Tuesday
It is painful to watch the struggles of those blindsided by what is now a recession. Does one harden one’s heart and look the other way? That is easy to say, but not so easy to do.
My restaurant had a regular customer for almost thirty years. One day, a few months ago, she approached me, as a friend, with tears in her eyes at her humiliation, and asked me for a personal loan. I gave it to her on the spot without a moment’s hesitation. I knew that the likely result would be that I would see neither her nor the money again. Thus it has turned out to be. She is a lovely and essentially decent and honest person, but in this economy, once you are on the down, it is extremely difficult to pick yourself up again.
Another long-standing customer was a chef. He was always clean shaven and reasonably dressed and I never suspected a problem. He confided in me the other day that he had been out of work and sleeping rough for the last month – Canberra is bitterly cold during the winter, minus 4, and lower, is not unusual. I gave him dinner and coffee with his volunteered promise that he would be in the next day to pay. I knew, of course, that he would not be. I am saddened that he has lost the one place that he could come in to where there was a friendly face and he could be warm.
I feel no kinship with those who are aware, to some degree or another, of the pending disaster and sit on their metaphoric crates of baked beans behind barbed wire clutching a shotgun.
We are all in this together and we must help each other to try to get through. We are about to lose the trappings of civilization; we do not want to also lose the sense of humanity that brought it about in the first place. With that intact, we can rebuild. If we abandon it for a vicious, might is right, socialism, then our civilization is permanently doomed.
Meanwhile, the amount of spending money in people’s pockets goes down, the amount needed to service loans for ever increasing commercial property prices (rent) goes up, government rates and taxes on properties go up, and global alarmist policies push power prices sky high.
The global warmists are right in one respect: there is a catastrophe on the way that will wipe out a lot of human life and yes, it is man-made. It is them. They are not, of course, the sole cause, but they are working very hard to be the final nail in the coffin.