Selective caution while true crises linger
If eclipse deserves a state of emergency, why not the long list of threats and problems we face?
A kind of eclipse occurs at the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic masterpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Then strange things start to happen: a mysterious black monolith appears; apes discover weapons; and a computer with artificial intelligence goes murderously haywire.
Eclipses have a great cosmic and psychological effect. It’s nature doing a strange, wondrous thing providing cultural fodder for centuries. All that puts the current delirium around the upcoming eclipse into some perspective. It is indeed a big deal, even if a number of the reactions seem a bit over the top.
Some municipalities are anticipating and even cultivating a tourism boom, hoping to capitalize on it with eclipse events. Elsewhere, students are being sent home early, or for the entire day, lest teachers not be able to keep all the children in their charge from staring directly at it. Even knowing it’s harmful, the urge to look at something as cool as an eclipse takes effort to resist. A brood of kids would be hard to control.
While the school issue seemed like overkill, the justification makes sense. The alternative might be just to keep them all indoors.
Still, the time off from school created quite a debate, perhaps only equal to Niagara region declaring a pre-emptive state of emergency as it expects more than a million people to head there on Monday. This is from a region that is used to lots of tourists arriving, so perhaps it knows something about that. For comparison, Sullivan County in neighbouring New York state declared a state of emergency during the 1969 Woodstock festival because of how many people converged there.
However, this “abundance of caution,” as one Niagara official said, puts a lot of other things in perspective.
If a state of emergency is declared for something as joyously fantastic as a total eclipse, why don’t we do the same for the long list of other threats and problems we have? Ones that fester and cause harm to society, the economy or even death and injury.
Occasionally this happens. Just over a year ago, Niagara region declared another state of emergency, one that triggered far less debate. Enacted to get a handle on the triple threat of homelessness, mental health and opioid addiction, the move was to bring attention to the problems and seek additional support from the federal and provincial governments, though questions were raised if it would be effective.
It’s not the first time this kind of thing has been discussed. In 2017, Toronto’s board of health called for an emergency declaration over the surge in opioid overdoses and deaths, but then-minister of health Eric Hoskins rejected it. Today opioid carnage continues.
Some object to the eclipse state of emergency because it can open the door to curtailing civil liberties. It’s not always the right move, it can be quite heavy-handed and needs to be considered thoroughly before implementing.
Those specifics aside, what the eclipse emergency says to me is officials are taking it seriously, while there are an awful lot of important things we don’t, issues that affect our lives much more than this celestial event.
I’ve likely written about the housing crisis more than any other issue, maybe our biggest next to climate change, yet even this past week Doug Ford doubled down on his fourplex stand. There is no housing crisis, it seems, no emergency, no seriousness in actually trying to solve it. This isn’t a unique dynamic.
Traffic gridlock, bickering over transit plans and even the epic, eclipse-worthiness of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT delays are often treated like a political squabble or even something to joke about rather than things that negatively affect hundreds of thousands of people daily. Why did it take months to get traffic wardens on King Street to keep the streetcar moving? Unseriousness.
Road conditions and behaviour that kill and injure pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers have, in Toronto, gone unenforced by our police, but also are treated with kid glove punishments and little change rather than having, say, a car impounded or shutting down the collision area to figure out why it happened and not reopening until there’s a redesign.
But then even something as obviously lifesaving as a bike lane is easily objected to by politicians and residents alike. It’s a useful example because, like a lot of things, if there’s no direct personal benefit it’s easy to object, to not take the consequences seriously, to be annoyed at how it might affect one’s own lifestyle.
So maybe it’s fine Niagara is declaring a state of emergency, showing they’re serious about possible threats, even if they might not materialize. A cloudy Monday could make all the fuss for naught. Sometimes that’s the best outcome.
We may not need a state of emergency for these other problems, but we need the same kind of seriousness.