Dear diary

MARCH 17, 2012

Here I am, 4,700 km from home and in spite of my almost chronic gripe-fest about email, Facebook and Twitter, it is precisely because of social media I read the news from the County. In particular, the relaxing of the death grip on our revered cultural institutions including our museums, our libraries and our archives. It isn’t great news but it is favourable and I believe it was because of the information and discussions held in our tight-knit social media forum that our community was aware of the issue and alerted to the need to show our support at the municipal level.

Dearest Diary, with the help of social media, it really has become a “small world, after all” and we didn’t have to drive to sunny California or to Florida to be all Disneyed about it. I figure if someone as hard-bitten as I am about the downside of social media can see the upside of this type of information dissemination, then there is hope for the holdouts. Whodda thunk it?

By the way, it’s St. Patrick’s Day in a province where the Irish Canadians are outnumbered by the Asian Canadians, yet I’ve never seen so much Blarney in my life. Everyone at the St. Patrick’s Day Run in Stanley Park wore something green. According to a couple of runners, new to Canada, they didn’t know who St. Patrick was, but were thrilled to be part of the crazy, hilly fun, and “the green beer at the end of the run didn’t hurt, either.” According to the organizers, most of the runners signed up online. Faith and Begorrah.

MARCH 18, 2012

I’ve been here, in wet Vancouver, since Wednesday morning and am just catching up on my “radical” West Coast news. Somehow everything in the County seems relatively tame compared to the wacky things happening in Lotus Land. The “next best” idea, here, is to pack up all of the under/unemployed who are able bodied and ship them to the northern part of the province to work. Seriously. Where are we on this timeline? I’ve forgotten. Is this 2012 or 1930? And, what was I saying about this being a small world, after all? It’s looking like a small-minded world out here. Really, how much do you suppose this program is going to cost the taxpaying public and which mega-multinational-billion-dollar corporations stand to rake in the benefits from another, ill-conceived government project? Yet, Dear Diary, I fear this is what will happen and worse, the province of Ontario might stand back, watch this crap roll out and promptly adopt it, or something similar, as their own. The haves preying on the under and unemployed who are desperate to make ends meet. It’s a program fraught with built-in abuse that will break up families to feed the mega-corporations and give the provincial government and likely the feds something to preen about. In the end, Dear Diary, we’ll all pay the piper for this one. Let’s hope the powers-that-be in the province of Ontario aren’t social media savvy. Relief camps are so 1930s.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca