Goodbye…!

2020 will be remembered as the year of the COVID–19 pandemic which is still in effect.

2020 also marks the year I lost my father.

It happened on Christmas Day. This last Friday, December 25, 2020.

I was with my father when he had his stroke in October.

We lived together.

I was with my father when he died, at age 88, during the early morning hours on Christmas Day.

As one who has always liked Christmas, for how it can bring people together, I will not look to the day as one I want to avoid but one I want to continue to appreciate. It is a good day. It is also my father’s day.

My father died at home with in-home Hospice. 

I was his caregiver. 

During the early period of his dying process, we talked. 

We were able to let each other know that we loved and were fortunate to have each other. Our family. Our lives. 

It was really good we talked. 

He told me, among a number of things, “[As a father], I made sure you [and your sibling] were provided for financially, emotionally, and spiritually.”

He did. My father, unlike my sibling and I, was not so fortunate. His father was present only financially.

My mother died at age 62 in 1998. (She was within weeks from turning 63.) She was 3 years younger than my father. He ended up with a lifespan of 25 more years than his wife. “I was married to a wonderful woman.” He said, after her death, his life was never the same. He missed her.

I will be turning 50 in 2021. I don’t look forward to that milestone of a birthday and age. But, I do look forward to moving past what I now label “The Worst Year Ever.”

2020 is…The Worst Year Ever.

Goodbye…Worst Year Ever!

Goodbye…To My Father!

While my life will be going through more changes, I will continue Progressives Chat with a regular schedule of blog topic posts on Mondays. I appreciate it. I know readers, who comment, do as well.

Although the word hope can mean little for some…I am hoping that this darkness that has been 2020 will bring us to light in 2021.

A ‘Merry’ Time with ‘Schitt’s Creek’

 

In 2018, during the week of Christmas, my blog topic [A Segue To Christmas: ‘SCTV’] featured videos from SCTV Network.  

As an early Christmas present for myself, I recently completed having viewed all episodes of the comedy series Schitt’s Creek.

It premiered on Pop TV in 2015 and ran for six seasons and concluded in 2020.

Created by father and son Eugene and Daniel Levy, the latter envisioned a series about characters who are wealthy but lose it all, or nearly all, and have to start over again. 

Schitt’s Creek is about the Rose family adjusting to their new life. They own this small town, called Schitt’s Creek, which the father bought for his son years ago as a joke. Well, the joke is on them.

Johnny Rose (Eugene Levy) is a former video store magnate who was defrauded by his business partner. His wife, Moira (Catherine O’Hara), is a former soap-opera actress who is wanting her star to shine again. Their adult children, David (Daniel Levy) and Alexis (Annie Murphy), are looking to branch out independently. 

The Roses are reduced to living in a motel run by its clerk Stevie Budd (Emily Hampshire). 

The Roses—especially the parents—are often challenged by mayor Roland (Chris Elliott) and his teacher wife Jocelyn Schitt (Jennifer Robertson).

Along the way, the adult children do find romantic partners—for David, it is business partner Patrick Brewer (Noah Reid); for Alexis, it is veterinarian Ted Mullins (Daniel Milligan)—and they may or may not be enough.

The first two seasons take their time developing. And the characters, and their stories, grow very nicely as Schitt’s Creek soars.

One of my favorite scenes has Johnny and Moira having dinner with old friends. The friends disparage Schitt’s Creek for being lowly, backward, and unworthy. But Johnny, with having an epiphany, speaks of how these old friends abandoned them yet the people of this small town have been there for the Roses since they arrived. It is a nice moment that speaks to one being able to recognize who are his true friends.

Schitt’s Creek did not catch on right away. What catapulted it were repeats made available for streaming on Netflix. (Yes, I streamed the episodes from Netflix.) The fifth season garnered key Emmy nominations, for the 2018–19 television season, for Outstanding Comedy Series, Lead Actor Eugene Levy, and Lead Actress Catherine O’Hara. (Winners were Amazon Prime Video’s Fleabag and its star Phoebe Waller–Bridge and Bill Hader of HBO’s Barry.) But with its sixth and final season, the 2019–20 television season, Schitt’s Creek became the first regular television season to win for all four series-regular performance categories (Lead Actor Levy; Lead Actress O’Hara; Supporting Actor Levy; Supporting Actress Murphy) along with Series, Directing, and Writing. (Daniel became the first to win for performance, Directing, Writing, and as co-producer for Series.)

Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara also won Emmys, as writers, for SCTV Network. Eugene, 74, and Catherine, 66, have been two of the most daring comedic actors of the last four decades.And they are terrific once again on Schitt’s Creek. One can tell, with this series, why the two—along with Eugene’s son Daniel Levy, 37, and Annie Murphy, 34—were prized. Schitt’s Creek is fresh and funny.

Although I cannot assume all readers of Progressives Chat recognize and observe Christmas, I want everyone to have a safe and enjoyable holiday period.

‘In the End We Will All Pay for the Cowardice of the Liberal Class’

Last week, Jimmy Dore suggested—make that urged—his viewers, and really all true progressives, to contact the supposedly true progressive members of the Democratic-majority United States House of Representatives. This includes, of course, New York’s Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez and Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar. 

With the post-2020 Democrats heading into the next Congress with 222 seats—it takes 218 for majority—the supposedly true progressives can use their numbers to prevent California’s Nancy Pelosi from winning re-election as speaker if she does not, at the very least, bring to the floor of the U.S. House a vote on Medicare for All.

I support this move. 

I support it because it is, as Dore describes, leverage. 

I support it because these so-called true progressives should be using their leverage if Pelosi wants to continue as speaker. 

I support it because these supposedly true progressives have gone on the record saying they support and want Medicare for All. 

I support this move because these so-called true progressives should be revealing themselves for just how serious they are when they said they support and want Medicare for All.

I am ready for these so-called true progressives in the U.S. House to use their leverage.

If they don’t use their leverage, they can be included among the cowards in the “Liberal Class” as described by Chris Hedges in his piece that is this week’s blog topic. (Its link: In the End We Will All Pay for the Cowardice of the Liberal Class.)

‘America Closes Down—People Get Shafted As Monopolies Take Over!’

Jimmy Dore addresses the trajectory of shutdowns of restaurants, as one example, and how the CARES Act set it in motion to what we are lately seeing play out.