Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

The City of Ottawa wants people to stop wearing anything that has a scent:

Ottawa councillors voted Thursday to start a public education campaign to get people to voluntarily stop wearing scented products, but stopped short of calling for a scents ban.

A citizens' committee on the environment submitted a proposal that the city phase in a bylaw banning people from wearing perfumes and scented products such as deodorants and soaps.

The proposal suggested starting with a public education campaign, then following with a scents ban in city buildings and later a citywide ban.

It seem that the right of some people to breathe fragrance-free air trumps the rights of others to wear fragrances which, the last time I checked, were still legal. And will we be banning deodorants as well? They all have added fragrances. How about foods with strong odors? This sounds like more of a "common sense" problem.

I can't help feeling that as we eliminate all of these things from our environment that we are creating a race of people who will be unable to deal with anything, never having built tolerances for such things. Over the past few decades as allergies have risen we have increasingly removed offending items from our lives. We now see schools that are completely nut-free as a result of allergies meaning that children aren't exposed at all. And now people are attempting to eliminate fragrances as well.

But nuts, fragrances, and a lot of other things exist in nature and the environment around us. Are we in the process of creating future generations of people who can't even go outside?

There is a group of people in my town that want to ban pesticides. I can understand their logic, but in a world where we have used perticides for so long do we know what kind of plant life might now flourish without it? Allergies are already bad. Will they get worse?

Tip of the hat to Being American in T.O.