reed writes

I am seriously hoping that Mr. Harper and his group do not contemplate anything hasty or rash with respect to any changes in our healthcare system. The only tampering required is more money to bring the system up to scratch.

Canadians spend approximately 9.5% of GDP on healthcare, while the Americans, with their multi-payer system spend about 15% of GDP on healthcare and yet they still have more than 45 million citizens without any insurance.

A recent poll in the United States shows that more than 70% of ordinary Americans would like to have the Canadian system.

Back in 1994, Jack Smith, a former CEO of General Motors went on record as “personally favor[ing] the Canadian system.” Smith, an anomaly ten years ago, today looks like the weatherman who knew which way the wind was blowing. The volume and intensity of anguished, bitter public complaints by business executives about the costs and burdens of health care has grown to major proportions.

A few bloggers and others are taking a somewhat cavalier approach to Muslim demonstrations against the anti-Islam cartoons that appeared recently in a Danish newspaper and which were subsequently republished around the world. These critics are asking why moderate Muslims have been relatively quiescent in the face of some of the violence that has resulted in the torching of Scandinavian embassies and wild threats against the west.

Red Tory is one of those who condemns the violence (good), but who takes a more or less light-hearted view of the situation in his blog today, February 6th 2006. As a form of protest against the violence- he vows to go on a shopping spree for Danish cheese and beer.

http://redtory.blogspot.com/

I’m not inclined just yet to cast stones at moderate Muslims, or to poke fun at the protests.

Anger, fear, shame, embarrassment, astonishment, – these and other emotions are no doubt being processed by many Muslims around the world. As happens so often, we north americans are interested in the quick fix and the instant response. Our society and our culture mandate it. Sometimes impatient westerners need to think before demanding an eye for an eye or a Tuborg for a slice of bacon.

My feeling is that millions of Muslims are probably praying right now for some sort of guidance as to how to react to all this. Just as it’s difficult for us to grasp the depth of Cindy Sheehan’s grief, or fully understand the real motivation behind some of her bizarre behaviour, it’s also difficult for us to understand the depth of Muslim feeling toward what they believe and feel is the hate-inciting depiction of the Prophet.

We used to believe that all Jews were a threat, either because they were Communists or Bankers supposedly. Our newspapers and magazines published degrading and humiliating cartoons of Jews; out of fear and hate- we prohibited Jews from immigrating to Canada during the time of their greatest crisis. (see Irving Abella ). We barred them from our clubs and from our society columns.

http://www.cdn-friends-icej.ca/antiholo/non2many.html

(Eventually, we stopped doing that because they got very angry and finally we saw our Jewish friends’ anguish and humiliation and the terrible threat to their religion, society and to their very lives). The Jews fought back and established a secure Homeland for themselves, courtesy the United Nations and their own dogged determination, tempered by an unwillingness to suffer further insults. But unfortunately, they secured their dignity only through violence and military superiority and not through any largesse of so-called Christian nations.

Now they have the bomb and nobody messes with them. The cost of degrading and humiliating whole groups of people can be inordinately high.

Maybe it’s time to stop and think about that.

Failure to learn from the mistakes of our past means that we may be doomed to repeat them.