July 17 is National Tattoo Day and I’ve been thinking about getting one.

Some years back I wanted to get a screaming eagle tattoo on my chest, but was advised not to by a friend.

“It might look cool now, but what about when you are older,” she said. “If you get a screaming eagle tattooed on your chest now, then when you get old and flabby it will droop and fall from its perch and land on your belly button.”

I took her advice and passed on getting inked.

Now that I’ve become old and flabby, I’m reconsidering. I mean any tattoo I get today will do little drooping and falling. That’s already happened.

So, I decided that National Tattoo Day would be a great time to show off a freshly-inked screaming eagle on my sunken chest. Display it proudly when I go to the dock for a morning swim.

I’ve been researching tattoos and where to get one. And wow, I have discovered there are more tattoo statistics than there are mosquitoes in July.

Think professional baseball statistics are overwhelming? Tattoo statistics are far more mind-numbing.

Support Tattoos And Piercings At Work (STPAW), an advocacy group, reports that as of 2018 nearly 40 per cent of Canadians and 42 per cent of Americans had tattoos. Almost one-half of the Italian population (48 per cent) is tattooed.

Other surveys show that 17 per cent of people who get tattoos regret them. The regrettable ones usually are those with the name of a boyfriend or girlfriend who dumped them.

The website Tattoo Pro says that it costs 10 times more to remove a tattoo than to put one on.

Another reports that people get a tattoo because it makes them sexy (31 per cent), or shows them as rebellious (29 per cent), or shows them to be intelligent (five per cent).

For whatever reasons, tattooing has surged in recent years. One statistic says that Americans alone spend $1.6 billion a year on tattoos.

That seems like an exaggeration, but it is believable because there are more than 20,000 tattoo parlours in the U.S.

The tattooing trend is not something new. Humans around the world have been using tattoos for centuries to make certain statements.

The 5th century Greeks used tattoos as a means of communication between spies. The Romans marked criminals and slaves with tattoos. Maya, Inca and Aztec peoples used tattoos in rituals and the Norse and Saxons proudly tattooed family crests on their bodies.

During the Crusades, soldiers tattooed crosses on their hands to indicate that if they were killed, they needed a Christian burial. Here in Canada, Inuit people sometimes created tattoos by pulling carbon-infused thread through their skins or rubbing ashes or ink into cuts in their bodies.

Recent tattoo information that really caught my attention was the news that the European Union has banned some pigments used in tattooing, deeming them a health hazard. Green and blue pigments, which ink manufacturers and tattoo artists say may be impossible to replace, will be forbidden as of next year.

North American regulatory agencies are considering similar bans on some inks. There is concern among tattoo artists that not having certain inks will make it difficult to do some tattoos, notably the increasingly popular portrait tattoos. Those are the ones where someone decides to get a full-size, blue-eyed hula girl in green skirt inked on their back instead of a plain black and white screaming eagle on their chest.

Some ink manufacturers now put heavy metals such as copper and barium into their pigments to improve colour variations. Also, some have used neurotoxic agents like cadmium, lead and arsenic that can do odd things to the central nervous system.

Concerns over those ingredients appear to be the reason for the ink bans in Europe. However, despite the increasing number of people with tattoos there have been few documented health problems attributed to tattoos. The most common complications are allergic reactions and bacterial infections.

After gathering all of this information I have decided, once again, not to get a tattoo.

My apologies to the ladies at the lake, who had been anxiously awaiting my July 17 appearance on the dock.

 The COVID-19 pandemic is over. That seems to be a consensus in a world that has succumbed to COVID fatigue.

Most people have tossed their masks. Government mandates and restrictions are mostly gone.

But the killer virus is still with us. Two to three thousand Canadians are catching it every day. Hundreds are ending up in hospital every day and several dozen are dying of it every day. In the U.S., the daily average death rate from the virus is 314.

It is a virus that keeps bringing us surprises. The latest is research showing how quickly vaccine protection against the virus wanes.

A British study has found that two doses of the highly-rated Pfizer vaccine provide only 34 percent protection after six months. Two doses of Astro-Zeneca provide zero protection after six months.

Another British study found that booster shots start losing their effectiveness after 10 weeks. 

So, more people vaccinated and boosted are catching it, although most of those cases are not severe. Many are older people whose immune systems don’t respond to vaccines as well as younger people.

“There’s still exceptionally high risk among older adults, even those with primary vaccine series,” Andrew Stokes, a Boston University assistant professor who studies COVID death age, was quoted as saying recently.

What worries me most about the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is how little we seem to know about it, and the surprises it brings us.

For instance, since the onset of COVID-19 there has been an increase in autoimmune disorders in people and pets. I know of three people who have contracted such disorders, which can range from recurring pneumonia to arthritis, lupus and psoriasis. 

Also, I have two granddogs who have developed autoimmune disorders since the pandemic began and have heard of other cases in dogs and cats.

Now there are reports of other viruses acting in odd ways. The medical community has reported surges in common viruses that cause colds and influenza, which are seen usually in the winter months.

Researchers are trying to figure out whether these common viruses are showing up now because of the lessening of masking and social distancing, or whether the powerful coronavirus is causing changes.

This coronavirus has too many variations, too many unanswered questions and too many surprises for us to become too relaxed.

Masking is unquestionably one of the most effective ways of reducing the spread of the virus. 

That’s not to say that government orders on mask wearing are the way to go. It is impossible for governments to enforce mask wearing for tens of millions of people.

And, government mandates for wearing masks have not proven very effective, as have other political decisions made during the pandemic.

Mask wearing at this point should be an individual decision. I intend to continue to wear mine in higher risk situations such as crowds.

The coronavirus is not going away anytime soon. Even if it does, there are other viruses out there preparing to take its place.

A worrisome one is the H5N1 strain of bird flu, which already has struck 100 species of wild birds. (If you have been wondering why you are seeing fewer birds around your place, the spreading bird flu might be the reason).

The experts say there is little risk that this bird flu will affect humans, however several human cases have been reported. There always is a risk of spillover into human populations as a virus evolves. Virus spillover from animals certainly has occurred many times in the past.

We live in a world of viruses. Shrugging and forgetting just how deadly and devastating they can be is a danger to us all.

For anyone who might have forgotten, here are a few facts to keep in mind:

In the United States, one of the world’s most medically advanced societies, coronavirus now is the third leading cause of death.

COVID-19 has reduced life expectancy in 31 of 37 high-income countries.

The virus has killed 6.3 million people worldwide.

Studies show that almost one-half of people who contract COVID-19 and survive suffer health impacts four months or more after the initial diagnosis.

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Working in the news industry can be depressing. It is work that draws much criticism and little praise.

The men and women who gather and report news get blamed for all kinds of stuff.

Politicians blame them for ills that they themselves create. The general public criticizes them for publishing stories and photos that show terrible things.

Take for instance the 1972 news photo of a nude nine-year-old girl running screaming down a road in Vietnam during a napalm attack. Her clothes were on fire and she tore them off, screaming. Nóng quá, nóng quá (“too hot, too hot”).

A frontal photo of a nude young girl burned and screaming is not something any person should want to see. It was an indecent photo that caused controversy and criticism.

Many have viewed it over the years and many more are seeing it now because June 8 was the 50th anniversary of its taking by Nick Ut, a 21-year-old photographer working for The Associated Press.

Pope Francis has seen it. Ut presented him an enlarged copy of the photo during an audience last month.

Yes, the Napalm Girl is a repulsive photo, but it is one of the most important news photos ever published. It captures the senseless cruelty of war, and the suffering it brings to innocent people, especially children.

That photo, plus other photos and news reports of the horrors of Vietnam, helped to change American public opinion about the war, which led to decisions to end it.

The story of the Napalm Girl did not end with the war. Kim Phuc, the little girl, suffered many operations and years of therapy and later defected to Canada. She now lives in the Toronto area.

As an adult she helped establish the Kim Foundation International, a non-profit organization dedicated to help heal innocent child victims of war.

Today she says showing photos of violent carnage, including the children and teachers slaughtered at Uvalde, Texas, seems unbearable. However, she wrote in the New York Times last week:

“ . . . but I think that showing the world what the aftermath of a gun rampage truly looks like can deliver the awful reality. We must face this violence head-on, and the first step is to look at it.”

Fifty years after the Napalm Girl photo was published, other gruesome photos are appearing in newspapers and on television screens. One of the most gruesome shows a mother and her two children lying bloody and face-up dead in a Ukraine street.

That photo was taken by American freelance photojournalist Lynsey Addario. She was photographing people fleeing Russian attacks when a mortar exploded, killing the mother, her teenage daughter, eight-year-old son and a friend.

“I’m thinking as horrific as this is, I have to document this because I just watched a mother and her two children get hit intentionally,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an interview.

Some might say it is obscene to show a mother and two children lying dead in a street.

Or, a screaming nude girl fleeing a napalm attack. Or, a two-year-old Syrian boy washed up on a Mediterranean beach, one of thousands of refugees drowned while fleeing a life of repression in the Middle East.

The news media has a social responsibility to tell important stories that some people might not like to hear or see. It is not its job to shield readers or viewers from humanity’s ugliness.

“We all do this work in order to have an impact, in order to affect policy, in order to educate people – to show the reality on the ground,” says Addario.

News and information give life to democracy. They are like air – not always totally clean, but necessary for life.

Horst Faas, the Associated Press photo editor who approved publication of the Napalm Girl photo, once said it is necessary to publish photos of graphic violence because “pain keeps you conscious.”

There is much pain in pictures of people, especially children, suffering and dying. But they are necessary pictures that should never be put to rest.

Hopefully, the gruesome photos coming out of Ukraine continue to live in our heads, causing us enough pain to do whatever is needed to stop that inhumane war.

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The really good news about last week’s Ontario election is that its citizens remain pragmatic, rather than dogmatic.

Voters didn’t re-elect Doug Ford’s government because they absolutely love it or passionately believe in it. They voted for it because they felt that is the best they could do considering other choices.

Ontario voters always have placed pragmatism above party loyalty. When they felt Conservatives could govern better than others, they voted them in. Ditto Liberals and New Democrats. 

Ontario even elected a United Farmers Party back in 1919. They might not have really liked the party, nor its politicians, but they felt that was the best they could do at the time.

Dumping party loyalty voting for pragmatic voting is a good thing because party loyalty often breeds fanaticism. Whatever your party believes and does, you stand by it whether it is good for the citizens or not.

 
Look at the United States. Democrats and Republicans are so frozen into their parties’ opposing beliefs that the country has become ungovernable. Its citizens are suffering because the parties refuse to step off the party line.

Party tribalism in that country has made it impossible to control gun violence, despite more than 250 mass shootings this year. That’s an average of roughly 1.5 mass shootings (four or more people shot dead) every day.

Meanwhile, the really bad news about last week’s Ontario election was the low voter turnout. Only 43 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot compared to 57 per cent in 2018.

When the math is done, that huge Progressive Conservative majority chosen to govern the province for the next four years was elected by just 18 per cent of all eligible Ontario voters.

That low vote, the lowest in the province’s history, is being attributed to voter apathy. Many potential voters did not see the Ford government as excellent. Nor did they see it as a disaster. They saw no need for a change, so were not motivated to vote.

The sad fact is not only was the majority of eligible voters not motivated to vote, they were not prepared. Most of us, whether we vote or not, are not well informed when choosing our governments.

We see a few manipulative political TV ads, follow uneducated voices on social media and listen to our friends, most of whom are no better informed than we are. We like style more than substance.

We don’t spend time seriously studying the issues or the candidates and their leaders. That’s why the world in general has so many mediocre politicians, and leaders who would have trouble running a peanut stand.

I blame our education systems. They fail to educate our children about the critical importance of selecting governments and leaders, or how to think deeply and critically in deciding who to elect.

As the American comedian Bill Maher said on TV the other night: People are so dumb (he used other words that I can’t use here) you wonder how a country can continue to exist.

We need education systems that provide strong courses in civics. Systems that teach our children the importance of quality leadership and what qualities to look for in good leaders. And, how to focus on substance instead of style when deciding who you want to lead you.

We need to elect people with the backbone to reject party policy when they think it is wrong. People who do what they think is right, not what the party wants. People who reject the party line even if it makes them outliers and costs them votes.

I’m not saying the few voters who did cast ballots last week elected the right or wrong government. I don’t have a preference. I’ve voted for each of the major parties at one time of another.

I am saying that whatever governments we do elect, must be better. 
The potential catastrophes facing our current and future world are unprecedented.

 
We have the resources and the ingenuity to fight them. What we don’t have are well-informed and engaged electorates to vote in governments and leaders who will bring fearless excellence to the fight.

 
Better education in civics can give us that.

 An organized gun range is a beautiful place. It’s a classroom – indoors or out – because it teaches valuable lessons. Lessons in safety and care and maintenance of weapons and ammunition.

Most importantly, gun ranges are places where you learn discipline and respect. Respect for rules and the discipline to ensure that you and others follow them.

Regretfully, there is a gun range in Haliburton County that is not a beautiful place. It’s a place where respect does not exist and discipline is nowhere to be found. It is a garbage-strewn, dangerous place and a disgrace to us all.It’s the abandoned gun range on the former Frost Centre area on the west side of Highway 35 near Margaret Lake Road. It is not the former Frost Centre property bought by the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU). OPSEU bought the 40.6 acres of Frost Centre property bounded by St. Nora Lake and Highway 35. 

Some Frost Centre activities, an old sawmill, a maple syrup demonstration site and the gun range, were conducted in the bushland on the other side of Highway 35 but were abandoned when the Frost Centre was closed in 2004.

That area was not part of the OPSEU purchase and is public land owned by the province. The township offers cross-country ski trails through the area and has erected signs saying a pass must be purchased to use them.

The gun range is accessed through a rough dirt road off Margaret Lake Road. It is gated but the chain lock has been broken many times and the gate has been wide open for many months, if not years.

People are still shooting there, without any organization, supervision or usual gun range protocols. They have turned the place into a garbage dump.

One of the first rules a shooter learns is to pick up spent casings. When you finish firing, you bend down and collect the empty shells.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of spent shells litter the range grounds, along with other garbage. There are plastic and brass shotgun casings, plus brass rifle and handgun shells. Some of the handgun rounds are .38 and .45 calibre – the type used by law enforcement.

/Photo by Jim Poling Sr.

There is a building on the gun range. It is a substantial, well-built structure that has been vandalized. Its doors are torn off and the inside is strewn with used targets, empty beer cans and a variety of other garbage.

I have no idea who is using the range. There was shooting there (it sounded like handgun shots) this past weekend.

The place needs to be shut down immediately. Who is responsible for doing that, I don’t know – it doesn’t matter who. Just get it done.

I am not writing this because I am anti-gun or opposed to shooting ranges. In earlier days I was a competitive shooter who competed against Michigan State Police and U.S. Army combat defence teams. It is a challenging fun sport and one that teaches responsibility and focus.

But what’s happening at the old gun range off Highway 35 is a sickening disgrace. 

This is Haliburton County, not some U.S. hillbilly county where people who have eaten squirrels for too many generations do a lot of stupid things and are content to live surrounded by their own squalor.

I try to be Mr. Nice with my critter neighbours at the lake. It is becoming more difficult, however. Much more difficult, especially this spring.

I feed and comfort the little birds: the sparrows, nuthatches and chickadees. And, I don’t shout at the bullying blue jays and crows when they horn in, chasing the hungry little guys away from the feeders.

I’m also calm and gentle with the chipmunks. Obviously, they are not affected by COVID, because they have multiplied by the thousands during the pandemic. They have brought their relatives and friends to my place to dig holes wide and deep enough to swallow an 18-wheeler.

I understand they must dig for their tunnelling systems, but why any tiny rodent wants to claw through hardpan and packed road gravel is a mystery to me. There are hundreds of acres of soft, easy digging soil around my lake.

Playing Mr. Nice is hardest when it comes to squirrels. The black squirrels and their grey cousins are relatively respectful and law-abiding. They don’t chatter at me when I catch them trying to steal something.

Red squirrels, however, are unredeemable career criminals. They respect no property or possessions. When I try to talk to them about leading more  and productive lives, they mock and taunt me. 

Two of their cousins, red flying squirrels, chewed their way into my place a few years ago. 

When they couldn’t get into the food cupboards, they chewed – totally out of spite – a trophy lake trout I had mounted on the wall.

Last month I discovered that red squirrels tried to destroy my new car. I brought it in for routine servicing and a tech came running into the customer waiting room with bad news. The red squirrels had started packing engine spaces with acorns. The cleanout cost me $60.

When I returned home later in the day, two red squirrels were sitting in a tree beside my parking spot. They pointed at me and began chattering and laughing.

Squirrels never seem to have enough places to store their acorns. 

This spring, I decided to tidy up my ATV shed. I have a vacuum there and sometimes the hose is plugged into the blower end instead of the suctioning end. This day the hose was on the blower end and when I turned the power on, it began raining acorns.

Raccoons enjoy hanging around my place and I try to be Mr. Nice with them. It’s not easy because they are sneaky and come at night. They get into the bird feeders, not just taking a snack but tearing them down and carrying them off into the woods.

I’ve taken to trapping them – in safe and comfortable wire cages, of course. I spray their tail tips with fluorescent orange paint and release them into a far-off Crown forest. 

I’m waiting for the morning when I look out and see a cage occupied by a raccoon with an orange tail.

This spring I received the ultimate insult from my critter neighbours. 

Every fall I unhook my dock and tow it down the shoreline and into a protected bay where it will not be damaged by shifting ice. Every spring, I tow it back and reattach it to the shore.

Bringing it back this year, I noticed it was floating very low on one end. I took a crow bar and pulled off some boards to check the floats.

What a shock! Two floats were gone, and so were the boards that held them in place. All that remained of the holding boards were gnawed stubs – the unmistakable chew marks of beaver.

Sometime during the winter, beavers had chewed away the wooden supports, somehow removed two Styrofoam floats and created a cave-like space where they had started to build a comfortable home.

It took several hours and some money to return the dock to its useful state. When the repairs were complete, I sat down exhausted and thought: I must stop being Mr. Nice.

Later, after a few refreshments, my thinking changed. My critter neighbours were here first and I was the intruder.

So, I guess I’ll continue to play Mr. Nice and simply put up with their antics.

The abortion debate has flared into rage again in the United States, spilling of course, into Canada and elsewhere.

Much time, energy and money is spent arguing whether governments should allow women to terminate pregnancies. Wouldn’t all that time, energy and spending be better directed at lessening the chances of a woman having to make an abortion decision

For instance, improving sexual and reproductive health services would reduce the need to worry about abortions. 

Here in Canada, provincial health plans typically do not cover most contraceptive drugs and devices. Many people have to rely on private insurance plans, sometimes available through their employers.

Single women, who have a high percentage of abortions, often do not have the higher-level jobs that provide such benefits.

Much can be done to improve work life for women who must work to feed their children. Many of these are single mothers, who number almost one million in Canada. Nearly one-third live below the poverty line. 

You can chalk that statistic up to inequality. Earnings of single moms lag well behind that of men – roughly 82 cents to the dollar for the same job. The gap is even larger for racialized women.

Also, the median income of Canadian families led by single women in 2020 was about $49,000 compared with $101,000 for married couples.

Working single mothers need improved programs that will help them raise their children while doing their jobs. Many have lower-level jobs with unpredictable work schedules that make it difficult to take care of children. They also need satisfactory paid family leave and affordable quality daycare. 

Affordable daycare is on the way. The federal government has made deals with the provinces to provide $10-a-day daycare. 

In Ontario, which has some of the highest daycare costs in the country, the average daily cost for daycare is roughly $70, which is difficult to handle for a single mother earning food outlet wages. However, earlier this year the province signed on to the federal plan that will lower the cost of daycare to $10, but not until 2025.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit single mothers particularly hard. One study has shown that the employment rate for single mothers has not rebounded as pandemic restrictions have eased.

An analysis of Statistics Canada data found that the employment rate for single mothers with children under age six was down 36 per cent between February 2020 and the end of 2021. Employment of mothers with partners and children in the same age group was up 4.5 per cent.

No matter what laws governments pass to control abortions, they will continue to be done. The plain facts are that the majority of women seeking abortions are poor, or categorized as low-income, and feel they cannot afford to raise children.

The Guttmacher Institute, a global research and policy institution says 75 per cent of women seeking abortions are living below the poverty line or are categorized as low-income. It believes that a comprehensive package of essential sexual and reproductive health services, including contraception and safe abortion care, should be included in national health systems.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says that 73 million induced abortions take place worldwide every year. It includes abortions in its list of essential health care services.

Meanwhile the rekindled abortion debate continues to rage in the United States. It is a partisan debate that threatens to further tear the country apart.                 

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to strike down the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which said the U.S. Constitution protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to have an abortion without excessive government intervention. That decision basically made abortion legal in the U.S. but hard-line conservative groups have been trying for decades to get it reversed.

The Supreme Court’s decision on whether to strike down Roe v. Wade is expected at the end of next month or in early July. A leaked draft of the decision indicates it will strike it down, creating more massive unrest in a country that some people believe is already on the verge of another civil war.