Ever read history and wonder why entire nations were so stupid? 
I have. 
“Idiots!” Is what I think, followed closely by “That would never happen HERE, that would never happen to ME!”
Perhaps the fact that the arrogance it would take for Thought #2 to so closely follow the very obvious missing of the lesson should let me in on the insight, but alas, it rarely does. 
The thought that something stupid could never make sense to you is a ridiculous thought in and of itself. You’ve never done anything really REALLY dumb?
Your brain fully agreed with the last stupid thing you did, but definitely trust it the next time with 100% confidence!
What makes us so gullible is that we are not a results based society any longer. 
The more we move away from what I call results based industries (things that have to make money/ accomplish something or they die) and towards salaried bureaucracies where how you play the gameis how you keep your job, the more gullible and responsibility-adverse we become. Job security is all that matters. Who cares if the company goes under in a month if you get paid on Friday?
If an oilfield company (Remember when those were? The companies that paid for useful things like food and shelter and schools?) projected a profit of a billion dollars and was out on their projections by, say, nine hundred million, EVERYBODY WOULD GET FIRED. And rightly so. 
Your mistake just cost a lot of people their house payment. We don’t have room for that kind of incompetence because of the damage to people it does. 
I love how everybody rags on oil and gas as if the industry itself is evil when it’s just another industry. There’s nothing particularly noble in most industries that provides a service, but if they could ascend the We Save Lives chain into god-like status, they could cheerfully leave any expectation of results far behind them. Don’t go so far as to ask which lives and how many we lost in total by saving these ones… 
At least oil and gas is driven by results, which means you can trust their message in some way because it’s always been very clear. You know their INTENT. 
What made the German people make such poor decisions as a nation under the Nazi party? Your own silly brain might jump in with how much the intelligence of everyone is greater now, which they were obviously told back then, or other ridiculous factoids like how much access to information we have (as if that translates automatically to desired results), but the reality is actually much scarier. Sometimes an extreme example helps us realize it starts in small mindset shifts. 
Some people are smart and some are clever. I’m a bit of both on good days, but then I look at my daughter Katie. Katie takes smart to a whole other level and is a bit scary. She can already get ahead of me sometimes in her mind, and she’s in grade eight!
The German people showed us their drive, intelligence and ingenuity during the great wars without a doubt, but sadly in the wrong direction for the most part. If one would weigh the intelligence against the average Canadian now I would suggest we would lose like we’d lose a national soccer match. We don’t even train our children with the types of thinking they did back then. 
We tend to think intelligence is being able to lay our hands on random facts at will, but they rightly based the measure of someone’s intelligence on their ability to get a result, not an instagram following. 
But their own ingenuity was used against them. 
How can this be? 
They were offered something in exchange for something else. A herd of Lemmings were made of very smart people.
Any nation that demands a man answer to the state (or anything else) before his God must demand he sacrifice his conscience for a collective one, for the “greater good” of course. For the “safety” “well being” “success” “health” “fatherland” “identity” or whatever trigger word happens to work on a generation to get them to sign away their personal conscience and responsibility. 
What’s also concerning is that most people’s personal conscience and morality is decided by whatever they think is fashionable (most popular) on social media that day based on whoever FB knew already agreed with them, which was paraded without dissent or the other side of the argument. 
Easy to discredit someone when you think there’s only one of them. They have the same agreeable information parade but YOU’RE the one idiot. 
A person can be smart if placed directly into cause and effect scenarios. PEOPLE are panicky and easily shifted by the proper leverages if personal, immediate payment can be avoided. 
If you knew you were immediately answerable for speeding on the road every single time you wouldn’t do it anymore. But get me on my bike on the QE2 and send fifty cars past me at 140 and guess what I’m going to do? 
150:)
Like lemmings off a cliff once the speed ramps up. And we don’t love having to slow down and turn around because we’d have to deal with the accidents our recklessness caused behind us. Like let’s keep Costco and Walmart open but close small businesses down because it’s somehow safer to pack everybody into two stores rather than twenty? Hmmm. Don’t recall anybody getting fired for that one… 
Every message you hear has something attached to it that’s more powerful than the message itself. It’s an agenda. Create fear! Create dependency! Control the market!
I distrust what’s behind any fear filled message. There’s caution which is good, but fighting a war afraid takes the fight out of you, then you get your friends shot. 
I distrust fear filled leaders. I would rather follow someone who is confident and has a proven track record able to get the only thing that matters (RESULTS). 
Politics aside I appreciate Mr Kenney (I appreciate his politics too but you may not). He’s a man who knows his own mind and has a rare one. I hate the thought of the ridiculous lemming pressure he must be facing from all sides with everybody rushing to equal destruction and demanding he follow and bring us with him too. 
I think his gut might get us out of this mess. I wish he’d have kept the mic and not passed it off so early to specialists in one area of life. A specialist consults but you NEVER make them CEO. 
Save every life? Impossible! Only a medic believes that (and that’s what makes a medic a good one), but medics aren’t generals. A medic-general’s tunnel vision with the idea to save every life gets everyone blown up in the end because they are built, trained, and purposed to save the person in front of them at any cost. 
There might be a hundred people that get sacrificed to save one. Do you see the difference in calling? Valuable, and both have to make incredibly hard decisions, both are soldiers, but the best medic doesn’t graduate into general. 
I look at the waffling and ridiculous hiding national and other provincial leaders are doing and appreciate our Premier’s vision that we must face covid before we starve and THEN have to face it. Maybe we can’t avoid the punch but could be first on our feet rather than go fifty seven more rounds and then get knocked out?
What we need now more than anything is the only thing that can get us out of this mess with the fewest long term casualties:
A leader with vision, tough skin and a conscience. 
May he not sacrifice it under pressure, 
And may he not give us what we want if it would destroy us in the end.