To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
30
Apr
2021
Men don’t like talking about emotions. They have a hang-up about discussing their hang-ups. If you want to get men talking, ask about their first car.
This tactic doesn’t work as well in mixed groups. Some women don’t care about cars. A few have never actually owned a car. They’ve left car ownership to their boyfriends or husbands.
Cars seem to matter more to men. It’s a macho thing, I guess.
That first car was a rite of passage. An entry to the adult world. A portal to an alternate universe.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: cars, Peter Egan, Road & Track, men
25
Sunday April 25, 2021
The federal budget is in. As presented by Finance Minister Christia Freeland last week, the budget expects to run a $354 billion -- yes, that’s billion -- deficit for the current fiscal year.
Plus $152 billion next year.
And $59 billion the year after.
On top of somewhere over $400 billion thrown at the economy during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic to reduce the carnage caused by closures, shutdowns, lockdowns, and travel restrictions.
The federal government itself has no money. It operates on money it collects from us, in taxes. If it doesn’t have enough money on hand, it has to borrow from us, so that it can feed that money back to us, to get us through an economic crisis, and then we have to re-pay ourselves the money that was borrowed on our behalf from ourselves.
Does that strike anyone else as somewhat circular?
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: government, deficit, credit, borrowing
23
If this column seems a little lighter than usual, it’s because I completely forgot about writing it for the local weekly paper. Until today. Which happens to be Earth Day, 2021.
A few years ago, a visiting friend asked me what I thought of the state of the world.
At the personal level, I said, I’m an incurable optimist. I don’t know any individual who would refuse to help out another individual in need.
I know, I know, there are occasional stories of someone being murdered while 27 eyewitnesses did nothing. But those stories make the news because they’re the exceptions.
Most individuals can be, and are, compassionate to other individuals.
At the collective level, though, I am equally pessimistic. As a human species, we seem incapable of thinking beyond the present. We are terminally short-sighted.
Tags: Earth Day, optimism, pessimism
18
Let’s imagine the unthinkable. Suppose life never goes back to “normal.”
Increasingly, I hear people expressing frustration about pandemic restrictions. They want to visit their grandchildren; travel to exotic places; hug their friends.
I share those desires.
I long for a time when I can associate with my friends directly – not virtually.
But maybe things won’t go back to what they used to be.
Tags: Friendship, COVID-19, isolation
16
Thurs. Spr. 15, 2021
In January 1993, Joan and I took our winter holiday in Montserrat, one of the less-visited islands of the Caribbean. It was so less-visited, it only had three hotels.
Four years later, the island’s volcano blew up. It buried the capital city in ash. To the rooftops.
Then in January 2008, we went to St. Vincent, at the other end of the Caribbean chain of islands. Five of us hiked up to the rim of St. Vincent’s volcano, past ferns growing 30-feet tall.
We peered down into swirling mists in the crater. I’d love to have gone down, but the rock walls were too sheer for anything but trained climbers with ropes and pitons.
Last week, the volcano on St. Vincent blew up.
Tags: volcano, coincidence, St.Vincent, Caribbean