Storms

The storm yesterday afternoon. The sky suddenly became grayer than the bad weather, the temperature dropped, the wind began to howl, then the rain fell, oblique and rough. It seemed like one of those winter storms where nothing is possible, each in their own den waiting for better times to come back. And they came back, picking up where they left off their regular knitwear.

Is this true of this student movement, of the social protest that has taken root in the hearts of a few people? On television, a documentary on Michel Chartrand’s life showed me Quebec in the 1960s and 1970s, during the time of laws 63, 19, war measures, etc. Beyond the folklore of attitudes, we can only make a connection with what is happening now. The degree and strength of the gestures differ, but the color seems to be the same.

Thunderstorms flout, disturb, destabilize, burn. Volcanoes spit, oceans drown, meteors erase. If this Nature seems to know where it is going, if it knows how to compensate, restore the good times, and use the death of one to feed the life of the other, I remain perplexed by human activities. I sometimes have trouble seeing the purpose of their actions, I don’t understand their anger, their greed, I find them strangely mechanical and useless. The anger of one is not there to feed but to protest against forces that do not give a shit about fertility, and that prefer to degrade themselves in greed. The storms of the people come only to call out their fed up with situations they have accepted for decades as if the game of slave and master were just a pale theatre of cat and mouse.

There are, of course, all these creative meadows, these noble hearts, these beautiful people, these geniuses, these great voices, these sublime writings, this angelic circle to which I would like to belong. There is certainly all the goodness and beauty of human inventiveness.

But there is still in me the memory of that song that asked why the world is without love and that it shouldn’t last forever.

The massacres, the injustices continue. Syria will get away with it since, on a global scale, war is still being played out as in the days of the brave knights. I see no balance, no reason behind it. I see only one race struggling with a surprisingly bad, defective assembly, or even an accident that Nature will eventually correct. Maybe it’s already started.