Jul. 19th, 2020

... it doesn't change you. So reads the inscription on this bench at one end of the bridge in Pakenham.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dyanora/albums/72157713704356231

We made the trip early during the pandemic lockdown, to pick up some maple products at Fulton's.

We had hoped to be able to at least explore some of the outdoor trails and maybe make our annual expedition to Barney's Grave, but it was not to be. We had to stay in the car, drive up to the Maple Shop and give our particulars, whereupon our order was placed in the trunk of the car and we drove away again.

However, we did make a brief stop at the Pakenham Bridge. Everything was quite deserted but we did wander around a bit. We couldn't actually sit on the bench (given that the potential penalty might have been a multi hundred dollar fine) but we did wander about the little park there and read the inscriptions on the various monuments.

But back to that slogan, "If it doesn't challenge you, it doesn't change you." When I was little, a child of the relatively prosperous post-war years in Canada, a lot of the oldsters grumbled about the spoilt and overindulged Dr. Spock generation who'd never lived through a war or known severe hardship of any kind.

I'm not so sure I've known severe hardship - I've never been homeless or "in care" or suffered through a major illness like polio or tuberculosis or rheumatic fever. I lived in a two-parent family and had my own bedroom and was never expelled or suspended from school nor did I even ever get the strap! I did get all the major childhood illnesses for which there was not yet a vaccine - measles (rougeola and rubella), mumps and chickenpox and I got my tonsils out in Grade 2 at the old General Hospital which at that time was staffed by nuns

Of course, there were the usual growing pains of adolescence but by and large, my life has been pretty stable and unremarkable.

I do remember stuff like the Kennedy assassinations, the War Measures Act and October Crisis, 9/11 and other significant events that shaped me. The slow liberalization of dress codes during my high school years, Pollution Probe and the concerns about phosphates in detergents, John Lennon and Yoko Ono's bed-in for peace in Montreal, Brigitte Bardot and the baby seals. I saw the Berlin Wall go up and come down again and I was over there in the summer of 1972 when Germany was still a divided country. Korea is still a divided country, several decades after the war ended. Then there's China and Russia and no one really talks about the Iron Curtain or the Bamboo Curtain any more, although I'm not sure the Cold War has entirely ended. Instead of Apartheid South Africa and Nelson Mandela, we're talking about Black Lives Matter and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and residential schools.

I've also been shaped by the women's movement, pay equity and the "consciousness raising" movement of the seventies.

But with Covid-19, I'm conscious now of being a part of something that is affecting people the world over. Not all to the same extent, of course. But in its magnitude, it's comparable to the flu pandemic of 1918, which wiped out a lot of people in the world, on the heels of the "Great War" which itself had already left death and destruction in its wake!

Medicine and technology and many other fields of human endeavour are at a different stage now. We all like to think that we're more "advanced" now. But does that mean that the human cost will be less? I'm not sure. Change can be good or bad. Or neutral. Advancement and progress bring their own costs too. Superbugs, climate change, new power struggles all over the world... Was it Margaret Thatcher who said "It's a funny old world"? She wasn't completely in her right mind at the end, but she may have been right about that, I think!
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