Insurance Mandate

In most countries, if not all, the ruling government demands – by use of the country’s legal system - that all drivers have insurance coverage, which at minimum (third party insurance) should be enough to cover the damage you (through your car) inflict on others.

On the face of it this seems like a reasonable system, but is it?

I, and you, may feel much safer driving our “tens of thousands dollar car” knowing that this asset is protected from all those other road-using-idiots. Unfortunately, with the experience from, my fifty-three years of existence and thirty-five years of driving, who I really need protection from is the Insurance Companies and their monopolistic control of the motor insurance industry. An industry that our legal system has allowed to run roughshod over all drivers-rights.

All governments should be guided by one underlying principle, to protect the rights of the individual while maintaining the goals of the society as a whole. And I agree with the policy of the mandatory driving insurance system, but I think that all governments have dropped the ball by allowing a law that allows one small segment of the business community to take advantage of a larger segment of the population.

This becomes even more disadvantages in small territories, where the market size further promotes monopolies through either the number of companies available to offer a service and/or collusion.

I will not bother to site examples of unrealistically high insurance rates charged by these companies nor site further examples of how these companies have also immorally, and in some cases illegally, wiggled out of claim payments, since I am positive that each of us has a personal experience or knows someone who has personal experience of this.

What I would like to offer is an alternative.

I agree that each vehicle user must be protected from every other road user, our road system, is after all, a shared asset that benefits each individual as well as our society as a whole. What we need is a better way to effect this protection, not only to each user, but also to limit it to when it is actually needed, that is when we are driving and not when the car is parked in our garage.

Remember, what I am talking about here is insuring the other road user (which you will always belong too since you are always the other road user to someone else) and not insuring your property, which in this case is your car. This you can do separately to protect it from damage inflected by you (such as car repairs from driving in into your garage door) or Acts of God (such as tress falling our your car).

No what I’m talking about is covering the damage you inflict on the other roads users, more commonly called third party insurance, and in most cases is the minimum insurance coverage the road users’ law requires you have.

I am suggesting that the government use its vast sea of data collected from the many years we have all been driving to determine the average annual payout of claims, due to third party road-going accidents, and use this to determine an appropriate fund to cover future road users.

Then apportion a fee, based on road usage, to each driver. This fee can be collected through a number of systems, annual fees much like the permits we pay for the car, toll systems on the roads, mandatory annual safety checks, etc. Each have their pros and cons, but what I would like to suggest, as the most efficient way, is through the gas station.

Every vehicle needs fuel to allow it to use the roads and in fact can only use the roads through the use of gas, so a fee attached to these prices will allow all roads users to travel with the required insurance.
The advantage of this system is that we pay insurance only when we “use the road” and not on the individual car. So if you drive more than me then you pay more than me, or if you drive less than me then you pay less than me.

You pay for usage and not for a car holed up in your garage for most of the year, you do not pay per car you own (as you do now) but for when you use the car, which is when the insurance is really needed.

All drivers will be covered, whether that driver is local or from out-of-country, or state, or town. Once you buy gas you are covered.

Not to mention reducing the high occurrence of non-insured drivers that presently use the road today. In Florida one in four drivers are un-insured; in Mississippi it is 28%; in Tennessee 24% and one in six drivers on the LA Freeway is un-insured. (from the National Insurance of Insurance Commissioners)

Of course nay-sayers will immediately baulk at this notion, siting increased government control of our lives and unnecessary red-tape, but really isn’t the mandatory insurance already a fact of road-life (and a control over our actions) and isn’t the Police stop where they ask for proof of insurance and supplying proof of insurance to annually re-permit your car already red-tape?

Plus we already have government fees/taxes being collected by businesses from us on behalf of the government in federal taxes, sales taxes and VAT (value added taxes).

Yes, there is one small negative to this system, as I see it. We are presently looking into alternate energy sources and have to apply this system to these alternate systems but at this stage in the game they are such a small segment of the total market that their impact can be easily calculated into the fee. The advantage though, at this time, as far as I am concerned, far outweighs the dis-advantage. We can stop the unethical legalizing of a business system that controls our road-user needs and whose only objective is generating a profit (and a fat one at that) at the detriment of  the individual’s rights.

Paradise lost

After twenty years in Barbados I became convinced that I was living in paradise, yes the cost of living was high, but I was getting by at a standard of living that, not as opulent as I could dream, was comfortable. I had a place to live, a loving son, a women I loved and a job that I enjoyed.

Then I hit fifty-one and it all came crashing down. I found out the woman I loved  felt somewhat different towards me, and with forethought and malice decided to take away my paradise.

No place to live, no job, no security, no money…all gone! Thank god for family, my sister came to my rescue and offered me a place to recoup, to recover. A place to lick my wounds and heal so I ended up moving in with my sister in Miami.

Now three months later, I’m back in Barbados. Back because my VISA ran out but also back to get my medical history for my doctors in the US. back to change my VISA so I can look for work in the US and while back I fully expected to be hit by nostalgia…and a yearning to be back home, back where I belonged, back to where I was known and to what I knew.

But its all just a place to me now, much like Las Vegas and Disney is, a place I visited and stayed awhile. That’s all.

What I’ve lost I can never get back, a partner in life that I can love and trust, gone, betrayed. A family destroyed by the explosive force of one person’s anger and vindictiveness born from a desire to control the world to their own view which, erroneously based on self determination, can only end up as ultimately self-centered and selfish.

At the same time my son, through his on-going maturity, has moved into the next phase of his family relationship, from a fully-dependent part of my family to a self reliant dependent. This is a natural stage of any growing family, when your child becomes an independent individual, making decisions for themselves based on the core factors you’ve instilled in them, through your life actions and teachings. All we can hope is these instilled behaviors will aid him positively in determining his future.

My son will always be that my son, but now, at soon to be twenty, and having lived on his own for fours years (albeit the first two under supervision) he is well on his way to being his own man.

So at 53, on my own, with my past just that, in the past, and no clear path forward, I strike out into the wilderness of single life, in a foreign country, without a job to seek out my future, my dreams, to find paradise once again.

Regrets, I’ve had a few

Yesterday was Richard’s (my brother-in-law) birthday and while we all reveled (me included, and for my own selfish reasons) in his joy at getting a Scaletric Racing set (a real big boy’s toy) it did set my mind to thinking of the past, unfortunately it’s where those of us with questionable futures tend to spend a lot of time.

There’s not a lot I regret from my past, much I am sorry for, but not a lot of regrets. The way I see it, all of my experiences have culminated in developing the person I am today and though I do not stack up even-steven with the likes of  Superman, Batman, Spiderman or even Obama, I do think that I am an OK guy.

The mistakes I’ve made, and boy have I made mistakes, have gained me the experience to be a better man and hopefully a better person today than I was at any other time in my past.

That’s not to say I do not have regrets, I, as the immortal Frank Sinatra sings, “have had a few.” My biggest regret though was destroying a relationship with of one of the few women I could have, or should have married. Hindsight is a bitch!

This incredible woman worked with me for a while and was not only beautifully sexy but also intelligent with an amazing capacity to experience new things all the time, a quality I find very attractive in women, mind you I’m probably overly romanticizing, like any good fisherman, the attributes of the one that got away.

My regret was not that I let her get away, sorry my male ego got in the way here; I do understand that a relationship is based on two people and not just what I want, and the fact, might be, that she, if I had given her the chance, would have turned me down anyway. The regret is actually that I took away the opportunity for her to make that decision. My actions drove her away and practically demanded that she hate me for the rest of her life, or mine depending on which of us crosses the pearly gates first.

Relationships are the bane to my existence, my Asperger's becomes a disability in this aspect of my life.

I do not intuitively understand the nuances of human verbal and non verbal interaction. At the best of times I use references from novels I’ve read and TV shows or movies I’ve seen, as well as past experience, compare the millions of scenes I’ve seen play out to the one I’m presently in and pattern my response to suit. This is not an automatic knee-jerk response that most people seem to be able to do but a calculated and determined action that I have to be actively engaged in, much like any work task you have been given to do.

Since no conversation flows exactly as the references I’m pulling from I have to constantly review each individual instance of my conversation, with all those stored in my head and pattern what I think is an appropriate response, verbally, non-verbally or both. This process takes intense concentration, specially when you have to keep the fact of what you are doing from your companion. It taxes me physically and mentally and after a while, from just pure exhaustion, I have to seek sanctuary and pull back and hide, as best I can.

You would think that after 53 years I would be more adept at this but that’s not the case and with my recent divorce, my ring finger still has the absent ring’s indent, I have once again been thrust into, at least for me, the black hole of female/male interaction.

Case in point, I met a woman last year at a rally event, with whom I had an immediate attraction, but with only one week to work with and her at opposite ends of the event to me meant we only interacted two or three times and only in an official capacity…if this were a movie I would have flirted with her at each occasion to let her know I was interested but I just did not know how too. A lost chance for me.

And again last night, on my way back home with Richard and Giselle, we were out with a few friends continuing Richard’s birthday celebrations, I was told that our waitress was flirting with a friend sitting but one seat away from me. What I thought was a waitress just being friendly, maybe angling for a bigger tip, was in fact flirting. I was shocked, not so much that she was flirting with my friend but at the now possible thousands of times that I had been flirted with and had not known about it.

A lesson we need to learn

I never had a granny. Well, like everyone else, I actually had two, my father's mother and my mother's mother. My father's mother died when I was still a child, before I could get to known her as anything other than Nan Nan. My mother's mother lived across the Atlantic Ocean, in Ireland so, here too, I never got to know her before she also passed away.

The only "granny" I knew was actually an in-law, my ex-wife's grandmother. Grace Taylor and she was all of what a classical "headstrong" granny should be. In an age which expected women to be subservient to men (in general) and their husbands needs, Granny Grace was anything but,she left her well-to-do home in Trinidad and flew to Barbados to build and run her own apartment hotel, in a swamp no less!

Granny always had her own way of doing everything. When she made up her mind on how things would happen, then that was that, no need to confuse her with actual facts.

One of the things she believed in, was the health benefits of a sea bath, as opposed to a fresh water bath (shower) or mud bath (Granny was a trained beautician). Every day at 10:00 she would drop whatever she was doing, even if it meant leaving the servants to check-in new arrivals to her apartment/hotel, and head to the Barbados Yacht club for her daily swim.

When I met granny Grace she had already decided (read this to mean forced to by her doctor and family) to stop driving. So she had "Trotman", her handyman and general all round go-to guy for the apartment/hotel, drive her for the institutional daily swim. The one problem with this arrangement was that Trotman had Sunday’s off, so, as the newest member to the family, it fell to me to take her to the Yacht Club on Sunday’s.

We’d go early, like about 9:15. this suited my ex-wife perfectly as she preferred to sleep in on Sunday’s, so I’d pick Granny Grace up from her cottage at about 9:00 and we’d be on the beach by 9:15. Now when I say she went for a swim, I mean just that, her routine was rigorous. 9:15 on the beach, ten minutes later we’d start our trek towards the sea. It took Granny that much time to take off her house dress, under which she already had her whole piece bathing suit on (thank god – the thought of helping her change still gives me nightmares) and put on her swimming cap (the aquamarine rubber skull cap with the stuck-on plastic blue and yellow daffodils).

The walk to the sea took another ten minutes of one jerky baby step after another with me in front of her (walking backwards) and her leaning onto my two supporting outstretched arms, with Granny constantly complaining that I was either not supporting her enough or taking the bumpiest route to the water or walking too fast. I swear we were moving so slow that on the days when the tide was going out it would take us twice as long to reach the water.

Finally we would enter the water with sighs of delight from us both, her for the feeling of the water supporting her not unsubstantial mass and me for the cooling effects the Caribbean sea would have on my now sweat drenched over worked muscles from the tedious ten minute walk to cover 50 feet of Carlisle Bay’s soft white sand.

Floating, free of gravity, in the aqua-green of the Caribbean sea, early on a Sunday morning, looking up into the never ending blue of a clear tropical sky made it all worth while, until I hear granny’s voice, still, even after more than twenty years in Barbados, easily identified by her Trinidadian lithe, say, “Tony, see that man there, her cheated on his wife with his secretary, who he eventually married, but later divorced to live with his maid. Image that!”

Now you would image that a statement like that would be said in a hushed, conspired whisper, with heads leaned close together, not Granny. She was floating a few feet from me, but she must have though we were at opposite ends of the three mile natural harbour that is Carlisle Bay, from the volume of her comment. Combine this with the natural affinity water has to amplify sound and I would not be surprised if seas bathers in Antigua, at the Northern end of the Caribbean Chain, could not have heard her comment.

And she had a comment about everybody that was enjoying a Sunday soak. Thank god it was early in the morning and there were only a few people out enjoying, or at least trying to, the peace and quite of the seas before the screaming, energetic sun-fuelled kids hit the beach later in the day.

After twenty minutes or so of floating (for relaxation) and swimming (for exercise), a very slow modification of the dog paddle, Granny was ready to come out of the water. reverse the trek in, only this time it took shorter since we were not chasing the receding water. And once back to our seats, thankfully proper seats provided by BYC, I could not imagine having to lower and raise Granny from a prone position on a towel laid out in the sand,we ended the routine with a Peña Colada, “To warm me up from my soak.” Granny would explain.Though if you would believe this, then Granny must have been the coldest person in Barbados, based on her alcohol intake. Thank god she lived in a tropical climate.

Granny is gone now, and I hope that the angels who now take her for her sea bath have as much fun as I had getting to know and understand a remarkable woman who lived in a world so far removed from the one I grew up in.

I truly believe that to move forward we not only need to know about our past but to also understand it, only with this understanding can we truly achieve the proper perspective to better help us move into a better and brighter future.

And the best way to achieve understanding is through the actual lived-it experience of those who were there. Our elders are an untapped resource that we all need to not only acknowledge, but to tap into as often as we can to gain the understanding urgently needed to help move us forward as a society.

The media’s fascination with ratios

I am a believer in mathematics, I specially like the absoluteness of formulae, which for the most part result in absolute answers. I am a black and white type of guy who unfortunately lives in a grey world.

So it grates me when math's is used incorrectly. And boy has it! The worst offender is the mass media and the most often incorrect use of mathematics by the media is ratios.

We are forever seeing statements like 70% increase, 150% decrease, 300% increase or just the plain ratios stated, 50% 10%…etc. What does this mean? On the face of it the figures are big, 70, 150 and 300 but are they?

Percentages are a typical way of showing ratio’s, in other words one number’s relationship to another. It is not an absolute number, such as 70, 150 and 300 but a relative one and takes its meaning from the absolute numbers it represents.

For example if you have one penny and someone gave you 3 more pennies, then you would have increased your assets by 300%. If you deal with the percentage only and told your friends that you increased your asset base by 300% then they would be amazed. Tell them you now have 4 pennies and that would not garner near as much interest as saying you have a 300% increase.

You see ratio’s are not and will never be absolute numbers, but they can and in many cases do provide eye raising reactions when quoted. That is why the media use them (and statistics, but that’s another topic).

Mass media, and here I include the main stream news broadcasts as well as the advertisers that use mass media (including some of the better known charities) need to balance the act of providing information and gaining attention. In there perspective what’s the point in gathering and reporting on news events when they do not have the attention of an audience to see/listen to it.

So this has lead to the use of percentages (ratio’s) to enhance the shock factor, to entice an audience to listen to the story of how Joe Bloke increased his assets by 300%, after all who would listen to a story about a bum who had four pennies to his name.

The ‘Me’ generation?! Really?

I hear, from time to time, declarations by the older and supposedly more experienced life-veterans, accusations that my generation is the ‘me’ generation. They blame most, if not all, of today’s society ills, from misbehaving children to the unproductivity of employees to the breakdown in family values, on this fact.

From my point of view I think they have it all wrong. this is in fact, not a ‘me’ generation. A true ‘me’ generation would require that you never think of yourself first. Let me explain.

If I wanted everything to be about me, then I should expect that everyone that I meet should be putting my needs before their own. by extension I am also included in the “everybody” to someone else. So I too, must put my neighbors first, which means I should not behave in a selfish manner, but be more cognizant to what my neighbor (the person in the line behind me, someone walking alongside me on the sidewalk or mall, a driver in traffic with me, the server at a restaurant etc.) needs are at our moment of contact.

With this in mind, and using the natural laws of morality and ethics, I should deal with my neighbor, as though they are more important than me, as I am to them, by way of the same reasoning.
This utopia will result in the real ‘me’ generation, where you will always be the center of your contacts circle.

What we have existing now, is not a ‘me ‘ generation but an isolationist generation, where each of us surrounds ourselves with a wall of solitude, ignorant of the needs of anyone but ourselves, oblivious to the true rewards that come from the sharing of lives, ambitions, frailties, loves and hopes, that enrich us as a people and in fact, makes us more human in every way, every day.

So, lets be good children and listen to our elders, if they are calling this the ‘me’ generation then lets make it a true ‘me’ generation by destroying our walls of solitude and putting our neighbors first!

Eating or taking

Every culture, or sub-culture for that matter, has their own language. Sometimes the language is made up of a mixture of different languages such as Patois (a French/English mash-up spoken in Trinidad) or, more commonly, a mixture of re-defined English words and truncated grammar.

Living in the Caribbean, with its many small micro-cultures, all co-existing in close proximity, creates not only a tolerance for but also an appreciation and understanding of the variances in dialect.

A Trinidadian friend of mine, living in Canada for quite a number of years, visited Barbados on business recently and though well versed in the various Trinidad dialects, was out of practice with dealing with different nuances, after all he had been exposed to the language of Canadian English as his only verbal communication for so long that his intuitive grasp of local dialect was rusty.

At the cashier of the local fast food outlet, after placing his order, he was asked, “Eating or taking?” To which he replied, falling back on the old Trinidad statement that conveyed the message that I did not understand you question, “Eh!”

“Eating or taking?” the cashier repeated, this time with a slight tone in her voice that said, you dumb or what! answer quickly nuh! De line getting’  longer.

My friend, recognizing the tone, began to think quickly, what is she’s asking? Eating or taking? Surely she can’t be asking if I intend to eat the food I just ordered, since this is a restaurant and they serve food, they must expect me to eat it. And taking, the food will be handed to me over a counter, like every other fast food restaurant, so I must also take it.

Looking at the cashier’s face for clues my friend was greeted with the bored, lights-on-but-nobody’s-home refection of a woman who has spent too many hours at the same job asking the same questions and who’s only ambition is to finish her shift without encountering too many stupid customers.

With the realization that an answer was expected to allow the completion of my friend’s transaction, he reverted to the tried and true Trinidad response to get the question repeated, “Eh!”

“Eating or taking?” the cashier  repeated exasperatedly. To which my friend replied, with a smile as though only now understanding, though all he did was take a stab in the dark, after all it couldn’t be eating, that was too obvious, so it must be…”Taking.”

The cashier smiled in return and handed him his change and directed him to the other end of the counter to collect his food.

When he returned to my car and explained what had happened, I laughed and explained to him the Bajan’s propensity to chop words in their dialect. What the woman was asking him was if he was planning to eat in or take out the food he had just ordered, but after so many times of saying the same thing over and over in got shortened to, eating or taking.