Post 3--Your Dough

POST 3—November 15, 2013

Your Dough

What kind of a trip am I on? you may well ask. Blog 2 is about death and now about dough, meaning, of course, money!  It’s a subject that lends itself to all kinds of moralisms, warnings, finger wagging, guilt trips and reams of more negative stuff. Why such negative topics so early in this blog?  Should you move on to more positive ventures?

Well, no! I told you the choice of topics I will be discussing is often, if not mostly, picked from current events and issues. November 2013 happens to be Financial Literacy Month in Canada. Not just literacy. That gets its own month, at least, in British Columbia (BC), my province. This one is about financial literacy.  Literacy campaigns try to overcome illiteracy and ignorance; financial literacy tells us that there is serious financial ignorance. The Canadian government has discovered that such ignorance has reached alarming levels in this so-called advanced country and is using this campaign as one of its tools to overcome it.

The Vancouver Sun highlighted the campaign with an article featuring a secondary school teacher who had fallen into the debt trap. A secondary school teacher. In other words, an intelligent person. I can find only one word adequate to describe his financial behaviour as he personally describes it, but I am loathe to use it, since some of my grandchildren have been forbidden to use it: stupid. He “over-indulged” his children with “the very best designer cloths and toys,” all the while living “from month to month.” He managed this stupidity with a whole raft of credit cards, “all maxed to the limit.”

Fortunately, he came to his senses when he reached bottom and now “shakes his head and wonders how his spending habits could have become so skewed. He wonders how he strayed so far from a path of responsible spending established within his family.”  He was, in the words of Yvonne Zacharias, the writer of the Sun article, “swept up in the debt tempest” that now has Canada worried, for his is an increasingly typical situation. 

Canadians are slipping “deeper into debt,” with “the ratio of household debt to household income” having hit “a record high of 163.4 per cent,” a level “alarmingly” similar to America’s just before the 2008 crash. No wonder different levels of government are taking steps to bring some rationality into this mess—and responsibility.

By means of this and occasional subsequent blogs I hope to contribute to the government’s campaign, but promise not to make it too heavy or dreary. In the next blog I will share a few similar situations I have come across myself, along with a few comments. I’ll move on after that, but fully intend to get back to the topic now and then.

In closing, a little smile.  I came across a cartoon by Jeff Keane under his rubric “Family Circus,” in which a boy seeks his father’s advice: “Daddy, I want to help the ‘conomy. Should I spend my nickel or save it?” There you go!

But before I go, congrats to our intelligent secondary school teacher for having dug himself out of his hole. 

(The Vancouver Sun material in this article is from Yvonne Zacharias’ “Climbing a Mountain of Debt,” November 2, 2013.)

Post 2--Remember and Honour

Death....

For only a second posting on a blog that aims to talk about "My Neighbour," death seems like a morbid and ominous way to start the day. But apart from birth, it's the only thing that all of us share, even more so than taxes. 

There's a good reason I have chosen this topic today. For one thing, it's Remembrance Day in Canada, something I always take very seriously, for I am old enough to remember and visualize the day Canadian soldiers marched through my Dutch village back in 1945 to liberate us from the German Nazis--our immediate neighbours next door. I will go to the cenotaph in downtown Vancouver today to join the crowds in paying homage to those who have fallen on my behalf during World War II as well as in Canadian peace keeping efforts subsequently. I remember and honour them. 

There are more reasons for the choice of this topic today. Yesterday I came home from a memorial service for a sister-inlaw. The new widower, my brother, chose to call it a "celebration." As such events go, it was kind of a family re-union. It took place in the same facility in Mission, BC, where my sister Elly and husband Fred lie buried. So, quite a number of us, including Fred and Elly's children, now grand parents in their own right, used the opportunity to visit their grave. 

We shared about whether anyone of us ever visits their grave. Even their children confessed they never do, for, it was explained, there's nothing of significance there. The important thing, their souls, are with God; the physical part has returned to dust and is no more. So, why visit? Do what? Most just shrugged their shoulders. Remembering and honouring their parents? Of course they do, but you don't have to come to an empty grave to do that. It's the same attitude an already passed-on brother-in-law expressed.

Though I do not criticize their attitude, for I know them well enough to know that they do remember and honour. But I do confess to be baffled, for to me remembering and honouring includes occasional visits to the graves or just the name plates of loved ones gone ahead of me, or perhaps some other kind of shrine dedicated to them, at least in so far as distance does not make that too difficult.  I know: to each his own and mine may be no better than theirs. 

In fact, over the weekend, together with my wife, Frances, two children and their "significant others," and four grandchildren, we also visited the graves of my parents in a nearby cemetery in Abbotsford, BC. Whenever we go to Grand Rapids, MI, where Fran is from and where I met her during our college days, we never fail to "greet" her parents and one sister, who are buried in Cascade, a Grand Rapids suburb. Depending on the time of the year and weather conditions, we may even clean up the site a bit and perhaps leave some flowers. That's our way of remembering and honouring them.

Halloween 2013 is still fresh in our memories. It is a time when the Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver tries to counter "the macabre tones" of that "celebration" when "the dead are depicted as something grotesque and frightening." The cemetery turns it into an opportunity "to honour our ancestors and understand and appreciate where we came from and acknowledge the role the dead play in our lives every day." "It is a wonderful way for families to spend the evening and introduce the concept of mortality to the kids," explained a spokeswoman (Gerry Bellett, Vancouver Sun, October 26, 2013).  I might insert some other elements into this programme, but I deeply appreciate the attempt on their part of, if I may put it this way, bringing the dead back to life for ourselves and our children.

Remember and honour. Reminds me a bit of Jesus' invitation to "remember and believe...." That goes one step further.