Month: October 2017

When I was a kid, I had the same teacher for grades 4 and 5.  Her name was Mrs Davidson, but we weren’t related.  She was always on a rant about shopping Canadian, watching Canadian TV shows, stuff like that.  She hated how Canadians always seemed to measure their success by how they made out in the USA.  We had a national inferiority complex where we would always need to succeed somewhere else to be any good.  She never got too crazy because we were just kids, but looking back you could see it simmering just below the surface.  I had other people around me who were patriotic northerners, too, but I still think of her when I hear myself telling our kids not to shop at Walmart.

Mrs Davidson lived a long life.  The last time I heard, maybe six or seven years ago, she was still alive, but probably in her nineties.  She must have been aware of Gord Downie, and my guess is, if she understood his role, she would have thought of him as a hero.  Other Canadian musicians made it much bigger in the USA than the Tragically Hip, Gord’s band, but they did so partially by blending into the American scene and keeping their mouths shut about Canada.  I once asked an American friend of mine what Americans think of Canadians, and he said “they don’t.”  For Gord and the Hip, they started off by committing career suicide by singing a lot of songs with Canadian history and hockey as lyrical subject matter.  How where they going to break into the Big Time like that?  They weren’t, and they probably knew it, but they stayed true to their roots.  There are stories about them ‘touring’ in the states, playing shows in small bars to a lot of empty chairs, then on the Canadian leg of the same tour selling out sports arenas across Canada within minutes of putting tickets on sale.

Gord Downie died only yesterday as I write this.  It has been an emotional couple of days for me, and I’m sure millions of other Canadians.  The only bittersweet upside to the last couple days is that Tragically Hip music is being played all day on the radio. Besides his music, he will be best remembered, probably, for fighting brain cancer and raising money for research, and also for his advocacy for indigenous people.  Great causes, to be sure.  For me, the thing I will always admire him for is helping to slay the Canadian inferiority complex.  He was a great song writer and performer, backed by an excellent band.  He could have wound up in the California hills with Neil Young, sitting on a pile of money, but he chose to remain humbly Canadian and tell our stories.

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Our youngest daughter Andria just went through the unenviable predicament of being pregnant in the summer.  It wasn’t the hottest summer or anything, but it was enough to keep her hot and irritable for a few months.  Finally, on 18 September 2017 she ended the misery – just as the misery was ending on its own in meteorological terms – by giving birth to a boy, Kingston.  We teased her for months about naming the boy Gordon, Gord or Gordie, but her and her guy weren’t having any of it.  Instead, they named him after the town our favourite Gord, Gord Downie, is from.

Close enough!

It’s times like these that make you consider the bigger picture.  My grandpa Don Davidson was born in June 1899.  In his lifetime, the changes he saw were staggering.  At his birth, there were no airplanes, cars were invented but were owned only by a few rich people with resources to burn on such wastes of money.  He would be married with kids of his own before cars overtook horses as the most common ride to town.  Almost no one had a telephone.  Recent wars were being contested by armies with horses and single shot rifles.  Queen Victoria was old but humourlessly in command.  Rates of child mortality and death during child birth were, by our standards, astronomical.   Most of those births took place at home, and most doctors didn’t have a medical degree.  According to one source, there was a grand total of 10 miles of paved roads in America!  The changes my grandfather saw in his lifetime, which ended in 1997, were mind boggling.  He died in a world of lasers, space travel, heart transplants, the internet, genetic engineering and instant global communication.
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What changes little Kingston is going to see in his lifetime remain to be seen, but they could be enormous.  We look back one human lifetime ago, and the world seems closer to Medieval times than to now.  Years from now, when little Kingston is an old man, the world of today will probably seem like a primitive, inhospitable time.  He will get to bore his grandchildren with stories about the astonishing lack of technology and backward social thinking that were prevalent in his youth.  Look around you.  Most of the crap in your house will be rustic antiques by then.

I would like to try to guess at some of the things that might be invented by then, but I’m not sure I could.  Only know this: they never intend to let us own flying cars.  They have already been around for 60+ years, and they are going to take off (pardon the pun) in ‘the next year or two’ at every point in time since.  Maybe when the self-propelled cars become a mainstream technology they could let us have self-propelled airplanes or helicopters, secure in the knowledge that Joe Sixpack and his violent tendencies aren’t zooming around trying to bully other commuters in the air.  Or that the crotchety old prick from up the street isn’t going for a speed limit minus 20 km/h scenic Sunday drive in the fast lane during rush hour.

My guess at what the world of 2100 will look like is this.  Much like the life expectancy seems to have peaked, and the next generation is expected to live shorter lives; and like the level of education is steadily declining, so I would expect the rate of technological change to slow too.  Thomas Edison doesn’t exist any more.  Inventions are made in company laboratories and the patents are owned by giant corporate conglomerates.  The US military gets to review every new patent, and anything that looks like a way of killing the opposition is snatched up.   A number of interesting ideas die here.  Nuclear fusion might squeak through.  T-shirts with animated designs are probably not that far off now.  In a similar vein, TVs might be able to encompass entire walls with circuitry overlaid with paint-thin reactive panels.  They could invent a device that mutes molecular excitement, cooling things down very quickly – the opposite of the microwave oven.  Canada will win Olympic gold medals in hockey in perpetuity when sports officials secretly begin breeding Mario Lemieux with Hayley Wickenheiser.  Space travel will get going in earnest with speed of light (or close to it) vehicle speeds.  Space tourism may become a big deal, and Kingston may well leave the planet at some point in his life.  Domed cities seem to be a future thing of the past, as they would have unintended greenhouse effects and block a lot of the vitamin D that was destined to enrich the people living under the dome.  Maybe people will explore the idea of living below ground part of the time, especially since any two-bit dictator can get his hands on a nuclear recipe online.  Sci-fi movies predict that aluminum foil clothing will become popular.  What would be an enormous help to future generations would be finding some way to get the idiot religious leaders to tolerate each other before they end human civilization over some 2000 year old book.  The Price Is Right will continue unabated as foreseen by the Barenaked Ladies.  A time out will need to be called to pause the following for some years: over fishing vulnerable species; over breeding various dog species into retarded, ornamental blobs of barking plasma; genetically engineering food which can survive huge doses of insecticides but pass the poison on to the consumers; and allowing any Kardashian access to vanity surgery.