A Soulful Evening

   On Friday night, Feb.12, many of the good people of Procter, B.C., were on stage at their village hall, having a bistro night in honour of Valentine's Day. While countless thousands were gathered around the hallowed glow of their t.v. screens, dutifully watching the orgy of excess in Vancouver, the remarkably cultured, socially and politically active, and creative citizens of this hamlet on the south shore of Kootenay Lake were making their own entertainment. We read poetry, sang songs of love and loss, drank and ate, and laughed our asses off as the evening progressed (some might say degenerated) into the madcap antics of karaoke. Older children ran about in the hall, and when they ventured onto the enclosed and darkened stage, where both the perfomers and the audience were, they lined the wall and watched in whispering and respectful silence. Some of them, too, got up and sang.
    It made me think, what constitues entertainment?  We have centainly become a society which passively consumes.This disease affects particularly the young, who depend upon their elders to protect them from it, and who, without such protection, have their heads bowed over their gadgets while the world conducts its ancient dramas around them. Don't they deserve more?