Letting Things Happen
“The whole rotten beastliness of things today doesn’t happen because people do it, but because everyone lets it happen. Letting things happen is ten times more dangerous than doing things.”
The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
My thoughts are directed toward Canada’s collective citizenry and the sad spectacle as enough of us stand by and let politicians indulge in all manner of “beastliness” – corruption, fiscal mismanagement, blind commitment to party policy over personal conviction, eagerness to change the definition of marriage.
I know the liberal media has characterized folks like me and (C)conservatives generally, as somehow being angry and hateful of Canada. This is nonsense but it doesn’t prevent it from being proposed by popular columnists, and endorsed by editorial staffs that choose whose letters to publish in response to the columns. I love our country but lament what it is becoming a - relativistic, smug, shrug infected, ‘what me worry’, we are the greatest, the world looks to us with envy – joke.
Canada Day is a week away. I will be back in Saskatchewan celebrating the centenary of that province and the 40th reunion of my graduating high school class. Nancy and I are driving back as there is really no better way (short of riding a bike which an industrious couple we know is doing in annual stages) to appreciate the enormousness and physical splendour of this country of ours.
Along the way we plan to stop over in little towns to better reacquaint ourselves with the mostly forgotten and utterly ignored (from a political perspective) rural Canadians; most of whom descend from immigrants who chose Canada as the place that would offer them hope and opportunity absent in their native lands.
I believe that if I kept driving all across Canada and avoided the major urban centers that the majority of people I would meet would share my concerns for how we have let things happen in Canada over the last few decades, and most alarmingly in the last 5 years.
My trip may prove me wrong. I may find that of the returning members of the 37 graduates from the Class of ’65, the percentage that shares my views is no greater than that in my urban West Side Vancouver community. Interestingly, while there are certainly more farmers in the ranks of my graduating class than one would find in an urban setting, there are doctors and lawyers and dentists and nurses and pharmacists, and teachers and property developers and senior financial and industrial executives amongst my cohorts – arguably a higher percentage of post secondary degrees than many urban schools produced 40 years ago.
Still I doubt I will be proven wrong. Letting things happen is not natural to the prairie psyche. Fields had to be cleared of trees, stumps had to be pulled, land had to be broken, fields had to be seeded, and houses had to be built. Bargains had to be kept, promises had to be honoured – the community didn’t function otherwise.
That was two generations ago. The next generation had to leave wives and children and parents and fields and businesses and prospects, to venture back to the continent from which the parents of many had left in order to fight and in many cases to die to preserve a freedom they cherished.
Now the next generation, better educated, better fed, more prosperous, more sophisticated, looks back with occasional pride at the accomplishments of its ancestors, but mostly shrugs and says aren’t we privileged not to be American!
Look how we are blessed with clean air, and magnificent geography, and fabulous skiing, and boating and golf courses and wineries and Medicare and lots of oil and fresh water. And aren’t we more tolerant, inclusive, peace-loving than those crazy Yanks. Aren't we lucky to have this freedom to do what we please?
Canada in 2005 seems to me a place that doesn’t really know how it arrived at where it is. Canada’s recent history reminds me of Ulrich’s reflection on history in Musil’s seminal novel from which I sourced my epigram:
“The course of history….was like a man sauntering through the streets – diverted here by a shadow, there by a little crowd of people, or by an unusual way one building jutted out and the next stood back from the street – finally arriving at a place that he had neither known of nor meant to reach. There was inherent in history a certain element of going off course. The present moment was always like the last house in town, which somehow no longer quite counts among the town houses.”
That absent-minded meandering image is evocative to me as the picture of Canada having gone off course. We have truly arrived at a place most of us had never known nor meant to reach.
And now we must decide whether to do something or to continue to let it happen.
It may already be too late, we may have wandered so far from the village we once knew that we can never find our way back or we would not recognize it if we did.
When we are willing to change the meaning of something as fundamental to our understanding of whom we are and where we have come from as marriage, we are lost. When in the same week we laud the granting of a Doctor of Law degree to an abortionist and raise not a whisper of protest when a court upholds the suspension of a teacher for writing a letter to the editor referencing the biblical admonitions against homosexuality, we are lost. When we permit our politicians to lie and cheat their way back into power, we are lost. When we are more concerned about how a potential Prime Minister looks than about what he really thinks and stands for and not what the media invent, we are lost. When we fight to prevent citizens from having the right to get the best medical care they can afford in order to preserve the myth of a functioning universally accessible health care system, we are lost.
We seem guaranteed to have a federal election in the next 6 months. Will we let things happen again, or will enough of us actually do something to help us find our way back on course?
The Man Without Qualities – Robert Musil
My thoughts are directed toward Canada’s collective citizenry and the sad spectacle as enough of us stand by and let politicians indulge in all manner of “beastliness” – corruption, fiscal mismanagement, blind commitment to party policy over personal conviction, eagerness to change the definition of marriage.
I know the liberal media has characterized folks like me and (C)conservatives generally, as somehow being angry and hateful of Canada. This is nonsense but it doesn’t prevent it from being proposed by popular columnists, and endorsed by editorial staffs that choose whose letters to publish in response to the columns. I love our country but lament what it is becoming a - relativistic, smug, shrug infected, ‘what me worry’, we are the greatest, the world looks to us with envy – joke.
Canada Day is a week away. I will be back in Saskatchewan celebrating the centenary of that province and the 40th reunion of my graduating high school class. Nancy and I are driving back as there is really no better way (short of riding a bike which an industrious couple we know is doing in annual stages) to appreciate the enormousness and physical splendour of this country of ours.
Along the way we plan to stop over in little towns to better reacquaint ourselves with the mostly forgotten and utterly ignored (from a political perspective) rural Canadians; most of whom descend from immigrants who chose Canada as the place that would offer them hope and opportunity absent in their native lands.
I believe that if I kept driving all across Canada and avoided the major urban centers that the majority of people I would meet would share my concerns for how we have let things happen in Canada over the last few decades, and most alarmingly in the last 5 years.
My trip may prove me wrong. I may find that of the returning members of the 37 graduates from the Class of ’65, the percentage that shares my views is no greater than that in my urban West Side Vancouver community. Interestingly, while there are certainly more farmers in the ranks of my graduating class than one would find in an urban setting, there are doctors and lawyers and dentists and nurses and pharmacists, and teachers and property developers and senior financial and industrial executives amongst my cohorts – arguably a higher percentage of post secondary degrees than many urban schools produced 40 years ago.
Still I doubt I will be proven wrong. Letting things happen is not natural to the prairie psyche. Fields had to be cleared of trees, stumps had to be pulled, land had to be broken, fields had to be seeded, and houses had to be built. Bargains had to be kept, promises had to be honoured – the community didn’t function otherwise.
That was two generations ago. The next generation had to leave wives and children and parents and fields and businesses and prospects, to venture back to the continent from which the parents of many had left in order to fight and in many cases to die to preserve a freedom they cherished.
Now the next generation, better educated, better fed, more prosperous, more sophisticated, looks back with occasional pride at the accomplishments of its ancestors, but mostly shrugs and says aren’t we privileged not to be American!
Look how we are blessed with clean air, and magnificent geography, and fabulous skiing, and boating and golf courses and wineries and Medicare and lots of oil and fresh water. And aren’t we more tolerant, inclusive, peace-loving than those crazy Yanks. Aren't we lucky to have this freedom to do what we please?
Canada in 2005 seems to me a place that doesn’t really know how it arrived at where it is. Canada’s recent history reminds me of Ulrich’s reflection on history in Musil’s seminal novel from which I sourced my epigram:
“The course of history….was like a man sauntering through the streets – diverted here by a shadow, there by a little crowd of people, or by an unusual way one building jutted out and the next stood back from the street – finally arriving at a place that he had neither known of nor meant to reach. There was inherent in history a certain element of going off course. The present moment was always like the last house in town, which somehow no longer quite counts among the town houses.”
That absent-minded meandering image is evocative to me as the picture of Canada having gone off course. We have truly arrived at a place most of us had never known nor meant to reach.
And now we must decide whether to do something or to continue to let it happen.
It may already be too late, we may have wandered so far from the village we once knew that we can never find our way back or we would not recognize it if we did.
When we are willing to change the meaning of something as fundamental to our understanding of whom we are and where we have come from as marriage, we are lost. When in the same week we laud the granting of a Doctor of Law degree to an abortionist and raise not a whisper of protest when a court upholds the suspension of a teacher for writing a letter to the editor referencing the biblical admonitions against homosexuality, we are lost. When we permit our politicians to lie and cheat their way back into power, we are lost. When we are more concerned about how a potential Prime Minister looks than about what he really thinks and stands for and not what the media invent, we are lost. When we fight to prevent citizens from having the right to get the best medical care they can afford in order to preserve the myth of a functioning universally accessible health care system, we are lost.
We seem guaranteed to have a federal election in the next 6 months. Will we let things happen again, or will enough of us actually do something to help us find our way back on course?
posted by Ben Buan | 10:04 p.m.
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