My website starts bravely with questions like these:
Well drilling down this morning, the answers don’t come to mind, but simply more questions. The morning paper (read digitally but in facsimile format) headlines the impasse created by six wheelers parked in front of the Canadian House of Parliament with their drivers determined to stay until their demands are met. The Ukraine is angry with us because we won’t send them lethal weapons. The British Prime Minister is saying sorry, sorry, sorry about 20 parties at 10 Downing Street when everyone else was locked down. Canadian Conservative Party members seem ready to throw out yet another leader - this one because he apparently reneged by supporting conversion therapy when several others didn’t want it banned. On a brighter note, the Webb telescope seems to be behaving the way it was intended.
I’ll have to leave the Conservatives here in Canada and in the UK to fend for themselves, but I feel more sympathy for those residents in Ottawa. I lived there for several years and it is a beautiful and livable city - 30 minutes from anything even if you live in the burbs, the best shopping, the ski hills, the lakes, the Canals. Six Wheelers have become weaponized to support political agendas - and they seem to be towing all kinds of other angry folks with them. Confederate flags and Swastikas are rightly condemned by all of us and it’s appalling to have to even say so - but we are having more trouble with Freedom.
It’s been said that when most think of America, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness comes to mind - and the Constitution. Move over to Canada and it’s Peace, Order and Good Government. Somehow I hear echoes former NDP Leader Tom Mulcair asking the party in power some years ago with a twinkle in his eye, “So How’s That Working for You?”.
It gets personal. So I’ll start today asking a bunch of questions of myself, because living the questions sometimes gets me where I need to go.
Have I ever spent any time on framing documents? What if I set an agenda over the coming weeks to read the US Constitution, The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms - and perhaps ones written by the UN?
What if I looked more seriously at protests? The one going on right now in Ottawa doesn’t have a permit. The citizens who live in the city are rightly put off by visitors who desecrate monuments, harass their citizens, impede their traffic, and break their pandemic protocols. The police have make judgment calls in applying the law judiciously when verbal anger can lead to physical violence. It doesn’t always erupt that way in a protest, but the latter is almost always preceded by the former. What’s the right call? What does the law say? What’s the right course of action? How does the treatment of white protesters compare with that of visible minorities.
Most of the protesters are angry white men. Have we failed them? If yes, how? If no, what do we do about it?
Here is a what-if. What if politicians stopped demonizing one another? What if any member said simply, “I disagree with member X. This is what I think is important instead”. They complain about the use of social media - but is there an opportunity to think about parliamentary civil discourse?
Here is another? What if we expected less of leaders and more of members? Do heroes always ultimately disappoint us because we expect so much of them when they are simply human beings - often letting us off the hook of doing much except judging them?
With the decline of institutional religion, is anything still sacred?
What are we really going to learn in the next two decades from the Webb telescope? Spoiler alert - how many of us will last that long? One good writer recently suggested that it will confirm that we are finally just tiny specks in a universe. Like Odysseus we act like his followers, when encouraged to stay the course and look ahead - and then drown - but do we just move forward anyway?
It looks as though my work is cut out for me over the rest of the week - and for future posts.
