The future is ours to see, and plan.

 

 The future is ours to see, and plan.

We all know the feeling of being forced to work and do things we do not approve of doing or wouldn’t do. We have a system that works, and none of us are willing to throw a monkey wrench into the machinery. It’s our economy.

A young person finishes grade 12 and needs to find a way to make a living. If he or she is not intellectually inclined, they go to work mostly for lower wages. The best students go to university. A few parents can finance the studies while most can’t. The young person borrows money to secure a better future. They start their working lives with debt that from graduation on is accumulating interest. If they find a job in their field, they will work for years to pay for their education and will try hard not to make waves. Jobs are not exactly waiting for them.

Both the university-educated and those who are not will be offered credit cards, easily borrowed money, and be pelted with advertising. “Fly now and pay later”. By the time that my generation often bought a house and began to save for retirement, today’s young people are in debt, often working in situations that they don’t enjoy but must endure.

Yet our kids are living in a reality that most people in the world envy. Many receive help from us, the older generation who lived in a better situation, received better wages, and knew not to get into debt over their heads. We often have old-age pensions, homes that are paid for, and some savings. This is not the reality that our kids are living in.

However, they are managing not too bad. Here there is Canadian Health-Care, a reasonable social safety net, self-improvement programs, and above all cheap imported foods and goods. The country is at peace and the infrastructure that we the elders built for them is holding. Every few years there is an economic crash and austerity-centred governments rip the floor from under them, but they make it.

It is not the same in the countries that are home to most of the world’s population. Those are the countries that enable us to have our lifestyle. When we colonized them we built our prosperity on their resources and now we use their cheap labour. Life here is not as good as fifty years ago, but it is the envy of most humans. That is why we have such pressure at all of our borders from refugees clamouring to get in.  

Most of us look at the people in poor places with disdain and say, you screwed up your place and now you are trying to come here and take what is ours, which we built by hard work. Please go to those places and look beyond the tourist places. Don’t expect it to be easy. Those “poor countries” guard their secrets.

You can easily see the rich people from China, India, wherever, but you will not see the people who work to produce all the cheap goods that we buy with plastic money. It is very easy to see now during the pandemic how we enjoy the products of modern slave labour and why we don’t buy Canadian or local.

Consider the masks and gloves that we use for protection. Mostly they are used for a short time and discarded. If they were produced here, they would be much more expensive. Or consider what you pay for vegetables in the supermarket. If we had to pay Canadian wages to our young people to produce it for ourselves, prices would double or more.

The CBC sent a team to Malaysia to investigate the manufacturing of disposable gloves. They found workers from Bangladesh and Nepal working for as little as $2.00 a day, in dangerous appalling conditions. The workers borrow money to get the jobs and endure abuse regularly.

Other Media outlets investigated the conditions of the Uyghur (Xinjiang) people working in China while being “re-educated,” forced to abandon their religion and way of life. The average Canadian looks at the smuggled recordings depicting rapes and beatings of those who produce what we need with skepticism. We find it impossible to believe how badly humans can be abused to benefit us.

There is good and bad in every corner of the world. Right now we see some countries with authoritarian regimes winning, the most visible is China. They developed a mixture of Capitalism and Communism that works in today’s environment but suppresses their people.

We watch with dismay the Chinese economy doing much better than our Western economies. We see on the news that Wuhan where Covid first struck had no new cases for months and life is back to normal. China also spends most in the world to reduce pollution. I still don’t recommend Communism or authoritarian Capitalism.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I wearily watch here in my community a conflict building up between farmers, ranchers, and coal miners. The miners wouldn’t do well without food and the farmers without water or steel produced from coal. Why are the two hurting each other while the hotheads amongst them happily throw fuel on the fire? It is our idea of competition, which is based on winning. Competition could be different. Economics can be built to improve our lives instead of destroying them. We just have to pay the cost.

Both groups of people desperately need each other here in southern Alberta. What we need is a way to go forward without hurting each other, even if there is a cost attached. We can do it with proper planning and some effort, but profits will be reduced for the financiers who currently benefit from low taxes, a safe central well-serviced location, and an educated workforce.

Our young people deserve a good world and should learn the benefits of co-operation and the security that comes from living in a caring country where everyone is benefiting from their work. Ranchers and miners should be on the same team.

Here is a link to my blog: https://thesimpleravenspost.blogspot.ca/  Feel free to check other articles and comment.