The World Hasn't Ended Lately

Today the sun shone and is shining still.  The temperature has been pleasant, the very low twenties with a light breeze.  I have seen and heard children playing as though they hadn't a care in the world and I have watched their mothers, resplendent in traditional Somali attire, laugh and joke together as though they have found the threshold of heaven.

Somalia, as we know, is a failed state, parceled off by savage warlords and Islamic extremists. No one in their right mind visits that country and even those who want to help the Somali people are pitied.

I often see our local birds, not just pigeons, seagulls, starlings and crows, but lovely native birds that no one seems to really notice: flickers:  I saw a dead flicker on the grass recently and phoned our city hall public service number (311 for those who live in Vancouver).  I described this beautiful bird to the representaive and she couldn't believe that something so beautiful could exist here and that it must be an escaped cage bird.






Steller's jays:  A lot of people still don't seem to believe that they live and fly and nest and squawk all over Vancouver.  I see or hear them, like the flickers, almost every day.



house finches: Someone who has lived in this city for decades told me that just the other day she saw one of these lovely finches.  She had never seen one before and didn't know what it was:





I sat today in a comfy chair inside a local café during my break time at work.  I was enjoying an iced Americano while working on my current drawing of a malachite sunbird from Africa:




It is common knowledge that because of climate change and environmental degradation that many bird species are in peril.

While in the café I enjoyed a conversation with a friendly stranger, a young student majoring in political science.  I think he will do well and I have the hope that he could be a positive influence for change.

We are justifiably cynical about political corruption all over the world and even here in our dear little Canada.

I see people of all colours and nationalities, religions and social classes coexisting and actually liking each other.  I did have to tell one teenage boy after he shouted the word "faggot" at one of his friends that that word is not acceptable and we are in 2016 but I am confident that he and his little friends will learn fast.

In the meantime, 46 were gunned down a few weeks ago in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, eight cops have been shot to death in two separate US massacres, more than eighty have been murdered by an idiot loser in Nice, not to mention the foiled military coup in Turkey and that Donald Trump still will not go away.

Today it was announced that our newly minted federal government has begun sending two hundred dollars a month into the bank accounts of every family that isn't wealthy in Canada.

I could go on.  There are bad things happening in the world.  There are also good things happening.  I would even wager, Gentle Reader, that there are more good things occurring than bad things.  Perhaps it depends on what the news media chooses to report about, perhaps it depends on whether or not we know when to stop listening to the news, perhaps it means that with only a little effort that we might try focussing on the good as often as we dwell on the bad.

Try it some time.  The world hasn't ended lately.