Who will get my vote?

 

 Who will get my vote?

I knew a couple from China who came here with nothing and after a short while opened a restaurant. They worked day and night, raised their kids while working, and survived any competition that took them on. After some years, they bought a nice home, sent their kids to university, and even managed to bring one set of parents here. They are a living example of how private businesses can operate successfully and efficiently.

I also knew some people who chose a career in the civil service. They worked for less than their equals in private industries but had more benefits and security. Most did well, but a few abused the system. Sometimes when politicians promise to create jobs, they do it by increasing the civil service without providing proper supervision. Elected politicians focus on staying in power, not on managing the workforce like a business would. We all know that if you leave kids unsupervised, they will get into trouble.

There are two solutions to the problem. One is to connect the pay of the high-level civil servants and their political masters to the performance of their departments. People in the cabinet should have clear goals and regular reviews. Being a premier is not just delivering speeches but acting as the CEO of a large company. Those who get elected only to be yes-men and vote with the party are not the same as those who strive to improve the system. I like the municipal way of governing. Each member of the council can use their moral guiding system.

The second is to privatize the service, which will not be free. Whoever is going to do the supervising for the government will do so usually for high returns. The government that privatizes public assets and services may have a free ride for a short duration, but the citizens will pay the price in the long run. We should never consider essential services, water, electricity, the internet, air, transportation network, police, health care, public education, courts, government revenue, and a few others, for privatization. If we must pay someone to let us stay alive, it is akin to extortion.

The problem we currently face is that people think we can privatize government functions and have them run like a little Chinese restaurant. There is no possible way that a private corporation will take on a great responsibility, like for example, health care for a province, and make it as efficient as the Chinese restaurant, without skimming high rewards for its investors or owners. We will pay for what we get, but the profits will go to a private pocket instead of back to the citizens.

The voting public is seeking simple things. The voting public seeks health, safety, political and religious freedom, and above all, an economy that does not set them back. Those who work wish for security and equality with their parents and other workers. They face a choice about parties promoting different ways of getting it.

I look for who is most likely to protect my way of living now that my work life is over, (oops, I am working right now) and who will treat my kind of people best in a sustainable way. I know all politicians will promise great things, so I look at their histories and what they have done in the past. If they had workers, I try to see how they treated those. Did they pay fairly for work? If they were in politics, did they do what it takes to ensure that their citizens enjoy a reasonable life? Did they treat my hard-earned taxes with respect as they should?

Take, for example, the latest controversy about the replacement of the Saddledome in Calgary. People in my area will have no benefit at all from the Calgary Flames new home. The team’s owners will. Yet the province was pretty insistent a few years ago on saving money from the pay of rural medical professionals. We paid and still are paying dearly for that move. People like me died from the shortage of doctors and nurses. It will take us years now to attain the level of care we were accustomed to.

So many people, especially the young, choose not to vote because they think that their one vote won't make a difference, or they don't trust all politicians. I like to say to them, making a few right moves can make a significant difference. Life will go on if we do anything or not, but not in the same way.

The people who started the little Chinese restaurant years ago could have worked for minimum pay for someone else who became rich from their efforts. They took action, made a sacrifice, and did not give up. We can all do that.

I look at where I live and pay attention. A few years ago, the main street here was full of for sale or rent signs and you could taste the feeling of despair. Now the Real Estate people are left with nothing to list. We are full. We only need more competition, but it will come. The Co-op is moving in. The people can own their needs without privatizing.

I also consider the state of our world. Spain last year had the hottest summer in 600 years. Are my leaders considering if our actions are good for the Earth? I only have one vote and I will make it count.

Written on Good Friday.

 

Written on Good Friday.

As a child, He was a refugee that escaped Judah and went to Egypt. In Egypt, his father probably worked on construction until returning home to Nazareth. Here we lose written records until he was old enough to go with His family to Jerusalem and got lost, apparently “teaching” the elders at the temple. Some years later, we discover Him doing miracles and preaching in Galilea. The rest of the story we all know.

The story repeats itself many times in history. People escape their countries to save their lives and some of them become famous in later years in the countries they migrated to. Albert Einstein comes to mind. After the Second World War, German scientists escaped to both Russia and the USA to develop the space program that is still going on. It is the way of the world.

Canadians today understand that immigration is essential for our prosperity. Yet, many others are campaigning against it. I know people who immigrated to Canada or were born to parents who did, and they want our province to go on its own. Their most regular excuse is that the Federal government takes our oil money and gives it to Quebec where people have better social programs than we do. We could do the same, but we give our money to oil companies.

Albertans don’t talk about moving away from native lands, only about freedom from the rest of our country. It’s a cartoonish solution. Alberta will need an army to protect its borders from the Americans and the rest of Canadians. All free countries have one. Yes, we will. Our Premier will “fight Trudeau” or his successor by legislating some bills in Edmonton and force the other provinces to have an energy corridor on their land. The first nations will only be asked after we tell them what they must do and they will agree to it. I find the entire argument hilarious unless I am missing something.

I met a guy, by the Post Office, who is very upset about the homeless people and the unemployed folks on our streets. The TV news interviewed some. Most of them were obviously beyond any hope of working a regular job. They were uneducated addicts with mental health issues. There was one who was educated and worked three low-paying jobs. After a couple of minutes, I realized I would not be able to explain to the gentleman at the Post Office that we can’t improve the economy by trying to force the homeless to work or by shutting off immigration.

What we can do is prevent our province from spending twenty billion taxpayers’ dollars on cleaning orphan oil wells that are the responsibility of those who enriched themselves by selling our oil.

The oil companies are seeing the writing on the wall and slowing down activity unless governments pay them. Now the cash cow is no longer oil but clean energy and storage for it.

We better watch our rhetoric about transfer payments which were invented so all Canadians would share equally in our country’s prosperity. Fortunes change and the last may be first. Recently, there were rich deposits of valuable rare minerals found in the Ring of Fire, about four hundred kilometers north of Thunder Bay. It will fuel the Canadian economy in the future and it is on the land of some First Nations. Those folks stated they are more interested in the well-being of the people than in making returns on investments. Their attitude may change what our society values.

When I started campaigning for the then-new Progressive Conservatives under Peter Lougheed, he made a prophetic statement. He said that the oil will give Alberta a chance to set up for the future before oil revenues run out. We squandered our chances and dismantled what he set up, making a few super rich and the many not so. We developed the province, but now a lot of us are struggling, even though Alberta has plenty of wealth. We don’t have enough doctors and nurses, and many seniors are visiting half-empty food banks. It is not because we are lazy, only because we lived too long under poor management. I am still waiting to get some value from Kenny’s War Room, for example. I will never see returns from some pipelines that took our money either. The only one still being built is doing so because of the Federal government’s generosity. I wouldn’t run a political campaign based on “fighting Trudeau” at this time.

Our so-called Western culture is based on a religious faith that began two thousand years ago. It taught simple truths which appealed to people. It was based on humans viewing society as one body. We celebrated Easter each year to remind us it could be beneficial to sacrifice the self for the benefit of all. After all, we don’t know what happens to the “self” when earthly life is finished. We know that all things are recycled and there is a natural resurrection happening year after year.

I am not any kind of religious leader, but I like to draw conclusions from what I encounter in life. I promote accepting the basics of my religious faith and applying it to life. Do unto others as…..

Is there a God?

 

 Is there a God?

On Easter day, a young man from out of town who reads the Simple Raven’s Post blessed me with a visit. He is about forty and educated above a Master’s level. I have been reading your column; he said, and I am surprised. You seem to balance your comments, but there is one group you don’t consider at all. The people who don’t believe in God. You know that there are a lot of us.

That is true, I must admit. I have been studying beliefs in God since before he was born. It has exposed me to the main Abrahamic religions, and I lived in the ruins of the historical places that they built. My high school was in the Galilea mountains where Jesus grew up. As soon as I could, I studied the history of human faith in a supreme deity. We always had one since the days of cave people. We have worshipped the Spirit as a singularity or split into many specialized Gods but always existed in human reality or imagination. Thousands of philosophers over many generations debated what God is like or not. As a matter of fact, I am writing a book about it, if I will ever finish.

Here was an intelligent young man, asking me on Easter day to tell him why I don’t take atheism seriously when writing in the Pass Herald. He left me lost for words. I should serve my whole readers’ community equally and remember the two newest religions, Science and money, or the faith in the Golden Calf. The last is not that new.

Every generation of humans always believed that their science is the greatest. If new scientific discoveries or hoarded riches are their God, I should mention them when I talk about religions. He was demanding of me to provide proof that the biblical God exists or admit that there is no God. He wants material evidence for a spiritual being. Can’t be done. Yet I care about that young man and wouldn’t wish him to feel ignored.

We have surpassed other animals and humans in terms of our culture. Yet we spend a lot of time trying to discover how the world or universe around us is working. We do it with our senses, eyes, ears, and so on. We are also very good at fooling our senses. One only needs to learn how to do some magic tricks to prove it. We can’t build even one human being or any other living animal and make it alive with all that we know.

My friend believes that it all happened by chance. Luck alone. He can easily point at things in the holy books that are factually wrong. He met some people who believe in the bible literally and he thinks that all those who believe in God think that way. We don’t. We have books with stories that demonstrate examples of humanity’s wisdom. Those books were written generations after events happened at times when most people were illiterate and knowledge was passed on by word of mouth. There were many more books that the communities of faith lived by and, over time, wars and other disasters, disappeared. After each great civilization, people destroyed books and past knowledge. The Spaniards destroyed the records of the Incas, for example.  

I can prove that I am a spiritual soul. I was a tiny toddler years ago and now I am a big old man. All the cells in my body and brain died and new ones replaced them, yet I am me. Not my body, but my soul. My scientific conclusion is that if that is the way things happen, it should go on the same way. The body recycles, but the person stays the same. Only at some point the body is no longer changing to get bigger or older but immaterial. Spiritual instead of physical. In games, we reach a point where we go to the next level.

The Bible mentions it in the story of the woman at the well. People, at some point, no longer will worship in an earthly place but in a spiritual way. The early Christians had many arguments about it and eventually solved the argument by force. That is not the Christian way.

My young friend said that perhaps we think God is some more advanced alien that came to Earth in our past. I have books about it. It’s not a new idea. What the ancients called Gods were far more advanced than humans at the time or possibly even now. I asked him if he ever tried to communicate with an amoeba. Perhaps advanced civilizations, or possibly even God, have no reason to communicate with us. God can easily not be visible to us and angels possibly are all around us.

Unless we investigate the dimension, we call “spiritual” we may not get far. Our experience shows that we tend to go one step forward and two steps back.

Old and New morality.

 

Old and New morality.

I am tempted to join the political discussion that heated up lately. What’s the use? In two months, we will consider other issues the most important. Presently, my son-in-law is upset about the NDP getting us into debt. They were in power when oil prices were the lowest for a while and Alberta had high unemployment. The fires in Fort McMurray drained their budget at the same time. The UCP came in when energy prices were rising and Putin was threatening Ukraine. Can we compare the two over that aspect? I think not. We should judge by what they each did with our money.

It is most interesting right now that the authorities have indicted a past President of the United States for crimes related to what seems to be sexual misconduct and cheating in business affairs. This is happening just at the time of Easter when many people are thinking about Christ being crucified for human sins. After all, the ex-president was married three times, which is forbidden in the Bible. Relationships with sex workers are also considered unfavorable. Will the American public reconsider their political choice? This remains to be seen.

Here in Canada, we are not as religious as our neighbors. Over three-quarters of Americans believe in creation and the rest in evolution. Here and in the UK, less than a quarter believe in creation, for example. Yet we have problems with sexual immorality issues. In the last year or so, we lost some of the most senior members of our military due to accusations of sexual abuse and or misconduct. Similarly, much of the clergy, often related to the infamous residential schools, have been accused. Many cases are in courts where they will be for a long time, and some individuals may be convicted. We should enforce the law on offenders, but the innocent suffer unimaginable pain and shame.

Laws can never cover all possibilities and fairly apply to all situations. Presently, the trend is to treat people as guilty until we prove them to be innocent, which often happens after a person’s name and career have been destroyed. We recently did it to a Chinese Canadian member of parliament and to high-ranking officers. In some cases, the alleged crimes took place long ago, and it’s hardly possible to remember the details. Politicians have no mercy if they smell danger to their power. The government removed the officers from prestigious positions, making them suspected criminals. That took place until they removed Major General Dany Fortin.

Mr. Fortin is a professional fighting man who knows what he is capable of. He didn’t go down easy and he is fighting back. He hired lawyers and demanded to have his old job back. It’s possible that he will take the government to court.

I lived through the period in which much of what is being fought about today was happening. It was a different world then. People were testing the laws and going around saying, “make love, not war.” Birth control pills became available and women could find jobs and live on their own. We made many technological advancements to suit women, like the automatic transmission, for example, and there was a new freedom in the air. We saw the first woman in parliament.

The new freedom mixed with the old customs. A sixteen-year-old girl was free to marry and have sex if she wished. It was almost the turn of the century when the government declared new rules about sex. Consequently, girls felt free to try their new freedoms, but guys could end up in jail for taking advantage of it.

A few years passed, and men with money or high positions became an endangered species. They lived in what was considered normal at the time, now not permitted.

I am the last one to protect abusers. I don’t feel sorry for an old ex-president displaying behavior that all Christians and Jews consider sinful. With an influential position comes responsibility. I object to people being punished for what used to be a joking matter and now is treated like a crime. We must take into consideration the fact that morality is forever changing like everything else.

Used to be that smoking marijuana was illegal, but smoking cigarettes on airplanes or in movie theaters was the norm. Now it’s different. God, according to the scriptures, created all things with a word. Our language is changing. Look at the words gay, black, trans, and thousands of others. It is immoral to punish people for not having followed the most recent meaning. We must revise the way we administer justice and take politics out of it.

It is wrong to deny girls schooling or force them to hide their hair. It should be just to lock up those who use power and money to abuse kids, break families and deny human rights to the unfortunate people who try to stay alive. A sin is hurting people unjustly. This is what Easter is about. Crucifying an innocent person for evil done by others.

An old friend called me and asked. Do I think that God is punishing humans? I look at the big world through my little computer screen and wonder. All sides are doing things that could bring the wrath of God upon us. I can’t just say, no.