Not quite Adam Smith’s invisible hand, is it.

It’s been a stressful time, making decisions involving a substantial amount of money on behalf of a lot of people, especially with one of our committee gone rogue, but we’re doing it, our little pod of volunteers. Maybe we’ve even done it. Certainly, at this point I expect the roofers to just do the job, get paid, and maybe we’ll see them next year, maybe we won’t, because they’ll have to do good work to make up for that little miscalculation back there.

Would that it were so in politics, eh, and all our volunteer voters would pay some attention to this time of taxation without representation and adjust their votes accordingly.

What is it this government is doing that so many Canadians are okay with when I’m not okay with any of it? I mean, I really am a conservative when it comes to money, and now that I’m responsible for making decisions affecting essential infrastructure in urgent need of repair on behalf of a whole community, I’m just shocked by the failure of our very well paid and benefited politicians to look after the country.

It’s unconscionable, what the government is getting away with NOT doing, let alone what it is.

It was so disheartening, too, to watch the Conservatives change the channel so easily on their corruption and incompetence with more corruption and incompetence, and straight out of the unelected PMO again, too, wasn’t it.

I seriously wanted to kick some NDP ass for falling for it so stupidly. Who cares about Justin Trudeau’s appearance fees? He’s currently the leader of the third party and if he’s so charismatic that he can get the Liberal Party from where it is now into the Prime Minister’s Office, so be it. We’ve done worse as a country. Meanwhile, everybody else is just coming across as jealous and petty and fiddling while Rome burns.

We’ve gone from being a country with a government that runs the oil and gas industry to a country with a government that is run by it. And when Stephen Harper speaks on the world stage, you can practically see the strings being pulled. Instead of being proud, I’m worried that he actually might have some influence over how it’s going to be elsewhere in the world.

Come home. Answer to the problems you’ve created here in Canada, please, I want to shout at him when he shows up on the nightly news addressing us from foreign soil.

Or even worse, addressing the people who inhabit the foreign soil he’s visiting. My gord but that makes me squirm with embarrassment.

Hard to ignore the terrible and inhumane decisions with regard to Syrian refugees being made by Jason Kenney at the moment. He strikes me as the last person who should be in charge of immigration, quite frankly, so I guess it makes sense in Harper Canada that he is.  The Conservative fixation on terrorism circa the turn of the new millennium and their prejudicial views of Arabs and Jews should have no place in the Canada of today and yet they do.

It isn’t rational, so how can there even be rational self-interest at play here?

It should be criminal for a country like ours not to do what it can to help people in distress elsewhere in the world.

Last night The National had a piece on an Alberta rancher still doing the cattle drive. He choked up a few times, discussing the despoiling of Alberta’s landscape by the oil and gas industry. The other day I watched a rant by David Letterman about fracking in his country. But it’s as if our governments don’t function as governments anymore, they’re just there to do the bidding of the oil and gas industry.

I admit to being partisan. I want government to be government, to look out for my interests as a citizen, to stand up for my rights, to regulate to protect our collective well-being.

You know, to govern.

I thought that was why I’ve been paying taxes all these many years. Apparently, I was wrong. I pay taxes so that Stephen Harper can settle an imaginary score with a long dead Liberal Prime Minister via his son, whose politics really seem to be very much the same as his own – just minus the irrational V is for Vendetta.

I am good at supporting my kids without judgement. I’ll give myself that, although it causes me a great deal of anxiety because my only reason for supporting my kids without judgement is because I have no idea what else to do and, trust me, none of the parenting experts suggest supporting your kids without judgement.

Sigh, I know, I know, there’s a reason they don’t. Lalalalalalalala, I can’t hear you. Lalalalalalalala.

But I just watched David Letterman do a rant about fracking (with back-up from Canada’s own Paul Allen Wood Shaffer) that takes some of the pressure off. Not that I’ve been doing anything about fracking except being anxious about it, but it’s nice to know that David Letterman is anxious about it, too.

What’s the point of having government if it’s going to collude with the sorts of stupidly evil men and women who wantonly pollute our drinking water, then lie about it and/or sue farmers who complain about being able to light their well water on fire, so that they can make a financial killing on the market and go on the Lang/O’Leary Exchange to bark about less government regulation being good for the economy.

There is no such thing as an invisible hand. Adam Smith was crazy and saw things that simply are not there.

Business really is a mug’s game these days, though, isn’t it. Our goal, my Beau’s and mine, is to do as little as possible of it before we die. For instance, now that I’ve noticed Direct Energy shows up on our Enbridge bill, because we apparently rent a water heater from it, I plan to find out how I can get at least one of the nasty cockburgers off it so I only feel half as sick every time we get an energy bill in the mail.

Yes. I said mail.

As I’ve also blogged before, I’m president of our housing committee, a volunteer position, in a community that is not particularly well-heeled and formerly owned by one of Ottawa’s handful of odious rental companies.

Yes. I said odious.

When the rentals were converted to freehold townhomes, a few slapdash cosmetic repairs were done while the roofs were left to become in need of urgent repair sort of now-ish.

Anyway, we’re in the middle of that project, replacing roofs, but due to the hail storm of last summer, more roofs need replacing than the list for which we’d budgeted and contracted for this summer. We found this out via a couple of leaks and a re-assessment of a previous assessment by the company that won the bid by coming in lowest.

It also replaced roofs last year.

Well, lo and behold, doing more roofs will suddenly cost us more money. Indeed, according to at least one Ottawa roofing company, they do more for more, but not more for the same, or, gord forbid, more for less. I mean, we’re talking about a contract and a half, here, for which the half is going to cost substantially more than the whole.

In the meantime, we’ve been warned by our property management company, which we fired recently because, well, we never actually chose it, and it doesn’t even really do properties like us, that making a claim on the couple of roof leaks will raise our insurance rates for next year.

(See, our property management company isn’t really “ours”. The company we originally had was inherited when the conversion took place, then swallowed up by another company so ill-suited to our particular development that we went from almost no service to almost less than no service if we follow the natural laws of physics. After giving notice, of course, we went from almost less than no service to almost less than no service not delivered with a passive aggressive attitude.)

Did I mention that we’re a committee of volunteers, as in, not being paid for any of this?

Oh, and that a rogue member of our committee keeps threatening to sue everybody?

Anyway, I think we should let the roofing company go ahead as scheduled with the original contract (because you can be sure the cockburgers would sue for breach of contract otherwise) but allow it to do the rest of the roofs only if it modifies its modified quote. I mean, why the hell would we reward such a shitty tactic (did I mention this company has had our very reliable business before?) with more of our business?

Seriously, is the Conservative Party training private business operators now in the art of screwing over the public?

I know, I know, don’t reward it at all, give the extra roofs to another roofing company.

Did I mention that we’re a committee of volunteers, as in, not being paid for any of this?

Oh, and that a rogue member of our committee keeps threatening to sue everybody?

Furthermore, with regard to our insurance company, well, prepare to be dumped, ye shifty grifters. (And, of course, the company they actually subcontract to, as well, because, just like our roofing company, the company we think we’ve contracted to doesn’t actually do any of the work for which it’s been hired.)

Why the hell do we pay insurance at all if making a claim will mean our rates rise? I mean, how absurd has it become that people are hesitant to make insurance claims because it will cost us more money than not in the long term?!

Anyway, I hope David Letterman felt better after his rant. I’m not sure if I do or if I just made myself more anxious laying all that stupid down. But I do appreciate your reading this, NSA/CSEC/haters, and, of course, you, dear Sooey Says reader(s). So feel free to leave any suggestions you may have in the box.

Update: Just contacted by said property management company re roofing company: So sad, our bad – same price for more roofs…

To be continued.

But today, someone posted this on my Facebook page:

If you aren’t on a government watchlist by now, you should be ashamed of yourself.

I like it. Short, to the point, and a reminder that fighting the good fight isn’t going to make you popular with governing politicians.

And who, other than Sun Media, wants to be popular with governing politicians?

Because following what’s happening in Turkey right now reminds me of what happened when the Harper government hosted the G8/G20 in Toronto and Muskoka. No wait, Huntsville. Muskoka was where all that money was misappropriated to by its elected representative and President of Treasury Board, Tony Clement.

Crazy, isn’t it, that he got away with it, but he did, he did get away with it. I think he’s even rubbing our noses in it with those gangster suits he wears when he goes on CBC to update us on his latest war with the public service, don’t you?

Good grief, I’m surprised anyone can stomach working for his government at this point. Sick leave should be through the roof.

Besides, why does an anti-government government give a rat’s ass if public servants show up to work or not?

But I’m still applying for jobs at Treasury Board, because, fuck Tony Clement, that’s why. This is my country, too, dammit! Make that Big Red X as big and as red as you want to, Tony Clement, I will outlast you even if I’m down to stealing from my neighbour’s garden to do it.

There’s a Sun Media shill who goes by the understated name of “Mercedes” who spun a tale about Tom Mulcair asking “Don’t you know who I am?” of a security guard supposedly on his first day, when said terrorist-catcher didn’t and sicced the coppers on him instead, after Mulcair waved himself through security.

Yeah, yeah, Tom Mulcair, too big for his britches. I wonder how often bike-riding Jack Layton was strip searched by the partisan heavies hired to make sure nobody gets close to the scum sucking bottom feeders in the Conservative Party who are currently lurching from one fraud scandal to the next.

Every day?

I wonder, too, how often Stephen Harper’s $20,000,000 security entourage is waved through security.

Every day?

It all brings to mind when former premier Mike Harris, in pre-9/11 days even, turned Queen’s Park into a fortress because he figured everyone else was as much of a brainless thug as he is.

Wrong, Mike – it really was just you. And fuck you very much once again for the door-to-door energy company fraudsters.

Honestly, even NDPers don’t confuse Tom Mulcair with Jack Layton. Cripes, with Tom Mulcair, we might actually form the government in 2015.

To be fair, my partisan hackles still rise on occasion, too, and I suppose “Mercedes” isn’t paid by Sun Media to be anything other than a shill who spins tales, but it is stupid, isn’t it, calling out poor old Tom Mulcair, who was no doubt having a bit of fun, when the government “Mercedes” more or less shills for is so bad for our collective finances.

Not to mention our collective health and well-being. Of course, Conservative don’t much care about the collective, do they. Odd that they cheat so hard to win at being the government then, eh?

Seriously, if Conservatives aren’t blathering on about the lack of profiling, they’re blathering on about how anybody and everybody is a potential terrorist.

Cripes, don’t accept a bribe and Conservatives are all over the implications of that, aren’t they.

No, what Conservatives want, everywhere in the world, apparently, including Canada, is a police state. And they want the public to pay for it.

There’s been another huge pipeline spill in Alberta. I guess the plan is that when the landscape is completely despoiled in Alberta all the Canadians who’ve moved out west to work the tarsands will move back east and anybody who owns property here will be in the money.

Perhaps that’s why the government of Alberta isn’t bothering to invest in infrastructure.

But again, the entire agenda of the Conservative Party revolves around using public money for private investments, not public investments. And for some bizarre reason I absolutely do not understand, seemingly intelligent people continue to support it. We even have an entire network, Sun Media, devoted to shilling for it.

My Conservative friend doesn’t believe there’s a tape of Rob Ford smoking crack. He really doesn’t. He thinks the Toronto Star is out to get Rob Ford because it’s a liberal/left newspaper and that Rob Ford, even if he was filmed smoking crack with a bunch of murdered and arrested gangsters – no one has seen it and no one has it because it doesn’t exist.

I guess it’s sort of how Pierre Poilievre could argue now that there’s not a secret fund in the Prime Minister’s office for use as a payoff/slush money/honey pot because it’s not secret on account of the Prime Minister’s office uses money it has on hand for certain expenses that can’t be paid for with the public’s money because it would look bad bad bad if it got caught doing so.

My gawd but Doug Ford is a noxious bore, isn’t he? How contrary do you have to be, how disillusioned, how negative, to vote for Doug Ford? But I guess to some people voting for Doug Ford is their way of telling people like me that I’m wrong, that it doesn’t matter who we elect to public office, that a garden variety thug is as good as an Olivia Chow, just to pull a random political name out of the air, that government is bad bad bad and no number of politicians will ever make it good good good.

As far as I’m concerned, though, we’ve reached the end of argument because I do have to admit that as much as he’s better than the other guy, Obama’s a bust, isn’t he. Either it matters that all our private communications are being accessed and reviewed by the National Security Agency in the United States and the Communications Security Establishment in Canada, or it doesn’t. Either way, it can’t be good that we’re all caught in a net meant to catch enemies of the state when the state itself seems to be an enemy of the state, can it?

Ironic, with the internet ever-expanding, that we have reached the end of argument already.

Thank gawd for George Takei having the wherewithal to pay for great jokes!

We’re ALL so used to thinking women need to be made-up and coiffed to look like how women are supposed to look according to the fashion industry and tv and movies that it isn’t fair to single out Conservative MPs for expensing lipstick and hair products worn on the campaign trail.

But I’ll paraphrase my Conservative webmaster’s joke to further make my point that it truly is ridiculous (women having to look a certain way to get elected is ridiculous, not my point) that everyone agrees women are too smelly and ugly in our natural state to compete fairly with men and so must be allowed to expense our enhancements, virtually all of which are poisonous to our collective environment and our personal health in one way or another.

You go, grrls…

Then she said, “I’m looking forward to death.”

It seemed an unimaginable thought then, when I was a party girl, now not so much.

I live in a development where we all need new roofs at the same time but our fees are low because it’s not a well-heeled development. Ergo, we have a roof replacement order that goes from bad to worse over the next couple of years, but it’s interesting how some people really just don’t give a shit about other people, even when it involves a shared real estate investment, and want theirs done now, first, screw everybody else.

The worst offender is a retired union honcho, too. He’s so convinced that everyone who’s anyone is out to get him, that it’s a dog eat dog world, that if you don’t reach out and grab your slice of the pie, screw waiting your turn, there will only be crumbs left.

What’s terrible is that I think I might recognize myself in him.

I have the mitigating factor of a touch of Blanche DuBois (“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers” – family being somewhat hit and miss) – and I’m definitely glass half full, not half empty, but still…

I wonder if his father died when he was young so that there was no wolf in the house to tell the wolf at the door to get bent.

I have fairy tale like ideas of what fathers are like but a lot of my insight comes from my friend B. whose father used to pee on all four corners of their property whenever they’d move, which was often, because her father was the type of guy who peed on all four corners of their property whenever they’d move.

You know, to mark it.

The thing is, I have to work with this guy (on our volunteer housing committee) with whom I seem to share some very offputting personality traits, okay, flaws, and he gets me really worked up.

Really worked up. And I don’t need working up, I need calming down.

For instance, after the last meeting he had me convinced that 1) we were all gonna blow in a giant gas explosion, and 2) the former landlord had slipped a clause into the deal to sell off his property that would allow him to seize it back after we repair all the roofs he left to rot and resurface our lopsided parking lots.

Meanwhile, the other people on the committee make significant eye contact with me, including winking, and I’m talking big cartoon winking (which makes me nervous because I’m afraid he’ll see them do it and then he’ll think we’re out to get him, too) but I still have to wait until they’re gone so I can blurt out all my fears to my Beau, who always gets to play the sane partner, it seems.

On the other hand, when this guy gets aggressively me first because “my roof is worse than everybody else’s and I want it done first or I’m really gonna go nuts and sue everybody I touch today” (the roof thing is literal, but also a metaphor) – it kind of brings out the magnanimous in me and I realize he actually does need to come first because, like I just said in brackets, the roof thing is literal – for all of us – but it’s also a metaphor – for him.

As I blogged before, I recently read a book called “The Monkey Mind” (a memoir of anxiety) by Daniel Smith, and there’s a connection he makes between anxiety and homesickness (the paralyzing disorienting kind) that resonated with me. When I left my marriage I moved out of the house I’d been a homemaker in and it took until now for me to get over my homesickness. That’s ten years of missing something, someone, everything, everyone.

When I was a kid I had terrible homesickness and I seem to recall being mocked for it by my siblings but I may just have been mocked for my frantic at the door last minute checking with my mother every time she went out – and she went out a lot – that she would return and when she did that I could sleep in her bed if I had bad dreams.

I eventually shortened the routine at the door to, “If I?!”, to which she’d say, “Yes, yes, I told you yes. Now get out of the way of the door.”

And when I did I’d be greeted by the mocking “If I?!” from my siblings (older, not younger, my younger sister didn’t suffer from homesickness). I believe my brother actually made fun of me as recently as a decade or so ago. So I delivered unto him a withering stare of such moral and womanly superiority that his innards contracted and his wife admonished him, “Schooey!” and he apologized.

But that’s just it, isn’t it, the struggle to leave the anxious and homesick child behind to become a real live adult. Pinocchio, it’s the story of Pinocchio really, for people like me, because I have kids and I can see that at least one of them always had something of the real live adult about her. Her dad and I even used to call her Jr Mom.

Although, now I think about it, we may have called her that because she was anxious about our parenting of her siblings and so was stepping in to do it right. Certainly she now keeps an autonomous life, penciling us in among various pop cultural pursuits as a bit of a good daughter duty, a behaviour I’ve adopted in dealing with my own mother of late.

Face it, boomers on down, we’re full of illusions that we’re somehow different than all humans who came before us.

Although, it’s possible our kids might be. Certainly they’re more precious.

Right? That’s what’s really going on here, isn’t it. It’s not so much that we’re entitled, but holy crap, you’d better believe that our kids are, right?

In a perverse way, too, this relative stranger, who does cause me spasms of heart thumping anxiety, is a bit of a crazy house mirror and I catch distorted glimpses of myself and then I remember, “No. Be an adult. Wait your turn.”

Or really, as my friend B., a political philosophy aficionado would say, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Because if you put aside Marxism, i.e the economic argument inherent in that quote, and just take it as a social maxim, it really would do a lot to help us all just calm the fuck down and try to get along.

Oh dear, I can hear my Conservative friend mocking me now, “Can’t we all just get along?!”

Ta ta for now, Sooey Says reader(s) – I’m off to practice my withering stare.

If Rob Ford can smoke crack and still be Mayor of Toronto, surely I can not smoke crack and blather out one little blob of blurbs while unemployed in Ottawa.

Ugh. Why do I set the bar so damnably high, dear Sooey Says readers/spooks? Strike that. I hereby do not commit to not smoking crack.

But I have to say on behalf of His Worship that he really knows how to do up a world class scandal, eh? And unlike all those Progressives (i.e. shoppers who criticize the shopping habits of others) I think the Fords should be lauded for doing more to de-stigmatize crack use than Dave Chappelle did with his character of Tyrone Biggums.

And Ottawa’s former mayor, Larry O’Brien, who spent much of his mandate on trial for bribery, was best known for referring to homeless crack addicts as “pigeons”. As in, don’t feed them and they’ll go away.

Well, now they have a place to go, don’t they – Etobicoke.

Thank you, Ford family.

Meanwhile, it occurs to me that as a former federal public servant laid off by the Harper government I can shed some light on emails and cancellations of accounts and whatnot for anyone who’s following the deleted email scandal afflicting the Liberal government of Ontario.

It’s normal to delete your email accounts upon departure – because – any emails pertinent to the decision-making process (ugh, government-speak, sorry) should be stored on a shared drive. That’s how it works for the lower orders, anyway, although I do recall working for a director general who took to using yellow sticky notes instead of email because she thought it would protect her? us? from access to information requests from the media.

It’s true. My manager came to me one day (low level drone that I was) and said, “Could you put your communication on a yellow sticky instead of in an email next time, please? We’re supposed to use yellow stickies to communicate back and forth.”

“Uh… gee… that seems weird… why?”

“The DG is worried about access to information requests.”

“Uh… gee… that seems weird… why?”

“Well, she is.”

“Okay, well, I’m not, so, no. I’m not going to use yellow stickies instead of email to communicate and you can tell the DG that if you want, but maybe tell her instead that she shouldn’t be doing it either.”

I kid you not, sister and brother taxpayers. I believe we were working on a transparency protocol (ugh, sorry again, eh) at the time, too.

But having been laid off by the Harper government from the federal public service, I can tell you, yes, we do delete our email accounts upon departure. That’s because email shouldn’t house pertinent information that isn’t also put on a shared drive as a document in support of how a decision was reached.

And ultimately, the Minister is responsible for the decision. Or, at least, s/he should be since that’s what all those memos are for, memos that include mandatory options so the Minister can make an informed political decision if it looks like making an informed decision will piss off an important constituency.

Funny how we’re never an important constituency, but there you go, dear Sooey Says reader(s).

Not there appears to be any mystery as to why the decision by a government facing by-elections in ridings where gas plants were to be located to cancel them. I mean, would YOU want a gas plant next to YOUR house? No. Me, neither. And, quite frankly, I wouldn’t give a shit how much it cost other taxpayers for my government to cancel them, either.

Of course, all sorts of people have access to shared drives and can delete whatever I guess. I dunno. I’m not very technical. I did work in a place once where a co-worker went off her nut and started randomly deleting the historical record from our shared drive before getting into a shouting match with another co-worker and ending up being escorted out of the building by security.

If departing Liberal movers and shakers asked that their email be completely deleted, backups erased, systems cleared, beyond the normal deletion of a departing worker’s email account, that’s pretty suspicious.

Although, not nearly as suspicious as the timing of former Premier Dalton McGuinty’s latest suspiciously timed resignation.

Is it me? Or does that guy have an uncanny knack for ramping up suspicions at the least opportune time for the rest of his party? I mean, does somebody have pictures of him licking toads or something and they’re blackmailing him:

“Okay, resign now as an MP or we’ll release the tape of you licking those toads.”

Anyway, I want to close this entry today with something hilarious. Last night, after sharing a joint in our tree house (oh shit, I keep forgetting about the NSA and CSE) I was talking about an old friend and saying, “I’m really alarmed by his weight”.

And my Beau, who is all about live and let live and it takes all kinds to make a world and leave people alone about how they look, act, are (i.e. a man – so there, men, don’t say Sooey never Says anything good about us) says, “Well maybe he’s really alarmed by your face.”

Then we laughed ourselves silly because, as everyone, especially me myself and I know, my face is the least alarming thing about me.

Oh, and frack off, hockey. Thanks to a bunch of professional children I have to stay up until midnight to catch The National, which has been kicking ass, so I can revel in Stephen Harper’s discomfort.

Sigh. It’s terrible, I know, but I’ve started to feel almost sorry for him. I also think he’s all that’s standing between my daughters and mandatory state run birthing centers, so I don’t really want him to resign, either.

Yes, my guess is he mollified the fed-up pro-life men of his caucus with a promise that, while he plans to keep his, Jason Kenney would like nothing better than to put the jackboots to female citizens.

What the hell does he care about us, after all.

Nothing, dear Sooey Says readers. (I know for sure there’s more than one of you now – hey there, my new National Security Agency readers!) Nada. Nil. We are anathema to Jason Kenney.

But I wonder. Did Harper even know Nigel Wright before he showed up to be his chief of staff and take calls from Barrick and gift the odd Senator. (Or two? Three? Four? No, that fourth one would be Liberal.) Was it his idea to keep a slush fund in his office for use in paying off certain inconveniences? What about Arthur Porter? Who introduced our poor judgement-challenged Prime Minister to Arthur Porter?

I read the other day that Nick Kouvalis has told the Fords that he won’t be getting Rob re-elected until he seeks treatment for his drug and alcohol addiction. He says Rob has to go to rehab, or it’s no, no, no.

Gee, didn’t Nick Kouvalis teach the Conservative Party all the ins and outs of getting itself elected that it’s in trouble for now because, well, most of it was against the rules as prescribed by Elections Canada?

That was too funny, though, party brass telling the truth one day and then issuing a different truth the next about the secret (slush) fund in Harper’s office. Yeah, we get it, it’s not technically a secret fund because CBC reported on it. Right. Gotcha. You win again, guys and dolls of the CPC. Is there no end to your winning ways?

Pierre Poutine? Haha! Hey, that reminds me of Pierre Poilievre! Did I guess? Close? I wish a reporter would just start asking people who work for the CPC, directly, if they know who committed the electoral fraud that has supposedly debased the Conservative brand (quoting its former cheerleaders in the media).

Funny that anyone thought combining a party that accepted envelopes of cash in a hotel room from a foreign national with a party obsessed with rolling back the reproductive rights of Canadian girls and women was a boffo idea, eh?

But, oh, how they did. Unite the Right. Sure. Why pay for a hotel room when you can use the Prime Minister’s office?

And sorry, but I’m not buying the resignation on principle of that Alberta Conservative MP unless the principle is that Harper hasn’t decreed that the state should control the reproduction of its female citizens and taxpayers.

Where were you when your buddy was boohooing on YouTube about having no say in his party’s deal with the communist dictators of China.

Say, I wonder if Mr. Harper made a deal with Mrs. Harper that he wouldn’t re-criminalize abortion and that’s what’s saving us all from the most undemocratic clawback of Canadian human rights imaginable.

But I guess Obama would kill for Harper’s problems right now, eh? Oops, I hope I didn’t give the National Security Agency any ideas there. Still, I hope it’s reading this. I do love to have readers. I mean, really, for an internet attention whore, the news couldn’t be better that the NSA is reading all our communications.

Whee!

If we were a cooperative populace, we’d have fun with this revelation and flood it with inane terrorist talk. In the meantime, I’d be curious to know what all this spying has caught.

Gotta love seeing Zuckerberg’s mug everywhere as the corporate face of denial.

Seriously, though, it’s almost as if the NSA sent that whistleblower to Glenn Greenwald to tell us to stop suspecting that all our communications are being monitored and let us know for sure – yes, all your communications are being monitored.

It’s frustrating when you’re all powerful and all knowing and not getting the credit for it.

But it does go to show you what a myth America is, eh? I mean, it should come as no surprise to anyone that a government department created by the Bush administration is spying on everybody everywhere, and yet it does. And it should come as no surprise to anyone that Obama is just like the Wizard of Oz after Dorothy pulls the curtain back.

The thing is, what’s the point of it all? The uncle of the supposed Boston marathon bombers, Uncle Rus, works for the Central Intelligence Agency and yet, in spite of that and all the spying and forcing citizens to remove our shoes and give up our fingernail scissors (really, security must be drowning in confiscated toiletries) the terrorists keep winning, dammit.

Still, I’m glad the whistleblower went public with his identity. (He probably insisted as much to the NSA – “Look, I’ll do it, but I’m going public with my identity so you guys don’t kill me later to make yourselves look even scarier.”) Because he looks like lots of sons, doesn’t he, like Bradley Manning looks like lots of army boys.

And at least young people get a chance to see what real heroism looks like – them.

If you ask me what matters in terms of democracy it’s this – we know now what liars our governing politicians are and they know we know and it shows on their faces and neither of us can pretend we don’t see it because we do.

Which still leaves us with what the hell do we do about it, I suppose, but in the meantime, the more we know the more we know and the more they know we know, too.

One day, governing politicians may even decide to deny whistleblowers credit for telling the truth and do it themselves.

I am so proud of me.

Except that it turns out my celebration may have been Tom Jackson’s celebration. As I said to my daughter over the post-graduation lunch with me, her sister, her sister’s friend, her Dad, and my Beau – I think you’re going to have to move over because today was Tom Jackson’s day.

And we all laughed because, really, it was. He’s the Chancellor of Trent University, or has been the Chancellor of Trent University, and his tenure is over now, so this was his last graduation ceremony.

He told his graduates, one by one, as they picked up their degrees, that he loved them.

“What did he say to you that took so long?” I asked, excitedly.

“I can’t remember all of it, but he said that he loves me.”

He loves me. And my eyes welled up and I said, “That’s weird.” And my daughter laughed and said, “I know! But it was cool!” So I said, “And I guess now you know that, wherever you go, whatever you do, Tom Jackson loves you.”

“He said I’d accomplished something!”

And so she had. People can make all the arguments they want against arts educations – but why do they? Why is a life spent in pursuit of a way to make money, pushed by our governments as a benefit to society, but a life spent in pursuit of understanding, of happiness, of love – considered to be a waste of our collective and individual time and money, a negative in terms of the overall health and well-being of the people who make up a society – all of us.

To close the ceremony, Tom Jackson played the guitar and sang a song. It was about “blue water” and it, too, was weird, or, at least, unexpected. But it gave me a feeling of connectedness to everybody there, that we’re all in this together, that the individual and the community are one in the same.

It made me think about the previous night, when I was so thirsty for water that I woke up out a deep sleep and actually made my way down the hall to the bathroom to drink a glass of water, using the one that I keep by the sink for everybody else.

I’m aware of that now, it’s always in my mind, our easy access to clean, cool, refreshing and life-sustaining water.

As parents, we’re all sort of just waiting for our own kid’s name to be called at a degree-granting ceremony (my ex had to snap at a guy doing business on his cellphone right near where we were sitting so we could hear it, while my Beau positioned himself for the professional shot of her receiving her degree) but my other daughter and her friend were there waiting for the names of other kids they knew to be called, too.

Against protocol, they whooped a couple of times, like others scattered around the outdoor audience, and it was fun. Technically, it’s applause that we’re asked to hold until all recipients have received their degrees. I know those whooped kids, one of them was my daughter’s boyfriend for a while and my other daughter and her friend were there to see him graduate, too. The lucky young fellow got to live in apartments with both of them in different years.

He changed his major from philosophy to English, citing my daughter as his inspiration, and now he’s due to be published.

My older daughter and her friend graduated last year, and their speaker, Gwynne Dyer, talked about war, the challenges of previous generations being the First and the Second. What the graduating class of 2012 would have to deal with, he said, unfortunately, is climate change. That’s your challenge, he said, and good luck with all that.

It was a cool message, because it was honest and kids know climate change is the problem. This year’s speaker was a former student from Hong Kong, who was there to get an honourary doctorate, having achieved phenomenal business success, which he acknowledged by donating to Trent an athletic complex.

I know, that sounds like I’m being disparaging, and I don’t really mean it that way, but it was hard to reconcile his personal success story, money-wise, with a collective success story, planet-wise. If becoming a millionaire or billionaire is how we define success, still, I’m not sure how the circle of life will meet the square of climate change.

What do people mean when they say other people have been lifted out of poverty because they work in urban factories instead of on rural farms.

And, by the way, his degree was in sociology, topped off with business.

The graduation song for my older daughter’s class was “We Are Young” by Fun. I didn’t recognize the graduation song this year, although the professors were dancing to it as they passed, but I will never forget Tom Jackson strumming his guitar and singing his song about “blue water”.

I love you, too, Tom Jackson.