Concern

Jennifer Rubin’s writing this morning on Substack, notes how many Republicans in the US are expressing “concern” about what is going on. Some express concern about the actions of people they voted for, even though something like their support of Vladimir Putin was well known. One, a medical doctor, was concerned about the quackery of Robert Kennedy – but voted for him.  Again, the quackery was well known in advance. Others are concerned about DOGE and its cuts that are affecting their constituents. From the perspective on one Canadian, they are participating in agreement with growing executive orders that sound like fascism in spite of their “concern”.

Opposition to government action can be a slow process. In my own country’s national newspaper, the Globe & Mail, I read yesterday that some people with disabilities are denied supplementary benefits because the forms to fill out are confusing, lengthy and difficult for the disabled and also take too much time from their medical practitioners to fill out. What I can do later this morning is to write my newly elected member of parliament to look into this. She comes to the position after losing her first try by a small margin to a member of the Conservative Party. The defeat of the prime minister at the time started with the loss of this riding in downtown Toronto that had been a stable Liberal seat for decades. But everything changed when Justin Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister and a Conservative party leader who was well ahead in the polls lost the election to a new Prime Minister. As I write this, Prime Minister Mark Carney is heading for a meeting at the White House.

And oh the flurry on Canadian TV and assuredly in social media that I see very little of. I’m amused and annoyed with pundits who ask what the deal at the end of the day will  be. Most of them have never sat in a meeting at high level where a strategy gets enacted over a very long time.  As an exec director of a small non-profit decades ago, I learned that my board members would never accept any new initiative I suggested –and always said no.  It took me considerable time to accept that the initiative did finally come to fruition – often years later – and one of the board members took the credit for thinking of it. I also remember sitting as a consultant in a boardroom of a group that was trying to build a new cultural center. We watched through a long series of meetings where the chair never put a motion on the table until he was totally convinced that it would pass. These were small things compared to negotiations between countries. Deals are about money and land. Agreements are about morality, ethics and law one hopes = and the necessary amount of time it takes to understand and implement them.

So I’ll go and read the morning paper and see what the unrealistic predictions are there. What has been more productive is to start reading Timothy Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom, Russia, Europe, America. I know far too much about America and very little about the others, based on what I am learning from reading this book.  As a start, anyone might take the challenge of drawing a rough map of Europe and naming the positions of EU countries. I would have failed this totally. Every current country of the EU has a history as important and interesting as those of the United States or Canada. If we paid much more attention to history, every single one of us would have a much better understanding of what is happening now – and start to move toward actions, however small –  beyond “concern”. It’s up to all of us.