Gord Downie - Canada's Rock Poet
It was Tuesday, May 24, 2016...you know how when you land the flight attendant says it\u2019s now permissible to \u201cuse transmitting and receiving functions your portable devices\u201d while you\u2019re taxiing to the gate?...\nI\u2019d just landed on a 14-hour flight from Hong Kong...and as soon as I flicked my phone out of airplane mode, it blew up...emails and texts all about one thing: The Tragically Hip had just announced that their singer, Gord Downie, had brain cancer...\nAt first, this didn\u2019t make sense...had the jet lag kicked in already?...was this some kind of hoax?...I mean, this was\xa0Gord...he was practically a Canadian superhero...nothing like this was supposed to happen to him...\nBut it was true...the emails and texts kept popping up...dozens,\xa0hundreds\xa0of them...and we all know how the next 18 months played out...\nWhen Gord left us in October 2017, it was really rough...the best tweet I saw that day was \u201cCanada closed: death in the family\u201d...the country spent the next week trying to explain to the rest of the world how a singer of a rock band had brought an entire nation to tears\u2014even the Prime Minister...where else in the world does something like that happen?...\nThe answer is you have to be a special kind of person: artist, writer, thinker, activist, and\xa0poet\u2026 this is the story of Gord Downie, Canada\u2019s own rock poet\u2026\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices