Feeling unhappy?

Many Canadians are. We just placed 15th on the latest United Nations’ World Happiness Index. That’s down from eighth three years ago.

Well, cheer up. You can take a course to get happy.

There’s an online course titled The Science of Well-Being and is adapted from the Yale University course Psychology and the Good Life. It is touted as one of the most popular courses offered by Yale in its 320-year history.

I’ve never taken any of the many happiness courses out there. In fact, I wonder why anyone would spend time and money on learning to be happy? Wouldn’t the energy be best spent on finding what makes us not happy in the first place?

The daily news provides insights into reasons for unhappiness.
COVID-19 obviously is a major reason for much unhappiness. It has most of us worried (if not downright panicked) about catching the virus. With good reason – 123 million cases worldwide and 2.7 million deaths.

Then there are all the terrible side effects: business losses, unemployment, lost education opportunities, increased crime and mental illness and many others.

Plus, worry about the future. How will we recover from COVID-19’s economic disasters? How will our kids’ education change? How will future work change? Are more viruses coming and will they be worse than this one? Will we be as unprepared as we were for this one?

On top of all that, climate change news is causing unhappiness about the future. More people (except the “fake news” numbskulls) are realizing that changes in the world’s climate are a genuine threat to civilization as we have known it.

Arctic ice is disappearing, oceans are rising, wind patterns are changing. Temperatures are warming, notably in the Canadian north.

Climate change is tied to human abuse of our planet. The abuse is not just with carbon dioxide emissions and industrial pollution. A walk along springtime roadsides littered with bottles, cans, coffee cups tells a story of human lack of respect for nature.

Climate change threatens massive upheaval in the world population. Where do people go if coastal cities become uninhabitable because of rising oceans? How will warmer temperatures affect agriculture and the millions of people who depend on it?

Also, our capitalist system is creating little sustained happiness. It probably is the best system for us but has gone out of control and needs reforming.

We rely on our governments to make reforms by tackling issues that create unhappy citizens. Governments, however, have become more intrusive, more confused and yet less effective. The pandemic has magnified and brought government ineffectiveness into clearer focus.

Few governments have the dynamic, clear-eyed leadership needed to deal effectively with today’s serious challenges and those of the future.

Government leadership is overwhelmed, trying to please many factions instead of being decisive and hitting problems head on. Our leaders place more emphasis on partisan politics than on getting the work done.

We need leaders like the young private sector executives who are building new companies with out-of-the-box thinking not shackled by political thinking.

We don’t have that type of leadership in our federal or provincial governments.

Federally we have a prime minister who is a nice young man who talks softly and at length without ever saying anything. The Conservative opposition leader can’t get his own party to say what it stands for and the New Democrats … do they still have a leader or is he simply invisible?

We need leaders – I don’t care what they label themselves politically – who build solutions without worrying about personal and party re-election.

We don’t need courses to show us how to be happy. Maybe the reason for our unhappiness is knowing that as individuals we could be doing more to help overcome these problems and we aren’t. We are too wrapped up in our individual lives.

Our best chance for increasing happiness lies in becoming better informed about the issues and getting involved with the efforts for change. A big part of that is finding, promoting and electing innovative leaders with the talents and skills to make all our lives better.

Happiness is created. To create more of it, we all need to get more informed, more involved and more creative.

There are clues, but the sensational British royalty whodunnit remains unsolved.

Would-be detectives are poring over statements, reading between lines, sifting the clues but no one has found any solid evidence of who did the deed.

Who is the bozo who worried aloud about how dark would be the skin of Prince Harry and Megan Markle’s baby Archie? Implied in the question, of course, is worry of having a person of colour in the Royal family.

Harry has said the villain was not his grandmother the Queen, or his grandfather Prince Philip. His brother, William, has said the Royal family is not racist. The Queen has said the family will look into the mystery privately.

There are clues pointing to what real police detectives call “persons of interest.” The Royal family has a history of saying goofy things, some of them racist, or close to it. 

Harry himself apologized in 2009 for calling an Asian army colleague a ‘Paki.’ A few years earlier he apologized for wearing a Nazi uniform to a costume party.

The two biggest offenders of saying stupid or racist things are Philip and son Charles, the aging prince waiting to become king.

On a trip to China Philip told a group of British students: “You’ll get slitty eyes if you stay too long.”

Visiting a company in Scotland he noticed a poorly-wired electrical box and remarked: “It looks as though it was put in by an Indian.”

And, during a visit to Australia he asked an Aborigine if they still threw spears at each other.

Like father, like son, Charles has stunned people with dumb comments. During a visit to India just before he married Diana, he was asked by a local reporter about his marriage prospects.

His reply: “I’m encouraged by the fact that if I were to become a Muslim, I could have lots of wives.”

One of Charles’ dumbest comments was revealed in 1993 when a newspaper intercepted his telephone call to Camilla Parker Bowles, then his lover. Charles told her that he wished to be reincarnated as her tampon.

Any number of the Royals could have asked the question about Archie’s potential skin colour because most of them have been caught out doing or saying insensitive things.

Princess Anne, the Queen’s daughter, encountered a pensioner waiting for her outside a church on Christmas Day back in 2000. The pensioner, a Royal admirer, wanted to present a basket of flowers she made for the Queen Mother.

“What a ridiculous thing to do,” a grumpy Anne huffed as she snatched the basket from the woman.

In 1992 Sarah Ferguson, ex-wife of Prince Andrew, was seen in photographs kissing and having her toes sucked by her “financial advisor.”

As comedian-commentator John Oliver said of the royal family recently:

"They're an emotionally stunted group of fundamentally flawed people doing a very silly pseudo-job.”

 But are they racist? Possibly not. Maybe just plain stupid.

Meghan’s father, Thomas Markle, said recently that he does not think the British royal family is racist and he hopes the question about his grandson’s skin colour was just a “dumb question.”

We all hope so, although what the Royals do or say has little to do with us. 

Canada is a constitutional democracy in which the Queen is the head of state. We don’t need her permission to do anything, however. The prime minister and his or her cabinet make all the country’s decisions, with the Queen and her family simply figureheads.

The Royals do continue to offer us excellent examples of how not to behave, and remind us of the dangers of putting the mouth in gear without checking with the brain.

If we learn from the Royals’ bad examples, we can avoid situations like Prince Philip often found himself in – like the time he was talking to a Briton about his experience travelling in Papua New Guinea. 

“You managed not to get eaten then?” said the prince.

Or, insulting an entire country by telling reporters during a visit to Canada:

"We don’t come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves."

The Queen, investigating whodunnit, should not have far to look. 

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The sun is shining. The snow is melting. Time for hungry bears to wake and go looking for breakfast.

Which has me thinking about Jordan and Athena. I wonder where they are now, and what they are doing?

Jordan and Athena are the two black bear cubs that gained international attention back in 2015. 

They were out shopping for food with mom one day on Vancouver Island. The shopping trip led them into a mobile home park in Port Hardy where mom got into stuff she wasn’t supposed to get into. Someone called the cops. 

Conservation officer Bryce Casavant arrived and shot mom. He refused, however, a superior’s orders to shoot the cubs, who were a couple of months old. 

He decided they were not problems so tranquillized them and brought them to a vet and then a wildlife recovery centre, which later released them into the wild. 

Casavant was suspended and later fired for refusing to follow the boss’ emailed order. 

The boss wanted the cubs dead so they would not become nuisance bears like their mom. Casavant believed they could be returned to the wild where they would learn to hunt for natural food instead of getting into people’s garbage. 

“My duties as a law-enforcement officer do not include the needless destruction of a baby animal that can be rehabilitated,” he told his boss. 

The B.C. Court of Appeal nullified Casavant’s firing, but he has not been reinstated as a conservation officer. A tangled legal battle is continuing but will not settle the ethical issues of this case. 

First, anyone authorized to carry a gun surely must have the right to decide when and when not to pull the trigger. He or she is on the scene, better positioned to assess the situation than a boss in a far-off place. 

Also, before becoming a conservation officer, Casavant was a soldier who served in Afghanistan, which no doubt helped to develop his thinking on weapons and how and when they should be used. 

Second, should we kill the babies of parents we consider our enemies? 

History holds other stories of armed people having to decide whether to follow their conscience or orders from a superior. One of the most famous occurred March 16, 1968 during the Vietnam War. 

American soldiers fighting the Viet Cong were sent into what was believed to be an enemy stronghold and were ordered to destroy a village named My Lai. 

The soldiers, led by Lieutenant William Calley, arrived at the village and found mainly women, children and old men preparing their breakfast. Calley ordered his men to round them up and shoot them. 

More than 500 villagers were killed, including 173 children, many just infants. 

Some of Calley’s soldiers balked at his order to shoot. Then, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, an American helicopter pilot landed his copter between the soldiers and fleeing villagers and threatened to open fire on his fellow Americans if they did not stop the massacre. 

That pilot saved the lives of some innocent humans by telling soldiers to stop following Calley’s kill order. Casavant saved the lives of two innocent baby bears by rejecting his superior’s order. 

Both kill orders developed from our refusal to accept that all living things have an equal right to life. 

That refusal leads some to believe that: 

Bear cubs can be killed because they might grow up to become garbage pickers. Vietnamese kids can be shot because they might grow up to become fighters for what they believe could be better government. 

I assume that Jordan and Athena grew to be adult bears enjoying the wilderness life they were destined for and which they deserved. I also assume any kids who survived the My Lai Massacre grew up to be productive citizens of Vietnam. 

Yes, we live in a world of laws and practices that authorize killing living things. But anyone doing the killing, or ordering the killing, better be damn sure they understand that every life is sacred, and have a thorough knowledge of the moral principles governing human behaviour. 

There is too much unintelligent and unnecessary killing in our societies. We need more people like Bryce Casavant and Warrant Officer Thompson to help us change that  

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The Great Birdsong Mystery

Our first guess at the source of the bird tweets, twitters and cheeps was a robin.

We were in the living room one afternoon when the racket began. It was sharp, penetrating and seemed to come from the ceiling.

We banged the ceiling with a broom handle but the chirping did not stop. We Googled bird calls and concluded that a robin got into our rafters.

The next day I checked the eaves and facia, but there were no holes, cracks or crevices that would allow a bird into the building.

The birdsong returned the next day and more investigation revealed no place of entry or any sign of a bird. We downloaded more bird calls and decided it was not a robin. Maybe a woodland thrush or a warbler.

What such a bird was doing inside our place in mid-winter was another mystery. But after another day or so the birdsong stopped and we assumed the singer had moved on.

It returned this week, more high-pitched than before and it continued well into the evening.

Pounding on the ceiling and screaming into the woodwork did not make it stop. This was one stubborn bird, something possessed sent to drive us mad.

The next morning, we checked outside. The way the snow was banked on the roof provided a possible sheltered hiding spot. Also, a pyramidal vent stack protector might offer a place to hide, keep warm and sing.

But both possibilities were outside and the birdsong was shrill and piercing inside. We talked about shovelling the roof or perhaps calling an exterminator.

That evening, we again sat to watch some television and the bird calls began piercing the room. They were loud enough to override Bill Maher using the F-word on his Real Time television show.

We watched the 10 o’clock news then went to bed, leaving the bird chirping and cheeping. Obviously, it had no intention of sleeping, or allowing us to sleep. 

I am partially deaf from competitive target shooting without earmuffs decades ago when I foolishly did not pay attention to such things. So, I unplugged my hearing aids and fell asleep.

My wife was not so fortunate. The bird kept her up most of the night. About 4 a.m. she couldn’t tolerate any more. I awoke to her pounding the ceiling and shouting for the bird to shut up.

I am not the most pleasant person when my sleep is disturbed, so an argument ensued.

“You have to turn the volume up to 100 to hear the television or radio but you can hear little tweets from a bird?” I shouted before storming back to bed.

I was awakened later by the sweet aroma of freshly-brewed coffee and traipsed down to the kitchen, where my wife was sending and receiving her daily ‘good morning’ messages on her iPad.

“It’s here in the kitchen now,” she informed me sleepily. “And, it’s even louder. At least it shut up long enough for me to do my messages.”

That evening it started up again as we watched the television news. Frustrated, my wife picked up her iPad to read and ignore the annoying racket. When she did, the birdsong stopped suddenly.

Then it dawned on us: every time the bird sang, the iPad was close by. And, whenever an iPad button was pushed, the birdsong stopped. The bird was inside the iPad!

I consulted Google and learned that others have complained of hearing noises, some bird-like, on their iPads. I didn’t try to learn more about those complaints or what those iPad owners had discovered, if anything.

I didn’t because I feared finding yet another conspiracy theory, and we already have too many of those.

With thousands believing climate change is caused by Jewish snow machines in space, or that Covid-19 is fake news, or that liberal thinkers are pedophiles who eat little children, anything is possible.

It’s not a far reach for those who believe that Bill Gates is a voodoo doll trying to depopulate the world, to believing that Apple is practising mind control with birdsongs in its iPads.

Meanwhile, we are not taking any chances. The iPad is locked away in a soundproof place and quiet has returned to our house.

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