Hot Fun in the Summertime

If you’ve seen a newspaper or TV or Radio Newscast in the past few days, the headlines have been brutal. All the “carnage” in the world, as stated by the Toronto Sun recently, is enough to throw your hands up in frustration. We’ve got aggressive moves by the Israeli army into Lebanon and Gaza, Hezbollah firing rockets into train stations; more fighting in Kashmir, Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile the North Koreans are trying to prove a military point with missile testing. Since none of these moves is changing anything except the body count and the cost of doing business in these respective regions, when is it all going to end?

Plato once said, “the price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men”. So it seems to me that we, the people, have a choice. We can either go on summer vacation or start demanding more from our elected officials. Are we going to stand up and say enough already? Are we going to kick the stupid people out of office and get on with a more progressive, peaceful and equitable society with better relations around the world?

How frustrating it must be for the Mexicans who came out in droves to vote for their progressive candidate, only to be left off the voters list. Note the struggle by Palestinians living on the border with Lebanon, waking up to repeated bombing, the likes of which they haven’t heard in years. Meanwhile, in the exotic region known as Kashmir, the fighting heats up faster than the thermometer in a war that is a virtual stalemate.

Maybe it’s the heat and the humidity that causes all of us to lose the power of the rational mind. I think it was Pierre Trudeau who felt that we needed "reason over passion," three words that sound great together but lead to an occasional hiccup when looking at the politics of the world in the 21st Century.

Perhaps I need a summer vacation.

Maybe everybody does.

That’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.