What Do We Actually DO, We People of the West?

I've been reading a lot about World War II lately. I don't romanticize the conflict. Unless epic tragedies caused by deluded fuck-wits can be romanticized. But I do think about the future those people were fighting and dying for. (Or, in the case of the civilians murdered by the leaders, the future that many simply missed by being killed.)

To a great degree, in the Western democracies, democracy was never stronger than after the war. The ordinary people, who felt deserving of a say after the shared sacrifices of the war, and all the hooting and hollering about "democracy" and "equality" from those leaders inspiring them to fight, made their demands very clear. And those demands were all about material concerns, and why not? Protection from the appalling insecurities of unemployment in an industrial capitalist economy. The right to unionize to deal with the collective of the industrial corporation or conglomerates with some degree of equality and dignity. The taxation of the super-rich to fund a more human way of life in the great cities. Access to education. Access to decent health care.

Here's the thing: These material benefits helped produce generations of people, of whom, MANY (but not all) had the privilege and comfort and peace of mind, to be able to think about people and issues other than themselves.

I'm talking, of course, about the much-maligned "hippies." The feminists. The peace-movement activists. The civil-rights activists. The environmental activists. Derided by small-minded, stunted, twisted souls today, these people thought beyond their own immediate self-interest and helped to create many improvements and bring a degree of sanity to our civilization. At the same time that they were doing this, our governments and capitalists, were both building things. To a great degree this was made possible by the wealth created by the reforms that had been demanded in the post-War period.

Not all of these things were blessings. The St. Lawrence Seaway has caused a number of unintended ecological consequences. The CN Tower is actually a monstrosity (even though I've been up it twice).

But I look at these public projects, from the 1950s and the 1970s, and I think: Has there been any project of similar ambition and confidence produced since the 1970s? What have we been doing as a people?

For the most part, it's consisted of austerity at home, and, lately, throwing money down rat-holes in military adventures like Afghanistan. Oh, that, and shovelling even more money at the wealthiest in the faint hope that once they're lying on heaps of gold deep enough to swim in, they'll feel some "confidence" and "invest in the economy" to hire people. (This after they've been laying us off for years pronouncing our labour costs as "unrealistic" or "un-competitive" with wage rates prevailing in Mexico, Brazil, China, or India.)

And what have we, as a people, been doing? For the most part we've been complete cowards. Gutless dupes. As the elites have turned against the post-war compromise and counter-attacked, the majority of us, it seems, are all fired up to beat on the weakest and the poorest. Supposedly petty criminals and welfare recipients held us all hostage for decades and wrecked the economy in their mad lust for substandard housing and poverty-level incomes, but NO MORE! Or else it's immigrants; both too lazy to work and stealing our jobs at the same time. Anti-immigration hysterics can't seem to find the time to research the probable causes of immigration to Canada. They're too selfish, stupid, and oafish to look into how the Western elite-managed IMF imposes economy-destroying policies on those countries. US-Americans shriek about the Mexican invasion, never looking at how NAFTA has devastated Mexico's economy.

Large minorities of Canadian voters embrace wars on the weakest and the poorest, as well as upon those groups (some of whom are simultaneously among the weakest and the poorest) whose work over the decades was so crucial for improving the Canadian standard of living (feminists, environmentalists, artists, civil rights activists), and cheerfully support shit-head politicians who blatantly rob them and cheat them, and acquiesce (probably out of laziness and ignorance) to an economic system that increases their economic insecurity and reduces their chances of a future. They read garbage and swill, suitable perhaps to their level of mental and moral illiteracy (Toronto Sun, National Post) that only clouds their minds with delusions and lies.

As a result of the ascendancy of these morons, we have governments that do nothing for us but brutalize us and lie to us. We have an economic system lurching from one crisis to another (larger) crisis. We have an industrial-consumerist way of life that is suicidal. We build nothing. We achieve nothing. Nothing but our own sad, ridiculous demise.

And, while it all goes down, these witless fools will renounce ALL of their legal and civil rights, in the pathetic hope that the governments and elites who betrayed them and led them to ruin, will torture and execute the "right people" to keep them safe.