Habs a relief from the news madness
Captive audience can shift attention away from lockdowns, curfews, madness in U.S.
Bring on the Leafs!
Welcome relief from the current madness could come as soon as Wednesday night with the resumption of NHL play. Habs fans may be able to shift attention, momentarily, from dilemmas other than COVID-19, curfew, lockdowns, lack of vaccinations and Donald Trump and focus instead on battling longtime rivals: the Toronto Maple Leafs.
There should be a captive audience for the game. Literally. It's not like most have anywhere else to go past 8 p.m. anyway. (Other than some of us briefly paroled midnight ramblers wandering the streets of our ghost town with our puzzled pooches — just as long as we're within one kilometre of our homes.)
It's been 10 months, and reality continues to bite.
The coronavirus is unabated. The ever-rising number of deaths, hospitalizations and ICU stays lead the news daily.
The isolation factor had been tough enough already in separating loved ones from friends and family and in keeping so many away from their workplaces. Now we must deal with the month-long — for now — curfew, further cutting folks off from one another, not to mention further impacting already hard-hit businesses still reeling from previously imposed lockdowns.
Worse, the panacea that was supposed to arrive with vaccinations has been nothing short of a national embarrassment. Seniors and front line healthcare workers who received a first shot aren't holding their collective breath for their follow-up jabs. At this rate, the rest of us best not even think about getting vaccinations for a long, long time to come.
And yet we learned last week that as daunting as life can be in these parts it could be a whole lot worse. Like that grotesquely horrific reality show going on to the south of us.
While anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers and anti-curfewers here would likely argue otherwise, we should certainly be rest assured that our political leaders do possess moral compasses — something that can't be purchased at Sports Experts. We can rightfully question policies of our leaders on an array of subjects, including COVID-19, but we can at least go to bed at night without fearing our elected leaders will incite insurrection and violence.
It's pretty hard to fathom that our leaders would dispute the results of a fair election, much less refuse to concede a loss and then perpetuate a lie to their followers that the election was rigged and stolen and to encourage noose-bearing hordes to storm the houses of government and create chaos, resulting in the loss of lives. Or that our leaders
would try to intimidate legislators to reverse election results by adding bogus votes.
This is beyond shocking. This is lunacy. If this were a fictional film or TV series, critics would complain that it was just too farfetched.
One of the best international newspaper headlines to emerge from last week's terrifying storming of Washington D.C.'S Capitol Hill came from Kenya: “Who's the banana republic now?”
No doubt the headline writer still remembered the leader of the free world referring to Haiti and African nations as “s---hole” countries. And no doubt many from these nations wondered what would have been the police response had the rioters been Black.
Among the best tweets to emerge were those noting that “the person with the nuclear codes has been deemed too dangerous to have a Twitter account.” Or, for that matter, a Facebook or Instagram account. This is the sort of punishment
one would normally dole out to a petulant child. Then again, many might suggest that there's little difference between a petulant child and this petulant president.
And among the most powerful statements to emerge came from, of all people, former Republican governor and action-film star Arnold Schwarzenegger. In a video release, he denounced Trump for his baseless election claims, called out “those elected officials who have enabled (the president's) lies and his treachery” and compared the Proud Boys to Nazis.
Schwarzenegger, like so many others, noticed that among the president's emboldened rioters — “fine people … we love you … you're very special” — were Proud Boys sporting T-shirts emblazoned with Camp Auschwitz and 6MWE, the latter a reference to 6 million Jews not being enough to have been killed during the Holocaust.
'Nuf said.