Hamilton Spectator

BERLIN – So Hitler was called to lurk among us. And never showed. Not even in Germany. This regarding Kony 2012, the strange and shrinking campaign that in its posters — now hung virtually nowhere — features Hitler idling behind warlord Joseph Kony and Osama bin Laden. The square-moustached megalomaniac has made a bigger splash online. On YouTube, an impersonator of the führer is enraged over the world’s apparent inaction against Kony. “Get my laptop,” he tells his generals, with English subtitles, in this satirical video with a million views.

KAMPALA, UGANDA – The times, they are a changin.’ Maybe. Sort of. Well, we live in hope, anyway. I think of it while on Skype with Walid al Saqaf. We’re talking to catch up, about Yemen and censorship and technology and other things. Walid is a Yemeni journalist who has been noted in this space in the past. We were colleagues in Sana’a while Walid was publisher and editor-in-chief of the Yemen Times. I worked at his side.

LONDON — The world is getting faster. And stranger. Have you noticed? This is what I know. I think. I mean, sometimes it’s hard to know what we know. Take Joseph Kony. He’s someone who, thanks to social media, you likely know. I’m betting you know Kony is that Ugandan warlord with a strangely genteel face, that he’s abducted thousands of Ugandan boys and stole their souls when he made them into so-called soldiers.

Cultural relativism can blind us to warped thinking and behaviour.

(Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, December 24, 2011) KAMPALA, UGANDA — It’s late at night at the Ugandan-Kenyan border and a little Ugandan boy is about to disappear forever. Moses Kaloulou, all of seven years old, is crying hysterically. Not that he knows what’s going to happen, that he’ll likely soon die at the hands, and knife blade, of a witch doctor. All he knows is that it’s late — about midnight now — and very dark, and that some hours ago he was taken by strange men.

Government education is a sham but top students are heroes.

Old age is not for wimps. We approach it, even from a distance, with trepidation. It’s like your second childhood.

Hamilton’s Dr. Jean Chamberlain Froese was invited to speak at a venerable institution.

Technology tempts us, lures us, hooks us. And too often, we’re the poorer for it.

Continents apart, generations and circumstance between them, hands always tell the stories.

As the country’s president seems about to topple, a writer remembers times of living dangerously.

The revolutionary spirit sweeping North Africa isn’t coming to Black Africa — yet.

When you get out in the fresh air of the world, you’re awakened to how Western countries have lost it, this ability to run barefoot in the grass.

I think of what Saint Augustine said: “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”

We believe in Heaven not through religious instruction but rather because of an instinct that’s hard-wired into us, like a child in the womb who senses some grand world outside his dark closet.