Decisions, Decisions....Surrounded by Ambiguity!

As I sit down to type a new blog the TV News has announced that the Super Cyclone Phailin is bearing down on India. They say winds of 300 kilometers per hour are expected. Meantime, another Cyclone is hammering the Philippines, also with unbelievable force. My God, and some people still believe we humans have nothing to do with the huge changes happening to our weather patterns! At the same time it is reported that Steve Jensen's farm in North Dakota was soaked with 20,000 barrels of oil from a twenty-year old underground pipe line. He discovered the problem at harvest time!

Perhaps it is time to give some thought to the life-changing ambiguities facing our little planet.

Let's look at some examples:

Recently it was announced that a huge oil reserve has been discovered off the shores of Newfoundland. My first reaction was "Wonderful." Not only will it be good for jobs and the economy in that province, but I am sure there will be spin offs for the rest of the country as well.(At least they say that about the Tar Sands!) Then I think there is another side of such large oil deposits. As long as we find new oil, build new pipe lines to feed our oil hungry world, we are prolonging the damage we are doing to our sweet little planet and the less motivated we are to search for alternatives. What to do?

Driving home recently from New Brunswick to Ontario I was impressed by the quality of the highways. No longer two slow and dangerous lanes, but for the most part four reliable lanes, often divided by bush or rock cutouts. With the exception of the Montreal and Toronto areas, we practically had the road to ourselves. We made excellent time on the road, even though we took three days to do it! But, the more splendid highways we build, the more oil burning vehicles we put on our roads, the more pollution we jettison into our once clean air! And so - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly!

Last winter we visited the huge Loblaw store at 60 Carlton Street, Toronto, located in the old Maple Leaf Gardens. We went up on the escalator to look for bargains in the then new Joe Fresh outlet. Poking around I found a large hand-knit type wool sweater that zippered up the centre. I only had to pay $20 for it! What a bargain! It turned out to be a great bonus during some of the cold winter days in 2013. In April we learned that over one thousand workers died in Bangladesh where my sweater was made, when the factory in Ranna Plaza collapsed killing over a thousand workers, workers who were paid about $2 a day! Many of these workers were young women forced to leave their villages because of floods and land disputes to eek out a living in poverty. Am I justified is purchasing a sweater and arguing that working for a meager wage, in an unsafe building, is better than not working at all?

Most of us have surrounded ourselves with some of the new devices..phones, iPods, iPads, Electronic Readers, a GPS and so on. Keeping up to date and connected is fun and helps us stay on top of things. Every day hundreds of useful Apps appear on the market. But, there is danger out there as well, hackers breaking into your bank account, loss of privacy, threat to your personal security, risking the quality of your interpersonal relations or your reputation jeopardize.

Many of the same conundrums exist with over-population, access to clean drinking water, food production and supply, wars and terrorism that threaten the lives of thousands.

An ambiguity is a situation where something can be understood in more  than one way. It affects every decision we make. Our daily lives are full of ambiguities. It is becoming more and more evident that there may not be a right answer to anything and where only compromise can save us. To survive as individuals we need to be safe, to cloth our bodies, to heat our homes, to move about, and above all to have strong interpersonal relations.

So what is the answer? We can't stop using oil or wearing clothes! But we can find a way to put pressure on the oil companies and drudge factories, forcing them through existing legal systems to spend more on alternative energy research, on improving wages and hazardous working conditions and on modern transportation systems for our large cities. Who did you vote for in the last election? I am sure owners, stock holders and some politicians think differently! As costs continue to rise we need to find clothes we can afford. But we can put pressure on those who produce them to provide safer environments and a decent wage. Of course, we must be ready to pay a little more as well.

I don't pretend to know all the answers as to how we citizens of the world can bring about the changes our little planet desperately needs to continue to support human life. I do think the warning bells are ringing, heard in the environment or hidden in the minds of greedy people. I do know we all need to start thinking about where we are going before we freeze to death or die gulping down toxic air.

And that's Dick's View of the World this Week.