It’s amazing how often we humans are caught by surprise.
Word of a pandemic in China started to percolate through the media in January 2020. In February, we heard of its devastating impact in Italy. Then, in March, suddenly it was here. Thousands of us were infected and people started to die by the hundreds, with the greatest tragedies occurring in seniors’ homes and other long-term care facilities.
Then, just as we seemed to be getting a handle on the . . .
pandemic, the virus mutated and a variant appeared, completely by surprise. If only we had known this could happen, we could have prepared better. Then, unbelievably, it happened again, followed by more deaths and wishes we had been better prepared.
Convoys of trucks from across the country headed for Ottawa, adorned with messages about freedom from COVID mandates, taking back the country, plans to overthrow our political system and threats to certain of its personalities. It took weeks to get here and, when it finally did, the trucks drove right into the Parliamentary precinct and made camp there, catching everyone by surprise.
After years of mounting tensions between Russia and the West over Ukraine, and months of amassing troops along the border, Putin finally invaded. Everyone in the world, other than Ukrainians, were caught completely off-guard by the move and we now seem to have very constrained response options, even as hundreds of innocent citizens are killed day after day.
Too bad we hadn’t seen this coming.
As we speak, a slow-motion surprise is creeping up on us. Gradually over decades the planet is warming up. It’s happening much faster than normal rates of climate change, so it’s easy for scientists studying the matter to see what’s happening. But it’s just too slow for the rest of us to notice a big enough difference in our daily lives to want to do anything to forestall it.
What’s next?
There’s a plan to build a nuclear dump on a spot surrounded by water courses that move in the direction of the Ottawa River, just across from our beautiful Pontiac. A dump that, by many knowledgeable accounts, will contain radioactive material that will be deadly toxic for thousands of years.
The site within one kilometer of the Ottawa River, chosen by the private-sector consortium consisting of SNC Lavalin and two U.S. companies, is probably the least expensive location because it will require a minimum of movement of the radioactive material that has been accumulating there for decades. But that’s not to say that, once the threshold of public acceptance has been crossed, there won’t be many truckloads of radioactive material brought in from all over the country to be dumped there over the coming decades, generating high profits for the consortium.
So, what could go wrong?
One thing of which we can be sure is that, if and when something does go wrong, whether it is in five, 50 or 500 years from now, everyone will be totally surprised, not least the poor officials left running the facility whose job it will be to let us or our descendants know there has been a leak contaminating the drinking water for millions of people.
Meanwhile, the people who put the dump there in the first place will be long gone. They will be on a yacht somewhere far from the nuclear dump, or long since passed on to the next stage of their journey.
And our great grand-children will be left to wonder how their ancestors didn’t see this coming.
Charles Dickson
