l'salon des métiers d’art du Québec

The French Butter dish from l'alon des métiers d’art du Québec (the fair of the Quebec artisans) and healthy, whole wheat home made from scratch bread... :)

The artisan fair made me think complex thoughts... - to see all these people who make all these cool things that are buyable at Ikea for less than $5. How do they make a living doing these things? Should I support these artisans and thereby artificially sustain their bussiness and hope there would be many more people who'd do the same? But then what will happen if/when the masses flock to Ikea and ignore these artisans? But then I want these bussinesses to sustain - I easily tire off Ikea's generic patterns...

Then there was this guy from rural Quebec who makes these wood board games and he told me all about his games, some games which he himself had designed. But he was selling them for $100 which was full worth the price, but how many times in a person's life time can they shell out $100 for a board game...? I felt soooo soo bad for him...

Anyway, so one of my friends and I were chatting and she goes like 'so how was the artisan fair?' and I expressed my thoughts, to which she said "oh no... don't be sad... you can not save them... you know what I do? I pray to God to take care of them."

Another reason why I think religion should be abolished from the face of the earth - it fosters irresponsibility. People fail to take responsibility for their actions (or inactions as was the case here) and hide behind 'prayers'. I think it is really sweet that some people still believe in God and all, but for all of human history we know that God did not give those artisans' kids food or education...

The few socially concious people (I am not one, I have but a long long way to go before I am socially concious enough to make a difference...), make the existence of such hypocrites even more possible, because by taking action, they allow the hypocrites to be even more hands-off and even proclaim "see, my prayers were answered!!"

This obviously totally blew my lid off, but I did keep it cool, because I work with her and have to do so for at least 1.5 more years. And thus I became one of those many people who timidly keep silent for selfish reasons...

As she in her very sweet way tried to console me, I did say to her though just in one simple sentence, how I wanted to never stop feeling this way.

And that said off we went for beer - having said our prayers, our job here was done... we could rest and enjoy our beers...