A Grave Injustice

If someone committed a grave injustice against you (stole your business, your life savings, kidnapped your child, poisoned your family, destroyed your life) and then bribed or otherwise corrupted all the institutions that could bring you justice, what would you do?

What would you feel entitled to do?

Would you ever say to yourself: "Well, the courts have ruled in my adversary's favour. I might not agree with this decision, but I have to respect it."? Would you really say that in the face of an obviously corrupt process?

What if it never even got that far? What if the police were in your enemy's back-pocket and they ignored your claims and beat you up if you made a stink about it? Would you say: "I guess there just wasn't enough evidence to press charges."?

So, faced with a failed economic system, disguised by a corporate media system biased towards the status-quo, we face at least a decade of ruinous austerity. We face ruinous austerity, which means we have no idea what sort of economic tail-spin it will cause. We also face the galloping crisis of global warming, which we, as a civilization, are obviously incapable of even admitting to, let alone responding sanely to it.

At the present level, we have super-corrupt provincial governments in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. We have corrupt incompetents pretty much everywhere else. We have a government installed via fraud and protected by corruption. And we have three federal parties, all competing to be their own versions of the lowest common denominator, in order to try to win the "big prize" of a majority of the seats in our legislature, based on the largest minority of the bare majority of Canadians who bother to vote.

Part of the reason for this revolting state of affairs is OUR failure (we the people on the internet and in the streets who have been right all the time; right about Afghanistan, right about Iraq, right about global warming, right about "free trade" deals, right about economic policies, right about tax-cuts, right about education, right about pollution, right about the First Nations, right about gay rights, right about feminism) to use what power we have as a small, but committed minority, to have an impact on the political culture in this country.

Right here, right now, I encourage everyone who reads this to leave a comment. Everyone, even the lurkers; lurkers who are similar to the people who I've met in person who are just as intelligent as me, but lack the self-confidence or the willingness to publicly make mistakes, to blog or speak in public, leave a comment.

But your comment must answer the question: In the face of a government installed via fraud and protected by corrupted institutions, in the face of the fact that you believe in your heart that our present "government" stole its power, ... what can unarmed, democratic activists do in response to this?