Building Walls

 A few weeks ago, I read a brief article somewhere (I have not been able to find it again) that has haunted me ever since. In the seventeenth century, the plague broke out in several cities of France. As an attempt to control the spread of this terrible disease, plague victims were sometimes walled into their dwelling and left to die. Such was the case with one elderly woman and her granddaughter. Saint Vincent de Paul heard about this, went to her house, and broke through the wall to take care of them. He found that the woman was indeed dying, but not of the plague. She posed no risk of infection whatsoever. The child was not ill at all but would no doubt have died of starvation if Vincent had not intervened.

I can’t help seeing in this anecdote a parallel to what is happening today. Are we at risk of putting walls up between ourselves and others because of our fear of contagion? There is a difference between being cautious – and yes, we should be extremely cautious for our sake and that of others around us – and being afraid. Fear builds walls between people. These walls not only shut other people out, but shut us into ourselves. I pray we do not become a walled-in world.

Facts & Inferences

 Because I felt like having a bit of fun with my students and because I wanted them to learn how to think, I sometimes did rather crazy things with them. On one occasion, before class started, I spoke to one of them and told him that we would be playing a little prank on the rest of the class. Once everybody was seated, I would write two words on the blackboard: facts and inferences. I explained to the student that as soon as I had finished writing the word “inferences”, he was to get up, shout, “I’m not going to take this anymore.”, throw an eraser at me, walk out of the classroom, and slam the door. He was to wait outside the classroom until I called him back in.

The student performed his role to perfection and even managed to hit me on the bald spot on the back of my head. Once he slammed the door, there was dead silence in the classroom. All faces were turned to me waiting to see what I would do. I simply said, “We’re not going to let this upset us. Let’s use it to talk about those two words I wrote on the board. Tell me, what just happened a minute ago?” Hands went up and students volunteered answers to my question. I jotted these down in one or the other column under the two words.

Once we had finished doing this, I went to the door and asked the “angry student” to come in and tell the class why he had behaved the way he did.

With so many poorly drawn conclusions and inferences circulating on social medias, I think I might have to serve as target practice again and draw a bullseye on the back of my head.

Tall Tales

 I love pulling my grand-children’s leg. I put on a straight face and tell them the tallest of tales all the while insisting that it is the absolute truth. I then wait for the moment when they realize that I am feeding them blarney and they roll their eyes, heave out a great groan and say “Ah, grandpapaaaa!!” I remember, for example, telling them, as we passed by a field filled with hundreds of gulls, that it was a gull farm and that the gulls grown there supplied all of Canada with gulls.

One of my proudest moment was when I learned that the grandkids had invented a game called “grandpapa explanations”. The purpose of the game was to come up with the most outlandish explanations for specific events or things.

I realized this morning that I have serious competition as a provider of such blarney. Mr. Trump recently said, with the straightest of faces, that the forest fires on the West coast of the United States was not caused by climate change, but was the result of not raking the leaves and picking up dead branches on the forests’ beds. Now that is powerful tall tale telling! I bet he must be waiting with anticipation for the moment when hundreds of millions of Americans heave a great groan, roll their eyes and say, “Ah, Mr. Truuuummmmppp!”