If you can tear yourself away from riveting play-by-play coverage of the Liberal leadership race, including its carbon tax contortions, here’s a suggestion for filling the resulting empty hours. Take a pencil and paper or, if you’re under about 40, open an app, and write down in short, pithy sentences what’s currently wrong with Canada and how to fix it. Then compare it with what the parties are saying and add that gap to the list.
“Empty hours,” you cry? My life is not filled with joy only because of political races. Well, aren’t you weird? Just maybe weird enough to have clear, coherent ideas about public affairs broadly speaking.
For instance, “Not enough straight talk from those in power.” When’s the last time you heard a politician confronted with an inconsistency say “Yes, I used to think that way but I’ve changed my mind and here’s why.” Would they spontaneously combust?
Then there’s “We spend too much public money, so we need to spend less.” Instead, lots of them say the former but not the latter, leaving you doubting their sanity, yours, or both.
You might be deterred from this exercise by fear of being told your proposals aren’t “practical.” Please don’t be. I’m not saying go insane; many popular solutions genuinely aren’t practical, including all that hinge on conspiracy theories. If you were heading down that rabbit hole, please destroy the piece of paper so there’s no evidence, and start over.
You don’t say. But there are a great many things we take for granted because they do exist or happen, which we would benefit from recognizing as extraordinary. Many are good, from the existence and re-establishment of Israel to the fact that after water comes from the sky, food comes from the dirt. If the latter two didn’t happen, we wouldn’t be around to say it was strange that they didn’t. But it’s literally a daily miracle. Give thanks.
Indeed, pillorying the debt is a constant sport among politicians who seem unable to do anything about it except add to it while performing kabuki theatre over a “debt limit.” But don’t be shy. If Theodore Herzl, in Austria-Hungary (another on the “not” list), could seriously propose re-establishing the Jewish homeland after 1,800 years, you can write “Let’s pay off the national debt.”
Be ambitious. Write down “We need a Christian revival.” Or “Quebec should separate.”
So think responsibly. But think big, because big ideas change the world, for better or worse, whereas “managerial competence” doesn’t even when it exists, though “I wish our politicians were less conspicuously unable to keep even the promises they try to” is a reasonable item for your list.
Certainly, “I wish politicians would acknowledge that reality is tricky” is high on mine. It doesn’t matter whether I generally agree with their approach or not, though overwhelmingly I don’t, especially with those meant to be on my side who advocate tiptoeing cautiously in the wrong direction as the “practical” key to success for Conservatives.
So, “I wish Conservatives would be conservative” is among my items. Oh, and this one: “There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.” Yay! Wahoo!
Before you raise pen or race to keyboard to allege plagiarism, I didn’t invent it. It’s Ronald Reagan. (Whereas I came up with “I wish politicians and pundits would adopt, and acknowledge, good ideas from the past.”) And while we can’t re-elect the Gipper, Coolidge, or Laurier, we can do the modern equivalent.
It starts with clarity. So go ahead. Write down “Politicians should be clearer.” Then vote accordingly.
