Having been laid up for a while gave me the opportunity to observe and think, when I was not sleeping.
What came to mind very often was the amount of cancer of all kinds that is around us. It is not that strange my thoughts went that way because very recently I lost my brother and my wife lost her sister to cancer in the same hospital only two days apart.
The method of trying to heal was the same in both cases, radiation and chemo and when that failed, heavy drugs to ease the pain till the end. It seemed to me while there is large amount of money spent on cures and treatment, very little attention is given to prevention.
Oh yes, we have been warned of the dangers and use of plastics, p.c.b.’s, pesticides, micro waves, tobacco, food additives, nuclear power plants and a host of dangerous chemicals, but very little has been done to properly test or totally ban the production of these sources.
We have even managed to make the sunlight that used to be a healing and growing light, a source of cancer.
The process of ignoring the source and concentrate on a cure has now permeated our society. When too many people have died on curvy highways mainly because they drove too fast, we widen or take the sharp curves out of the road and then raise the speed limit and allow cars with up to seven hundred horse power to be built.
The problem is not so much the roads but the drivers that are over confident, careless or incompetent and the over powered cars that are available.
Along the coast line from California to Northern Washington right on or near a major fault line are at least eight nuclear power plants. Considering what happened in Japan, as far as I know there are still no plans to dismantle and move these plants to a safer place.
To replace these power plants with a safer way to produce power like windmills or wave action would be a better plan because the storage of nuclear waste seems to be an ongoing problem that future generations will have to deal with.
Another example is the present monetary system.
How can a monetary system, based on economic growth, maintain itself in a world with limited and dwindling resources?
The world population now stands at seven billion people of which two per cent own all the wealth.
The existing monetary system failed or was made to fail in the early 1900s and lasted till the First World War and failed again in the early 1930s until World War II.
Since then many small wars kept things going with threats and relatively small depressions until recently when banks and financial institutions had to be bailed out at the tax payers expense.
The people who caused this helped themselves to millions and millions of bonuses while the majority of the population took a licking.
At this point we are faced with another depression.
Again financial institutions are making healthy profits, large corporations are getting massive tax breaks, the middle class are seeing prices go up and up while income has been at a stand still for a long time.
The poor are getting poorer and many middle class people are getting deeper and deeper in debt. We have already seen an uprising in the state of Wisconsin and large protest rallies in California.
We have revolutions in many of the North African countries where the leaders are bathing in money and the population lives in poverty. In Europe countries like France, Italy, Greece and Spain work stoppages and massive protests seem to be the order of the day.
I sincerely hope it does not go that far here, but I do not think Canadian governments local and federal are heeding the warning signs, prevention
is not part of their thinking.
Bert de Vink’s a long-time Quesnel resident who wrote for the Cariboo Observer from the mid 80’s to the late 90’s. The Observer is pleased de Vink once again decided to put pen to paper.