Dear Editor
One day last year, I was driving home on Highway 16 and listening to CBC Radio II, proof I can do two things at once. There was a program featuring that fine instrument, the flute. Archeologists studying caves somewhere in South Africa came across a startling artifact.
They had found a flute made from the bone of a sabretooth tiger. I listened to the music played on an instrument thousands of years old.
The researchers believe those caves were used by Neanderthal people, and after many years of studies and discoveries, workers in that field of study have come to think the Neanderthal were peaceful, which explains why they were either destroyed or assimilated by homo sapiens. Homo sapiens: that's you, that's me.
It is presumed that if homo sapiens had picked up that bone he would have bopped the Neanderthal or bopped another homo sapiens.
And so the pattern was set. Homo sapiens (that's us) for eons bopped one another. Any excuse will do, or none at all.
We are like a group of two-year-old children in a sandbox. It might be filled with teddy bears, toy trucks and toy robots and the little darlings will be shrieking "Mine! Mine!" and snatching the toys from one another then throwing tantrums when they can't get what they want.
Some might grow up (physically) and become dictators, joining the ranks of men who have had no regard for other people and, as they lust after power, cause death and destruction. Of course the female of species has played her part. We read that Helen of Tory was so beautiful she "had a face that launched a thousand ships."
"Sank a thousand ships" would be more like it.
Or they might be assassins, working on their own, or a small group of terrorists, all with the same kind of brain.
Knowing there might be an infiltration of crazies in that truck convoy in my capital city, the people responsible for the safety of prime ministers moved him and his family. It isn't many years since an armed man walked into the Parliament Buildings. Had he not been stopped by an alert sergeant-at-arms, we would have had a nasty chapter written in our history.
In 2000, I freely walked around the Parliament Buildings to look for the superb equestrian statue of Queen Elizabeth II. Thanks to the homo sapiens tendencies of the public, I can no longer do that.
Not long after the truck convoy days, the president of the country to the south of us gave a State of the Union Address. The cordons, the National Guard and doubtless many men we could not see where thick around the Capitol. It was just over a year since a small mob had stormed the Capitol, resulting death and permanent injuries.
It is interesting how some people view a democracy as the means to do whatever they want without considering other people.
It's quite a few years now that I was asked to go on a committee consisting of five people, to spearhead a growing public anger caused by a small city dumping raw sewage into a certain small creek. Our first public meeting was arranged by our local MLA, a fine person who looked after voters no matter if they voted for him or not.
At that meeting, the mayor of that city rose and loudly proclaimed to a packed house (and cooking his goose), "But, by God, we have a right to that creek."
No. They didn't.
More recently a man loudly proclaimed for the cameras and recorders that he had a "God-given right" to do such and such a thing.
No. He hasn't
God has no part in those shenanigans. Mr. Homo Sapiens, leave Her out of it. You keep messing up on your own, anyway.
Everyone knows how I complain about certain extreme right-wing ideologies coming from certain movements in the neighbours to the south of us. Of course there's also an odd faction where they preach extreme left wing, yet the favoured ones make their millions by investing in capitalism.
So, here we are, hamstrung every century by brats in a sandbox.
Madame Curie discovered the atom. Home sapiens uses it to make bombs.
We are thought to still have a little Neanderthal in our DNA. We try to make and play flutes, but the melodies we play cannot be heard above the bombs the we make.
Cain still kills Abel.
And the Deity does not give us the right to do so.
Christine Pike
Waseca
