There shall be wars and rumours of war.
Listening to the news reveals a litany of man's inhumanity to man. The triumph of celebrity over justice in the Bill Cosby Trial or the election of a president. The treatment of a sexual assault victim in a court of law is nothing short of shameful and a definite deterrent to coming forward. The latest mass shooting becomes so common as to be ho-hum.
There are enough natural disasters and suffering to go around without man-made aggressions. Fires set by lightening, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and landslides. Saturday the Toronto Area was under a tornado watch and today a severe thunderstorm watch. June 18.
Talk of raising the minimum wage raises cries from business that they can't afford to pay. But wouldn't putting more spending power in the hands of low wage earners increase business? Landlords including government in the case of public housing resist spending funds on measures to improve the safety of high rises unless forced to by legislation enforced by inspections. A recent fire in England has dramatically brought the issue to the fore with an increasing death toll. The yearly opening of private pools is already being marked by deaths in those facilities. A coming long weekend will be marked by carnage on the highways.
Baby Boomers are dropping like flies, every week we seem to hear of yet another group of celebrities who have passed on, dying no longer seems to be a politically correct term. More troubling personally is the fact that more and more the people succumbing to one illness or another are younger than I.
"Democracy is the worst form of government there is, except for all the rest." Winston Churchill. When did the common man ever have a proper grasp of what was in his best interest. First Britons voted to leave the European Union—Brexit; then they voted to emasculate the government that has to negotiate the process. Britain is either in or out, there is no cherry picking of aspects of union AND there is a price to be paid for leaving, there are huge costs involved. Oops!
Human migration and the aspirations of those migrants inundate small countries and neighbourhoods leading to resistance to change among the traditional residents of those localities. The threat of such change has even led European Nations to resist immigration and I'm all too familiar with the fear of the "Hispanic Menace" or the annoyance in South Florida at the Cuban invasion. I know my own frustration at the thought that the possibility of offending a visible minority means our schools and public spaces no longer celebrate Christmas. When one is stressed by illness or a sick child the desire to be comfortable speaking to a health care worker whose cultural and language background is one's own can be very strong. After all one is not in a foreign country where one needs an interpreter to get medical care. Expressing such desires may not be politically correct but that doesn't make them go away. The fact that a mother made such a request in nearby Mississauga has caused a social media and political frenzy.
Having had to use Oakville's Taxi system I learned that perspective drivers are allowed an interpreter when they take their taxi license test, but the customer is offered no such service. Would it be too much to ask that my driver speak one of Canada's official languages and know the town and its surrounding neighbourhood? Does this make me a racist? That my driver was a doctor or lawyer in his country of origin is quite another matter.
I realize that racist arguments can sound very reasonable, after all there are sections of the Bible that justify slavery. Opposing racism and xenophobia in theory is easy, it's quite another matter when your new neighbour starts cooking curry in the next apartment daily, starts hanging their laundry from tree branches or starts beating his wife.
Feeding babies on demand, that is, when they cry, teaches us to associate food with comfort and contributes to obesity in adults. After all we refer to comfort foods.
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