Two weeks ago Jack Layton, the leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) of Canada, passed away after battling cancer. Although he came to Montreal quite often, I first had a chance to see him speak live only last November during Question Period in the House of Commons which I was attending as part of the McGill Women in House program.

I was absolutely taken by how he questioned with strength and resolve Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan, climate change accountability and the use of unelected senators by the government to kill a bill that passed had majority approval in the House. In a room filled with extraordinary men and women, Jack Layton stood out.

Following reports of his passing, I felt devastated that a person I’d come to respect so much… I was going to write back then, but the only words that I could write were ‘So sad… so very sad…” I couldn’t make sense of my own reaction, was this man not just a politician that I’d never even met? Yes I’d watched Layton speak time and time again after and was impressed by his views on how we can tackle the problems in society by empowering and mobilizing every citizen. Yes I was living in Québec at the time the NDP sweeped the election under Layton’s leadership, a feat considered impossible for a federalist party. But he was more than that.

By Andrew Vaughan / The Canadian Press

Mudslinging and negativity are a part of every election, and voters often stand by and watch as they would a carnival of idiots, wondering which party seems less like a trainwreck. But Layton did it another way. Where others wear promises of a better tomorrow on their sleeve, and forget everything as soon as they are elected, Layton rolled up his sleeves and stood with the youth, with the working-class, with the immigrants, with the veterans, with the elderly… He understood our concerns, he stood with us, he became our friend: Jack.

And it was for our friend, Jack, that public squares were covered with chalk-written memorials.

By Jackman Chiu

Two weeks ago I went to a vigil held in Montreal’s Mont Royal to remember Jack. I stood there alongside hundreds of people with candles in hand, under stony angels and a starry sky, singing songs from “Oh Canada…” to “This land is your land, this land is my land… from Bonavista, to Vancouver Island…” (yes, the Great North has its adapted version). Someone speaking at vigil said “Jack loved people.” He united them too. There people of all ages, of all backgrounds, of different political stripes cried and sang alongside each other, mourning and paying their respects to a great person in their own way.

He was a person with so much to do and so far to go– he could have changed the world– But as the days pass, I contemplate less and less what could have been, and instead focus on what could be– Jack’s last words to Canadians:

“Love is better than anger.
Hope is better than fear.
Optimism is better than despair.
So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic.
And we’ll change the world.”

Looking at these words up on my wall, I smile– remembering a man who has changed the world with a dream that will last longer than any lifetime.

By Garnotte / Le Devoir

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Oh my god… one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century… Kurt Vonnegut is dead! Heart pain. :(

I don’t know what to say. On personal level I am sorry I never had the chance to write to him to tell him that somewhere in the world another person was absolutely inspired by his work. There are only a few writers who I can say have transformed my being and helped defined my views about life and the world. He was one of them. I am just glad, grateful that he lived in at time where his visions, his writings, his art, his satire was needed the most. He’s not gone forever, his legacy, his flame… he will always be here.

By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy – indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction.

- William Osler (Father of Modern Medicine)

http://www.filmloop.com/cgi-bin/bv/bv.py?ticket=jpH7ym5Xwgey458JA08v7io-g-HfdDx0&flash=1&extAds=1&px=FL

I found this link on the imdb site for “Sometimes in April“… a movie that after a year and a half I still can’t stop thinking about.

Today is April 6th, 2007. Here I am, sitting somewhat comfortably in my chair on a pinpoint in the North American continet. Among the concerns I have are the upcoming exams and my plans for the summer. It’s difficult to imagine that nineteen years ago I could have, all of us could have just as easily been born somewhere else, where the destruction of our lives, families, homes, everything we knew was all reduced to a red spot on a map, a small yellow headline — flickering for a few moments on a television screen to the rest of the world.

In 1994, in a short stretch of 100 days, beginning on April 6th and continuing to mid-July, between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Rwandans were killed. The link shows a stretch of picture taken at Rwanda January this year. Like the calm after the storm, these pictures show such a serene place that it is almost impossible to imagine that these luscious green fields are where only 13 years ago the blood of thousands of human beings was shed while everyone either stood by or did not care.

Sometimes I just wonder whether the most horrifying thought is the apathy, the massive failure of humanity– 13 years ago, when I’m certain if everyone, citizens, the international community had cared, had pushed hard enough, at the very least a million lives would not have been lost… or that 13 years from now, we’ll sigh, looking back at today and the things that plague our world, and wish we had cared about something, wish we had done something, anything… when it was not too late.