Colourful Reflections Re-Visited

The old man is a creature of Canada’s west coast. Reared and in his early years restricted in large part to the Fraser Valley, the realities of the rest of Canada were largely unknown. Though he had briefly explored the washboard gravel of Canada’s cross country highway in the forties through the Fraser Canyon and east as far as Armstrong with the family Model A, the wonders of the Rockies and the Prairies were yet to be discovered.
So when my favourite Facebook “friend” from Saskatchewan admired my colours in the last issue of the Post and complained about the cold, the snow and the drab foliage of his town, I decided to show him at left above, the change to BC drab just five days later.
The comparisons reminded me of my first experience of the Prairies when I took a job in the oil patch there after completing my schooling in 1952. My wife and I travelled coach class by CPR and arrived exhausted and dishevelled at the Revelstoke stop by morning in time to see the glories of the Rockies. As we left Banff and rode through the foothills into Calgary I had my first experience of what, at first, looked like a barren and empty land. The western Alberta ranch country reminded me of the sagebrush country I had seen in the forties around Kamloops. Approaching Calgary the horizon stretched out to encompass flatter grass lands and periodic grain fields being readied for planting. That was my first view of “the prairies”.
My seven years on the prairies gave me a certain hypnotic attachment to the romance of the big open sky. I found the excitement and electricity of sudden storms, the mystery of the cloud formations at dusk, and the boredom of mile after mile of flat, dusty road as I drove through the barren looking countryside. I experienced the loneliness across the vast night plain interrupted only by a lone hunting hawk flashing through the headlights until all at once the lights of a town or city twinkled in the distance. That sensation then reminded me nostalgically of leaning dreamily over the deck railing on one of the Union Steamship vessels late at night as the captain guided it toward the cluster of lights along the waterfront of a small port along the inland passage of BC.
The Prairies are different now, of course. Still, in the fifties we found the people of the plains more purposeful and alive than the people at the coast, and usually less worried looking. My lovely Fraser Valley environment sometimes breeds lethargy when compared to the vibrancy found on the prairies. Enjoy the vibrancy, kids!

- 30 –

The Colours of November

The colours of November shown here represent the ending of another cycle in the wonderful world of nature here on Canada’s south-western Pacific coast. In other ways they represent the continuing cycle of the terrible world of politics. Here at home, November brings the bi-annual cycle of urban and rural municipal and regional district politics. In the States November is the month of many national and state elections in what appears to have become a continuing cycle of campaigning for power or raising money by political professionals. There is no obvious connection between the two, you say? But we find civic elections here at the coast in Canada dominated by local versions of New York’s Occupy Wall Street protest movement. That has become, at least for now, an international protest movement inevitably linked to the upcoming American November 2012 presidential and congressional elections.
Almost exactly two years ago, the old man published his then reflections on the state of Canadian and American politics. Obama had been president less than a year then. Since then we have seen many natural, economic and political disasters, especially in the States but with global effect. Has anything really changed since then in the way our Western democracies govern their societies? In part I reflected those two years ago:

In the States President Obama too is becoming a toothless tiger as ruler of the White House. No matter what his good intentions as a candidate, he is still a prisoner of the system. On domestic and economic matters he must rely on advisors he chose, all establishment figures in finance, public relations and politics, and pushed one way and another, he must opt for a decision, usually a compromise, which he must then try to sell to the body politic. As he nears the end of his first year in office, it is unlikely that anything approaching a successful health plan will take effect. Many of his economic and finance advisors are products of the banks and organizations who caused the near Depression in the first place, and as yet there is no indication that his government will come up with any way of bringing Wall Street under any reasonable control.

Today, Obama’s health plan, which the Republicans have vowed to squash, is scheduled for testing by the U.S. Supreme Court, with numerous States questioning its constitutionality. The recession, though declared over some time ago, seems to be over only for the Wall Street banks and investment houses bailed out by the government to prevent a depression. Joblessness continues disastrously high. Foreclosures are going on apace. Homelessness is getting worse. European economics are in deep trouble. The Middle East is in turmoil. The American national debt has just exceeded 15 trillion dollars. The many Republican presidential candidates, most of them revealing their total ignorance of practical affairs, think nothing of advocating pre-emptive military action against Iran for pursuing its nuclear program.
The insanity goes on, much as it has done from the beginning. Right now, I am in the process of reading Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil. In many respects the left-wing protest groups ranging from Wobblies to Bolsheviks to Anarchists of countless variety, each group sure it had the only answer and fighting with the others while oil capitalists were making Harding president, were doing the same thing in 1920 as the many uncoordinated groups forming the Occupy Wall Street protesters are doing today. Will they turn out to be just as useless?
Who knows? If all the veterans returning from the many distant countries left damaged and unemployed join their ranks, they might affect the body politic as did the anti-war protesters of the sixties. Would that improve the welfare of America’s 300 million plus population? I doubt it. What it could do, if successful, is change the life of what has been the individualistic American’s dream to become a capitalist, to one of dependence on the social collective. In the end such a collective is bound to live well beyond its means through years of consumption, only to find grief that comes when the piper must be paid. That is really the case with social welfare Europe as it gropes for answers today.
The old man has no answer. Our politicians and economists have no answer. Our species has obviously not evolved into cooperative individuals. I’m afraid we will always consist of the haves and have-nots, the leaders and followers, the good and the bad, the wise and the stupid, and nowadays the many that just want to consume and have a good time, and let tomorrow or the government look after the rest.
In the meantime, let the old man continue to enjoy the disaster-free colours of nature in my pleasant part of the universe for as long as I have left.

- 30 –