Socrates | Straight Speak

The foxes will never fix the hen house of democracy …

By david|2017-03-16T10:38:15-05:00March 15th, 2017|Categories: community, communitywatch, politics, social|Tags: Cobourg, Plato, Port Hope, Socrates, Trudeau, Trump|

and the hens will never stop being a bunch of chickens Three things you might not know Why did the turkey cross the road? To prove he wasn't a chicken. But being a bunch of turkeys doesn't get us anywhere either, except over to the other side of the same road, which, as Plato established 2,400 years ago, is Read more...

Dumb and Dumber – no, it’s not a movie; it’s reality

By david|2016-12-10T00:41:08-05:00November 20th, 2012|Categories: social|Tags: chimpanzees, Einstein, Gerald Crabtree, Greeks, Jared Diamond, Lucretius, Semb and Dumber, Socrates|

Socrates, Plato, Lucretius would not have allowed Einstein to pass out of the fifth grade. (vk.com) We humans are dumber than we were 1000 years ago Are we devolving rather than evolving? Is the human brain, which is 98.4% the same as a chimpanzee’s, slowly deteriorating? If Lucretius (99-55 BC) had known Einstein would he have considered him Read more...

The human species lacks any goal external to its own biological nature.

Edward O. Wislon, Pulitzer Prize winning American biologist

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

Edmund Burke

Exactly how much of nature can we trash and burn and get away with it?

Philip Anderson, Nobel laureate physicist, Princeton

There is nothing man won't do to avoid the difficult task of thinking.

Thomas Edison

We humans are capable of greatness ... but we are making a mess of our planet and becoming a danger to ourselves.

Carl Sagan

My personal history is the stuff they write books about. And that's what I am doing. The working title "Five Generations to Freedom."

It's historical fiction because, unfortunately, I can not find enough records to substantiate all facets of the story. I've combed the genealogy, traveled to my father and grandmothers' birthplace, walked the graveyards, searched the churches and ... well, the facts just aren't there. I have written three books based on other families and their genealogy but my ancestors emerged from a journey that left few records – slavery.

My great grandmother, on my father's side, was a "freed slave." My grandmother, Amelia, was born to a white, French plantation owner in Grenada and a black slave named Mary, who worked on the Count de Poulain's plantation. Amelia was raised in her father's home and in adulthood, in an attempt to escape her black heritage, she "disowned" her mother Mary. Once, when Mary visited her daughter, Amelia told her, "Get out and never come back." And Amelia, as a mother herself (twelve children), told all of them, "Marry white." And many did, including my father. My mother was white Anglo-Saxon protestant born in England. They met in Canada where dad became a doctor.

It has taken five generations for the descendants of Mary (we do not know her last name) to free themselves from the bondage and stigma of their black heritage. But today, my children embrace it and are damn proud of it. Unfortunately, the 150 years in between has been a wasteland of bigotry, racism and bullying, Filled with anger, rejection, shame, fear, violence, murder and ... love, romance, kindness, perseverance and pride.