We Are Sinking
We are crawling back into the sludge from whence science tells us we originally escaped.
I am thinking about the recent municipal elections and the current Cirque De Oy Vay in Ottawa.
I understand people's reluctance to vote. I vigorously don't agree with this decision, but I understand it. The price of democracy is ever steady vigilance and that includes casting a vote for the worse of numerous evils and dunderheads. It's the act of voting that counts first.
In the case of the civic elections, try to use the fingers of more than one hand to add up the candidates, let alone the elected, who were worthy of public service. In Vancouver, for example, Suzanne Anton, NPA, David Cadman, Independent, and Raymond Louie, Vision, come to mind as serious, well-informed councillors who have a contribution to make. There may be others; that's up to you to decide.
But what a paucity of leadership. What a vacuum of inspiration or excitement.
Neither of the two leading mayoral candidates could qualify as a political high-jumper. Good fellows, dull as last week's sports page, and without any real muscular argument.
Where are the Walter Hardwicks, Harry Rankins, Jonathan Bakers or even George Puils? Where are the vigorous hearts and minds of men and women who really know the territory and who have a clear point of view and some sense of what the City ought to be?
At the federal level, we are now saddled with the most unseemly mess I can remember in a long, long time.
Do you really believe that Stephen Harper, Stephane Dion, Jack Layton or Gilles Duceppe cares a whit for your welfare at this time? Did they ever?
This is a transparent and ugly case of children fighting in the sandbox about who has the biggest toy truck.
Which might all be mildly amusing were it not for the fact that, given a world economy in disaster mode, we have rarely needed more a non-partisan effort of clear and focused minds on the task in front of us.
There are some among you that believe that Canada is curiously inoculated against the tides of bad news flowing daily from every index in the world. You are wrong.
We need leadership. We need people who can look ahead and make decisions today about the auto industry, about health, about defense, about crumbling infrastructure in our cities.
What we have instead is an abomination of self-aggrandizing cupidity.
Will we ever again have real political candidates and leaders?
The Four Fools do not qualify.