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From yesterday’s Free Fall Friday comes this a poem. Ignore my poetic license; Sir Winston Churchill did not exactly fail school, but he had his troubles. He started writing as a young man, and I am privileged to have several old volumes of his personal essays.
Journalists may recall Strunk and White’s advice to explain all initials in full, when first presented, however important and well known, such as the president’s S.A.L.T. meetings with the Soviets, (strategic arms limitation talks) because there are babies being born every minute who do not know. Incidentally, U.S.S.R. (“don’t know how lucky you are, boy”) means union of soviet socialist republics.
General Sir Robert Baden-Powell, the hero of Mafeking, (for which church bells rang back in England) was known in his lifetime for being the only living man to have founded an international organization. I will always wonder if the founder of the Boy Scout movement would have brought some much needed creativity to the western front during World War I. But he left the army before the war as the king requested he give his full attention to the Boy Scouts. A statue of him looking genial seated on a bench had to be boarded up last summer lest it be toppled as part of that summer’s madness.
Our prompt at Free Fall was Learning How
…
Learning how is one of my joys,
No instant results among the boys,
New babies are born every day,
To pick up things along the way.
A different world, once you learn,
A new skill lets new ambitions burn,
I went from roads to a freeway fast,
Now I can try the 401 at last.
How do you learn is a thing to ponder.
In a straight line, or does it help to wander?
By hearing or reading is the way of most
A school failure learned by writing—now he can boast.
By that I mean Churchill, a hero to many.
Today skeptics believe in not having any.
To “burn down the system” means “no heroes.”
To me “woke” leftists are a bunch of zeros
A role model is the best way to change,
It’s done below thought and isn’t that strange?
Hence our reason for totems, that leftists allow,
But no statue of Baden-Powell, not now.
…
It was Canadian professor, Jordan Peterson, who pointed out that we, society, know what “going too far” means for the right wing conservatives, (for example white supremacy) but we don’t know what going too far means for the left wing. Hence moderate leftists won’t tell their extremist brothers to go fly a kite.
I thought the professors known as the Regina 16 went too far when they said children of fallen heroes shouldn’t be allowed a scholarship, as I wrote September 30.
…
…
Sean Crawford
looking at a white Hallowe’en,
2021
