Fifty Shades of Black by Arthur Black Read Free Book Online Page A

using the White Man’s money to do it.

 
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    Comox Women Rock!
    A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
    â€”Irina Dunn
    A lot of rock fans are positive that the group U2 invented that phrase. Others will beat you over the head with a bicycle pump insisting that Gloria Steinem deserves the credit. Actually, it was an Australian writer by the name of Irina Dunn, but attribution doesn’t really matter; it’s the sentiment that counts. A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. A Victoria cop takes down her would-be murderer even after he all but hacks off half her hand and stabs her in the neck. “Ninety percent of my officers would have died in that attack,” says police chief Jamie Graham. Not Constable Lane Douglas-Hunt. She’s back on duty as I write.
    A woman named Alexandra Morton leads the campaign to get Norwegian fish farms out of our coastal waters; a woman named Elizabeth May leads the campaign to keep an oil pipeline to China out of our mountains and rivers and valleys. Six of our provincial premiers are women. Lots of Canadian women in leadership roles these days; no fish or bicycles need apply.
    Still it was instructive to take a drive up Vancouver Island to the Comox Valley to deliver a keynote speech to the CVWBN. This stands for Comox Valley Womens’ Business Network, a group of more than seventy local women entrepreneurs representing every profession from real estate to investment counselling, as well as bookkeeping, graphics, advertising, public relations—you name it, they do it, and they get together once a month to network, have dinner together and listen to an after-dinner speaker such as, well, that bald guy from Salt Spring.
    As an observer it was fascinating for me. I couldn’t get over how vibrant and sizzly the evening was, compared to a lot of guy get-­togethers I’ve sat through. The businesswomen of Comox Valley really meet when they meet. It happened to be International Women’s Day when I was their guest, and every woman stood up and said a few words about why she was glad to be a woman. I can’t imagine even suggesting such a departure at any of the male-dominated get-togethers I attend.
    The question I keep getting since I came back is: “So if the Comox Valley Women’s Business Network is so powerful, how come they asked a man to be their guest speaker?”
    I think the answer’s pretty obvious. They’re beyond that petty gender crap. If somebody’s got something to say, it really doesn’t matter how they’re wired.
    When Golda Meir became prime minister of Israel, a reporter asked her how it felt to be a woman prime minister. Golda shrugged and said, “I don’t know; I’ve never been a man prime minister.”

 
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    A Walk on the Wild Side
    A few words about traffic jams. First, understand that I come from a Gulf Island that has (I’m being generous here) four, maybe five thousand cars, trucks, bicycles, skateboards, unicycles and other wheeled means of conveyance, all told. I have just returned from Vietnam. From Ho Chi Minh City, a.k.a. Saigon, which according to my guidebook contains some four million motorbikes. Not counting cars, taxis, buses, rickshaws, trucks or tuk-tuks. Just . . . motorbikes. Four million.
    A traffic jam on Salt Spring occurs whenever two good old boys travelling in pickups in opposite directions on the same road, espy one another and stop for a chat through their driver-side windows while the traffic on both sides backs up behind them. We islanders seldom honk at the good old boys. We know they’ll be done soon enough and traffic will resume.
    A traffic jam in Saigon? Can’t tell you. Never saw one. Oh, it’s curb-to-curb chrome and rubber, all right. An absolute river of motorbikes and scooters and tuk-tuks, but like a river, it keeps moving. And like a river, there are back eddies and side streams and rapids and the odd