Hamas Credible - Israel?

Didn't you know? Mainstream media is
the only legitimate source for reliable 
as-it-happens news coverage. A fount of 
news and insightful reportage staffed by 
resourceful journalists geared by trade and 
by inner-sourced respect for truth and the need 
to ensure the public remains fully and well 
informed, challenged by the ubiquitous 
presence of reportage clearly subjective 
where objectivity is required so that the 
public's intelligence is not insulted by those 
who seek to score points for their preferred 
champions of justice. Social media reeks of 
blatant and erroneous, often deliberate 
misinformation verging on the thin edge of 
malevolence directed toward one or another
of the world's most beleaguered and mistrusted
actors, we are warned. Trust mainstream media 
as the sole source of unquestioned reality for 
we have their sincere word that all others 
play with our inherent decency in a collusion 
of misdirecting collective ire exemplified by
fake news sites. The very sites that swiftly
seek to correct all the swill promulgated
by respected media sources eager and
prepared to publish unchecked for any
degree of accuracy much less resemblance
to truth that groups wallowing in their
outraged sense of victimhood they alone
are responsible for, targeting Israel as an
unprincipled aggressor, slaughterer of
children whom the victims have groomed
to regard themselves as martyrs for their
cause of destroying Jewish lives and the
state that protects them. A narrative that
fascinates and attracts all the latent
anti-Semites glorying in the prospect that
their !breaking news! coverage serves to
slander the universally detested Jews.

Space Cookie

Lady, ever hear of basic shoppers' etiquette?
I know, I know, such transactions as filling
one's shopping cart with food demands
much of us, choices befuddle, prices astound
ingredients elude us, value is questionable
but because we must eat, therefore we are.
And there we were, a line of tired supermarket
shoppers awaiting their opportunity to unload
carts, pay the freight and get on with life.
And there you were -- mind if I ask? -- how
did you reach a half-century of existence
without becoming aware of others around you?
Totally oblivious you were to the long wait
you occasioned and the restless patience of
those behind you. Taking your sweet time to
perform simple tasks automatically demanded
to complete the shopping expedition. Whatever
went into the cart had to come out of it. Then
you know, placed on the treadmill, totted
up for a total to be paid, then packed and off
you go! Tedious it was awaiting your most
leisurely performance, rummaging in your
mind for the next step to satisfy your captive
audience. When I began packing you were
still at it. When I placed the bag meant for
the Food Bank on the shelf below that
conveyor belt and continued my packing
suddenly that bag wasn't there and you were
preparing to leave. Until I checked to see
you walking off with it and claimed it for
the Food Bank, depriving you of the mystery
contents of non-perishable food, Space Cookie!

Palestinian Justice

It becomes an effort for sane minds to begin
to envision a savage pathology so mired
in collective hatred that it incites an entire
population to spite itself in its greater
enterprise of placing blame in its self-imposed
culture of victimhood leading to its stark
embrace of death, a cultivation of martyrdom
taught to children from childhood to inspire
in them the highest calling demanded of
them as the generation of hope; one prepared
to surrender life in the greater aspiration of
their personal sacrifice heralding a new
dawn of national conquest. Not for any
of their generations can normalcy be
tolerated for theirs is an implacable
journey to seize that which has been lost.
There will be no surrender to the finer
human traits of compromise and sharing
in recognition that their demands have no
basis in justice for all. There is no space for
discussion and agreement leading to peace
in this mind-stunted pathology of all or
nothing in a people who will not accept
nothing and demand all they claim others
owe them while they owe others nothing.
A people who call themselves a nation, one
devoted to violent extremism determined to
destroy lives; if not others, then their own.

Where is Home?

Next year in Jerusalem the beloved lament
of a thousand years and another thousand
years had to happen at some time for it
was ordained that home is where the heart
is and that beating heart of a nation never
forsook its heritage and its collective memory
of a time before time returning finally as a
nation once despised and delivered by its
enemies to a world that viewed it with
suspicion and distrust in a widely circulated
diaspora where the heart yearned for home.
The anguish of its exile was a people's
dilemma one never forgotten, simply set
aside for an auspicious opportunity that
appeared never to arrive while in the interim
vast suffering and misery remained the lot
of the scattered remnants whose very
existence brought bloody pogroms and
expulsions anew. Resilient and determined
even they could not avert the final solution
that destroyed the greater part of its intolerable
existence. Their extermination served to grant
greater meaning to the need to return from
whence they had been exiled for Jerusalem
still awaited them while they awaited polite
and final permission from others to retake
what had been been wrenched from them.
And now that they had and reclaimed Judea
for Israel, a haven for its people their friends
and enemies alike deny them Jerusalem.

Perception

In a world where people go to great
lengths to elbow others out of their way
as they attain the heights of professional
celebrity, as an authentic practitioner of
the world's oldest profession, I take a wry
view of the acclaim vested in the artificiality
of celebrity and its worship for what does
it accomplish other than elevating yet
another nonentity through the pretext of
originality and talent that others strive
to emulate as they shriek in awe of the
degenerate culture degrading humanity.
As a housewife my accomplishments
over sixty years of married life interrupted
now and again by years of employment
in the world of business it was the state
of my home, my children's accomplishments
and my husband's companionship that I
valued. Now these aged hands knead
dough, cook meals, bake irresistible
temptations and share conversations and
long woodside walks with my husband
and our little dogs in the fullness of
nature and our growing maturity of years.
Those of our generation mirror our
varied experience and graduation toward
the future unlike the aimless, valueless
and tasteless generations that followed
and we can only express our sympathy
toward the endless vacuum we assume
their lives to be, incapable of distinguishing
priorities, of recognizing what truly
matters, languishing oblivious to the sad
emptiness of their lives and the vacuity
of their pointless aspirations, utterly sad.

Sunny Ways Idiocy

Of course it is most unfortunate and
can be of little comfort to you to remind
yourself that you never cast your ballot for
the man at the polls, when he becomes an
absurd embarrassment travelling abroad on
state visits, his self-reverential mannerisms
an affront to his hosts in his never-ending
mission to draw attention to his noted
exceptionalism, his youth, appearance and
of course his lack of experience in a
position as head of a country you are a
proud citizen of. His penchant for endless
photographic opportunities, his emotive
and tedious empathy for social variants
championing the rights of women, of
immigrants, Indigenous, LGBTQ2S+
in constant displays of sanctimonious
righteousness stale and rehearsed as befits
one to the stage born is worn and does
nothing to knit the fabric of society in a
cohesive whole; his firm insistence rather
a fracturing alienation withholding
public funding from any and all who defy
his injunction that everyone must worship at
the same altar he has made his own. His
grave disingenuousness not reflective of an
open mind in a learning curve but a very
special arrogance of believing he knows
what he does not. His pandering to an
audience known as a voting bloc of high
value and his strange fascination with
totalitarian governments for their envied
flexibility peculiar in one who values his
own progressive ideology leading him to
profess support in an alliance with those
whose agenda represents a dread threat
to the common weal in established and
well-supported democratic realities. If
any of these attributes relate to an
executive figure familiar to you, why then
you must by any account be Canadian!

Elderly Dissonance

Yes, yes I hear you. You hate hospitals.
You make that abundantly clear. Yes,
hospitals are for the ill and the elderly.
Yes, people who gravitate there are often
gravely ill and they shed toxins. Yes,
hospitals are playgrounds for viruses and
germs, yes they are. Yes, the atmosphere
is oppressively depressing ... all those
doddering, wan, shapeless people whose
time on Earth has been ill spent, else why
has ill health plagued them? Yes, you
have no wish to be in their company
because it pains you to think anyone
might consider you belong among them
while you are aware you have nothing
whatever in common with them. Just as
well the hospital personnel are so
efficient, yes of course. Yes, they
waste no time in excessive, misplaced
courtesies for the ambience is not that
of a socially pleasant gathering. Yes, it's
a miserable way to spend a day though
mere hours sufficed for your purpose.
And yes, consider this: you were not
hoisted off to that drear place through
accident or emergency but arrived there
on your own cognizance of your own 
volition, a temporary hiatus of your
quotidian familiarity with the order of
your ordinary life, now returned. Yes?