1.) They are providing lockers for the homeless in my home town of Victoria BC. Not housing, not help - lockers. This is ostensibly so people who end up homeless do not have to risk losing their material possessions. What's wrong with this? Well, granted, it does make it easier to be homeless, not having to drag around all those reminders of a time when you might actually have had some place to go must be a bit of an emotional relief. Although in my experience of travelling for nine months last year, it is not the stuff you miss, maybe I'm wrong. It renders the most obviously homeless less visible and I am sure that's a great relief to everyone, knowing how they think in Victoria, I am sure it is only a matter of time before people start considering themselves to be virtuous because they don't notice someone's poverty status - "oh, you're homeless?! I had no idea - I see you only as a person and my friend" This attitude is common in Victoria, it's a great insulator.
Victoria - be ashamed. Stop sheltering people's belongings and start sheltering people. They say you can never go home again, honestly, if home is Victoria - who would want to?
2.) The Pope. He says he will go to visit earthquake victims when he has time. Probably after Easter. Oh that's great, I'm sure they'll put the dying on hold for a while and set aside their need to be comforted for a few days - what's a few days in the face of a busy Pontiff's overbooked schedule? For Christ's sake, it's a natural disaster, in Italy, his home turf. Does this man's callousness know no bounds?
3.) The snow. It continues to drift over the city in waves. It looks like dust being continually shaken from some filthy feather duster and it is not going anywhere. I have heard scientists say that global warming could actually result in colder temperatures and more precipitation for northern latitudes and that does seem to be the case. Last summer was the greyest, wettest on record, this winter we have had six months of snow and very little sun to give it the beauty that makes most of us feel affection for it. Instead we have wind, cloud and snow - day after dreary day of it. I have friends who say they like grey weather, I think a person should live where the weather best suits their personality. I moved to Ottawa because I like sunshine and I like extremes. This climate suited me ten years ago and I haven't changed but the climate has and part of me gets angry when people say - with a self-satisfied sigh, that they like it this way. It's not normal for it to be this way here, it's not uplifting and it's not OK.
4.) The infant heart transplant in Toronto and the fact that it is news. A baby in Toronto was dying of a congenital brain defect, or so the doctors thought. Her parents decided to remove her from life support, let her die and give her heart to another baby in need of a transplant. A wrenching decision, I'm sure. They removed the life support equipment and the baby lived. Now nobody knows what to do and the press is all over this. Having lived with a transplant recipient, I can say with some authority that a transplant is not a "life-saving" surgery. Transplants do not last forever. They are not a guarantee of life and for those reasons among others we take them only from the willing and the dead. That baby could not consent to be one of the willing and she is not yet one of the dead. This whole thing is ethically shaky and it is ghoulish of us to watch it with such an appetite.
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