My reactions to Fort McMurray

[GliderGuider]

I'm gradually working through the shock of the event.

While I don't celebrate the loss and devastation caused by the Fort McMurray wildfire (what compassionate person could possibly celebrate such a thing?) I will cop to some very mixed emotions.

Mostly I see the Fort McMurray blaze as a powerful symbol for the most urgent existential struggle on the face of the Earth: the fight to retain some space for living beings on this planet in the face of universal human rapaciousness and overgrowth. It's as symbolic as the picture of the polar bear standing on a tiny chunk of ice floe, but a whole lot closer to home.

But the catastrophe also stirs up my anti-civ sentiments. Part of me feels a dark kinship with Ted Kaczynski, and takes a grim morsel of pleasure from seeing those who live by the sword of technology reap the rewards of their thoughtless arrogance. I try to keep those feelings in check most of the time, because they come from an inner place I do not admire - it's my Shadow speaking.

Finally, I'm old enough to have lived through Pierre Trudeau's National Energy Program, and the hateful backlash it spawned in Alberta. I remember Ralph Klein, who was the mayor of Calgary at the time (and later became the Premier of Alberta), saying on national radio, "Let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark." That line has left a lingering bitterness on the back of my tongue. If that bitterness occasionally invades my words and slips out of my mouth, I'm inclined to forgive myself...

[MisterP]

1. that's always how it goes with subsidized communities: either they're boom-and-bust economies

who're constantly flattered that they're carrying the coastal urbanites on their shoulders (AB, TX, CA's Central Valley): during boomtimes they want to keep all the money, and during the bust they say the money they're getting isn't handouts because they've never been moochers

or they forget that they're net losses and think that they're so rich that they shouldn't even have to pay taxes (viz. suburbia, Quebec)

[pscot]

2. Is that the same guy who's prescription for mad cow disease

was 'shoot, shovel and shut up'?

[GliderGuider]

3. Yep, same guy. Good memory! nt

[pscot]

4. He had a way with words

I'm actually quite angry and disturbed by the bland, official indifference to the causes of the disaster.

[hatrack]

5. I was listening to Nice Polite Republicans this afternoon, and was shocked, SHOCKED . . .

The actually mentioned that fact that a weirdly warm winter limited snowfall, that there had been hardly any rain this spring, and that temperatures were 30-40F above normal.

It's almost as they they nearly said "climate" but managed to bit it back at the last moment.