Reflections during a dismal post-election,
pre-Hallowe’en week:
Presumably, and hopefully,
blackface will not be part of Hallowe’en costuming this year.
It was when I was a child.
The only concern back then was expressed by our mothers. They worried that shoe
polish would irritate our skin because the polish contained solvents like
naphtha and Turpentine.
Mom insisted on applying a
coat of protective cold cream to my face before dad applied the shoe polish.
Times change. We all move
along, often becoming smarter and more sensitive.
---
Evidence this week that
animals tire of being pushed around and hunted. Sometimes they push back.
An Arkansas deer hunter died
when a buck he shot and presumed was dead, gored him with its antlers.
The hunter dropped the buck
with a muzzle loader, then walked up to check that it was dead. It wasn’t. It
got back to its feet and gored the hunter, who died later in hospital.
Meanwhile in Olonets, Russia
last week a 660-pound brown bear attacked its trainer during a circus
performance. The attack occurred during an act called Clubfoot and the
Wheelbarrow in which the trainer forces the bear to stand on its hind legs and
push a wheelbarrow.
The bear was not in the
mood. It attacked the trainer, pushing him to the floor then climbing on top of
him.
Another trainer ran into the
ring and began kicking the bear to get it to stop.
Neither the trainer nor the
bear were injured.
The trainer later attributed
the bear’s attack to its age and joint pain that flares up seasonally. I
understand that completely.
---
Still with critters, there
is new research on ants that provides us lessons for avoiding traffic jams.
Researchers built highway
systems connecting large ant colonies with small village type colonies. Then
they watched ants moving between the places.
There were no ant jams, nor
multiple ant crashes. Ant traffic moved steadily without the traffic snarls we humans
see on our highways.
The researchers concluded
that ants avoid traffic foul-ups by changing their behaviour to meet changing
conditions. No individual speeding up and slowing down. No lane changes to get
ahead of the guy in front.
The lesson: humans drive in
ways that satisfy their individual objectives. Ants travel collectively,
co-operating with each other to optimize food collection for their colonies.
---
The recent federal election
brought us some new faces to Parliament and a lot of new talk about separation.
The sovereigntist Bloc Quebec
more than tripled its standing in the House of Commons but said it will follow
a nationalist agenda. For now. Still it is a party formed to achieve Quebec
separation from the rest of Canada.
The election also revived
talk of separation in Alberta and Saskatchewan. There’s even a new name for
western separation -- Wexit, a meme
concocted after Britain’s Bexit movement to leave the European Common Union.
Separation talk, of course,
is old hat in Canada. Those of us born and raised in Northwestern Ontario lived
with the dream of not being governed by provincial powers created and exercised
in Toronto the Good.
Toronto and a large chunk of
southern Ontario surrounding it grabbed our natural resources and taxes on
money earned from our hard work in the pulp and paper and grain elevator
industries. Little of it ever came back to us, leaving us like orphans forced
to fend for ourselves.
Those industries declined,
killing many jobs and the taxes they paid. Toronto the Good did not give up on
the northwest as a source of income, however. Now it has sent its gangs, pimps
and drug dealers to suck dollars out of Northwest Ontario folks, Indigenous
people in particular.
Thunder Bay has a booming
illegal drug industry and was Canada’s murder capital with almost seven
homicides per 100,000 population in 2018.
---
Despite the federal election
mess and Winter whispering “Run hard, I’m almost on top of you,” we Canadians should
not feel down. We still have our sense of humour, despite most of our comedians having moved to the
United States.
So what if our roads are
bumpy messes? It won’t be long before all those unrepaired potholes will be
filled with snow. There’s smooth sailing from here on in.
#
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