blogcutter

Today instead of a throwback Thursday, I'm going to do a kind of throw-ahead Thursday. Our local newspaper is asking people to write in and briefly describe what their "new normal" will look like, or what they would LIKE it to look like once this pandemic is a distant memory.

So here's what I hope for, tempered by what I think we can realistically expect.

You know that old adage, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger"? I don't think anybody will come through this totally unscathed, even if their own and their family's health are not directly affected. I would hope that most of us have learned to be kinder and more compassionate than we may have been previously, and that we will be more appreciative of what we have. I think we are coming to understand, in a more heartfelt way, the value but also the fragility of our lives. Many of us have reassessed our goals and priorities over the past several months. Some of us have had ample time to take stock of our lives. As for those stressed-out folk fighting a sometimes losing battle on the front lines? It's probably fair to say that somewhere in the back of their minds, their psyches are busily taking stock FOR them and once the day-to-day and minute-to-minute crises have ended, these people will find themselves at a fork in the road, making decisions about what to do next.

That's the more macro picture. There are some more specific things I'd like to see happen too.

In Canada, I'd like to finally see a universal basic income for every adult Canadian citizen. And in fact, that is definitely on the agenda of the federal Liberals at the moment. I'm hoping it won't go the way of the Liberal promise to get rid of the first-past-the-post electoral system. We shall see.

I'd like to see more of a "Man is the measure of all things" society. Human-scale, walkable, public transit-rich environmentally conscious cities and towns. But to accomplish this, we need to be conscious of people's habits, of the things people DO do rather than just what we think they OUGHT to do. For example, it's one thing to say that everyone should travel by bicycle instead of private car ALL THE TIME and no one should EVER smoke or eat junk food or do anything that's bad for them - but that's just not going to happen! So what do we do instead?

We need to make it easier for ordinary everyday people to do the more desirable things, at least a good portion of the time, and to feel their efforts are being acknowledged. Less of the carrot and the stick; more of the incentives and deterrents, without actually outlawing most popular activities. Provide as much in the way of information and social, consultational and educational opportunities as possible and let people make up their own minds about how they will proceed.

Politically, we have so many levels of government in this country and things can end up being very polarized. What doesn't always work well is executive federalism, where the Prime minister meets with the Premiers or the Health Ministers or the Finance Ministers of the provinces and territories (and lately often with indigenous leaders, which is at least a step in the right direction). Individual Canadians feel very much excluded from the process as in fact they are, with no MP or MPP or local councillor or other constituency person to represent them.

But there are many issues that transcend party lines. I'd like to see more collaboration between politicians of different political stripes. All-party committees, special committees, public consultations, even more good old-fashioned constituency work on the part of our representatives at all levels.

I know I've lapsed into generalities again here, but I'll close with one specific example. While I'm unlikely to vote Conservative any time soon, I definitely applaud the private member's bill of our local Conservative MPP, Jeremy Roberts, which aims to get rid of the nonsense and aggravation of changing our clocks twice a year. And good on him for seeking collaboration with Quebec and New York State!

Of course, we'll need to backtrack on that message of changing the batteries in smoke alarm and CO detectors at the same time as we change the clocks! I wonder what they do in Saskatchewan?

Sometimes during a major crisis such as a world-wide public health pandemic, the armed forces are called in to provide much-needed assistance. Other times, they're sent out to sea to play war games, as with the RIMPAC exercise currently underway in the Hawaiian islands. Is this really the best use of our naval person-power? Here is the Canadian government's official position on it:

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/operations/exercises/rimpac.html

Others see it differently. Not only do they question the validity of the primary rationale for this biennial exercise but they also point to a whole host of environmental, health, human rights and other concerns. See, for example, this opinion piece by Tamara Lorincz:

https://www.saltwire.com/opinion/local-perspectives/tamara-lorincz-navy-war-games-put-our-oceans-and-public-health-in-peril-483577/?location=nova-scotia

The unintended consequences of the RIMPAC exercise are far from insignificant. I found it doubly baffling that this biennial ritual did not even begin until the early 1970s: not, as I would have suspected, when our country was at war but during a time of relative optimism and prosperity.

Rather than saying "The show must go on" even during a pandemic, albeit in a shortened and more limited format, I'm thinking we should instead view this international emergency as a golden opportunity to cancel events like RIMPAC and refocus on more pressing matters.

Friday was Climate Strike day, with MEC and LUSH closing for the day and thousands converging on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, while in Toronto Greta Thunberg shook her fist at Justin Trudeau and demanded he take more action to combat the climate apocalypse.

I recently heard about micro plastics in, of all things, teabags! I don't think any of the ones we have are affected and in any case, we often use loose tea instead. And we don't use coffee pods either! Single-use plastics are being demonized, perhaps justifiably, but primarily in the form of plastic bags, straws and cutlery.

Now to some extent, I'm guilty of using all of these, although rarely do I use them only once before discarding them. Plastic straws? I rarely use them. Plastic cutlery? If I do use it, I clean it off and stash it in my purse, pocket, hotel room or medicine cabinet; sometimes they break in transit and then I check for a recycle symbol and blue-bin them. As for plastic bags, I don't routinely use them for retail purchases (I carry my own reusable bags) but when I do get them, they definitely get re-used, whether to keep library books out of the rain, to separate clean and dirty clothes if I'm travelling, to hold wet bathing suits and towels or to line the garbage pail. As well, plastic bags are now being accepted in the municipal green bin, although I don't think they're really being recycled - just separated out from all the guck that IS recyclable.

But there's one product in my life that definitely IS a single-use plastic: dental floss. And it's something I struggle with every time I sift through our waste for garbage day, determining which colour-coded bin to put things in. It gets tangled up in the human hair, pet fur, dust bunnies and floor sweepings which ARE recyclable and I dutifully strain it out.

Apparently there are alternatives out there at a price, like silk or bamboo, but they don't seem to be readily available on the shelves of grocery stores or pharmacies.

As Kermit says, it ain't easy being green.

Back in 1976, I was living in London, Ontario, and studying to become a librarian. There was a bulk-foods store in town called "Grains, Beans and Things", where I discovered the joys of purple loosestrife honey.

Fast forward to 1992. I went back for a reunion and GB&T was still there (though in the process of moving to a new but nearby location). There was a sign in the front window exhorting customers NOT to feed the squirrels because they were a nuisance. And the purple loosestrife honey was long gone.

Some time in the 1980s or 90s it became decidedly politically-incorrect to be a fan of purple loosestrife. "It's not a native plant! It's an invasive species! It has no natural predators! It will choke out our wetlands and leave death and destruction in its wake!" So what did they do about this monstrous purple bogeyplant?

Well for one thing, they imported some beetles from somewhere in Europe and under cover of darkness, deposited them in purple loosestrife patches to gorge their little hearts out. Hmmm. I guess non-native beetles are okay as long as they are fightng the good fight against a domestic menace.

Now fast forward another twenty years. Turns out, purple loosestrife is still out there, but it's only about 5% or so of the wetland. And the other species that they were supposedly killing off are still out there too. Perhaps that's in part because they stepped in promptly with those non-native beetles and addressed the national epidemic, but the general consensus amonst scientists these days seems to be that rumours of a weed-induced apocalypse were gross exaggerations.

And you know, I really don't understand this "non-native species" argument. After all, Canada is largely a nation of immigrants. If anything, its probably the native populations who have been treated as second-class citizens - to the extent that they even accept the concept of citizenship as non-aboriginals have come to define it.

Is it any wonder that there are sceptics out there who don't buy into the dire warnings about climate change and global warming? Now don't get me wrong. Certain things are measurable and quantifiable and I don't dispute them for a moment. But the devil is in the interpretation - lies, damn lies and statistics as the saying goes. Average temperatures probably ARE going up over time. The polar ice cap probably IS melting at a faster rate than it was. That doesn't necessarily mean that they will continue to do so at the same or at an accelerating rate. A few decades is a relatively short period of time in the vast history of the planet and the universe. And even if things do continue on their current course, it seems to me that the real problem is whether climate change happens at such a rapid and unpredictable rate that we are unable to come up with good-enough adaptive or delaying tools and mechanisms. As humans, we do have a few points in our favour that the dinosaurs, for example, lacked.

In some respects, it might of course be a GOOD thing if the polar ice cap melts and the vast desolate swaths of northern wasteland become more habitable. Yes, certain species would undoubtedly die out. Over time, others would evolve to take their place. That doesn't mean we should bury our heads in the sand and avoid dealing with the problems as we perceive them at the moment. The pure and applied research that we do now, the innovations and inventions and just plain wild or bizarre ideas that we come up with - some of them, anyway - will no doubt be of SOME use for SOME purpose at SOME time!

What's the difference between a hoarder and an environmentalist? Well, I suppose it's a question of degree.

If you permanently stash your dishes in the oven, your plants in the bathtub and your tropical fish in the toilet bowl so that you can't answer a call of nature in the way that nature or modern civilization intends, then chances are you're a hoarder. But for the generations that remember the Great Depression or wartime and postwar austerity measures like rationing, and as a result are loath to discard things that can be repaired, renovated or repurposed, I'd say you were probably an environmentalist long before environmentalism entered the mainstream lexicon.

On March 31, an article in the Ottawa Citizen bore the headline "CAS removes children from hoarder's home". The alleged hoarder in this case was the children's grandmother, and the children consisted of a two-year-old girl and her two brothers, aged eight and eleven. All three children were seized earlier this year but the two boys have apparently been returned to their grandmother's care, while the girl is to remain in a foster home.

I would be curious to know why the boys, who had apparently been living quite happily with their grandmother for eight years before their apprehension, were considered eligible to return, while their sister was not. Frankly, I suspect it's because they were able to verbalize their wishes more effectively. Most two-year-olds are familiar with the word "no" but if you asked them to elaborate, few would be able to respond all that eloquently.

There is no word as to where the children's parents are in all of this, or even whether they are still living. Surely, though, a grandparent would in most cases be a good choice for providing some much-needed stability and continuity in these children's lives.

Or maybe not. But the point I would make here is this: WE'LL NEVER KNOW. Freedom of speech is not an absolute. Wards of state must not be named in the media. Child welfare cases are shrouded in secrecy. We have no choice but to fund the Children's Aid Society through our tax dollars (which, among other things, pay for that offensive series of TV commercials along the lines of "Meghan is YOUR Children's Aid!") Yes, I am sure they do some good things. But when they do not, when they ruin children's lives, just who exactly can be held accountable?