Does
ANYONE know what’s going on?
by
Robert LaFrance
Trying to find a certain snippet of
information, I was looking over my 1995 columns and came across this item: A
total of 182 countries had met in Sweden with the aim of finally doing away
with child poverty by the year 2000. I am sure that countries like Lesotho
would have had a great influence on eliminating world poverty back then and it
turns out they did – by adding thousands more to the bulging list.
Although it goes against my grain to
do research, I held my nose and did some. This ringing declaration of 1995 was
about as useless as a Canadian Senator who never shows up in the Red Chamber
and who over-claims on his or her expense account.
If one is to believe the statistics
available, child poverty has increased by fifty percent during that time. Part
of that is because there are now seven billion people in the world compared to
5.7 billion back in 1995. Would you believe there were fewer than 3 billion in
1950?
Anyway, those are mere statistics
which is one category of untruths (lies, damn lies, and statistics according to
Mark Twain). The point is, those turkeys who met in Sweden 18 years ago were
there to sample fine cuisine and soft beds and they didn’t care any more for
child poverty than a hedgehog cares about chess.
That wasn’t a bad rant, was it? I’m
no competition for Rick Mercer, but I can fume and bluster with the best.
***************************
Along the same line of cynical
thought, I have often wondered if ANYONE knows how things work today. Every
once in a while, through no fault of my own, I get to thinking about how things
work (or don’t work) in 2013. I’m talking about things like the Global Economy.
I don’t think anybody really knows how it all works.
That’s the way ‘they’ want it, isn’t
it? If you bought a computer back in the early 1990s, it was a fairly
straightforward piece of equipment, wasn’t it? Your word processor processed
words, your printer printed, and there were a few dozen computer games that
didn’t require the brain of an Einstein to play. Today I am sure that Albert
Einstein would be as baffled as the rest of us at the garbage he and we see on
our monitors.
When I bought my first computer in
1994 – with advice from the late Bob Inman – I could write a sentence in my
word processor and I could trust that it remained the same as I wrote it.
Nowadays (an old person’s word) the sentence is just as likely to have been
changed to the wording that Microsoft Word prefers and any spelling is changed
to the American one. I labour hard to get the word changed from ‘labor’. Every
few months I have to go into Microsoft Word’s ‘preferences’ file and say: DON’T
EDIT MY WORK! I CAN SPELL, AND MISS SARA WILLIAMS WAS MY ENGLISH TEACHER!!
Does ANYONE really understand the
so-called Global Economy? I’ve met quite a few people who say they do, but a
few searching questions reveal they don’t know squat. When a fire in Bangladesh
can force down the price of Nike stock in Tokyo, and a train accident in Quebec
can raise the price of oil, and a poor canola crop in Ontario can cause
palpitations in Belgium, something’s wrong.
And then there
are the global crooks who steal $460 zillion in France end up in comfortable
retirement at age 29 in Cannes, Costa Rica or Crete. Those bad apples should be
weeded out before they get in a position to steal all that bread. They
obviously went bananas, but I suppose every outfit has some lemons.
“Bob, are there
any more fruits to add to that basket?” said Flug was had been reading over my
shoulder while sipping on a jar of 7% lemonade from Indonesia. “I was afraid
for a moment you were going to mention spoiled pomegranates and crushed
grapes.”
“Flug, I know
you were the apple of your mother’s eye, but you ain’t the apple of mine, so
why don’t you sip your lemonade on the porch while I finish this column?” He
said he guessed the main reason was that the bottle was empty, so he got
another, went out on the porch, and turned on the radio to a hip-hop (as opposed
to music) station to annoy me further.
Back to the
subject, I suppose we can take some solace in the fact that sometimes these
rich people do get caught with their hands so far into the cookie jar that even
they can’t talk their way out of it. We won’t hold our breath though, waiting
for the next one. It costs too much to prosecute them. Remember all those Wall
Street banks and bankers who brought international economies to their knees?
Noticed any of them going to jail?
Rant Number Two
complete.
-end-
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