Rural life and Communities.

 

 Rural life and Communities.

I am beginning to feel like a writer from the past. Often my articles start with a line similar to the old children’s stories that used to open with, “a long time ago in a faraway land”. I don’t have a time machine. The truth is that my stories were in my lifetime and here in Alberta. It feels as if it was in history in some other place. We like nostalgia and remember mostly the good things, but Alberta was a better place in many ways. People didn’t go on cruises, didn’t have homes full of unneeded, often unused stuff, and having a telephone and a black-and-white TV was the limit of technology we used. We had real walking talking friends instead of Facebook friends and told them what we liked instead of clicking “likes” and counting them.

Friends often met someplace and went together. Some groups met over kids’ activities, community sports, and, in those days, some church activities. Later, we went for coffee or even a meal together. Even those who made minimum wages could afford to go out. Since I didn’t belong to a social group with money to spare, we looked for places that cost little. One option in those years was to go to a hospital cafeteria.

The hospital kitchen served nutritious meals to patients, staff, and outsiders who could sit together at long tables and meet new people. It wasn’t fancy, but outsiders were welcome and had a nutritious, safe meal. We sat at the long tables and met nurses, doctors, and perhaps some homeless people.

Schools had cafeterias, daycares did, and some places provided meals for the needy, free of charge. The point I’d like to make is that we didn’t have situations where hundreds of people were catching diseases from one central kitchen. Now we do.

Last week a whole chain of daycares spread E’coli to their little trusting customers. Some kids are probably still hospitalized as you are reading this. It couldn’t have happened under the old system. They all share a central kitchen.

I look with tears in my eyes at the parents whose kids are fighting for their lives. Many had to stay away from work, causing problems all over the place and they don’t know where to leave their kids next week. They talk about class action lawsuits, but how will that help? We can’t buy kids for money or purchase health.

The Alberta that I remember, was built on communities that copied our rural life. A village had a doctor, a town had a clinic with some most needed equipment, and for big problems, we went to the nearest city. A village had a daycare where they cooked food for their kids. They cared. The same was true for a community in the city.

Now economics is the driving force. It is cheaper to cook on an industrial level, so we did away with kitchens in each hospital or school. Efficiency was prioritized over human interaction to benefit investors, but this caused a gap between producers and consumers. They don’t live happy lives but exist to produce and consume. They are always pursuing happiness, but happiness in the form of lots of money never comes close to most people. We buy lottery tickets even if only one in millions ever wins and mostly don’t keep it long.

I am not trying to tell you that Canada was perfect in those days. It wasn’t. The people who felt most oppressed were in Quebec and they rebelled in the quiet revolution. African Canadians and First Nations began to demand equality and acknowledgment of their legal rights. People who were different asked for better treatment. There was a big argument in the country about abortion and birth control rights for women. Draft dodgers from the US came by the thousands and we had demonstrations against the US policies about Vietnam. Canada was discovering its soul.

None of the disturbances were as noticeable as the women and their sympathizers fighting for equality, especially on pay. It was legal and common to pay women half or three-quarters of what we pay men for the same work.

Canada chose a new flag and a new Prime Minister wanted to bring the Constitution home and be free from British rule. Slowly the people won some rights but also lost the spirit of community living and small business being important for the new economy.

Now we can’t find anything made in Canada and we must sell our resources for a price determined by forces outside of our country. We can’t compete in the market if our local daycare cooks their own meals. We hardly have any communities left that can be as self-sufficient as they used to be. People in our cities don’t know their neighbors.

I owe my life to technical advancement and modern development. Yet I am nostalgic about the communities we had and miss knowing who cooked the meals in the hospital, daycare, and school.

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