The Smile

It seems that once I start writing, I can not pass a keyboard.

The Price of Christmas

While watching the Food Channel the other day, I saw a commercial talking about bringing back the magic of Christmas. Before the smile could reach my lips, it continued to advertise a musical gingerbread house for $19.95 as well as singing snowmen, snow globes and other items available at a special price when you buy Hallmark cards.

The magic of Christmas has a price tag and it is $19.95.

A Simpler Time

I have been blessed with the opportunity of experiencing rural life as it was a hundred years ago. My grandparents were second generation settlers in rural north-central Ontario. They spent their adult lives farming, hunting, trapping and making whatever they needed. Use it up, fix it up, throw it out, do without.

In their old age, they moved to the edge of town into a house that the town council had built for my great-grandmother. She had been the first white woman to settle in the area. There was no electricity, no plumbing, and no water on the property. I spent my earliest years with them.

Crossroads

We are at a crossroads. The fate of our world depends on what we do now. The forty nation summit is a first and hopefully the first step in uniting our whole world in a common goal, that of saving our earth and saving ourselves in the process.

We can not go back to a simpler time but if we all co-operate, perhaps we can create a world where ninety percent of the world’s wealth is not in the hands of ten percent of its people, a world that does not wage war in the name of peace, and a safe world we can be proud to raise our children in.

Are we prepared to give up many of the luxuries we have here in the west and work with the emerging nations to improve their standard of living? We also need to make sure that everyone knows our opulent lifestyle can no longer be supported, and obtain the agreement of the third world countries that they can not aim for what we now have.

All must be equalized. We need to reduce our requirements at the same time others accept that they can not achieve what we are relinquishing for the good of the planet. If not, no one will have a comfortable life style. Technology has achieved a life of it’s own, evolving faster than our resources can keep up.

And then I watched the Suzuki Diaries and the smile came back.