The best places in which to observe the workings of the minds of the aged male intelligentsia are the lobbies of small town post offices. Male retirees congregate in them six days a week to clean the flyers and begging letters out of their mail boxes. They are really hoping to find cheques and missives from secret female admirers. Mostly, this is a vain hope, because pension cheques come only once a month and messages from secret admirers never come at all.
One day last week I encountered a band of male retirees at the post office. I listened politely to all of their confabulations, as I always do. I am older than any of them and also much wiser, although the stubborn old coots don't believe it. Except for one old fellow, all had joyless faces. Apparently this was their morning for lamentations.
They were concerned about the gentle folk called Hutterites. One said if the little towns were surrounded by Hutterite colonies real estate values would drop in every one of them. Another went even further. He claimed to have met a stranger with a German accent, whom he believed to be a Russian spy, who told him the male Hutterites had a secret plan to take over all the agricultural land in the world. Ridiculous, I thought. It couldn't happen because the Hutterite ladies are smarter than that. Of course, I didn't argue with him. There is no point in debating with any of these old geezers.
The smiling man was growing a beard. He said a beard might gain him residence in a Hutterite colony where he could add something new to the gene pool. Ridiculous, I thought; Hutterite ladies are smarter than that. But I didn't try to wipe the smile off his face.
Two of the old codgers had more conventional concerns. One feared there would be no winter snows nor spring rains. There would be a devastating drought. The other one thought Ottawa was going to pay for its fancy new fighter planes with his pension money.
The final oldster, a confused old conservative, (conservatives can be just as confused as anybody else) was worried because he thought Canada had traded Prime Minister Harper to the Chinese for two giant pandas. Ridiculous, I thought. The Chinese are smarter than that. They know how valuable giant pandas are.
After toddling home, I sat in a chair by the front window and subjected everything I had heard to some serious analysis. From time to time, my cerebral activity was interrupted by new people passing by and the necessity for me to wonder who they were, where they were going and what they were doing. Massive brain power is a wonderful thing. In due time and in spite of interruptions, my analysis of the codgers' conversations was completed.
I decided that worrying about a plethora of Hutterian Brethren and their affect on real estate values is a useless exercise. So long as I can remain in a warm, comfortable house with an indoor bathroom, I don't care what any real estate agent thinks it's worth.
I decided not to worry about the government using my pension money to buy a few squadrons of fighter-bombers. There is always a fallback position. The government is building nice new prisons and tightening up on laws and penalties so that more Canadians can find places in them. Prisons, when you stop to think about it, provide the richest form of taxpayer supported living. Free room, board and health care, along with no income tax to worry about, all look pretty good to me. Of course, the guests can't go out much, but I'm not going out much now. In case of emergency, I shall have to select a heinous crime to commit, bearing in mind that it can't take too much energy. Voting Liberal might do it, but I don't think that's a felony, yet.
I decided it was too bad farmers don't have the same deal as oil companies. When farmers have lots of stuff to sell, the prices go down and when, because of drought, they don't have much to sell, prices don't go up. When oil companies have lots of oil to sell, they make lots of money, and when they have less oil to sell, the price goes up, and they make lots of money. This is a glaring discrepancy which we should all have faith the feds will fix just as soon as they have looked after the prisons and the fighter jets.
I still have some reservations about the aeroplanes. They are attack planes, but I guess our leaders in Ottawa already know who we are going to attack. They are just keeping it secret, which is standard operating procedure. (I suspect, however, that the American military knows all the secrets and maybe even the Russian spy I heard about at the post office knows, too.)
I have no worries about what was bothering the last old duck. He just had it wrong. Canada didn't trade Mr. Harper to China as rent for two giant pandas and there was never any intention of doing so. But I could go along with that kind of a trade, if the Chinese would sweeten the deal by giving us permanent ownership of the pandas and throwing in a ton of sweet and sour pork and a tank car filled with bird's nest soup. In my opinion that would be a fair trade. The trouble is that nobody in Ottawa has asked for my opinion. They never do.
