THE GOOD NEWS IS
Sunday, May 15, 2022
What is happening in everyone’s backyard?
War? Not in my backyard (NIMBY).
Peace? Not in my backyard.
Prosperity? In my backyard, maybe – keep your fingers crossed.
Too many have too much money, and too many people have too little – and the supply-chain grief we all hear about will settle down, I’m sure of that. When the Swiss-watch-like gears of the world came to a stop two years ago, any thinking person would expect the re-start to be bumpy. When that happened, we didn’t see opportunistic moves by Putin lurking in the wings as COVID-19 was our common enemy.
Now, for a while, Putin and Russia will be our common enemy. That’s somewhat certain, but will that last a few months or a few decades. When bullies make trouble, they draw nearly everyone into the fray to some degree. In our highly connected economies, there seems no way to just ignore the bully.
Weekend news offers little encouragement for optimism. There are acts of terror on battlefields and shoot-ups in shopping centers, weird court decisions and uncertainty …
And here, the weather is warming, yards are being raked, and campers are unfolding their tents.
Here, in Alberta, politics and the ‘Kenney-watch’ leadership review seem to be less of a concern than whether the Oilers and/or Flames will advance in the Stanley Cup playoffs.
Is the world going to get along more this year or less? Will the Russians win or lose their poker game – betting the world’s muscles will be held in check rather than risking nuclear weapon use? Or is it just economic poker playing, with China on the sidelines with fingers crossed that we will avoid another cold war, or worse, a recession. Poker chips, gamesmanship, lack of trust …
It’s not going to be lazy-hazy-crazy days of summer. We’ll have the weather for it!
Sure, climate change, agriculture, and COVID news will fill out the rest of the newspaper, but what’s happening in Russia/Ukraine will dominate the news and attention this summer. And there will be some shifts in our attention to a disaster or two around the world, and there will be celebrity news and surprises that will make Elon Musk’s buy/not buy Twitter fiasco look like the silly pursuit it is …
Most of the time, what is essential to most of us, are minor and local issues – and it would be nice to focus our attention on our own backyard, accompanied by a fervent desire for other countries to do the same. Those days seem lost and gone forever.
The days of ignoring what happens a thousand miles away or on the other side of the planet, wishing to not have them in my backyard, are over. The whole world is our backyard.
The good news is that media and social media keep it in our faces all the time.
The bad news is that media and social media keep it in our faces all the time.
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