Dearest readers, no matter what political camp or social group you belong to, all of us can agree on one thing- 2020 has not been handled the best by our elected leaders. This is not the first pandemic that has ever affected Canada, and it is far from the first one in the world. Yet, we still found ourselves woefully unprepared and even more woefully confused this year. Let us, for a change, split hairs and really get into the mistake within orders our leaders have given us and keep giving us. Let us look at the lack of logic, common sense and other tools truly lacking at the top, and then ask ourselves what lessons we the people have learned from their actions in 2020 and what all of this means for us.
First, businesses closed- lots of them- because of lockdowns. Let us not play dumb here, they have all been sacrificed at the altar of what I now call pandemic correctness. It is just like political correctness, only it caused way more carnage in record time. I have seen clips of random interviews here and in USA of business owners saying that sure they could have closed their businesses and sat in their homes for a few weeks, a month or two months if the government covered at least their basic operating expenses, perhaps some of the living expenses as well. Now, you may say to me "Miss Z, these businesses should have some savings!" True, they should have some savings but if our government is ok with most regular people not having any decent savings to get by for a few months without pay, why should businesses have tons of unencumbered money just waiting for a pandemic to happen? Our government loves it when we borrow money from banks, spend spend spend and also start businesses and make tons of revenue. Why? Well, they love getting more and more income tax and sales tax, and they love seeing the economy grow, fully at the expense of people and businesses not having any decent unencumbered savings for serious emergencies. So, our leaders have to decide quickly at the onset of every single pandemic that will come in the future: to close or not to close. If they lock everything down for a month to try and stop the pandemic, they can say they expect every single business and adult individual to have enough money to survive for a month of no income. Otherwise, bankruptcy it is. Yes, be a little tough instead of just thinking about the next election. If we need to lock down longer, our government should start building a pandemic relief fund that will be invested in between pandemics to make it grow- even if it means us paying a little more in taxes. Let us not kid ourselves- with the money they tax us now, they cannot even keep the country running fine and have big enough hospitals and smooth highways, let alone set aside money for a pandemic relief fund. That way, we can try sitting at home, confined for a few weeks and hopefully that does it. Or, our leaders can decide that there will be no more lockdowns and start building up our medical resources and infrastructure for the next pandemic.
The next major point is that our leaders have treated us like self-centered morons! Masks clearly help, yet in the beginning of this pandemic they told us that masks do not help so that we do not run out and hoard them because the front line workers were running out of them fast. Do you not feel offended? I sure do. I wish our supreme leader actually stood on the podium all those months ago and appealed to our sense of unity, fraternity, our Canadian spirit and love for our fellow man and asked us not to hoard masks because we do not have enough for front line workers and it will be some time before we do, and we do not want them getting sick and dying in the meantime. I know plenty of younger healthy people who would answer the call and only get the masks they absolutely need. After all, even today most people keep reusing dirty-ish masks anyways. This was judgment call that got called completely wrong and it is something we should not soon forget.
Finally, the environment. Seriously, in the middle of this socioeconomic carnage our leader is reaffirming ever more ambitious green targets. Yep, increased carbon tax and all. People, let us dispense with this nonsense once and for all. Aside from super volcanoes and asteroids, the only other thing that dictates the rhythm of ice ages and interglacial periods on our planet are the Milankovitch cycles, a major climate change discovery made by an eminent geophysicist and astronomer of the same name way back in the 1920's. Clearly stated even on Wikipedia, "In the 1920s, he hypothesized that variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession resulted in cyclical variation in the solar radiation reaching the Earth, and that this orbital forcing strongly influenced the Earth's climatic patterns." This turned out to be the case. So, instead of focusing on how to mitigate the effects of NATURALLY OCCURING ICE AGES- a project for all nations on this planet- we try to lower the number of farts our civilization makes. Great, just freakin' great. Therefore, we have a leader in power who is willing to throw our collective COVID weakened body under the bus to pursue an expensive unscientific agenda. There, I said it- any environmental project that is not on a global scale and does not focus on naturally occurring ice age mitigation is UNSCIENTIFIC and purely political, while also being short-sighted and a plague on our economy that is normally supposed to compete on a global scale.
So, in summary dearest readers, what three lessons can we learn from these three leadership mistakes? First, our leaders are capable of using us to keep getting debt, not saving enough and putting every dollar we have into the economy, but then turn their backs on us when we are supposed to lock down and we have no money. The financial support programs they used have not been successful. Second, our leaders are willing to treat us like morons and to lie to us as a group, but hey most of us actually suspected that already. Third, our leaders are willing to abandon science in favor short-sighted, vote grabbing unscientific projects disguised as science, and they want us to pay for them. While more can be said, there is only one thing I would like to add. The main takeaway for we the people is that- in 2021- however much we think we should rely solely on ourselves vs on the government, we should multiply that by at least 1.5.
What do you think?
P.S. (added December 16th at 6:44 PM)
There seems to be some confusion about the part of this post referring to the environment and the climate change policies set by our government- including the announced carbon tax hikes. I originally said that using carbon tax and similar policies is short sighted and unscientific because we have natural cooling and warming happening on our planet in cycles over millions of years and this is what we should truly focus on. I now realize that using the word unscientific was a poor choice on my part and it made some of you believe that I was a climate change denier, which I am not. I remember reading a long time ago that scientists have discovered that the Roman Empire and Han China were the first ever countries in human history to have produced greenhouse gas emissions and affected the climate. So, if they were able to do it with a smaller population and no fossil fuels, obviously we are doing it too. However, I feel really fussy about it because we do not have a well coordinated global effort to get global warming under control, and THEN tackle the problem of cyclical ice ages down the road. I feel like we have suffered so much during COVID that we cannot do this alone. I looked at the Paris Agreement and it is simply not good enough because it has little to no accountability and no strict commitment guidelines as well as no penalties for failing to meet its goals. Imagine this instead. All countries beyond a certain carbon emission level must join. Every member country should contribute a percentage of its GDP every year to joint green solutions research and development. Finally, there should be strict deadlines and goal criteria and failure to meet them would pay a penalty in form of increased percentage of its GDP that it would have to contribute annually. Basically, something along these lines would make me and everyone else who cares about the environment feel a lot better. If carbon tax were the way to go, I would very much like to see all developed countries have it and stick with it through the good times and the pandemics. I am sure all of us can agree that our carbon tax alone will not heal the world- it will encourage other places around the world to compensate by pushing out more carbon into the atmosphere. "All for one and one for all" may have worked for the musketeers, but to tackle climate change it is "all together now". :)