BURKE CONNECTED WITH QUIRKS

“As long as you have the wisdom to keep this country as the sanctuary of liberty, wherever [people] worship freedom they will turn their faces towards you.” Edmund Burke

Yes, I know. I started my last post with these lines and now I start this post with the same quote.
And this is why. We all have our own ‘quirks’, right? Well, one of my quirks are the images which certain songs produce in my mind.
Some of you may remember a Canadian rock group of the late eighties up to about 1990 called The Pursuit of Happiness. Maybe you also remember an album they made titled Love Junk. It has quite a few songs which get me to think of London as it once was and might still be again, although probably not within my lifetime given how horrifically insane a majority of our cousins seem to have gone.
That is, London as the hearthstone of such liberty which, back around 1990, seemed like it was on top of the globe. I remember how happy I felt that English is not only my native language but my ancestral language on my dad’s side. When I imagine these songs as musical backdrops to the above quotation, I actually choke up. No, really.
And I choke up all the tighter when I’m back in 2022 and I remember that England (not Scotland, at least not as much) has gone insane with xenophobia and that we here in the States still have a long, hard fight ahead of us to get democracy out of the woods and onto the sunlit uplands where, for the first time in recorded human history, democracy will be multiracial, multi-ethnic, multi-faith and, I guess, multi-gender (although that last is something I…