June Callwood, Canada’s social conscience, dies at 82.
“If any of you happens to see an injustice, you are no longer a spectator, you are a participant. And you have an obligation to do something.”
June Callwood – accepting Writers’ Trust Award for Distinguished Contribution, Toronto (7 March 2007)
June Callwood, the remarkable Canadian journalist, humanitarian and social activist, died early Saturday after a long fight with cancer.
She was 82.
She was born in Chatham, Ontario and began her journalism career at Brantford Collegiate. Awards and credits include the Order of Canada, Order of Ontario, Toronto Arts Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, and she was an inductee into the Canadian News Hall of Fame.
“She was first diagnosed with inoperable cancer in 2004, but refused treatment and continued to be active, most recently on the campaign to end child poverty, until a few months ago.
Callwood blazed trails for women’s rights, gay rights and the rights of the underprivileged with a history of activism dating back to the 1960s.” — CBC
Kurt Vonnegut is one writer who moved much of my generation and who is responsible for much of how we think today. Today he died, another great human mind, passing into history. A person full of love, insight, and story telling. Thanks Kurt, you rocked my universe.
Quotes
Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.
I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.
I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.
Requiem (ending)
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.[60]
–Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country, 2005
“Our president is a Christian? So was Adolf Hitler. What can be said to our young people, now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?”
