What?!

Yesterday I found myself yearning to read a news article more than 140 words long, so I bought the Saturday edition of the Globe and Mail. The front cover promised several stories that appealed to me, including the feature by Elizabeth Renzetti blurbed as "No kids? No problem. Let's all lay off the child free."

This was interesting to me because first, I am child free and second, I didn't know that people without children were being laid on.

I got my consciousness raised. Evidently there are people out there with children who have the notion that people without children are selfish. The magic math the child-unfree have done in their heads is that because some of us have the temerity to not reproduce we are robbing the race of its future.

What?! Have they checked global population growth recently?

I'll speculate that this nonsense originates in a thin sliver of thinking that says, without young people to work and pay taxes, the burgeoning mass of old people won't get the services they need.

Here's the math in my head. Childless taxpayers pay for schools, health care for children, teenagers and young adults including pregnant women without a dime of that money benefitting them directly.

Here's more math. The greatest proportion of tax dollars in Canada are spent on two things: education, mostly for children and health care, again mostly for children.

This is as it should be. I can't think of better expenditures of public money. I can, however, think of a few things better to do with one's time than concoct complaints about people who don't have kids.

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I will assume that none of my readers have missed the media bombardment connected with the recently-released Gatsby movie by Baz Luhrmann. Nothing in that blitz made me want to see the movie, but it did make me want to read the book again, which I did, online, without having to claim my abandoned Kobo credit.

This reading I really noticed how much of the story has been added by the way the book is talked about. For example, everyone knows it was Daisy who was driving Gatsby's car when Myrtle Wilson is struck and killed. It's probably true. It's just not in the book. Everyone says Gatsby is a mysterious figure. But Nick gives Gatsby's entire backstory: his military career and how he ended up at Oxford, how he met the bootlegger who became his mentor. The only thing that's not completely drawn about Gatsby is how he came to be killed in his swimming pool. Finally, everyone says the book is a classic. Well, it's short so it's taught in schools and gets its generations of new readers that way. 

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The condo boom in Toronto has created another boom in street level retail. Every city block of towers supports a dentist, two coffee shops (a Starbucks and a Tim Horton's), an animal hospital, a dry cleaner, a convenience store or two and, as recently spotted, a new and likely growing service.

Have a great week!

Karen