On reflections

First I want to share with everyone a posting I put on the Globe and Mail website, a pair of cyclists were killed while riding on the Trans Canada out in Manitoba. Some people posted saying that cyclists should be more careful. (Given that these guys were on a country road, I don’t see how they can get more careful, car drivers… well just read what I wrote.)

Okay a little story that happens to be true from right in the heart of Hog
Town.

I commute to my professional office job in downtown, it's 7km, I use my bike. I could drive, I have a fancy over priced 1200kg slab of steel in the garage that costs a fortune every time it goes to the mechanic or gas station, but I choose to bike. Besides being a way to relieve stress, cheaper to use and park, better for me, better for the environment, better for road congestion, better for the over burdened city streets, its a more fun way to get to and from work each day.

Every day I take the Eastern Lake Shore trail past Don Roadway, there is a traffic light, right beside the light is a diagram, it shows a red light and under the light is a "no right turn" symbol. You don't need to speak English or French to understand this diagram, they are all over the city, they mean (for those of you who really do need this explained) No right on red. Today, as I approached that intersection two cars made a right on red. The problem is not cyclists, the problem is not car drivers
who do not pay attention. The problem is that car drivers do not pay attention
and do not even realise they are not paying attention. Being cocooned in one or
two tons of steel and using a slight downward pressure on the right foot to move
forward is too mind numbing.

If it were up to me, cars would be band from all roads. The lazy incompetence of most drivers boggles my mind and when you consider that I am asking for nothing more than what I pay for with the insane tax burden that I have to pick up, (roughly 4 times the national average) to say that I have less right to the road... that's insulting!

Today I am not going to write about skating, or riding or anything of the sort. (Except I guess this whole post sort of is about riding... but it is not really.) Some of you may find what I am about to write boring and I don’t give a damn. Sometimes it is worth changing topics.

The fact is we live in a very precarious time. In late 2000 I wrote the following for mathNEWS:

Our great inventiveness has brought us from the dark ages and the bubonic plague
to our hyper connected dot-com, super frantic, 24x7x365 World where the
difference between day and night is a program called clock running on our
terminals.

So here we stand on the edge of a new millennium and the question
is, what will be the big deal? My guess: Education. For about a thousand years
we have had Universities, and as they slowly become the centre of learning, not
only for philosophical and theoretical matters but also applied and practical
knowledge we must ask ourselves, to what end?

I find the optimism of my writing to be well frankly less optimistic than I remember. But I must admit, in the pre 9/11 World of December 2000 things seemed a great deal less complicated. Everything seems so very much more ugly now, the Prime Minister of Canada sucks (what else is new?), the Prime Minister of England is appalling (makes me pine for Tony Blair), the President of the United States is beyond treasonous (a sarcastic comment about the Bush II administration seems painfully small given the magnitude of their crimes). The democracies of the World cannot seem to figure out what it means to be a democracy. A frightfully large number of American’s in the Blogosphere seem so enamored with their own country that they have yet to figure out that there are major systemic flaws in the system that could spell the demise of the so called ‘shining city on a hill’.

Cheap oil has run out and we have no substitute, this end of cheap oil has brought about a new period of expensive food and surely expensive commodities. Meanwhile the atmospheric carbon dioxide level continues to rise while the only thing most politicians can do, besides agree that there is a problem, is to use green house gases as yet another reason to attack the opposition.

We, the human race, are running head long into a brick wall and the best part is, we see it coming, yet instead of slowing down or changing directions the only thing we seem able to do is run faster! We know that we are killing our planet, nuclear waste, toxins, green house gases, yet we just cannot seem to stop. What really depresses me, people see the ability to drive a behemoth SUV as a right, a freedom even (that freedom is actually a direct quotation from a syndicated columnist I could not get permission to quote at length from). I want to know, when did having a monster tank go from being ludicrous to a freedom? How is it that Tom Jefferson and all those guys made do without that freedom yet still managed to craft the declaration of independence, the US Constitution?

We are not a nation addicted to oil, we are a race addicted to our automobiles and the addiction is killing us.