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I am too easily confused, and not just because I'm hard of hearing. You think Beverly has issues with confusion? Ha, she has a real diagnosis. I'm just an old male person; it comes with the territory. Seriously, and I really can shift into that realm, difficult as it may be, there are a number of word pairs that seem almost synonymous or at least some very interested parties want to force a synonymous relationship on them. Here's what I have. Easy ones first.

No one but some of my very little friends try to mix the restaurant menu with the meal. They never tire of pretending to gobble up the pictures of deserts on the menu, telling me how delicious it is. At a certain age their imaginations move on to other things or they actually heed the voices that tell them not to slobber on the paper or that horrible sick people might have handled it before them. Parents can be such killjoys. But some of the kids grow up with the menu-meal connection intact.

Hypochondriacs, a lot of them, and the disclaimers on TV medicine ads feed them all the material their overactive poor-me minds can handle. Although, I have it on good report that some first-year nursing students also qualify. Give anyone a few months of concentrated study of diseases and bodily malfunctions and their imaginations will do the rest. Nurses, thankfully, get over it quickly. Then there are the politicians and they have no excuse.

If the menu is not the meal, then the slogan is not the policy and the lie is not the law. "Axe the tax" on carbon emitters goes against all recommendations as advocated by climate scientists and the international agreements in line with their advice. And the idea that some federal government has been "stealing" the resources of a province (or state, or country) is merely an excuse for rousing the local rabble or outright invasion. I was going to dig up the numbers on trade deficits and exports and federal-provincial transfer payments and things like Cuban survival and global contribution after 40+ years of US embargoes, but you do it. Or you already have.

In line with that menu-meal mixup is the notion that equal presentation space equals equal validity. Some years back I heard David Suzuki gently chiding a CBC reporter (Peter Mansbridge I believe it was) for that very fallacy regarding climate change. The broadaster felt that it was the right thing to do in presenting both points of view, but it fed into a rediculous error in making it appear that there was a 50-50 split in reputable opinion. It was actually 99.9 % to nearly negligible. Equal time does not confer equal importance.

Umberto Eco, the philosopher and scholar put it this way: “Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots” Well, I called them "idiot arrogánts" back here at https://www.derekpeach.com/blog/terminal-humanism, but we were describing the same people.

There's a few other spinoffs from the menu-meal mixup that you may have noted along the information highway. (Whew, metaphor madness today) The authority reputation is one of them. If I can spin my person's credentials to make them look really knowledgeable, then no one, you least of haven't-got-time-or-resources-to-check, uninformed all, certainly should believe them. But we're a long way from kids playing in the diner.

Remember road maps? Every glove compartment in every car on the planet had a few crammed in there.  Now we have the GPS screen and the soothing Hollywood voice telling us where to go and "recalculating" whenever you find yourself on a piece of asphalt that wasn't there when it was calibrated. No one mistakes the map for the highway. One you look at; the other you drive on. One you can view in comfort (unless you're hiking on some godforsaken moor in Scotland) the other you set your feet or wheels on and start moving.

Other pairs aren't always so easy to separate. Take that liberty and democracy one for starters. Democracy was born in the Greek city-states, but it certainly wasn't liberal. Slaves had no rights, nor did women. It's been a long road to liberal democracy through the gradual tempering of autocracies from divine right of kings, some of whom lost their heads over the issue, through revolution and the variably successful defeats of those autocracies and oligarchs in Europe and Russia and North America. Gradually, liberties were gained and nations incorporated democratic ideals such as universal voting rights into their constitutions.

Even incipient Canada had to convince its landed (British) gentry in the form of a family compact to loosen up and give representation to the middle class. Remember the stories of Willian Lyon McKenzie and his 1837 revolutionaries marching down Yonge St with their squirrel rifles? Or Georges Papineau in Quebec? Well it worked. But today some folk would say that liberal ideals have gone too far and actually endanger the very democratic institution they sprang from.

I am quoting from an essay by Marc Plattner in the Journal of Democracy who says, "To be stable and successful, liberal democracy must seek an appropriate balance between its liberal and its democratic elements, not allowing either to swell in size at the expense of the other." So"woke" in its truest meaning is great and informs a liberal ideology of inclusion. As an excuse for using the notwithstanding clause every time a provincial politician doesn't like a federal law, not so great. Other nations have their own tensions between liberalism as licence and democratic inclusiveness.

And the expression "freedom not licence" was the central theme and title of A.S. Neill's 1976 book on his Summerhill School. He believed you couldn't teach independent thinking by witholding the opportunity to practise it. In the foreword to his book by that title, he wrote;

I define license as interfering with another's freedom. For example, in my school a child is free to go to lessons or stay away from lessons because that is his own affair, but be is not free to play a trumpet when others want to study or sleep.

When I was in America, I would have an occasion, now and then, to visit a professor or a doctor. When I arrived his wife and children might be in the room. The children remained and monopolized the conversation.

When an American visitor came to visit me at Summerhill today, three children were in my room. "Come on, kids." I said, "buzz off. I want to talk to this visitor." And off they went without a murmur.

Of course, the principle would have applied the other way around, too. My pupils have often told me to clear out when they wanted privacy-when rehearsing a play, for example.

Every child is selfish-Me first! Parents must appreciate and accept that stage for what it is; at the same time, they must refuse to give Junior the license to do everything he wants to do.

A proper answer is "Yes, Bobby, you may use my car tools to fix your bike, but you have got to put the tools back in the car trunk when you are finished with them." That answer may spell discipline to you--maybe it is discipline-but for me it is just life's give and take.

How can children develop self-control if they are never restrained from doing whatever they want to do? is a question I am often asked.

But who ever advocated a child's always doing what he wants to do? I certainly never did. Junior can decide what he doesn't want to do. For example, study Latin. But he is not free to choose to play cops and robbers in father's car.

What is the true definition of self-control? Is it just good manners, like curbing your profanities when you are golfing with the Baptist minister? No, in my opinion self- control means the ability to think of other people, to respect the rights of other people.

No self-controlled man ever sits down with others and helps himself to half the salad in the salad bowl. According to anecdote, Frank Harris once boasted that he had dined at the best houses in London, "Yes, Frank," said Oscar Wilde, "once!"

In my book SUMMERHILL, I pointed out that "It is this distinction between freedom and license that many parents cannot grasp. In the disciplined home, the children have no rights. In the spoiled home, they have all the rights. The proper home is one in which children and adults have equal rights."

This distinction may not be one that could be easily applied to such concepts as liberty and democracy, but there is a tension if you will in the balancing of those two political entities. With other forces there is a much clearer demarcation.

Some of the firmest voices denouncing Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank belong to Jews - students, politicians, rabbis, soldiers in nations around the globe and in Israel itself - and they speak one clear distinction; namely, that of Zionism as opposed to Judaism. These are not apologists for the murderous acts of some radicalized Muslims who killed cartoonists at the Charlie Hebdo publication in Paris or detonated their explosive charges in crowded markets. They are clear-eyed academics and citizens, willing to suffer the retaliation of a vindictive Zionist lobby to speak against the apartheid actions of a rogue government which besmirches their religious faith.

There, you knew it was coming at some point, didn't you. Now I can unwind with these last few items.

Winston Churchill gets the credit for saying, "We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give." He pointed to the difference between the attainment of wealth and the acquisition of money. Thankfully, there have been many who managed to get both, and they have shared their fortunes through foundations and endowments and straight-out giving. I reread this article (https://thewalrus.ca/im-part-of-the-0-1-percent-and-i-want-a-wealth-tax/) from time to time to remind myself that there are people who understand the Churchillian distinction.

That distinction is synonymous with the one between comfort and satisfaction. A wise person (about which, more in a moment) told me once that in life I could go for comfort but I wouldn't be satisfied, or I could go for satisfaction and life would be hard. I really did not want to hear that. Let me talk teaching for a bit.

When we teachers were designing questions for grade 12 provincial exams way back when - and imagine an enlightened government actually having teachers do that - we were asked to make some items fact-based (usually for short-answer or multiple choice items) and others knowledge-based which would require coordinating curriculum elements to express a response. Well, that handled facts and knowledge; wisdom we couldn't test.

I like the wag who got at it by saying, "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit and wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad". Today, we carry with us in our phones an easy access to all the facts and knowledge of the world, but when we leave the phones mute and live our lives in this amazing blue dot of a world, we have the opportunity to acquire wisdom. I still make a bad salad of all the knowledge I've got hold of in 84 years, but in the space of your patience I'm working on it.

And finally, I have the words of the doctor at the memory clinic who gave us Beverly's diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. She wanted to assure us that memory and intelligence were not the same thing. I nodded, but I didn't believe it. I couldn't make the distinction then, and even now after a few week's reflection it's hard to keep them separate. It just seems that intelligence requires access to and manipulation of a lifetime of memories. We shall see. For sure.