Rhino's Ramblings - Coffee Time In A COVID World
By Robert Thomas - Opinion/Commentary
It was the week that was when it came to the COVID - 19 pandemic in Moose Jaw. It seemed like the entire city has become engulfed with the reality of the pandemic.
It seems the pandemic has played upon our minds so long we, or should I say a larger portion of society the world over, have just given up.
There are those out there among us who remain the eternal optimist that everything is going to key back to where things once were and life is going to continue in a blink of an instant. Everything is somehow going to be just like it was once before and the nightmare that COVID - 19 has become will be forgotten as we wake up from this damn awful nightmare.
But even now as we roll around in this lobotomized REM 4 sleep that COVID - 19 has put the entire world into we nevertheless need some type of life, or as they say life must go on.
With that stated I found myself out having an afternoon coffee - something I don’t think I have done for months - and I ran into an old coffee friend who I have not seen since March of last year just after the restrictions came into place.
As I met my friend I subconsciously thought for an instant should I sit with him? Should I let’s say break that small bubble of people I have been within six feet of for many, many months?
Despite that micro-seconds of misgiving I somehow felt it was worth the risk. If I were to get sick then it was on me and I would pay the ultimate consequences for my own actions.
My friend had been out an about and was brandishing one of those fancy funky green and white stickers proclaiming they had just been vaccinated for COVID - 19 and on his way home he stopped in to reflect and have a cup of coffee.
He had some good news for me and that this summer finally the cast iron water main replacement program was set to hit his street. Despite the inconvenience of having his street closed it was something he had been looking forward to literally for years.
This is the issue we had initially met on. It is one he likes to reminisce with me about - a lot.
It is a story you have to repeat for those who are unaware of it all.
Although we had lived in the same neighbourhood, for decades and only lived a couple of blocks away from each other our lives never intersected until the issue of the Local Improvement Program (LIP) rose it ugly head in 2015 - 2016.
For those of you who are unaware of the entre LIP controversy or issue was the City putting off the replacement of the cast iron water main system for decades. Instead throwing money into all other sorts of other things.
Everyone wanted to leave a legacy project behind it seemed but fixing the underlying core infrastructure or glue of the community took the back seat.
It is something that you may very well get away with for a few years or even decades but you can only patch things up for so long until you have to do major and expensive repairs or replacement or the entire apparatus is just going to quite literally fall apart.
Or in the case of Moose Jaw spring leaks seemingly everywhere.
When it came to core infrastructure in Moose Jaw it was continually put off until sometime in 2013. And then suddenly the idea started to come forward in Administration the way out of the financial crisis that was literally growing daily when it came to the water distribution system was to hit up the property owners who would directly benefit. And thus the infancy of the LIP was born.
It might sound so simple to some in the community that the LIP was the way to go.
Make the property owners who were set to benefit the most pay for the entire project. It is done in other cities in the province was the rationale. The only problem was it had never been done on a such a wide-spread scale anywhere else in the province that I am aware of.
It is so widespread in Moose Jaw it is scheduled to take 20 year and over $100 million to complete.
Sure other cities use LIPs but not what Moose Jaw was looking at.
They do not do it where the major part of the burden is borne by some of the property owners in the poorer areas of the city to foot such a major portion of the bill.
The impact would have been massive to people in my neighbourhood. People who have lived here for generations were set to be saddled with a major bill just as they enter, or have entered, what should be their golden years in life.
He laughed about how a foul mouthed phatty could not crow enough swinging from Mac the Moose’s antlers to make this all go away.
So as I told my neighbour back in 2015 I calculated what I could see coming when it came to how the local media and others in the local apparatchik would react in the upcoming campaign. So I threw my hat into the ring. And yes I calculated it out right to a tee.
It is one of the advantages of sitting in as a staff member at the local paper over 30 years go - you know the drill and exactly where the coverage is going to go.
I still remember Don Mitchell and others from CAST (Citizens Advocating Sustainable Taxation) approaching me during the campaign and asking me if I would say something at the upcoming Mayor’s debate.
They knew then that with no candidate in their slate of candidates seeking the seat for the mayor that for the remaining weeks of the campaign they had no voice at the podium.
It was sort of a look of shock and awe when I finally told former Councillor Mitchell I had only really ran to bring attention to the entire LIP issue.
But I also wanted to go further than that. I wanted to help bury it so deep that no politician or Administrative member would ever think about using that unfair funding formula for a city-wide issue ever again.
Additionally I had another target and that was to also punish in the best way I could the politicians at City Hall who ran for re-election and were supporting the LIP.
It is like I told Don at the time I ran for the Rhino Party here locally and know how to lose an election but win on an issue. It is no big deal.
For my neighbour recounting the election campaign and burying the LIP so deep always makes him laugh when he talks to me. That finally something had come out to help the little guy, the ordinary everyday person in Moose Jaw who does not have a lot of extra cash.
My talk with my coffee friend moved into what we were planning to do this summer and of course when was this stupid pandemic going to end - if ever.
We spoke about the leaves and how dry the soil was.
I told him how last fall I had literally allowed the water to run for hours around my cherry tree and it seemed the ground never stopped wanting more water. It took close to three days until the trickle finally was enough that the water started to spill out past the base of the tree’s dripline.
Hopefully this year I will get a decent cherry crop and enough left over for the birds who love them for the much needed moisture.
My neighbour asked me if I planned to go to Odessa this summer and sit on the beach. But alas in a world of COVID it is just so unpredictable and will not be happening.
My neighbour told me what his life had been like since losing his wife last April and the loneliness he was going through.
How the entire pandemic and his wife’s passing from a heart attack had left him really all alone. It has him on the Internet a lot and watching lots of movies and sports as he has nothing else to do with very few really venturing out anymore.
He watches Council on television if he can hear it. The technical problems continue.
This is what is so tragic with the pandemic - the bloody isolation many people are living in.
It has changed how we think and appreciate things.
The mundane things we all do in our regular lives like going out to pick up the mail really turn into a major social outing as you somehow feel liberated going to pick up the junk mail to study and the inevitable bills. I was sort of wondering given its importance if I should not buy myself a tux just for the special occasion.
It is really the human cost of isolation that this pandemic is placing on most of us which is going to take at least a decade I reckon to repair if we ever really do.
As the entire hour wore down and we talked about our lives over the past year it was one upon reflection and in the end trying to count our blessings amongst the rubble.
The thought that there is hope the days will get better soon and the pandemic nightmare we all live in will finally end as we wake up refreshed.