Healthy Lifestyles, Napoleon In London - While Asia Ascends
Healthy lifestyles have been on the news today. First we saw a video of a day in the newly created city of ten million people people on the Pearl River delta near Hong Kong in China. We see a before photo of a quiet rice farming valley, and then as it is now. a valley of high tower buildings with a massive harbor, apparently with that vast harbor in Japan, now largest harbor in the world. How did this happen in a decade?
China basically recreated and doubled nearby Hong Kong. They allowed ten million peasants to leave their farms and pour into town. Most high tech factories have vast scales of mostly female workers who earn an average of $120.00 a month. They stay about two years and then go home for a while, to be replaced by another. It is an amazing, magnificent, brand new city that has much of the industry of China, and we walk along massive wharves piled high with cargo crates.
We are told that a ship leaves one of the harbors every second, day and night, every day of the year. Mostly to America, these manufactured high tech goods fill each ship on the way to America. We are told they return with scrap metal and scrap paper.
Then a news story that Tata Motors of India are growing so fast that their feel they have outgrown their one billion people market of India. So they have bought Jaguar and Land Rover, in hopes to further expand. The empires are being struck back at and bought up.
So, naturally, the next news story is that the French President had a lovely reception and ride through London town with the Queen of England in her most fancy white horse and carriage parade, with the British playing the French national anthem. Then to show today’s inheritor of modern France, not Napoleon, but the newest chap with his young girl friend. She and Prince Phillip chatted in the lesser carriage that followed the Queen and Napoleon.
And then, not using an Indian owned Jaguar, nor an Indian owned Land Rover, they made their way out of town to her English created Windsor Castle, which the grandson of her ancestor Queen Victoria, born in Germany, changed the family name to. And as this was such a special occasion, our modern Napoleon would not have his historic sleep at her modest town house of Buckingham Palace. No, this was to be the real old thing.
Napoleon so ached to sleep here, but never forced his way in. And never had an invitation. So it is good and healthy that those two old mortal enemies are realizing their common blood, bonds, heritage and humanity. Even those common enemies our modern Napoleon says we share in common, and we do, are human as well.
So even while another tiger from Asia arrives on the world scene, it is a good balance perhaps that India outbid China on this purchase. Because the next show was British sports, which includes cricket, soccer, and rugby, and I saw India beat New Zealand in one of those sports. Which here in Canada is all Greek to us. That is perhaps news to an American, that we here in Canada are well known as outside the club in those good British sports.
Cultures merge and blend. With the British Empire, certain sports became embedded around the world. Yet in Canada, instead we watch our local hero Steve Nash be the best basketball player in America, and we beam with pride. We tell ourselves he is best because he is a giver; he hands off the ball when he steals it, where the loud taller stars are takers, and do not help their mates excel as does our Canadian icon, Steve. I happen to know the local original school coach for Steve.
The high school coach of Steve Nash of basketball says Steve devoted himself to whatever he tried. Too short for basketball in the big leagues, he tried harder.The coach saw the change one day, when Steve changed from kicking a soccer ball to bouncing a basketball to and from school each day.
Steve fondles that ball so much he feels an empathy with the basketball, sleeps with it I am sure.And on the floor, if it is in the hands of someone else, it is not theirs, and he must rescue it, and so he does. Steve has found that Gretsky sense of steal and pass to who is closest the net. And this has caused Steve to make greater those around him, or the net. Such leaders as Steve who do that are truly great.When Steve Nash from Victoria and Phoenix outplays men a foot taller than him, we all cheer. We could paraphrase JFK that even if a wall is built between Canada and America, we will still say “ich bin ein Phoenixer”. And if Canada has a cricket hero, I have never heard of him.
Canadian are too close to the Americans, the rest of the old British Empire says. Canadians even understand, and play those American games. It is true. Cultures merge in various ways, and hold to their common center. The irony here is that all the world except Canada and America know that game of soccer we call, football they call, is the sport of the world. When France won the World Cup, Paris was ablaze with fireworks, and all French knew they were the emperors of the world, and every nation from every continent saw this game as their own.
I had the strange experience a decade ago of arriving in London the morning after a sports event related night long riot. My English son in law and I witnessed Germany beat England in their football, and he then drove me to the airport with my youngest daughter. We were sleep deprived, but astounded to see London in such disorder.
The one hundred thousand good English fans felt that Hitler had won after all, and every schnitzel bar and lamp post took a beating. We drove in one of those London cabs through as the crowds were being placed into police vans as the others straggled away. Welcome to sports in politics in the new united Europe!
We think there are hard feelings between Boston and New York. So, all the world loves soccer, except Canada and America, who were both eliminated by tiny nations with the population of New York. The more we all merge the more healthy and wise we all become. The luxury Jaguar now has a Bengal tiger in her tank.
Derek Dashwood enjoys the combining of science into the humanities to measure politics and use and wise use of power at
Healthy Lifestyles That Could Take Us Around the World
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