Mission accomplished!

I was going to use that other image — you know the one: George W. Bush on the deck of the aircraft carrier with the big "Mission Accomplished" sign behind him, announcing the…uh…middle? of the Iraq war. I really didn't want to be associated with that venture or that player.

No, my mission was actually accomplished. I set out to reactivate my blog writing after a too-long period of silence by challenging myself to produce thirty posts on the theme of Thirty Rants Hath November. And I have done it.

I expect I will be a little less prolific in the coming times, as I return to a pace a little more normal for me, but I am determined not to neglect this space, even in the midst of a number of difficult funding applications at work. The month of November was not my easiest and I still managed to do this, so I can do anything with enough determination behind me.

The other challenge I have coming up, lobbed my way by a friend, is to balance my curmudgeonly observations with a little more positivity. It won't be an exclusive series, and it won't follow the same blistering pace, but I will share the good stuff with you. I'm going to file these ones under the label "Life's Beauty and Magic," which already exists on the blog. It will have to be my ongoing mission to grow the size of that label so its font is bigger than that of the label "Rant."

And I know I can do that. Will you join me?

Thirty: Own It

It probably won't come as a surprise to any of my readers that I don't tend to agree with the views or the priorities of the current federal government. Sometimes I wonder if we even come from the same planet. I do recognize, however, that our political system works in such a way that they are in control of certain things in their jurisdiction and we who disagree can work to ensure that they play within the rules and that our own opinions are heard as loudly and clearly as possible, but at the end of the day, they get to make the decision.

We had the comfort of a minority government for a number of years, where dissent could serve to influence one or more of the players in such a way as to bring things around to a more tolerable result. That is gone. That is not the subject of my rant: as a respecter of the democratic process, I get it, even if I and many others want changes to the current system that might make things a little more fair in the end. (Proportional representations, change in the voting system to ensure the winner has majority support.)

No, this rant is about acting openly and above-board. It's about owning your decisions and stepping up to defend them.

If you were in Canada prior to the last election and not hiding under a rock, you will be familiar with the scandal involving International Development Minister Bev Oda and the funding application of Kairos, a faith-based international development agency. The group's funding had been through all the usual reviews and had been signed off on by two of the top public employees in the file. When it arrived at the minister's desk, however, she decided to veto it in a most clumsy fashion, inserting a handwritten "not" into the sentence regarding project approval, leaving the impression that this was the point of view of all three individuals who had signed the letter.

Now, she would have the power to veto the funding of a group, albeit within a recognized process of application review and recommendation. She might also, having determined within the rules that her department did not want to fund the group, had the letter re-written to reflect the negative decision. She didn't do that. She inserted her sloppy handwritten "not" and then tried to blame that on someone else, too.

Cowardly, and unfortunately not the only example of how this government, even in its majority status, hides behind rhetoric, half-truths and diversionary tactics instead of standing up and owning the decisions it makes.

Twenty-nine: Stamp This!

I'm going to drag this next one out of my distant work memories from a job long past. It does, however, remain valid today, even as 'snail' mail becomes less common in the face of electronic communications.

As the diagram above shows, there is a certain expectation that one might have of where everything on the outside of the envelope will be found. The stamp, you will notice, is up in the top right corner and it is well-aligned with the edges of the envelope.

My job experience came in the form of a horrifying experience I had, having delegated the sending of a number of letters to a colleague. I watch in utter disbelief as this person applied the stamps to the envelopes any which way: crooked, even upside down! I didn't say anything at the time — we had just competed for the same position and I, as the one who got it, was feeling a little odd about delegating things to this particular colleague. I quietly resolved just to send my own letters in order to avoid a repetition.

What's the big deal? I feel like the attention one pays to the elements on the outside of the envelope are a cue to the recipient as to the degree of care I am taking with our relationship. Slap-dash means I really don't care about you, and I would never send such a message to anyone. Being an uptight WASP, I wouldn't send that message to my worst enemy.

So if I should ever have the occasion to send you a letter, you will see that the stamp is as straight as my failing eyesight and trembling hands can make it. I only expect the same in return.

Twenty-eight: Look Both Ways

I live downtown. I work downtown. I expect that when I step out onto the sidewalk, there might be someone walking that same sidewalk in proximity, so I look out before inserting myself into the traffic.

People in cars or on bicycles do this all the time, although many of these might be faulted for only looking out for their own, to the detriment of the smaller traveller (sometimes the victim in this is a pedestrian). We don't tend to talk about pedestrian-pedestrian collisions quite so much, although I have dozens of near misses every month.

We all recognize the situation, but I'm going to illustrate with something that happened to me this past week. I was proceeding up the street after finishing work, on my way to do a little shopping just north of my office. A woman stepped out of a doorway and quickly assumed the speed of the pedestrian traffic and blended right in. The man who exited the same door after her, however, stopped dead in front of me to watch the woman walking away, never even glancing to determine if there was oncoming pedestrian traffic. I almost ran him over!

Luckily, I can put on a show almost as well as a professional soccer player (you know, the horrible falls suggesting that a terrible foul has befallen them), to I made a big braking and avoiding gesture that elicited a brief embarrassed apology from him. I suspect that it was as much guilt about being caught looking at the woman as it was about obstructing my path, but I'll take it.

Don't count on my continued agility, however. As I age, I am getting more likely to just trample you if you get in the way!

Twenty-seven: Yes, I Can Hear You Now

It's bad enough when you can see the phone in someone's hand. The loud 'private' conversations in public places (are we going back to the public transit again?).

This happened in my vicinity this past week as I waited for the bus. A woman also at the bus stop was having a heated argument with someone on the phone. All we could hear was her very rude side of the conversation; no one wanted to look her in the eyes either for fear of being similarly attacked or because we were embarrassed on her behalf for the rude public display.

When the phone is invisible, it can be downright unnerving. If you're on the wrong side of the person with a Bluetooth device or on any side of someone with one of those 'phones' that looks like they're just listening to a music device, their audible utterances seem like they might be directed to you. I, for one, have responded on many an occasion and gotten a glare back at me.

If you don't want me to listen to your conversation, maybe even insert myself unwittingly into it, then don't have your conversation in public.

Twenty-six: Deflection

There has been a fascinating difference between how the Occupy movement was received in Canada versus the US. The occupations themselves seem to have ended the same, although more violently in some parts of the US, but the beginning of the occupations provoked quite different reactions.

In the US, everyone to the left of Fox News seems to have heralded this understandable reaction to the excesses of the banking sector in particular and big business in general, along with their disproportionate influence on politics. It took the Democratic Party quite a long time to embrace them with somewhat open arms.

In Canada, a whole other approach. Deflection. The Governor of the Bank of Canada expressing his understanding of the frustration that people can feel, but this is really about supporting the US movement, because they have something real to be upset about. Things just aren't that bad in Canada. This approach later repeated by other high level individuals, cabinet ministers, etc.

Oh really? I will give you that our banks were not as deregulated as their US counterparts, and that we have a somewhat less porous social safety net, what with medicare and all. If our banks did not teeter on the brink during the worst of the banking crisis, it is because they have been gouging us for a long time, so they are very solvent and stable. Is political power more widely distributed here than there? Wealth? Not particularly, but pointing southward worked.

Canadians didn't (and don't — it isn't over) take the movement as seriously and were more dismissive, less upset by the expulsions from public spaces. We sit here in our smug superiority pointing south to the real disparities and not seeing those at home.

A clever strategy on the part of our own ruling class, but no more respectful of the majority than the bare shows of force in some of the evictions in the US.