Madame:
American smoking before the Surgeon General’s report could
perhaps be explained away by ignorance.
Smoking after the report had its legacy holdover, then dropped, and then
the drop stopped. Why, we could
ask? Perhaps it could be a lack of
confidence or even hope in a decent future?
Think of all the people under 40 that smoke: Do they, on average, seem
the success-bound, confident kind?
Perhaps there’s general malaise and low-confidence about a great future
that is playing a factor.
And yes, it’s probably the bike thing. Those other things don’t matter, do they? :)
Canada, which I surprisingly had never been to, was a good deal
more full of the unexpected than, well, I expected. I got approached by Greenpeace, by girls'
worldwide education (Plan), attended a native American (Canadian)
anti-fracking/RCMP brutality protest by accident, and got to see how much food
is available without all the crap Americans typically have loaded into for
them.
Vancouver had a library that became a Victoria’s Secret (am
assuming the library just moved, but it was odd to see the VS pink in the 2nd
story windows where the books used to be).
And speaking of the 2nd floor, so many restaurants were on
the 2nd floors of buildings.
Seemed to be a quite popular design layout.
Of course, the papers were filled with tales of the antics of
crazy American politics. But Canadian newspapers actually had reporters asking
deep insightful questions of their own politicians. Some top topics in the Canadian scene seemed
to be cyberbulling, railroad safety, mismatched skills of college graduates, and
free trade, topics almost welcome-tame in comparison to American ones, although
one additional topic, failure of Native American (Canadian) policy, was a
possible exception.
Still, I had a Canadian-born political scientist tell me that
their government is different from ours in economic servitude to the wealthy
only by degrees, and that their democracy is nearly just as constrained as ours,
just in different ways. She said, and the
papers gave some support to, that Canada is in the process of subjugating
itself to potentially ruinous trade arrangements, all to serve a global class
of wealthy people while caring hardly at all about sustainability or the
environment. Perhaps issues are more
alike in some respects than one would think.
Canada is also getting pot vending machines (for medical
marijuana), with safeguards to keep it under control. Guess we’ll find out how it works out! Speaking of medical, Canadians are overall
pretty proud of their universal health care.
The one complaint they generally have, and it doesn’t get too loud as I
perceive it, is the wait for elective procedures.
It was interesting to go to Canadian businesses and have them
use machines, like a fast machine that lets you input tip yourself—calculating percentage
for you if you want—and save a step (and some paper), that are just beginning
to appear in a few places in America.
One Canadian manager even said to me, “In a year or two, you down south
will have this too.”
So in addition to a whole lot else, we can’t even be on the
cutting edge anymore. Better we not be
so eager to flash the “number 1” sign, eh?
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