Collective Trauma: The Fallout 21

The cooler weather has been upon us these last three or four days, and what a relief from the stifling heat. It is supposed to warm up again this week, I hear, and so goes our summer roller coaster of heat. This is what we have to get used to now, and still we have it better than in most places. Here where I live, it almost never gets above thirty degrees and we complain bitterly anyway, such is life for the soft, spoilt and privileged. Yes, privileged. Even someone like me, living in social housing in a crappy neighbourhood downtown, I am privileged. Even if I don't feel privileged. I can still live in this fabulously expensive city with a modicum of dignity and still enjoy relatively quiet days and nights, given that my unit faces the back. I can still walk on the seawall or on one of the bridges and enjoy the cool ocean breezes. I can still wander over to Stanley Park, or take a thirty minute bus ride to the forest of Pacific Spirit Park and get lost among the towering trees while dodging testosterone addled (male and female) joggers, cyclists and other narcissists. I can still enjoy long, meandering walks through expansive leafy and tony neighbourhoods that I will never be able to live in. There is so much to enjoy and appreciate here, despite the heat at times, despite the frequent rain, and despite the imbeciles who get elected to public office only to use their largess as a platform for selling us up the river to the rapacious property developer, real estate and foreign house flipper scum that have infested our city like rats, cockroaches and bedbugs. This is not Eden. It is neither perfect nor ideal. And you know what, Gentle Reader? Neither are we. Yes, we are paying the piper and we will soon be paying the whole goddam philharmonic orchestra in full for our sins against the climate and our violations against Mother Earth, and maybe it is not too late, but we are going to have to look at the likelihood that we are going to be suffering over the next few generations, and we are going to be suffering big time and now we have to start getting used to the idea, because if we are going to pull through this mammoth disaster of our own making then we are going to have to pull together as never before, and it just ain't happenin'. In the meantime there is the every day. The day by day. How we treat others. How we conduct ourselves. Gratitude. Enjoying and savouring the moment, for these moments are soon going to end. But we don't have to end with them. Today, Gentle Reader, when you see a stranger, be kind. courteous, respectful treatment of others, regardless of who they are, may be just the key to getting us out of this mess. We can do nothing about President Dump, nor about Duterte the Dirty, nor Putin nor those nasty autocrats in Saudi Arabia, nor can we stop them from ravaging other countries or slaughtering the innocent. But here at hone, we have to do what we can. It might not be enough. Or maybe our acts of kindness and mercy will be carried on a wind that circumnavigates the globe. We can only try, can't we? This also is going to involve a bit of sacrifice. That's right. We have to start being more generous. I was thinking the other day while I was waiting in line to pay for a belt at the local Wiener's (I mean, Winners) and all the security devices that had been attached to the belt so that no one would just put it on and walk out the store without paying for it. I can understand that they want to discourage theft so they can keep their prices low. But how about eliminating all the potential causes of theft? That's right. Paying all workers a living wage, and a liveable guaranteed income for people on low incomes. If we all had enough to live on, and we didn't have to carefully select only the cheapest stores to shop in because of our modest budgets, then perhaps there wold be less theft, fewer robberies, fewer break-ins. But we're all considered guilty till proven innocent, it seems and so we must live in a dystopia of mutual suspicion. This has to change or our planet is going to continue hurtling towards it's worst possible conclusion.