Essays in Idleness

I am appalled to see Easter eggs on sale in Holy Week, and often, long before. I make the same complaint about hot cross buns, which seem to have jumped all our supply chain hurdles. Had no one the will to persist through Lenten abstinence and fast? Or horror, perhaps they’ve ceased to be Christian. We live in an ever more barbaric society, even while our physical prospects are improving.

From my readings in the Wall Street Journal, “globalism” has taken a few hits lately, and with any luck, should soon fade from the background of media clichés. Of course, the hits I’ve been monitoring are relatively minor. They are sword, famine, beasts, and pestilence; it would be tedious to document the route of each horseman. But worse can be easily anticipated, when we factor in a catastrophically aging population, and the violent gerontological behaviour of such as Russia and China.

It is an ill wind that blows no one any favours, however, and supposing that we outlast any attempts at armed invasion by more envious powers, Canada is well-placed. All we need do is to “phase out” our obnoxious environmentalist constituency, which by now we should be willing to perform as an end in itself.

I am thinking of our national reserves in, for instance, potash, and nickel. Sotto voce, let me add natural gas and coal, and our splendid variety of titanium and other rare metal ores. We are perfectly located to become the New Russia, once the Old Russia has itself been phased away. If gentle reader, too, consults the Wall Street Journal, and can skip through all the liberal posturing in its pointless feature stories, I think he will be rendered giddy.

Alas, this applies only to Canadians (and perhaps Australians); most other nations had the misfortune to be founded closer to Russia, or China.  Most, also, did not have the luck to seize, or inherit, some several billion acres of mostly unoccupied territory, under which the usual wild surplus of resources were buried. This, too, is the purest good fortune, when considering our far northern climate — for anything not astutely buried will surely perish (unless it is frozen carefully). Even so, with a small population, it is easy enough to grow what we need, and a few things more for sale to the famished (although mangoes we may always have to import).

All over the world, the potential for agriculture is actually high, no matter the supply of fertilizers and transport. This is because human labour can replace technology, and always will, except where the people are lazy or sluggish. For hunger, I like to opine, is the great motivator to oeconomic activity.

But what of the aging nations? With my own first taste of the effects of catastrophic aging, my desire to get out into the fields, or even visit the groceteria, has become more modest. And needless to say, where the average age is now above fifty, they cannot be seriously expecting a baby boom. This is terribly sad.