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My writings - and those of others.
Puzzlement
There were myriad criticisms of a former president after that one awful debate. I watched only a small part of of it and concurred with the media view that this person was no longer fit to be president on the basis of his performance. But it might be fun to turn the tables. What if Mr. Biden said “I’m going to fire as many people as I can”. Or “ I think it would be great to turn Gaza into a beautiful seaside resort.” or even “How about Canada becoming the 51st state!” The hue and cry would be that the poor man was delusional or just plain crazy. If he had continued to declare that he had always been effective in his job in government, we would have at least surmised that it was too bad, but he wasn’t in the same position any more.
I just wonder if the current incumbent actually thinks he is just in a previous scenario - being able to yell out, “You’re fired”. Or he is channeling the old real estate developer role. Government isn’t a TV series or a real estate company. No one seems to be pointing this out. Acting out of context brings some pretty serious consequences. Will anybody wake up?
Elephants in the Room
With all the drama surrounding life, we are also involved in an provincial election. For Americans, this isn’t a pejorative comment, but it relates to an election of a geographical area comparable to one of your states. Elections must be called after a certain period of time, but can also be called earlier. In this case the Premier - think Governor in your case, is facing some unpleasant and possibly scandalous revelations and is trying to get ahead of it as a giant going after the USA and needing a mandate. He doesn’t. Bribing me with $200 of my own money doesn’t endear me either.
This morning I received a message from a competing poliical party called the Green Party - and you can guess that it is progressive. Here’s what its message said: Let’s take a look at his environmental record:
He tried to open the Greenbelt for development. (And is still moving ahead with his plan to build two highways through the Greenbelt – including the controversial Highway 413.)
He’s working with Enbridge to ensure that oil and gas remain a staple of the power grid.
He gutted conservation authorities to speed up development. (And isn’t consulting – or even informing! – the public about major changes to environmental policy.)
He weakened endangered species’ laws, and now Lake Superior’s woodland caribou are in danger of being wiped out.
He’s making it easier to build on wetlands. (Doesn’t he know paving wetlands will make flooding worse?)
He’s ripping up bike lanes in downtown Toronto.
He’s making it easier to build natural gas pipelines.
The Green Party message followed with one very brief paragraph stating what it valued and stood for. Then it went back to their complaints
Later this morning I started on a book called Don't Think of an Elephant by George Lakoff. You know what you just thought of..
The above message is a good example of how not to communicate to potential voters.. It simply reinforces the views of the part it opposes. The book mentioned is written for American progressives, but it has application here as well.
As long as you talk about what you are opposed to, it makes the reader focus on that. In American media You-know-who’s image heads up most news items. I’m now starting to see whether New York Times and Globe and Mail articles start with the fact and then dispute a lie. When the opposite occurs the reader may stop before continuing, and the reinforcement works every time.
Framing of messages matters!
Not revenge, just power
We Canadians are rather a mild lot. But don’t push us. We have something that some of our nieghbours below the line don’t have - backbone.
When we are unhappy with our own politicians we say so. A Prime Minister, who incidentally is not a governor of a state, has submitted his resignation when a new party letter is selected. short civics lesson for House Reps and Senators: we are not a single state, but a country of provinces and territories. Would any American politician have the backbone to tell his/her own constituents a few of these facts. I side with David Brooks in his recent article that stupidity has less to do with intelligence than with behavior.
I like what Brooks has to say about Stupidity (The Six Principles of Stupidity, New York Times, Jan, 30, 2025 )defining it as “ behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next?” and elaborating as follows:
Stupidity makes us befuddled. He goes on to say “When stupidity is in control, the literature professor Patrick Moreau argues, words become unscrewed “from their relation to reality.” . Here is another thing, America. Canada is not a source of overwhelming amounts of drugs entering the US.
Stupidity happens when organizations put all their hopes in one person. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is getting a lot of attention these days. Remember him as someone who stood up to Hitler? He said, “The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.” Of course there was a cost to standing up. Bonhoeffer died for speaking the truth so that we still be here and free.
Stupidity already has all the answers! Watch this one. Especially since there is such a blast of news that we fall behind and fail to say “Huh?”
People who behave stupidly are unaware of the stupidity of their actions. Most of us know when we have been stupid after the fact. Will any Americans wake up to the fact of what they knew already and still went ahead and elected or approved people? They are going to find out.
Brooks continues: “Because stupid actions do not make sense, they invariably come as a surprise. Reasonable arguments fall on deaf ears. Counter-evidence is brushed aside. Facts are deemed irrelevant.” Stupidity is nearly impossible to oppose. Bonhoeffer notes, “Against stupidity we are defenseless.”
People in the grip of the populist mind-set tend to be contemptuous of experience, prudence and expertise, helpful components of rationality, Brroks says. As the writer Marilynne Robinson noted in her book, Genesis, History is so much a matter of distortion and omission that dealing with truth feels like a breach of etiquette”
Robert Reich, noted in a recent podcast that the press is wrong in seeing all of these befuddling actions as revenge. Instead they are about centralizing power. It’s not fun to watch and be affected by. But it’s impressive until it isn’t. Somehow all of this reminds me of Keats’ poem, Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
As Sister Joan Chittister reminds us in her book, The Time is Now, we are called to be prophets, not just healer. That takes backbone.
Not Nasty
Compassionate - asking for mercy, not just of one person, but a percentage of an entire population, who, with the exception of original indgenous people were all immigrants themselves. Perhaps a person who calls others nasty to look in the mirror now and then. It makes me proud to be a woman - and the Canadian version of an Episcopalian. It a US congressman thinks she should be deported, he might consider England. Apparently Canterbury is looking for an Archbishop!
Misadventures
AI Hype is boring and I wonder how long it will be before the bubble bursts. It may be as much due to shortages of water to run the huge servers, rather than the crazy stuff it creates. Good bye help desks; we are on our own now and reading Q&A feels like those scam calls pretending to be Microsoft. The best response to them was a small granddaughter pretending to cry when they called saying she was so happy for their help - imitating her father who loved to keep them on the line to see how long it would take for the caller to go off script. - and the poor scammer even left his to ask if she was all right.
Then there is a world of devastation both in the Middle East where last minute bombing has to precede a cease fire -and other kinds of fires on the west coast. Is this our new normal? Devastation that takes decades to remedy?
And then there is politics - such fawning questions by the senators who want to support questionable leaders. We might call These guys - and they definitely are guys -oligarchs if we didn’t want to annoy a couple of them as Canadians. I’ll join Michelle Obama as a no-show for the inauguration. It’s hard to imagine how much three or four miliion of bad taste might be on display. A bright note in our Canadian election of a new part y leader is that we have a couple of promising contenders coming to the top; maybe it will all be settled quickly and we can focus on avoiding tariffs.
And last of all social media. I’m close to leaving Meta, having already abandoned Instagram and X. LinkenIn tells me how many people are searching on profile even though I am retired and am not contemplating starting a new job or an MBA. My Facebook feed is pretty vapid for a reason. I lurk and comment as little as possible, The algorithms are very frustrated because they don’t know what to send me and keep asking if I would like more or less of the real messages that are sent through. More than half of the posts are ads re something I searched on sometime. Detergent sheets liked by a couple of friends have bombarded me now for about five years. I don’t think I need influencers in my life even if 20,000 other people like them. Thankfully I have never been subjected to the worst of social media’s trolling and hate, but I do wonder how often I am to admire endless updates of selfies and dining out of people I know rather casually. These are not media that encourage collective humility.
And so the year starts What’s always worth remembering is that as much as we applaud or fear, what we are really faced with is unpredictability. After so many awful surprises, who knows - there just might be a couple of good ones.