Ive just rounded out some of my exposures to the
appropriation discussion and emerge somewhat troubled.
Fortunate to encounter Shandra’s contributions so de-inflaming of the topic.
The inflamedness of it all was quite disturbing.
A lot of what I’d seen was from frends’ fb walls
and it was really tough to pull the seam of the actual topic
out of the intensity and unmeasurable sense of ‘the stakes being raised’
to unbettable amounts.
In aftermath there’s a sense of an orthodoxy presenting itself
that all will resolutely follow.
But the orthodoxy is so much composed of large phrases like
“cultural appropriation” and respect, and listening.
All very good but these are very core features of being human.
The goal of the intent to be a good person
would cleave straight to such words.
You might as well go up to someone who is oft stressed
and sometimes depressed and stressed in very immediate ways,
has long been so, and thus is only so good a listener,
only so patient, and oft very focused on some particular
mission or sense of urgency, and you say to that person:
“NOW BE A PERFECT PERSON
WHO LISTENS VERY CAREFULLY
WHILE SILENTLY COMMUNICATING THAT LISTENINGNESS
WITH A RESPECTULNESS THAT IS PALPABLE”
ie., Be Sublimely and Serenely Calm, have nothing else on your mind,
and maximize attention to nuance and detail.
Oh how I love that feeling when it occurs. And it does occur.
But man, lo that that could be possible all the time.
It would take a completely different economic system
a far calmer home, far less ttc. 
I know some people who are such genius listeners of the like,
such that one can hear one’s own words more intelligently
via their listening when you speak with them.
It’s because they’re smarter, and better at everything,
and more successful in life, though some are not all that successful
(and overall few are succeeding collectively as we continue
to fashion forward an environmentally destructive
program of massive wealth disparity amid diminishing
resources and more rapid consumption and garbage
filling the world, and some of the worst global leadership ever
with impossible violence raining down in other parts of the world.
Success is relative. 
But they’re rare, the exceptionally intelligent good listeners
with perfect ease in relation to others and a sense of assuredness,
they’re so rare.
There wasn’t much of it to be found.
What I referred to on fb as “the msm coming into it with money”
‘debasing themselves’ as writers in the process ‘Hey, we’ve got cash
to steer literature in a more flippant less respectful direction in this country’
reflected just terribly on their media systems. Cash, we’ve got cash.
But Hal himself, man do I have sorrowful sympathy that car crash of a
decision writing the editorial or foreword.
We hadn’t been close or really even talked; he exuded disinterest in me,
but he’s no villain, and certainly not to blame for colonialism,
and for better or worse I’m certain he didn’t have ill intentions.
Early 2000s of Toronto poetry small press and so on into the Rudy’s
the notion of literature and art as recycling, as much as music is,
everything into it, like the earth. We’re all mulch.
Being very 19th Century it wasn’t my proclivity
but I could see the arguments.
Families have to be free to disagree. Even when they don’t.
Few orthodoxies work.
Intelligence caring and respectfulness always do.
And back into the tunnels it is.
Good is good. Everything else is myriad sad things.
More good to all. Those rare moments.
The End
Oversion 
