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14
May
2017
When I was young, we sometimes went to the Saturday movies. In those days, the theatre didn’t consider the main feature sufficient to attract an audience, so they ran a weekly serial as well. The serial always ended with what we called a “cliffhanger.” The hero – or the unfortunate heroine waiting to be rescued – faced almost certain death. The train thundered towards the victim. The snake prepared to strike. The bad guy got his gun out first.
Of course, we had to come back, next Saturday, we just had to, to see how this crisis resolved itself.
The makers of those old flicks never built a cliffhanger around a democratic election. But that’s what we have, currently, in B.C.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: B.C. election, cliffhanger, Green Party, Liberal, NDP
10
Change does not depend on modern technology. There’s nothing modern about knitting needles – two sticks, essentially. But knitting needles lifted 45 families in Bolivia out of abject poverty.
When the rich tin mines in Bolivia closed, in the late 1980s, miners simply left in search of new jobs, abandoning their wives and children. Many of these women ended up on the streets of the city of Cochabamba. All through the Andes, women knit soft alpaca wool into sweaters and shawls.
These women had knitting skills. But no markets.
Enter a Canadian connection. Volunteers brought some of their beautiful hand-knit garments to Canada. Where Beverley Edwards-Sawatzky saw them. By organizing annual sales -- in Edmonton, Calgary, Cranbrook, and now here in Lake Country – she has been able to funnel close to $1 million to the women of the Minkha cooperative.
This is the global economy at work.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: knitting, Bolivia, Minkha, Edwards-Sawatzky, global economy
7
Earlier this week, TV host Jimmy Kimmel told his studio audience, multiplied by millions on line, about his infant son’s emergency heart surgery.
Kimmel choked up as he described the events. A normal birth. In fact, an easy birth. Then, three hours later, an alert nurse noted a heart murmur, a purplish skin tone. A newborn infant rushed into surgery to repair a hole in his heart wall and a sticking valve.
Kimmel made the case for universal medical care when he said, “If your baby is going to die and it doesn't have to, it shouldn't matter how much money you make.”
Canadians, watching those TV clips, might have felt complacent. After all, we have a universal “single-payer system” that covers those costs.
Maybe not. Recently, I’ve been hearing about a drug that B.C. and several other provinces refuse to pay for.
Tags: Drugs, Orkambi, health plans, Cystic Fibrosis, CF
3
This column started as a casual email chat among editorial colleagues, about the virtues of knowing other languages and cultures. Somehow, it morphed into a discussion about the relative merits of the gods of various cultures, and the way every religion felt that its god was superior to any other god or gods.
And someone asked, “Who’d want to worship an inferior god?”
The concept intrigued me. An inferior god? Why not?
Tags: God, Almighty, vulnerable, weakness