The Ganga cleanses ... but, only if you truly repent

We had a tasty lunch with fresh garden ingredients, in a gorgeous setting overlooking the water, and with a gentle breeze blowing to soothe us on a warm afternoon.  It is a popular spot, and our first choice for a salad was already sold out :(

Such a farm-to-table operation is possible because there are farms all over the charming island.  Only a few looking commune-like, which might have been set up by hippies of the past.  Most farms, on the other hand, looked like they were thriving and prosperous; perhaps they are the expensive hobbies of the digital hippies who have more than a few dollars to spare while telecommuting from their farms.

Prior to the internet economy, and tourism and forest-bathing, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, labor was imported from across the Pacific, from Hawaii and Japan.  Which means, for all purposes, Salt Spring Island was a mini-USA, with the exception of Mexicans.

So, like the US, Canada, too, reacted to the Japanese population on the island similar to how FDR's government treated them.  The few with Japanese links were forced into internment camps in other provinces that were inland and away from the Pacific.  The horror!

When the Japanese were gone, their land and property were conveniently sold by the government.  The families had nothing to return to, even if they wanted to.  Only one family returned and put down their roots, again.  We saw the sign on the way to the small little museum in town.

Life is calm and peaceful now because, unlike the US, Canada has been actively engaged in making its peace with its past, and now warmly embraces non-whites and non-Christians.  Good for our northern neighbors that they don't have as a head of government a pathological narcissist who stokes fear and hatred.  Maybe some day we, too, will have a truth and reconciliation commission, and we can finally let go of our awful baggage.

I roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
And all around me , a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me

Torture, and government transparency

I really, really, hope that not only will there be a "truth" commission to clear up everything related to torture, but that it will also help clean up DC, at least for a couple of years, just like when the Watergate inquiry lead to a little bit of housecleaning before the vultures returned.
In today's NY Times, Frank Rich writes that we need to do this, and now:

the new administration doesn’t want to revisit this history any more than it wants to dwell on torture. Once the inspector general’s report on the military analysts was rescinded, the Obama Pentagon declared the matter closed. The White House seems to be taking its cues from the Reagan-Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan. “Sometimes I think just keep walking,” she said on ABC’s “This Week” as the torture memos surfaced. “Some of life has to be mysterious.” Imagine if she’d been at Nuremberg!

The administration can’t “just keep walking” because it is losing control of the story. The Beltway punditocracy keeps repeating the cliché that only the A.C.L.U. and the president’s “left-wing base” want accountability, but that’s not the case. Americans know that the Iraq war is not over. A key revelation in last month’s Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainees — that torture was used to try to coerce prisoners into “confirming” a bogus Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein link to sell that war — is finally attracting attention. The more we learn piecemeal of this history, the more bipartisan and voluble the call for full transparency has become.

And I do mean bipartisan. Both Dick Cheney, hoping to prove that torture “worked,” and Nancy Pelosi, fending off accusations of hypocrisy on torture, have now asked for classified C.I.A. documents to be made public. When a duo this unlikely, however inadvertently, is on the same side of an issue, the wave is rising too fast for any White House to control. Court cases, including appeals by the “bad apples” made scapegoats for Abu Ghraib, will yank more secrets into the daylight and enlist more anxious past and present officials into the Cheney-Pelosi demands for disclosure.

It will soon be every man for himself. “Did President Bush know everything you knew?” Bob Schieffer asked Cheney on “Face the Nation” last Sunday. The former vice president’s uncharacteristically stumbling and qualified answer — “I certainly, yeah, have every reason to believe he knew...” — suggests that the Bush White House’s once-united front is starting to crack under pressure.

I’m not a fan of Washington’s blue-ribbon commissions, where political compromises can trump the truth. But the 9/11 investigation did illuminate how, a month after Bush received an intelligence brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,” 3,000 Americans were slaughtered on his and Cheney’s watch. If the Obama administration really wants to move on from the dark Bush era, it will need a new commission, backed up by serious law enforcement, to shed light on where every body is buried.