“Power without love is reckless and abusive and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
Martin Luther King, in Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community.
Read it again. Power and love are positioned as allies, not foes, whose intersections lead toward the justice we all seek. That man had a mighty dream, but not only that.
I don’t have nearly so much to say about June Callwood as I did about Kurt Vonnegut, but thanks to the Globe and Mail‘s Sandra Martin, I don’t have to. You can find a splendid memorial to the remarkable Ms. Callwood here. This fiery, compassionate woman probably wrote more books than Vonnegut, but she was a different sort of writer altogether. She’ll be remembered more for the causes she espoused and the amazing number of organizations she founded for the public good. (A propos of her crusading innovation, Martin makes a comment that reminds me of the old joke about Liberal MP Ken Dryden when he was a hockey player: that he’d written more books than his teammates had read.) She was a brilliant and angry woman who put both those powers to superb use.
I long thought that Trent Frayne was a fine writer on hockey and other sports, and he was. But I have come to admire him hugely in recent years as June Callwood’s husband. I learned what a fine and loving man, father and husband he was. It’s not easy to be married to smart, strong women, especially back in the 1950s when he and Callwood began. By all accounts, especially hers, he was a prince. And what a loss now for him, I don’t forget, as Canada mourns one of its outstanding women, his June.
Well, YES, he said immodestly, but I’m not talking about my own stuff here. Give me credit for some level of humility! (But it’s true, there is a lot of good jock journalism in the box to your right.) I mean Dave Zirin, an American writer I read fairly regularly. He writes on the “Edge of Sports”, and insists on making the connection between athletics (especially the professional variety) and real life, unlikely as that may seem. He keeps hollering that social justice and the Great Big Sandbox are related to each other, that they MUST be.
Zirin is worth reading, even if you don’t normally open the sports section. For example, the article I got through subscribing to his service sent me an article that addresses the history of racial injustice in American sport, and suggests one small symbolic way to address it. (His web site is here. I’ll post an excerpt from the article in It’s All About Sports! right here.) If you are a sports fan, I defy you to answer the three trivia questions that he asks; I couldn’t. There were more barriers to be leaped over – still are – than the one with Jackie Robinson’s signature on it. I commend this to your interest, as Dave Zirin would say, in struggle and sport.
