A Ship without a Captain

A second wave of COVID-19 is growing internationally, nationally and provincially. Regionally cases are on the rise as well, which stands to reason. No one is immune to this virus or its insidious impact on day-to-day living but some are experiencing its consequence far more severely than others, so far.

 As with most storms, until folks are actually in the eye of it and experiencing its full force and impact, they do not respect it, even if they do fear it. Some will mock and jeer it. Some will cower and be crippled by it. Some will defy it and run out to confront it. Human responses to conflict are pretty predictable in that respect; they’re not all the same, unless and until uniformity and conformity is encouraged, enforced and sustained by the majority of those folks in any given society.

 That’s where Law arises as a tool to make as many as possible decide that being as much the same and behaving as much the same as possible is in everyone’s best interests. Those would be the Group Rights that have increasingly been challenged and minimized by the birth of Individual Rights in the past several decades and their expansion.

 Those Individual Rights are now challenged once more by the need for conformity to Group Rights interests and the clash between them is the David & Goliath struggle of our Age; precipitated in large part by a pandemic that can kill millions of folks indiscriminately if not checked and make both sets of ‘Rights’ completely mute.

 I won’t be here in 50 years but I would like to know how it all turns out. At a time when new cases and deaths are rising internationally, nationally and provincially as a second wave begins to unfold and gain momentum, political leadership is encouraging re-opening the economy, sending folks back to work and children into classrooms within the next couple of months.

 I see a perfect storm brewing and a lot of imperfect leaders putting on their blinders. Will they be held accountable for crimes against humanity if they are, by these choices now, sending the masses to slaughter? How will those masses cope if the health care system, the education system and the supply chains collapse just as the summer ends and we all start heading into the fall and winter seasons again? I certainly hope the Harvest is a good one this year!

 There is a large gap in the messaging between what I am seeing and reading from international bodies like the WHO and what my federal and provincial government leaders are messaging, and I am not okay with that. The interests of the Greater Good deserve better!

 If the economy needs shutting down and basic incomes distributed for 2 years, so be it. IMO that will still be far less costly for the rich and far less divesting for the masses of poor in the long-run than losing a significant percentage of the total work-force in coming months and all of the knowledge, skills and experience they possess with them for coming decades.

 It feels today like I’m on a ship with no Captain tacking into a very imperfect storm.

A New Dawn Is Stoking

Traversing fairways and greens is about to take on a whole new meaning for recreational users in Canada, and the golf industry needs to start rolling with that budding reality. The pace of play will be marshalled best by strategic thinking that sparks up discussion now about how to cultivate the growth of the game with a new menu of products and services offerings that will tee up an abundant stash of cash for those who are ready to grip it and rip it! It is time to get off the couch and embrace the appetite of a new Age. No stone must be ignored and go unturned if the #1 recreational sport in Canada is to benefit optimally from the new buzz about the land that is certain to see eagles and birdies pursued ever-the-more-so with a spliff in hands.  

There is no shortage of irony apparent in the prognosis that the game of golf and by extension the Club industry in Canada, as well as increasingly across all of the Americas, stands poised to benefit from enhanced opportunities to increase food (read, munchies) and beverage sales through the eradication of the prohibition against a weed. Less than a hundred years ago Clubs embraced the opportunity to grow in popularity across North America as venues where their patrons could satisfy their interests and desires for contraband alcohol during its era of prohibition. Now the game and its industry stands posed yet again in contemporary times to sprout anew from the elimination of a prohibition on toking dried leaves. The stagnation in the appeal and growth of the game, as well as the Club industry, will only be capitalized on proactively if the conservative stewards of tired traditions and under-informed thinking shed the inclination to boggart on the budding cultural dynamic that is destined to alter far more than just the states of mind of its current users, as well as its potential patrons. 

A recent poll conducted by The Globe and Mail underscores the potential in the winds billowing on the horizon. It was reported that 1 in 5 Canadians already choose to partake in the herb for its medicinal benefits as well as for their recreational desires, and 3 of 10 Canadians will avail themselves of this choice as soon as cannabis is legalized and regulated for sale from coast to coast, to coast. Its utilization is already multigenerational as well as multi-cultural and this poll makes it clear its user-ship is poised for a significant growth spurt. A recent poll in the United States found that 59% of Americans support legalization and in Canada a Liberal majority Federal government was elected at least in part on a platform promise to legalize and regulate the sale of cannabis for recreational as well as medicinal use. The Ministerial Mandate letters of the Justice Minister and Public Safety Minister in the Federal Cabinet clearly instructs them in no uncertain terms to work with Federal departments and provincial governments and their respective bureaucracies toward the implementation of this agenda. Legislation has already passed through Parliament, with a legalization date of July 1^st, 2018, now emerging from the haze.  

It has been estimated that Federal revenues from the sale of legalized and regulated cannabis in Canada could be in the range of $5 billion annually. Even the most conservative estimates suggest the revenues generated will exceed $1 billion annually. Ignoring this reality and failing to proactively prepare for its increased legal prevalence throughout our Society in months and years to come is not just a recipe for allowing new opportunity to go up in smoke. It is also potentially hazardous to the ability of the industry's stewards to provide informed and proactive leadership that can serve to positively influence and manage its impact on the game and on the culture within the game, as well as within the communal cultures of individual Clubs throughout the country. This is no longer a matter to snicker about and dismiss as a fringe thing. The time is now for the golf industry's professional stewards and its volunteer Boards and memberships to begin a serious dialogue in respect to how best to prepare for, manage and capitalize on Mary-Jane's increasing prevalence on the daily tee sheet as well as the impact it will have on the policies and operating procedures that govern the players who participate in and employee cadres who provide their services to the game. 

There is little question, to my mind at least, that the industry's stewards floundered and failed to provide informed and timely leadership ahead of the current when it came to the changing trends in personal preferences for more casual golf attire and corresponding amendments to traditional Dress Code policies, as well as with the emergence and mushrooming use of cell phones and other equipment and technology advancements that have swept across the country and affected all courses and clubs in their wake over the past two decades. A lot of hours in policy debate and drafting in committees and Boards across the country occurred trying to catch up from behind the wave. No shortage of discontent festered in the interim void in proactive leadership that served to negatively impact the daily outings and experiences of patrons and Club members, not to mention the workplace environments of their management and employee cadres. Eventually the industry's leadership were forced to shed their entrenched affinity for grasping on to dying traditions and embrace the emerging realities and desires for change within their communities and the will of their majority of members and patrons. 

Will conservative-minded resisters of change and adaptation to new realities continue the trend of reactive leadership behind the wave this time as well? Time will tell. Let’s hope that wiser minds will prevail and the industry's stewards will prove to have learned their lessons from the experiences of the relatively recent past within the golf and Club industry in Canada. Let's hope that they choose instead this time around to stop snickering and put aside their snifters, wine glasses and beer steins long enough at least to be proactive in discussing and preparing for the Mary-Jane Tsunami that there is little doubt now will be landing on the shore this coming season. 

It's like dipping a pinky finger into the icing on a cake to ponder on what this could mean for dessert and liqueur sales alone. Less tongue-in-cheek, it is no joke that Clubhouse kitchens and dining rooms can potentially see increased benefits ahead in both cost reductions and improved sales from the planting and tending of herb gardens. Grounds Crews, with their agronomy and horticultural expertise, may well be able to become revenue generating Club departments, eclipsing the expense budgets of golf course maintenance and turf care management practices across the nation. Hemp fabrics and products may also serve to reduce costs and increase durability of golf fashions, along with many other products utilized on a daily bases at courses and in Clubs throughout the country. The impact on the golf and Club industry in years ahead is in an embryonic state now, but may well grow with weed into a green giant virtually overnight.  

It won't be long now before millions of Canadians will be rolling along in laughter on fairways and greens. Whether the golf and Club industry is ready to embrace that coming day and is proactively prepared for the benefits and challenges that change will bring, only time will tell. One thing is for certain, those who chose to ignore the smoke and pretend it is not already prevalent in use on courses and at Clubs throughout the country are in for a blunt awakening in months and years to come. The surest buzz-kill awaits those who bury their heads in the sand and cannot see the plant's growth in use and opportunities, nor are prepared through proactive strategic thinking to welcome and embrace it, as the new era in legal recreational use of cannabis dawns in Canada in 2018.

Anger: Humanity's Achilles' Heel

"There is a harassed, knife-edge quality to daily life. Nerves are ragged and...tempers are barely under hair-trigger control. Millions of people are terminally fed up." [Alvin Toffler -The Third Wave]

It is no revelation that life and the living of it is a journey through a kaleidoscope of emotions that are coloured from a plethora of internal and external stimuli. Anger, associated with the colour Red on the spectrum, is unquestionably the most perplexing of the bunch intra-personally and inter-personally. In both spheres of its existence it is frequently experienced and yet seldom is it rationally considered and constructively examined. Most often it is nervously avoided, dismissed as irrational, or confronted in kind. Rarely is it understood and only exceptionally is it appreciated and regarded as reasonable. Yet, it is as natural a human emotion as happiness or sadness and no less logical and predictable in the circumstances that trigger it. It is prevalent in micro and macro group dynamics in familial, communal, societal and global arenas on a daily basis and yet it is shunned as a subject of genuine discourse and on the whole treated as a taboo topic. As natural as it is to the human condition and as frequently as it transpires, it is phenomenal how often it is stratified as inappropriate, intolerable and unnatural. 

Akin to the billions of galaxies that comprise the known Universe, anger is in equivalent abundance and has comparative complexity in its representations and manifestations in the human condition and in human inter-relations. Scores of millions have prematurely met their demise through the anger inherent in the hostilities of wars globally and regionally, as well as through genocides of antiquity and contemporary times. An estimated 45 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives in the Second World War alone, which wasn't really only the second global conflict; it was actually the sixth in a series of global wars dating back to 1618 and the start of the Thirty Years War.

The Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan, the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism in the years since 1948 have added scores more to graveyards the world over. The genocide in Rwanda and numerous other racially motivated massacres along with the killing of scores more by groups like ISIS in the name of religion have added immeasurably to the astronomical body count of human beings annihilated by the anger of others.  From archeological excavations to the study of primates and throughout the annals of mankind there is ample evidence that anger has been an ever-present aspect of the human condition and the experience of life since the dawn of our kind. 

Anger is hardly the sole purview of the military arms of nation states either; indeed it festers and ferments perpetually in all societies and cultures throughout the world. It knows no borders and is shared alike by all races, cultures, political communities and socio-economic classes. It is also neither gender nor generation specific. Adversarial and penal justice systems and institutions have been invented as a means to address it; laws and policies have been written in efforts to manage and curtail it; libraries are filled with research and commentaries on its root causes and the plethora of its consequences; and professions are devoted to responding to it, counselling about it, as well as medicating to try and tame, control and overcome it. Through it all, anger demonstrates its profound resilience. If one has ever witnessed a school yard fight, a bar room brawl, a boxing match or a hockey game when the gloves drop to the ice it's apparent anger can even be socially accepted, championed and cheered on feverishly. 

In communal, workplace, familial and domestic environments anger is also abundant and routinely vented. Political discord, racial tensions and even the outcome of sporting events routinely give rise to protests, riots and mob violence toward people and the institutions and entities of their making, as well as to the destruction of personal and public property. A massive body of research and courses of study focus on conflict resolution between managers and subordinates,  between peers, as well as between patrons of businesses and the employees that serve them. Careers are created and sustained solely devoted to offering psychological elixirs for managing the disgruntled and behavioural strategies for defusing and placating ire. Families and their domiciles are no less affected by anger and its expressions than any other stratum of human existence and can be as volatile and as decimating, or even more so, to individuals within them as between nations and their populations. Spousal abuse, sibling feuds, corporal punishment, and both physical aggressions as well as psychological tormenting are common place experiences in the lives of billions of relatives generation upon generation. Animals, and especially family pets, are even highly susceptible to being the subject of the wrath of Homo Sapiens of all ages, races, creeds, religions, sexes and sexual orientations. 

As this brief summary highlights, there seem to be as many words in language to describe anger in human interactions as there are occasions of it. There can be no doubt that it is humanity's Achilles' Heel. No human being is immune from it nor to it; it is an intrinsic part of the emotional arsenal naturally existing in everyone's psyche and within the interactions shared with all others. In my own life and its plethora of experiences I have been the subject of it, the perpetrator of it, exposed to it and collaterally affected by it more times than I can possibly recount. At 54 years of age, if I multiply the number of days I have been breathing by, conservatively, a half a dozen instances of anger affecting my psyche on any given one of them, it's in the range of 120,000 instances marked by the presence of anger in my lifetime alone. It is claimed that there are 60 times the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy as there are human beings on our planet. I would wager humanity's collective experiences with anger and expressions of it would dwarf that star count by astronomical proportions. 

In the various employment roles I have fulfilled through the past four decades in the restaurant & hospitality, security & loss prevention, health care, and golf & recreation industries I have been exposed to and affected by anger frequently. On numerous occasions daily I have also been responsible to manage and endeavour to resolve anger and its myriad expressions within amongst patrons and employees alike, as well as within myself. I believe it fair to say that through observation and osmosis from perpetual immersion in hostile interactions and environments I have not only been a student of it but also have accumulated substantial experience and significant expertise in managing and defusing it. Through all of it I have pondered and debriefed on its occurrences, studied its impacts on individuals and societies and quested to understand how best to combat and overcome it. 

After decades of living with it, studying it and addressing it, I have arrived upon one good answer to it, and I am not lightly saying so in a tongue-in-cheek manner. The answer is simple and indeed also natural; quite seriously, everyone with anger management issues should be smoking weed. 

Before discarding my hypothesis as silly or outlandish, it is appropriate to understand how I have arrived upon it. I have one particular life experience to site as an example, but I also have dozens upon dozens of others I can recount that are similar to it. Collectively they have all convinced me over time that Cannabis is in fact nature's remedy for combating and minimizing the impact of agitations and the expressions of anger arising from within the human psyche. 

In 1992 after graduating University I took a job as Night Manager of the Edmonton Inn, a large hotel property across the street from what was then the municipal airport. Within the hotel was a large Country & Western themed night club call Esmeralda's, a sports bar, a casual lounge and a couple of restaurants, along with several large banquet rooms and meeting spaces. It was then a busy and well frequented property with many conferences and conventions held there and numerous sports teams in the city for tournaments housed there as well. Every weekend and a lot of week nights as well Esmeralda's was filled to its 200 or so patron capacity and on a lot of nights angry patrons affected by alcohol became involved in physical altercations. As I recall, there was a Bouncer staff of at least six to eight strong guys on shift every night to manage whatever conflicts arose, and on frequent occasions the police also had to be called in to deal with the most unruly and agitated of patrons.

On one particular weekend the Edmonton Folk Music Festival was being held at Gallagher Park and many of the musicians and their road crews were staying at the hotel. The banquet rooms were utilized as a 24 hour Hospitality Suite for them to come and go from as they desired. At any given point on those Friday and Saturday nights there were upwards of 800 to a 1,000 people in those banquet rooms and the air was a bluish-grey haze of Pot smoke. Over those two nights there were no less than a half dozen serious fights that spilled out of Esmeralda's and into the parking lot, four separate instances requiring the police to be called and a couple where ambulances were required as well. Conversely, in the banquet rooms where up to five times the number of patrons were socializing while passing around joints there was not one single confrontation or fight amongst those in attendance all weekend long! 

I have worked the doors and on the bars of a lot of drinking establishments as well as supervised and managed the floors of a lot of cabarets and banquet rooms for wedding parties and golf tournaments over the past four decades. Time and time again I have observed the vastly different behaviours between those who swig back alcohol and those who suck back joints instead. The verdict is an easy one; alcohol consumption encourages and magnifies anger, while Cannabis use suppresses and eliminates it. Society is gradually coming to understand its benefits as a treatment for anxiety and PTSD in more recent years and more and more people are coming to appreciate its calming and euphoric influences on the psyche of its users as well. I dare say you will never find a group of pot-heads smashing all the glass in a neighbourhood bus stop or filling up Emergency wards in hospitals because of bar and parking lot brawls on most any given weekend across the country. Instead, you are much more likely to find them laughing it up and chatting while sitting in small groups in a park or on the beach, or while playing music and dancing, alone or together, in a care-free state. 

All of this is not to suggest that everyone needs to smoke Pot to suppress and eliminate anger, but for those who are challenged by control of that emotion it is to say that Cannabis can be a positive tool in its management based on my life's experience with it and around it. Anger is humanity's Achilles' Heel and a natural remedy for its treatment should not be illegal to possess and consume in this country or any other. That fact that it is today in many places is quite simply counter-productive, absurd and unnatural. Humans are always going to medicate with one substance or another. It makes sense to allow them to do so legally with a natural plant that actually achieves positive results and lessens the negative impacts arising from  humanity's propensity toward expressing the nastier qualities of its nature.

Intra-Planetary Identity Crisis

632 A.D. marks the death of Muhammad and the historical reference point for the beginning of 1,385 years since of a succession of 'Holy Wars' between the faithful of Islam and Christianity. For nearly fourteen centuries intolerances have spawned antagonisms, oppressions and aggressions that have perpetuated the zero-sum inter-relationship between the followers of these religious traditions through innumerable Jihads and Crusades. Millions of Muslim, European, African and Asian peoples have gone to early graves, and millions of Judaism's faithful have been exterminated as well, all in the pious service of 'God'. 

The quest for 'supremacy' motivates the ardent adherents of ancient teachings century upon century to claim the moral high ground; employing it to legitimize the vilest of atrocities and most inhumane of deeds, indiscriminately carried out against believers and non-believers alike. Piety is propelled through the Ages on a thick current of humanity's blood and portaged over mountains of corpses. Through the annals of this ancient obduracy the ultimate aim of supremacy for any religion has remained elusive. Were it ever actually attained it is left only to wonder, what will actually have been gained? 

The reason for being of every religion in the annals of humanity, whether long since abandoned or still proscribed to in the Common Era, is rooted in the fallibility of the mortal mind. In infancy, childhood, adolescents, young adulthood, middle age and geriatrics in the lifespans of our kind the innate quest of identity compels immeasurable crises of conscience. Religions are elixirs invented to counter the internal storm by providing communal norms. They generate parameters to narrow the psyche's myriad of choices in the expression of self and temper its inclinations toward primal instincts in the interests of communal harmony. The Ten Commandments offer an example through "Thou Shalt Not..." admonishments that serve ambitions toward temperance of individual egos in the interests of the Common Good. Parables are employed as a means to educate ignorance with lessons from precedents that impart the wisdom gleaned through the school of hard knocks. Should the day arrive that one religion attains supremacy over all others, so what? It's very existence will ultimately achieve no grander purpose than any of its predecessors or rival constructs. Millions of souls have perished in loyalty to divergent paths that in actuality are all intended to lead to the same destination.

Religions need to be abandoned on mass and be replaced with one entity that serves the universal destiny quested by all of their divergent paths. In proselytizing this course it is not lost on me that the views herein expressed are antithetical to religiosity and would result in excommunication as a Heretic or execution as an Infidel in any earlier period of history, and could well achieve such a response in many parts of the world today. Fortunately for me, and for their articulation, I live in one of the few nations on the planet, if not the only nation, that separates church and state through secular governance and enshrines a citizen's right to freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression in the highest law of the land. Without that liberty such candour would have significantly graver potential consequences. 

In reality no freedoms are absolute, even in the Great White North. It has been said that a pen is mightier than a sword, but I am also cognizant of the fact that holds true only until such time as a wielder of iron catches up with the author of the ink. There is always a measure of risk to longevity when choosing to challenge the deeply held religious beliefs of others. History is replete with accounts of bodies and books burned, but as these religious traditions and their histories attest to, there is some solace in knowing that ideas are not so easily quelled. I am not so naive as to think this discourse will stimulate an end to the absurdity I see as inherent in the religious distinctions and divisions existing intra and inter-societally on this third rock from the Sun within my lifetime. The best I can hope is for them to be a seed for more rational thought and a more peaceful world in years, centuries and millenniums to come.

What I advocate is humanity's collective membership in a 'Human Interest Club.' Eligibility is inclusive of all Homo-Sapiens born into life on planet Earth. Its Vision is a world in which there is acknowledged value in, and absolute commitment from all hearts and minds for everyone on the Planet to co-exist lovingly and respectfully in our shared humanity and experience of life together on Earth. Its Mission is to tenaciously purse the day when violence and aggression are extinguished as legitimate and accepted human inter-actions in the addressing of interests and grievances.

To achieve these ambitions I propose enshrining the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights as the paramount legislative instrument, applicable and enforceable in all regions of the Earth. It already serves as a foundation for defining the rights of individuals within our shared humanity on the globe. The Club's Creed would champion the following tenets: 

'Good Governance', achieved through Secular laws and institutions; 

'The Rule of Law', administered through a Restorative Justice legal philosophy, framework and system;

The responsibility to protect the Earth and its environment for future generations;

The elimination of all forms of discrimination, inequality, and injustice;

Freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, tempered with respect for the rights and interests of the ''Greater Good";

Free health care, child care, optical, dental and burial/cremation services;

The right to work and to earn a fair living wage, with equal pay for equal work;

The eradication of homelessness, along with free support services for the physically and/or mentally disadvantaged or addicted;

The right to healthy food and clean drinking water, along with safe and secure shelter, inclusive of electrical, mechanical, recycling, sanitation, sewage and waste disposal services;

The right to freedom of mobility and public transportation services;

The right to free education, public Libraries and Internet services;

The right, when exercised while of sound mind, to all decisions over one's own body, or bodies living within one's body; and,

The right to choose to die with dignity.

It is not a comprehensive list of tenets and will undoubtedly require refinement, but it is a good starting point toward the ambition of universal respect within humanity and the ultimate aim of genuine and lasting peace on Earth. It would certainly get us all a long way down the path of harmony and bring an end to millenniums of killing fields perpetuated by our intra-planetary identity crisis.