Like the rest of the world, I rejoiced when that boys’ soccer team and their coach were rescued from the cave in Thailand after being entombed for 16 days.

            I have a phobia about caves in general. I can feel panic rising even thinking about having to strap on an unfamiliar scuba mask, wade into murky water, dive way down into a hole in the rock in total darkness and then turn and feel my way towards a narrow cranny I have to wriggle through, rock walls scraping my skin…

            So I am in absolute awe of the courage and compassion of the divers who risked their own lives to get those boys and their coach out of the cave alive. 

            I suspect the Thai cave rescue will become a text-book case study for students of ethics in the not-too-distant future. 

Last Sunday, provincial MLA Norm Letnick and I were cooking pancakes together for the Canada Day celebrations in Lake Country organized by the Lake Country Rotary Club.

            “What does Canada mean to you,” Norm asked, flipping a pancake. 

            “That I don’t have to be an American,” I replied flippantly.

            “I can’t say that,” he laughed.

            So I tried again: “I like what Joe Clark said, years ago. That Canada is a community of communities.”

            Norm nodded. Then he used that line in his speech at the opening ceremonies. 

            Good for him. Because it really is a good description of how Canada differs from the much larger nation south of us.

King Canute sat on his royal throne. His courtiers grovelled at his feet. “Hail to the King,” they chanted, “You are all-powerful.”

            “Take me to the beach,” the king commanded.

            So they carried him to the edge of the ocean, and set his throne down on the sand. And the waters rose, and covered the king’s toes.

            “Make the sea go back,” the courtiers urged. “Stop the waters from rising.”

            “Idiots!” snorted the king. “No human has that power.”

            “Then we’re doomed!” the courtiers wailed. “What can we do?”

             “Sell the beach for a tourist destination,” King Canute ordered. “By the time it’s underwater, we can all be living in Switzerland with fat bank accounts.”

For a hundred years, the Canadian government took children from their parents and incarcerated them in Indian Residential Schools. For their own good.

            The feds have since issued apologies. They’ve paid around $5 billion in compensation. And all governments have paid many billions more in welfare, prisons, and social assistance.

            In the 1950s, the B.C. government took Doukhobor children away from their families, and locked them up in a prison camp in New Denver. For the children’s own good, of course.

            In the 1960s, various governments did the Sixties Scoop. Once again Indigenous children were separated from their parents and placed with white foster families. For their own good, of course.

            We’re now reaping a bitter harvest of alcoholism and drug dependency, of depression and suicide, of adults who don’t know how to be parents.

            And then the Trump administration set a policy of removing children from parents who enter the United States illegally, and locking the children up in detention centres.

            Can’t we ever learn from past mistakes?

           If you’ve ever wondered what writers write about when they don’t know what to write about, that incident might give you a clue. 

            We retreat into the commonplace world, the world we actually know about from personal experience, and hope to connect with larger events. 

            The problem is not having nothing to write about. The problem is having too much to write about. 

            Take this last week, for example. 

            Boatloads of refugees get sent back to sea in the Mediterranean, by nations unwilling to assume responsibility for disasters that they didn’t create, while the nations that caused the problems stay a comfortable distance away. 

            Volcanoes demonstrate that they can have different personalities. The one in Hawaii is relatively benign – dangerous, but not explosive. The one in Guatemala erupts explosively, searing its victims in hot ash and gases. The one in Washington… well, enough said. 

            The G-7 summit in Quebec, that became the G-6 summit after Russia got kicked out, became the G-5 summit when everyone was out of step except one man.

            And then the world’s two most unpredictable national leaders met in Singapore, to hatch a vague commitment to make the world safer.