December 20th, 2006

You know what is really killing my kalanchoe these days?

I've been watching this strange sense of safe-worldism / and how-could-it-happenism all over my home town and home province. Heck, I had to catch myself falling into this little intellectual trap myself!

Let me explain: Whether you want to blame global warming (human-induced or otherwise), seasonal law-of-the-averages, the Wrath of God, or cosmic ray beams from snarky space-aliens, the West Coast has seen some pretty severe weather in the last couple of months of 2006. We've had torrential rains, home-wrecking floods, high destructive winds, muddy undrinkable tap-water, lots of power-outages, tree-damaged or destroyed homes and other property, and general ancillary mayhem (mostly of the traffic-snarling variety) that comes with it.

Mother nature has spoken with her fists.

And, when the power is on, you can turn on your TV to your favourite news station to hear some people complaining how "the government" should have shored up this levy more, trimmed back that tree or other, or protected our water shed better. I'm not talking about the majority of people, mind you, but there are definitely a few vocal folks (mostly baby boomer men) who stop themselves just short of saying to the news cameras how it's all "the government's" fault. You get waves of attitude that say, "how dare they not protect us from this mess?" as though "the government" was somehow able to control the weather.

But what government are they vaguely referring to? Local, provincial, federal? Or something else? Well ... I pretty much know the answer to that already: They haven't thought it through clearly enough to come up with a face for "the government" at all.

The fact is, all the comforts of home come to us if-and-only-if Mother Nature wants to smile on us (or the comsic-ray-wielding space-aliens feel indifferent towards us). We—and I'm going to start including myself in this admonishment—get used to our creature comforts and start to feel entitled to them. We get the idea that it is our right to be warm and well-fed, connected to the local TV cable station and the Internet. We lose sight of the fact that we exist because other, random elements in the world let us exist.

So when a storm blows up and wrecks our cars or our houses ... or just turns off our power or soils our drinking water for a few days, we bristle with the mistaken notion that it happened because someone was not doing his/her job. We want to find a human scapegoat so that we can feel better about it: That there is a way to fix it so it never happens again. We don't want that storm to remind us of the ugly truth that the danger out there is very real at all times, and though the chances are remote, we could all fall from grace—from life itself, in fact!—at any time.

If we can say that this is all the fault of "the government", we can reassure ourselves, however mistakenly, that it's impossible for the world to come apart at the seams.

And this from a population that sits on a geological fault that is 150 years overdue for the most devastating earthquake modern times will have ever seen! It's time to stop blaming "the government" and keeping the attitude that the Good Shepherd will watch out for us in times of disaster. It's time to use these emergencies and disasters as a lesson in what it could be like at any time and on any day in our lives.

It's time to grow up.

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