" neighbour to put up a For Sale sign. Hang on to the horsehoes.

    Sally

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  3. Paul, yes, Hobo is amazing - impossible to imagine him being fazed by anything. It sounds like you are doing important social justice work yourself.
    And Sally - the condo next door is so self-contained, unfortunately, so much its own little planet - there are many of its citizens I've never seen, let alone met.

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  4. My father contributed to various academic texts and I think his royalties were measured in the less than $5 category.

    David

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