Justice for Cindy Gladue

I am very sore today because merely standing triggers my pelvis pain to the point where I drag both my feet.  Also, Paul very efficiently tricked me into mowing the back lawn, so I was really, really sore by the time I was done. 2.0 hours on the cpap – keep forgetting to put the mask back on.

I wrote this in my notebook over a rather lavishly irrigated lunch yesterday.  I went to the rally, which was triggered by this.  As is my custom, I did a square search count of the crowd. It was never fewer than a hundred people and swelled to 150 around 11 am.  Knowing that we were gathered in 20 cities across Canada (including Saint John’s NFLD, where it was ass freezing cold and blowing snow) made me very proud.  And sore, as I mentioned.  I am going to pick up another one of those mini-chairs from Lee Valley, I simply cannot stand for an hour and a half without problems.

So I was angry when I wrote this.  I am still angry, but it’s the quiet, smoldering kind.

Edited for errors in usage and kindness Feb. 20 2021, the day I learned Bradley Barton is going to jail.

April 2, 2015 unceded Coastal Salish land. MST LAND

Canada is the kind of country where a sex trade worker deserves to die for being a sex trade worker.  If she’s Indigenous, and ‘somehow’ ends up with an 11 inch stab wound which is paraded through the courtroom in a specimen jar in a grotesque parody of a ceremonial object, she had it coming.  Somehow the fact that a misogynistic piece of sh*t named Bradley Barton murdered her in a drunken stupor gets dropped from the equation, and he left the trial a free man.

I’ve been angry at the Canada ‘justice’ system before. Lots.  But I don’t normally get off my ass to protest.

Cindy Gladue did not deserve to die.

She didn’t get justice.

Her children and her family and loved ones did not get justice.

I am enraged that Cindy Gladue and her 1200 and counting indigenous sisters are being treated by the justice ‘shitstem’ as entirely disposable human refuse.  The UN has asked Canada to investigate.  Harper says it isn’t even on his radar.

F*CK THIS RACIST SEXIST ENTIRELY HORSESH*T SYSTEM.

It’s gotta come down.

Let it come down.

With unity of purpose and steel in our veins, let us BRING IT DOWN.

There were 150 of us in front of the Courthouse yesterday. Indigenous and white and mixed and ‘other’.  We were men and women and non-binary and children. We wept and drummed and sang and screamed our disappointment and anger that Indigenous lives are forced to be so far from justice, or even its prospect or possibility.

Justice for Cindy Gladue.