A Reflection On Canada Day

Most people who have lived in this country for any amount of time, I suspect, would agree that Canada is the best place in the world to be a citizen. While we often take much for granted, I am sure that, like me, the majority have a deep and abiding respect and love for the land that we call home. It's just that we are a quiet people, content in the knowledge of our strengths (and well-aware of our weaknesses), without a deep compulsion to brag about our good fortune.

Rick Salutin, reflecting on our country while watching people waiting for appointments or loved ones in the atrium of Toronto Western Hospital, observes a core value that makes us what we are:

What unites people there, waiting for their appointments, or for those they’ve brought to appointments? Neither health nor sickness, though most don’t look too fit. It’s something else: none is worried about how they’ll pay for it.

Absence of money anxieties is the unifying factor. Could this also be what unifies the country, as it does the atrium? Frank Graves of EKOS research found it so recently: far atop a list of sources of Canadian identity, leaving the anthem, the flag, and Mounties in the shade, was medicare.

While flag-waving and other patriotic gestures and symbols are on the decline, there is something deep and abiding that unites us as a country.

Nation states were always at their best a way for humans to embrace their common destiny: that we are social beings despite pretensions to splendid individualism (“I’m a loner, eh?”). Boiling the solution down till little but medicare remains at the bottom of the pan, reduces the concoction to a bold, unique minimum.

Which brings me back to the people hanging in the atrium at the Western, looking ethnically and multiculturally diverse but not particularly feeling the diversity because they’re all Canadians brought together by the Canadian way of dealing with the basic stuff of life and death, and forestalling the latter, as much as possible, for the former: Not through some abstraction like Canadian niceness, but by their commitment to pay their taxes, assuring that everyone else there needn’t worry about money while awaiting the good, or bad, news.

Americans are great at waving the flag and boasting that they are "the greatest country on earth." Yet they are now in the process, should the Senate bill pass, of ultimately removing over 35 million of their fellow citizens from health care coverage while the same bill also cuts a tax on investment income for people earning $200,000 or more. One could perhaps draw an inverse relationship between mindless jingoism and quality of life.

We, on the other hand, are a proud but quiet, even subdued nation. And for some very, very good reasons....

UPDATED: A Gratifying Trump Take-Down

Republican strategist Ana Navaro has had it with the Infant-in-Chief. His latest tweet has left her, and many other Republicans, outraged.



UPDATE: Morning Joe responds to Trump's disturbed and disturbing behaviour:

A Little Balance

Since yesterday's post was about the terrible excesses our cossetted and selfish species is capable of, I thought it might be nice to post today about someone who clearly respects her environment and has established a home with what we would call a very modest environmental footprint:

Just Imagine

Just imagine what could be accomplished if people drank tap water, not bottled water. It is, unfortunately, all too symptomatic of the egocentric and selfish lives we lead that few are willing to give up even something as minor as this. The pleasure principle surely prevails, eh?

Oh, and cutting back on soft drinks would help reduce not only plastic pollution but also runaway obesity.

Reports The Guardian:

A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20% by 2021, creating an environmental crisis some campaigners predict will be as serious as climate change.

More than 480bn plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016 across the world, up from about 300bn a decade ago. If placed end to end, they would extend more than halfway to the sun. By 2021 this will increase to 583.3bn, according to the most up-to-date estimates from Euromonitor International’s global packaging trends report.

But what about recycling?

Fewer than half of the bottles bought in 2016 were collected for recycling and just 7% of those collected were turned into new bottles. Instead most plastic bottles produced end up in landfill or in the ocean.

Between 5m and 13m tonnes of plastic leaks into the world’s oceans each year to be ingested by sea birds, fish and other organisms, and by 2050 the ocean will contain more plastic by weight than fish, according to research by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Humans are not immune to the effects of this environmental degradation:

Scientists at Ghent University in Belgium recently calculated people who eat seafood ingest up to 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic every year. Last August, the results of a study by Plymouth University reported plastic was found in a third of UK-caught fish, including cod, haddock, mackerel and shellfish. Last year, the European Food Safety Authority called for urgent research, citing increasing concern for human health and food safety “given the potential for microplastic pollution in edible tissues of commercial fish”.

As always, the fate of the world and all of its creatures is largely in our hands. And as always, warnings like The Guardian's will likely be ignored by the bulk of humanity whose personal preferences and comforts command such an unforgivably high premium.

A Thing Of Beauty: Rick Perry's Comeuppance At The Hands Of Al Franken

If you start at the two-minute mark, you will see the start of Senator Al Franken's public humiliation of Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, as the latter amply demonstrates both his intellectual deficiencies and his abject obeisance to the oil industry.

A Powerful Oration!

His denunciation is powerful and passionate. Watch as Keith Olbermann excoriates those who are aiding and abetting Trump's foul agenda.

Dispatches From Hell

... with a little water thrown in at the end to balance things out.



Meanwhile, Fortune Magazine predicts that things will only get much, much worse in the years to come.