Pains, Trains and Political thought

Spent yesterday performing my weekly, husbandly duties.

Aimlessly and painfully amongst wandering malls, I found myself sitting in a 30,000 sq. foot warehouse dedicated to designer shoes, and in horror I watched as predominantly younger women, googled, giggled, and forced their feet into spiked, six inch plus, heeled stilettos.

My mind drifted to the bound feet of an estimated 2 billion chinese girls, who from the late tenth century to a year after I was born, destroyed their feet in an effort to be more appealing and I thought how little has changed over time. Young women continue to cause themselves pain, just to satisfy their own, personalized vanities. Personalized, because the last thing that most males would care about is what you have on your feet or in some cases whether their female partner can stand up.

Explaining, my new theory on shoe shopping, on the way home, quickly led to some sort of complaint about my thought processes, which immediately faded into background noise as I spotted a commuter train coming into a station. The GTA is the only place in the world where saying, “Here comes the GO” does not make you a rapper. In fact rappers from other cities would probably say man that is sic and start making up their own meaning for GO and only those of us living on the edge of the center of the universe would know that they were really just rapping about trains.

My mind tends to wonder when it is focussed on politics. Being a closeted liberal, non partisan, who bases political allegiances more on feelings than political stratagems I’m having a difficult time accepting the so called capitulation of Jack Layton.

Cutting a deal to support the corporate tax cuts in exchange for increasing the CPP deductions and whatever the other three are, is what I expect an opposition party to do. I’ll let you assist the corporations if you also assist the workers. Capitulation no, politics yes.

The capitulation only comes at the time of the vote, if and when you accept less than what you signed on for or some vague promise for future action. Something both Harper and other opposition parties have been guilty of in the past.