Okay, I have to get something off my chest, actually a few somethings, so here you go.

There is a post making the rounds on Facebook about illegal immigration being like having to welcome a criminal into your house. The analogy is that these people enter into the country illegally, like breaking into our house, then not only do we have to let them stay in our house, we have to feed, clothe and educate them. Well, here’s another analogy. A family from another town is banging on your front door. Their town has been ransacked by marauding groups of thugs and their crops have been devastated by years of drought. They tried to stay but when the earthquake hit their house fell down and they had no way to protect their children. So they walked, mostly at night to get to your town, and now it’s pouring rain and they are tired, hungry and desperate. Open your damn doors. These people wouldn’t be going to where they don’t know the language, where they don’t know anyone, where they don’t know how they’ll support themselves and their family if they weren’t sure that staying where they were wasn’t an option. And when they finally get to their destination, hoping to get in as refugees, the rules have changed. Most of the immigrants who come work hard and integrate quickly into society. So when you post that video clip, read the messages that go along with it. And if you really believe that immigrants are choosing what happens to them because they are choosing to come illegally, well, I think you need to re-examine your humanity. We, and the US, are incredibly privileged to be living in a country where war hasn’t directly affected our people and lands. Most of us have lives infinitely better than the people travelling hundreds, if not thousands, of miles trying to escape what they are leaving behind. There’s a poem called “Home” by Warsan Shire, google it. One quote making the rounds from it is this: “no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land”. I’ll be posting that on Facebook when I’m finished here. Canada is a country of immigrants, most of us came here from someplace else. In fact, for most of us we only have to go back two or three generations to get to the immigrant in your family tree. That’s why you have to buy the premium version of Ancestry.ca if you want to document your family history. And we shouldn’t worry about poor immigrants taking our jobs, most of the time they’re doing the jobs we don’t want to do. We should be more worried about the corporations and companies who bypass the visa system to bring in overseas people to fill high-paying positions that Canadians are qualified to do.

Well, that felt good. On to topic two. I was just shouting swear words at the TV because a conservative talk show host (on a show with other, non-conservative hosts because if it was a show with just a conservative host I wouldn’t be watching it) made the outrageous claim that health care is too expensive to give to everyone in the US and if the health care system was so great in Canada, why do so many people, like the Snowbirds, come to the US to get operations? After I calmed down, I thought how ridiculous that claim was. Our neighbours who travel a lot are no longer going to the US because they can’t afford to pay the health insurance they need if they go there. They are healthy septuagenarians who each only take one medication a day. They are well-to-do but they can’t afford the premiums. Snowbirds hope like hell they don’t need medical care while they’re down there, and they have to buy health insurance at a hefty price to go. Yes, some people do go to the US for medical care, but not many. An old friend tells a story about his dad who had a heart attack while on a golfing vacation in California. It was cheaper to send an ambulance jet with a doctor and paramedics down there to bring him home than it was to leave him in the hospital. Dale was in a hockey tournament in a small American city years ago.  A Canadian player broke his leg. The ambulance crew wouldn’t load him until the charge on his credit card cleared. The same thing happened at the hospital. When I had my second son, a young American woman was in hospital also giving birth. It was cheaper to pay the full cost in Canada than to have her child in the hospital in her hometown. A friend’s daughter had open heart surgery as a child. If they had been in the US they’d still be paying off the bill. I could go on, but that’s enough.

Other topics that you don’t want to get me started on:

• gun control – no one needs an automatic weapon, or a handgun for that matter
• immunizations – they save lives, and the study linking autism and immunization has been fully discredited, stop using it
• climate change – is real, and no jobs are worth the damage coal does to our environment, and alternative energy research, development and implementation could provide many safe jobs
• recycling and water conservation – do your part, little things matter so limit your plastic usage, take reusable bags to the grocery store, let your grass go brown in the summer and don’t let the tap run when you’re brushing your teeth
• gender equality and gay rights, which are human rights – good, people are people, love is love
• homophobia, transphobia, misogyny, racism, body shaming, ageism, white supremacy – bad
• guaranteed basic wage, subsidized or free daycare, libraries, the arts in education, the sciences in education, free internet, paid parental leave, free symphonies in the park, inexpensive transit – all good
• the good old days weren’t all that good, we were too young and naive to realize the bad things going on around us – were the good old days when only white men could vote? Or when women died from backstreet abortions? Or when water fountains, restaurants, hotels, schools, hell, just about everything was segregated? We can’t go backwards people, and we shouldn’t want to.
• if you don’t believe in gay marriage, don’t marry a gay person; if you think abortion is wrong, don’t have one, but your beliefs and morality don’t override mine
• freedom of religion – good, but it means everyone is free to have, or not have, their own belief system, and that might not be yours so don’t complain and say we’ve declared war on your holidays when we allow others to celebrate theirs
• facts are facts, there is no such thing as alternative facts, those are opinions, but facts outweigh opinions because water will boil at 100 degrees C even if you are of the opinion that it won’t
• public education – please fund it fully and respect teachers and education assistants, after all, you leave your children in their care for at least five hours a day
• with information so readily available to us now, we really need to listen and think critically, we need to fact-check using reliable sources and there are still many reliable sources out there
• free speech doesn’t mean you can say anything you want, and the press isn’t bad, however, when the “News” has to make money, the information they report may reflect who pays them or who buys what their sponsors sell – see the previous point
• Why do we follow so many American systems and trends when there are other countries doing so much more and doing it so much better? Check the US rankings on just about anything, other than overt patriotism and belief in conspiracies, and they’ll be way down the list.
• Social media is like everything else. It can be good or bad, depending on how it’s used. Just remember, if it hits the net, it’s forever. So think before you post that picture.
• The earth is not flat, the moon landings were not faked, JFK and Elvis are not alive, megalodon does not roam the depths of the ocean, rising to chomp tour boats in half and if aliens walk among us I hope they’re trying to figure out a way to get us to the Star Trek level of humanity quickly!

There’s probably more I could add but I think I’m good now.