Commenter karen said this not too long ago:
I remember this guy at the counter of an internet cafe saying he hated politics. He said it with such disdain. Engaging in some stereotyping, I noticed that he was an Arab and because of his accent, I assumed he was an immigrant and I thought that he must be disillusioned or disgusted with the politics in the home country and was here in Canada to be left alone and to try to make a living.
Continuing on with these groundless assumptions, I thought that "politics" (whether in Libya, Syria or Saudi Arabia) are damned important obviously, and that the "politics" in any of those places is probably quite awful. But Canada's success is not based on the idea that politics is unimportant and that since nobody gets tortured or killed (well, hardly anybody, and its officially denied) the political debates are is nothing but cultural froth. If we don't take steps to arrest the declining respect for politics, things will soon become as horrible as they are in a dictatorship. We want to preserve the generally peaceful sort of political debate we have now.
That's the tragedy of harper's methods. The whole neo-liberal, pseudo-conservative attack on the great social compromise of the post-1945 era has been assisted by the deliberate denigration of democratic politics and has made things all the more violence-prone/zero-sum. And that's why I thought it had to be resisted.
And I know what you mean about fighting FOR something as opposed to fighting AGAINST stuff. I've proposed "Workers as Citizens" as a positive initiative. But I also think this initiative could have been positive in that it would strengthen Canadians' understanding and respect for their democracy and also show what a united people can achieve.
(Off topic: Have you read this book?)
Alison at Creekside told me the following at her own blog:
I beleive that politics are not something that can play in the background of our lives. We either participate or we risk winding up victims.I totally agree about politics' being in the foreground. Politics is everywhere. There's politics in real-life; family politics, relationship politics, workplace politics. And formal politics, with the politicians and the laws, is not something that one can turn-off.
One thing that I would like to suggest is that the focus NOT be on stopping something, or tearing something down, that the focus be on the building of something. It needs to be positive, not negative. I have a suspicion that the exhaustion comes from fighting, but that we can draw energy from building.
I remember this guy at the counter of an internet cafe saying he hated politics. He said it with such disdain. Engaging in some stereotyping, I noticed that he was an Arab and because of his accent, I assumed he was an immigrant and I thought that he must be disillusioned or disgusted with the politics in the home country and was here in Canada to be left alone and to try to make a living.
Continuing on with these groundless assumptions, I thought that "politics" (whether in Libya, Syria or Saudi Arabia) are damned important obviously, and that the "politics" in any of those places is probably quite awful. But Canada's success is not based on the idea that politics is unimportant and that since nobody gets tortured or killed (well, hardly anybody, and its officially denied) the political debates are is nothing but cultural froth. If we don't take steps to arrest the declining respect for politics, things will soon become as horrible as they are in a dictatorship. We want to preserve the generally peaceful sort of political debate we have now.
That's the tragedy of harper's methods. The whole neo-liberal, pseudo-conservative attack on the great social compromise of the post-1945 era has been assisted by the deliberate denigration of democratic politics and has made things all the more violence-prone/zero-sum. And that's why I thought it had to be resisted.
And I know what you mean about fighting FOR something as opposed to fighting AGAINST stuff. I've proposed "Workers as Citizens" as a positive initiative. But I also think this initiative could have been positive in that it would strengthen Canadians' understanding and respect for their democracy and also show what a united people can achieve.
(Off topic: Have you read this book?)
Alison at Creekside told me the following at her own blog:
Hi Thwap. I didn't think it a poor little scheme at all - just don't think the necessary natural momentum is there for it yet when what we need is this. Still - good on ya.I feel moved to say that when mainstream journalists like Andrew Coyne are saying:
Coyne ... Coyne! : "As Canadian democracy spirals further down the drain : In what other democracy is it permissible for the government of the day to hide from the legislature for months at a time?"
and
Boris : Resistance.One day we will look back on this time and say that this was when we lost it - the possibility of turning on our comfy little oligarchy into something that actually represents us.
That one of the key factors behind our failure to respond is the lack of a response. That there are a lot of Canadians sickened by the depravity of this government, but the absence of any sort of plan from the progressive leadership has been a main factor in stifling a response from these numbers.
Finally:
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