It's Not Easy - Part II

The crowd attending the launch of the Ontario Green Party Climate Plan at the Chelsea Hotel, Thursday, October 28, 2021

Now that the embargo's lifted, and my masked face has been shown on LinkedIn as being a part of it, I can talk about the Green Party of Ontario Climate Plan.

The plan is a rare example of public policy unencumbered by politics, so the plan is clear on what it will cost. $65 billion.

Talking with Steve Paiken from TV Ontario - the only media outlet to cover the release of the plan - Mike Schriener and Dianne Saxe admitted it would be hard to get elected on such a platform. They're hoping that the party that does come into power might steal their ideas. 

I helped with the plan. I did research to ground truth some of the policy proposals. I suggested that the plan not only needed to talk about its cost, but had to have some idea about where the money would come from. I edited an early draft. 

If any of the major news outlets take a look at the plan, I predict that they will denounce the plan as unrealistic and pathetic in its political naiveté, but they will also grudgingly acknowledge that, but for the political impracticality, the plan is necessary.

Think about that for a second.

We're over disputing that climate change exists, we're even more or less in agreement on what needs to be done. We just can't do it because the way we govern ourselves disallows taking the action we need.

Sheesh.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Hallowe'en!

Karen

Braced for the future:
In between shoulder surgeries
Dianne Saxe campaigns 
for a seat in University/Rosedale.

Scarcity

  

I went shopping this morning at the Maple Leaf Gardens Loblaws store. I still wore a mask, but for the first time since March 2020, the ends of the baguette bags were not taped shut and the olive bar was actually an olive bar, and not a stack of plastic containers with olives in them.

Something's going on. 

Yesterday, Doug Ford announced that by March 28, 2022, after a staged ratcheting down of restrictions, and so long as COVID trends are good, any remaining public health and workplace COVID safety measures in Ontario will be gone. 

It was March 17, 2020, when Ford declared the first COVID state of emergency in Ontario. So, it will be two full years of on-again-off-again lockdowns, massive unemployment and more government debt expenditure outside of wartime than the nation has ever seen, plus a lot of sickness and death -- but the privations of the former will have lessened the magnitude of the latter. 

I've got mixed feelings about lockdowns, but they have a better body count than the available alternatives. See Brazil ... or Florida ... or Alberta.

At the beginning of the pandemic, toilet paper was scarce. At pandemic's end, everything is scarce. There's a lot of pent up demand out there, while goods are in short supply or expensive or both. Just check out the price of propane. 

At the end of the third wave lockdown in May, we put together our own list of pent up demands. Creeping up on the end of October, most of the items on our list - a new HVAC system, new computers - have been taken care of, though most took longer to get and cost more than we thought. 

All we've got left is getting our furniture reupholstered which will cost about what we thought, but is taking longer than we expected.

David, a charming frenchman (from France) who apparently doesn't have a last name, is making his way through recovering our dining room chairs, two occasional chairs, and our couch and armchair. He brought back the dining room chairs this week, a few days later than he said he would.

Acclimatized as we are to delays, and also very happy with his work, we didn't ask why delivery was late. David volunteered the explanation that, while riding his spiffy BMW motorcycle last week, he'd been sideswiped by some guy in a car. He was OK, but his bike was a mess and his insurance company was being a complete jerk about honouring his claim.

Looks like things really are getting back to normal.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Circa 1910 

Eatons Catalogue 

oak chair with 

old upholstery

Shame, Humiliation and Death on Everest

Portrait of Mary Ann Shadd, McKenzie House, Bond Street, Toronto

You know who Monica Lewinski is. You've never met her, but you could pick her face out in a crowd. You likely have an opinion of her, too, and a strong one at that, even though you have never met her nor perhaps heard her side of the story of how she became so famous.

Lewinski's the producer of an HBO Max documentary called 15 Minutes of Shame, the true topic of which seems to be how a mix of the Internet and ancient human behaviours can as randomly as lightning bolts blow people's lives to smithereens.  

People have for ages used shame to expel others. Long ago, in Indian villages, women beat rapists with shoes and forced them out of town. The preferred expulsion in the Internet age is for someone to lose their job. The dog-walking Karen who called the cops in Central Park lost her job; Emmanuel Cafferty, who the Internet claimed to have made the wrong hand gesture as he drove by a BLM protest, lost his job. Lindsay Stone, who joked while posing in front of a sign at Arlington Cemetery, lost her job. Justine Sacco tweeted to 150 friends a poorly-written wisecrack about her own privilege, and lost her job. And so on. None of these people was entirely blameless; neither were their actions in any way proportionate to the price they paid.  

Oddly enough, humans also use shame to welcome others into their group. Ritual humiliation as a rite of passage is as old as public shaming. An increasingly unpopular example is hazing in university. Perhaps the greatest exemplum of this is initiation into the military. Grunts tell how boot camp breaks them them down and builds them into a soldier. 

Initiation comes at a price. Once you are part of a group, there are rules to follow on pain of expulsion. If you leave the group, you risk not having any status anywhere, which may explain why some army veterans have it so tough.

Shaming and humiliation are both about power. People don't hate the person they shame on Facebook as much as they love how shaming makes them feel. It's righteous, that indignation. Shaming is a point on the bullying spectrum; the power people feel when they pick on someone else.

And what, you may be longing to know, does any of this have to do with death on Mount Everest?  

I read somewhere that some people who climb Everest want to feel as if they are not a part of society, that's it's just them and the mountain. Perhaps that's why there can be such shameful behaviour above 8000 metres. People get left for dead on Everest, and robbed by their sherpas and other climbers. People bent on summiting will walk right by others obviously in distress. 

The acknowledged expert on all things Everest is Alan Arnette. Arnette summited Everest on May 21, 2011, after attempts in 2002, 2003 and 2008 where he reached about 8400 meters before health, weather or his own judgment caused him to turn back. There's no shame in that.

One More Thing

Facebook the corporation and climbers on Everest both do shameful things on the way to what they perceive to be a more important goal. The latter want to summit, the former wants to keep on making money without taking any responsibility for the social damage Facebook and Instagram do.

All of which is to say I have deleted my Facebook account.To all of my Facebook friends who read this blog, rest assured I "like" you now more than ever, I just won't be using Facebook anymore to tell you so. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

All alone? On Everest? Please.

It's Not Easy ...

What's wrong with this picture? *Answer below.

None of my readers will be surprised that, given the chance and the other choices, I most commonly vote for the Green Party.

That choice was complicated by the recent epic collapse of the party's public image, its internecine squabbles, the painful transition of its new leader into and then out of the role. 

I've seen two insider reports on what happened, both in the Toronto Star, one written by Elizabeth May, the former leader of the Greens and one by Jeff Wheeldon, a former international affairs critic for the Greens. May's argument was that, given the party's "grassroots up" governance model, the I-resigned-on-television-not-in-real-life leader Annamie Paul's top-down approach didn't fit all that well. Wheeldon argued that Paul's leadership style was only part of the problem. According to him, the grassroots wasn't pulling its weight, so there was no counterbalance to Paul's mis-steps as a leader. 

Sure. Whatever. I wasn't there, so I don't know. 

As a voter, I think about my values and who, among the parties, most represents them. I usually vote Green because I believe in what they profess is their vision: an equitable, sustainable, low-carbon society. I never expect them to form a government, but I do expect them to be a loud and compelling voice in opposition.

Mike Schreiner, for example, is the sole Green member of the Ontario provincial legislature. He can be relied upon, much more than Andrea Horvath, the leader of the Ontario NDP, to hit the nail of everything that's wrong with the Ford government on the head, especially from the perspective of how it's not equitable, not sustainable and not low-carbon.

The Greens should fight the other parties, not each other. But, Wheeldon suggests infighting is just part of being Green. He says, "a grassroots party is vulnerable to being influenced by anyone seeking a platform. That explains why we seem to be the favoured party for both Zionists and anti-Zionists at the same time." 

I think he means "infiltrated" not "influenced."

In any event, I am grateful for the effective opposition of the Greens to date, so that no other national party, not even the Conservatives, dared run in the past election without a climate change proposal. 

If they can loose their grips on one another's throats and reclaim their defining issues, the Greens could again be relevant in Canadian national politics. I'll look forward to that day.

In the meantime, I live in Annamie Paul's former riding. I had the opportunity to vote for her three times ... and I did, twice.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Karen

*All along Jarvis street, practically every water hydrant on the east side of the road has been set to release water into the storm sewers, so the water runs right into the lake. It has something to do with work the city's doing. All are set up as this one: a copper pipe sending water onto freshly applied asphalt. Here's the thing about fresh asphalt. Exposed to sun and running water, it leaches thousands of toxic compounds into the environment. Sheesh.

On the other hand ...

Mount Currie idyll: Annikka's garden from the screen porch.

 

 

Nuptials and the Unvaccinated

Twilight wedding feast: Pemberton Valley, 25 September 2021

So we're back from our back-to-back wedding weekends, one an hour north of the city, the other way over on the west coast in the beautiful Pemberton valley.

Both ceremonies were touching, featuring heartfelt I-wrote-this-myself vows, beautiful brides, handsome grooms, etc.

And both had unvaccinated people in attendance. 

Toronto has a vaccination rate among the highest in the country, but even 84% vaccinated means two people in ten are still a potential target for COVID Delta. Outside the city, the count gets higher with every excuse a person might offer. Excuses like, "I don't go out much, so I don't have the exposure risk," which position is rendered nugatory at a wedding with 70 people at it, fourteen of whom, if they're from Toronto, could be unvaccinated. 

One charming fellow I spent half an hour talking with about his art gallery casually let it slip that "he hadn't gotten around" to getting the shot. I imagine he prepared himself in other ways to travel six hours from Powell River to the wedding, so I wondered why not.

Another person, about whose unvaccinated status I had been already told, showed off her daily "vitamin-pill," a grotesque, weedy jarful of various dried fruits and plants in mud-coloured liquid, evidently conclusive proof that vaccines are for losers. 

Both weddings took many COVID precautions, being either entirely out of doors (see photo above) or generously socially distanced, masked, and so on.

There are articles written once every hour or so attempting to explain the mindset, motivations, and desperate rationalizations of the rabidly unvaccinated. I suppose for the lazily unvaccinated, their perception of the risk is too low to overcome their tendency not to act. Or, if they are convinced of the risk, then they still can't get over their deeply felt belief that they are personally harmless.

Whatever. I don't have any more weddings this year (that I know of) so I can put all this behind me, except for the fact that, now that I have travelled on airplanes and attended weddings, I would like to take a COVID test, just as a precaution against any risk I might pose to Bruce's dad.

Here's the prevailing irony right now in Toronto: vaccinations are free and readily available, but Bruce and I have already waited two days just to hear if we can even get a COVID test.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

The B&G make their getaway.