As I write this, thanks to press deadlines, I don't know what has happened in the first week of Donald Trump's second presidency.
Maybe he has, as threatened, imposed 25 per cent tariffs on all Canadian goods heading south. Maybe he's blinked in the face of threatened counter tariffs. Maybe there are frantic negotiations underway right now.
All I know is that things are trending, again, towards crisis. Serious people are worried about major job losses, profits cratering, prices and interest rates rising, the housing market going into the tank.
Hopefully, it's not that bad where you are, a week into the future.
The other day, I was at my local credit union dealing with something for my RRSPs, and they gave me one of those financial quizzes to determine my appetite for risk. At one extreme is the kind of person who bungee jumps over a lake filled with hungry crocodiles for fun, and at the other is someone who pushes the button for the WALK sign at a crosswalk, then checks both ways twice anyway.
Guess which end I fall closer to?
It's probably a matter of temperament how you see the world. Some people look at the last quarter century and see a time of wealth and expansion. I look back and see crisis after crisis, each one a serious threat to economic stability.
I was in my last year of college when the Asian financial crisis began in 1997. Then it was the bursting of the dotcom bubble, 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the sub-prime market meltdown and the Great Recession, and then a little worldwide viral pandemic. Throw in a few major hurricanes and earthquakes and wildfires for variety.
If I'm a pessimist, I'm not a full-time one. I know that we'll probably muddle through most things, short of someone with an itchy finger getting the nuclear launch button.
I'm perfectly capable of thinking that a lot of things get better. As a whole, we're healthier and live a whole lot longer than our grandparents or great-grandparents did, for one thing. We've got treatments for cancer, HIV, and cystic fibrosis that are miraculous compared to when I was a kid. We've still got public libraries, and we've also got Wikipedia. We have maintained, against all odds, electoral democracy. There's more work to do, but civil rights are far more expansive these days.
The difference seems to be that the things I am optimistic about are built slowly, over years, decades, generations.
The stuff that scares me erupts suddenly, explosively, and disruptively.
How do you look at history?
When I'm trying not to be a grump and a cynic, about the best I can do is to synthesize the two worldviews. Yes, there will be another crisis, and another one after that, and after that, and so on.
The only rational response is to assume that the good stuff 鈥� science and medicine, art, democracy, a free press 鈥� are potentially fragile. In between each crisis, we have to remember that, and to shore them up and protect them.
