Seasons

It's November and rains are only to be expected when you live next to the Pacific Ocean. It's not that Pacific, actually, so much of the world's weather seeming to originate in its vastness. The daily weather report looks to the Pacific to see what's coming to our shore next Often you just have to find a high point and look out to the west to get a good idea of what tomorrow will be like. But the masses of cloud that billow to the west often take a detour around us, going north or south. That seems to have happened today. We were enveloped in clouds yesterday, but today the clouds have parted. There are clouds to the north, clouds to the south, east and west, but blue skies open a pathway for the sun so Victorians can enjoy their walks along the beach.

It's in the winter that our grass turns green. During the dry days of summer our rocky soil loses it's moisture rapidly and our lawns turn brown. Watering restrictions come into effect out of concern for our water supply. Or so they say. But I 'spect an element of anti-human ideology creeps into it. Eek, people like green lawns! We can't have that.

The seasons come and go and I just get older. It's not fair.

History has its seasons, too. The elections in the US turned out pretty well for us conservative types. The Pelosi winter didn't last long. Still, I was vaguely disappointed. That could be because California, my favourite state, hasn't shared in the return to sanity that most of the rest of the country is enjoying, California, once a model of how to attain prosperity and high living standards, now has one of the highest unemployment rates of any state. The unions are sucking the lifeblood out of California with pension plans that will be impossible for the state to make good. We're sort of a junior California in BC. The governing party started out well and for the most part has kept us solvent which encourages investors to bring their money here. That's how prosperity happens. Without it everybody goes broke and there's no money for the pensions. As a pensioner myself I am highly interested in seeing the economy produce enough to support me. Alas, the Liberals, though vastly more competent than the silly NDP socialists, have been losing sight of what they were elected to do which is leaving the door unlocked for an NDP return. I don't know why politicians, when they are voted in on conservative platforms, habitually drift to the left. Alas, we don't even have a Conservative party in BC, never mind a Tea Party.

That perpetual drift to the left shows that it isn't enough to merely cut off the tops of the big government dandelions. You have to dig out the roots or they just grow back. The idea that big government can be the source of a people's well-being is so thoroughly disproven by history it's hard for me to understand how so many still believe in it. What is the answer? Obviously it's to be found in the workings of our major institutions, especially where they influence the thinking of upcoming generations.

We have a fairly large educational establishment in Victoria. We have the University of Victoria, Camosun College, and a number of private schools that cater to foreign students. St. Michaels used to be a boy's school but some years ago the feminist hurricane came by and decreed that there could be no more boy's schools so now there are girls at St Mikes. Curiously, girl's schools were unaffected. Boys schools had to let girls in but girls schools didn't have to let boys in. St. Margaret's is still an all girl school. I often wonder why, but it does put me in mind of a comic book published when I was at the comic book stage of my reading. Little Lulu was the title. One of the recurring plot lines had to do with the boys of the neighbourhood who had a club with a sign tacked up, "no girls allowed!" Little Lulu, naturally, was always plotting to find out what was going on with those nasty boys. I think that's really all there is to that facet of feminism. Boys off by themselves having fun. Can't have that. The trouble is, once girls are allowed into boys' spaces then boys are no longer comfortable doing the things they like to do that don't involve girls. In order to get by under the new dispensation boys no longer had places where they could go to learn how to be men.

The result has been an emasculated society that now seems unwilling to defend itself against enemies who want to destroy it. The feminist wave wasn't the cause of a societal revolution so much as one of the consequences of a long term, multigenerational evolution. These things have their seasons, too.