Photo by paparutzi
My contemporaries. Still missed. Still remembered.
- Geneviève Bergeron (b. 1968), civil engineering student.
- Hélène Colgan (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
- Nathalie Croteau (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
- Barbara Daigneault (b. 1967) mechanical engineering student.
- Anne-Marie Edward (b. 1968), chemical engineering student.
- Maud Haviernick (b. 1960), materials engineering student.
- Maryse Laganière (b. 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department.
- Maryse Leclair (b. 1966), materials engineering student.
- Anne-Marie Lemay (b. 1967), mechanical engineering student.
- Sonia Pelletier (b. 1961), mechanical engineering student.
- Michèle Richard (b. 1968), materials engineering student.
- Annie St-Arneault (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student.
- Annie Turcotte (b. 1969), materials engineering student.
- Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (b. 1958), nursing student.
Chicago, Illinois
It comes off almost as a sigh.
Chicago-O’Hare is well known for being a finicky place to make connections, due to weather or traffic. I’ve mostly had good luck coming through here, with only one weather delay. Today though I have enjoyed the hospitality of the C concourse for most of the day, compliments of a United flight to Vancouver that was cancelled at 9:00. I’m now awaiting the call for the 3:25 flight home.
So what does the C concourse have to offer the stranded traveller? There are Starbucks outlets, but they lose their appeal after a couple of shots of watery espresso. Hudson News is omnipresent but despite selling The Atlantic, The New Yorker and The Economist, they seems suspiciously short on Harper’s. I am half imagining that the reason is political, given Harper’s stinging rebukes of establishment American politics of late. Whch is why I want to read it. Instead, I bought a copy of Best American Short Stories 2006, edited by Stephen King who provides an entertaining and honest assessment about the state of American short stroy writing: alive but not well. His selections for the anthology are great.
Food…so not much around here of note. I’ve always appreciated the fact that you can get Odwalla juice pretty freely around here. I’m loaded on some kind of blueberry B-vitamin power mix. Of the outlets, the Corner Bakery has the nicest sandwiches, freshly made pannini. When I need a fill, the Manchu Wok offers heaps of non-descript Chinese food, MSG free at least and it fills the belly for the four hour flight to Vancouver on United, which I have redubbed “The Hungry Skies.”
Wireless is cheap, at $6.95 a day which is a steal if you’re logged on for as long as I have been, and there are these power stations that are nice to work at. Power plugs in the waiting areas are scarce and nearly all in use by businessmen sucking down the watts while they make uberimportant cell phone calls.
And so the day proceeds, slowly, without any remarkable incidents, watching the crowds ebb and flow and waiting for UA1119 to spirit me to the west coast, eight hours later than I expected to get home.
Burlington, Vermont
I grew up in Ontario and this my favourite time of year in Eastern North America for many reasons. But chief among those reasons is what happens to forests out here in the fall. It is hard to describe to anyone who has never seen them, a maple forest in the fall, where the colours are bright yellow, orange and red. Pitched against a blue sky, the scene is iconic, beautiful and stirs up a nostalgia in me for home.
Flying from Choicago to Burlington today, we crossed over the maple woodlots of the farming country of southern Ontario and upstate New York which were alive with the colour of turning. Then over the Adirondacks, past Mount Marcy and Skylight, two peaks I have climbed upon, these ancient worn down mountains, 20 times older than the ones I live on now but still showing their grandeur and the shape of peaks and valleys covered with pine and spruce with pockets of yellow birch and red maple. Over Lake Champlain, and into Burlington, a lovely older town on the lake, biger and more modern than I remembered it from a previous visit in 1993 but still small enough to have a main street feel about it.
Met up with my Art of Hosting mate Lenore Mewton and we stopped in at the CommunityMatters reception at the Echo Centre and then on for an excellent meal of contemporary Cantonese food at A SIngle Pebble.
Beautiful part of the world to retrun too, and I’m eagerly looking forward to the gathering tomorrow.
Jack Martin Leith is writing again, prolifically and brilliantly on the subject of facilitation, conferences, meeting, organization and work in general.
I may be late to the party, noticng his new blog, but I’m glad to see him back on the web sharing as generously as ever.
Our federal government announced in it’s throne speech yesterday that it was intending to extend Canada’s mission in Afghanistan to 2011. I have written before about my thoughts on the war there, and our role in it. Now, I’m adding my voice to a number of other bloggers who are demanding that we end our role in this conflict. Here are my reasons why:
- We are in a combat mission in Afghanistan. In other words we are a fighting force participating in a war. This is not a peacekeeping mission. It bears remembering that we went to Afghanistan, and we remain there, as a part of a NATO combat force, not a UN peacekeeping force. We went there originally to unseat the Taliban government and to do our part to fight terrorism 9whatever that means). The Taliban government was unseated in 2002, we were there as a new government took office (although it’s not exactly a DEMOCRATIC government). We are now working for THAT government, fighting a civil war against people who don’t agree with their government.
- I don’t believe that we have a role to play by taking sides in a civil war. Afghanistan now has its own government, and the people there need to figure out how to run their affairs. Having NATO doing the dirty work in the Afghan civil war provides no incentive for Afghans to create their own security infrastructure.
- To those who object to this line of thinking by saying that we shouldn’t abandon Afghans until there is some stability I will agree with this. We should therefore have a conversation within Canada about changing our role from a combat force to a peacekeeping force under the auspices of the United Nations. Of course, we have been at war in Afghanistan since 2001 and our leaders and their friends have been on record saying that we can’t negotiate with the Taliban, so perhaps we are not in a position to take a neutral peacekeeping role. I think we have lost that chance.
- Darfur is calling. We are unable to respond. I would like our country to be in a position to help in the world where we can be needed.
- Our commitments to the first and second world wars lasted 10 years combined. Our commitment to the uncertain outcomes of the Afghanistan civil war wlll stretch this far by the end of the current government’s proposed mandate. The outcomes are uncertain, the conditions for victory are unclear and unattainable. Therefore, we should leave now rather than later.
- Just to say it again, I believe that we have debased ourselves by using our armed forces to take sides in a civil war. We helped oust the Taliban, we chose not to be peacekeepers after that event. We have no right to be there any longer.
So, I am for Canada ending the mission there post-haste, regrouping our armed forces and redeploying to Darfur where we can do good.
[tags]canada, war, afghanistan, stephen harper[/tags]