Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming | Nick Hanauer

Opportunity in a World of Hurt

Creative writers, people who document the times, and journalists are being boxed in by creeping censorship.  The letter behind this link tells the story of self-censorship by writers and artists who depend on advertisers, corporate sponsors and  paymasters for their living.  Their argument leads one to consider those among us who have other means to sustain themselves than the royalties.

Pandemic attrition is making the problem worse.  Already under pressure, livelihoods for journalists have  been wiped out weekly since early March.  Documentary film-makers have a tough time to produce given the overheads involved.  Non-fiction writers, bloggers and others can work anywhere.  All they need is an idea and an  internet account.  So, the gauntlet of social criticism is being handed to those of us who have the experience, the education, the opinions and access to the audience.

The situation is causing this reporter to consider reviving prophetsofboom.com after a decade of neglect since outrage over economic inequality fizzled out with Occupy Walk Street fatigue.  Single-issue activists motivated by racial, sexual and economic inequalities have created a forceful coalition in 2020.  Their common cause provides an impetus for change.  We suspect that many outliers in  America see the movement as a force for removal of the narcissist con-man they insist on calling 'Mr. President'.

It remains to be seen if their combined zeal is enough to oust the most dangerous man whoever occupied The White House.  Meanwhile, the platform for pointed analysis is open, as salaried and sponsored opinions disappear.   

A Rear View on Pandemics

Prophet or Pretender?

The text below is something I wrote in 1998/99 as part of a treatment on futurism in Health  Care.  Be cautious how you handle this.  It can give you whiplash:

In Canada,  the provinces are locked in danse macabre with the federal government over their respective shares of national health care expenditures.  Managed care doesn’t have the same profile as privately-run HMOs do in the U.S., but provincial health programs exhibit many of the same characteristics.  Gaps have appeared in medicare coverage as provinces have eliminated overlap and  duplication and, in some cases reduced expenditures.

 Until the 1990s, equality of access to care was assumed by most Canadians to be another of their birthrights.  However, as public health has become a commodity as well as a medical service, there are widespread fears that a two-tier system -- one in which people with the most means will get the best care -- will one day be the norm.   The concept of “two-tier” health care has become the dividing line between those who consider equal access to high-quality medical treatment to be a sacred trust of national governance and those who fear that soaring medical costs could sink the Canadian federation almost as surely as the traditional ideology of Quebec separatism.           

At mid-century, few people imagined -- the lifestyles editor of The Futurist among them -- that along the way, the economics of distribution would create bottlenecks that may be more difficult to overcome, in the long run, than the diseases themselves.  As it has turned out in the Nineties, the cost of health care has become nearly as problematic as disease itself.

Medical technology has demonstrated repeatedly that it can deliver great advances in the treatment of many illnesses that have plagued humanity for at least as long as there have been records of public health.   Our faith in the promise of science has proved to be well-placed as each age-old malady has succombed to the accumulated knowledge and skill of medical research.  By the 1970s, it was common wisdom to declare that the war of bugs versus drugs had been won decisively.  Yet new challenges have emerged with each success.  New diseases, like AIDS, have probably crossed over from exotic jungle creatures to attack the human organism as greater numbers of people have ventured into the dark recesses of the planet.  Ebola, a ghastly hemorrhagic fever that causes the body to ooze streams of blood, was first identified in western Sudan and Zaire in 1976.  It had likely existed for eons in some forest rodent or bat species.  And now old diseases like influenza and common infections, once thought to have been eradicated, are threatening to invade us.   Technology is surrendering its power to newly resistant strains of micro-organisms that have co-existed with us peaceably for generations.

Medical researchers understand that our weakness for a sure thing is almost certain to be our downfall.  The question is not whether this will come about, but when it will occur.   We have become so accustomed to a life without the risk of the age-old infections that our very aversion to any such risk will be our undoing.  We insist so firmly on narrowing the probability of a foreshortened future that our very insistence will be the death of us.  Our demands for antibiotic insurance against every discomfort have become so strong that doctors have given in to the pressure.  According to one U.S. study, between 20 and 50 per cent of the 145-million prescriptions given each year to outpatients are unnecessary.^[1]   Between 25 and 45 per cent of the 190-million antibiotic doses administered in the hospital each year are equally superfluous, the study found.  Antibiotics are often taken for illnesses that they are not even designed to fight, like colds or flu, that are caused by viruses.  

Bacteria are among the oldest organisms on the planet.  What they do best of all is to survive.  They were doing this according to Darwinian principles eons before the great 19th century botanist enunciated his Theory of Evolution.  The emergence of resistant bacteria was inevitable.  But nobody predicted how quickly it would happen.  It has taken these organisms with a genius for adaptation less than half a century to overcome the most potent concoctions that mankind could devise.  Bacteria now exist for which there is no antibiotic antidote.  Some are resistant not to one drug, but to many. 

North America has become addicted to the antibiotic cocktail.  What happens next may turn out to be the nightmare of all hangovers. The next pandemic will almost certainly be the result of resistance to the cure.  The growing list of dangerously infectious, drug-resistant microbes is comprised of common household bugs that cause everyday maladies like sore throats, ear infections and influenza.  Headline writers have enthusiastically taken to calling them the “Superbugs”.  As the headlines tell the story, it’s as though each microbe has assumed heroic dimensions of virulence.  It is an imperfect caricature.  The real story is far more banal and, because of that, infinitely more menacing.  Organisms that live on the skin and in the nostrils of otherwise healthy people are threatening to overcome all the miracle drugs now known to medical research.  Their supremacy would be a terrible thing to behold.  More unsettling than this apocalyptic vision, however, is the consensus among epidemiologists.  They are nearly unanimous about the high probability of the threat.

Between 20 and 30 million people died world-wide in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918-1919.  The one-month death toll was more than 200,000 North Americans from a population at the time of less than 60-million. Epidemiologists agree that athere is a good probability of a pandemic of similar proportions  within the first five years of the new century, based on the calculation that major epidemics occur three or four times a century.  Thirty years have elapsed since the last one.  The longest span without one in the 20th Century was 39 years.  How prepared is the medical estabishment?  “I don’t think anyone could ever be ready for something like that,” says Health Canada’s chief epidemiologist. “How can you prepare?” ^[2]     

Ironically, the man who created the first miracle drug foresaw where all this was headed.  Penicillin was introduced in 1943.   Just two years later Alexander Fleming, the drug’s discoverer, warned in an interview that misuse of penicillin would cause bacteria to mutate into new strains.  These new organisms would exist solely to resist the new drug.   As things have turned out, the evolution of bacteria into increasingly virulent strains has been occurring faster than the ability to produce new medicines.   In part that is because drug manufacturers all but abandoned the search for new antibiotics in the early 1980s, believing that bacterial infections were under control once and for all. 

If medical science is about to lose its grip on infectious diseases, it  couldn happen at a worse time. Hospital cutbacks mean there is little capacity in the health system to care for  the victims of any  new pandemic.  Most likely, if one should occur, the corridors would be choked with [seething] masses, like some medieval mortuary.  

---

            ^[1] Superbugs, New York Times Magazine, August 2, 1998, p. 42.

            ^[2] Interview January 11, 1999 with Dr. John Spika (957-4243)

Supercharged for Tuesday

A year after Wall Street nearly bankrupted western economies Michael Moore produced and directed Capitalism: A Love Story in 2009 to document ways North Americans were manoeuvered into a consumerist frenzy lasting several decades in order to stoke the engines of U.S.-style capitalism.  Well before the financial collapse of 2007-2008, prophetsofboom.com described how the advertising industry, other mass media -- in fact, all aspects of the commercial propaganda machine  -- were harnessed to the same task.

Happy warriors have earned  a Trumpian epithet: are they socialists or just democrats?

Big business has refined a 'take-no-prisoners' style of capitalism in recent decades that reached its nadir and simultaneously its lowest point with the  near-collapse of the economy.  As a result, inequality of income and opportunity now anchors the system.  Reaction in the form of the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement and the improbable election of Donald Trump in 2016 have morphed into the shambolic Democratic primary race. Now septuagenarian Bernie Sanders is the unlikely recipient of impatience with the status quo.  Interestingly, Michael Moore is back in the mix.  Now he is one of Bernie's biggest election boosters.

By double-teaming the U.S. president, Bernie and Michael have earned Trump's enmity.  They have also handed him a club to beat them off with:  As a result, the clash between Sanders and moderate Joe Biden has become the race to watch on the eve of Super Tuesday. 

Does the Conversation Make Sense?

We're all out on  a limb

Is the conversation of a generation starting to take hold?  We turned this archaic blog to a new purpose out of  the debris of the Occupy Wall Street movement more than a decade ago. That seemed to make sense until the 2016 election, when the orange Disruptor-in-Chief made the U.S. of A. the world capital of nonsense.  For nearly four years the conversation has been incoherent.  That's why we quit trying to make sense of it as Donald Trump, the putative president, sowed havoc wherever his flighty attention landed.

American CEOs, assembled at Davos  (where all rational  thought is supposed to happen these days)  are beginning to realize that take-no-prisoners capitalism is a bad idea.  Why?  Because Hong Kong demonstrators showed them what real revolution looks like.  The piece that follows draws the lines between these seemingly random events.   Self-examination seems to be beyond the American political system at this time.Ironically,  it's an outsider writing in a Canadian news magazine who makes sense of the chaos.

Does the conversation of a generation make sense?  Only if people with divergent views are talking to each other.  So  far Canadians are able to do so.  But  as America goes, so too often do we. Watch this space for more developments.  And let us know what you think.   There's a link for  that.

Bystanders Beware

John Ibbitson encapsulates what's really at stake in  this shambolic U.S. election. The Republicans' standard-bearer, Trump personifies the future of America if the power elites' grip isn't soon  loosened.  Whether he wins or not, the 99 percent will opt  for iconoclasts of one sort or another until the fabric of the republic comes apart.  The schisms between rich and poor, red or blue states, black, white or brown people and authority figures over heavily-armed resistors are too obvious to deny any longer.

We hope that Hillary Clinton  recognizes the domestic challenges she would face as President-elect --to say nothing of the opportunistic Russian autocrat, suicidal Middle Easterners or that nuclear loon in North Korea.

We also hope that  Canadians understand how we have  gone  along with corporate America to get along for decades.  Our time is coming too.  The spillover effect from an American train wreck would send us crawling back into the farm fields and forests as sure as if the republican elephant sat on us.  
     

A Frank Assessment

Pollster Frank Graves offers this assessment of the state of the public's attitudes to their economic prospects.  Increasing pessimism begs many questions.  One that comes to my mind is how Canadians are going to react if the Liberal government's happy talk and moneybags financing fails to produce results.  But this is the risk we decided to take to rid ourselves of the  Harper gang's distorted interpretation of Canadian values.

Make no mistake:  we are on a course that we freely chose.  We will have to see it to its logical conclusion.  The odds seem to have changed since election day October 19, with the collapse of energy prices and the relative value of the dollar.  But the world has a way of offering unexpected new opportunities.  So hang on and enjoy the ride.

Meanwhile, we need to ask how we can insulate ourselves if global market forces turn out to be too resistant to the  Keynsian bargain.  The question for individuals is this:  does it make sense to abandon ourselves to deficit financing just because we've chosen that option collectively?

This University of Calgary analysis of public attitudes seems to line up with the facts.  Consumer-driven economic theory is creating fortunes at the top of an increasingly hierarchical heap, while the rest make do with the small money.  If Canadians are already pessimistic, will we continue to mortgage ourselves to the future, especially if  Justin's "beau risque" turns sour?

The message of this study seems to be that Canadians no longer buy into  right-wing economics any more than they did the expediency and ethical lapses of Harper's approach to governance.  Right-wing economics plays itself out most vividly in America.  The broken promise of "trickle-down" prosperity seems to be driving the campaigns of the most ardent iconoclasts.  You  have to wonder what  lesson Canadians are taking from that circus spectacle.  

          

The Universal Basic Income Sham

The notion that a universal basic income can plug the gaps in an economy built on myths and techno-hype are a cover for the  guilty minds who  have put America in this  position.  For every new digital innovation that creates fortunes for a few, jobs are disappearing by the thousands.  This discussion between two knowledgeable columnists makes me think all the more that a UBI is simply an escape hatch for dream-weavers from the inevitability of a jobless future.  

Meanwhile, the world's most robust engine of innovation is toying with leadership choices who would prolong the dream-induced fantasy that America can be "made strong again" by  the  same old lies.  Wealth doesn't trickle down.  Mostly it sticks to the innovators as real estate, luxury goods and investment portfolios.  

Nobody  seems to be  able  to answer the obvious question:  where is the  wealth going  to come from  to pay everybody  a basic income to be unemployed and like it well enough not to  revolt?  Surely nobody  thinks that the same folks who hoarded their wealth while the public bailed out  the economy in 2008-9 are going  to  underwrite  a new economic reality.

  

The Graveyard of the Elites: Chris Hedges

The Graveyard of the Elites: Chris Hedges: The establishment structure is sliding toward its death, and the foremost sign of this is the silly and sickening display of “junk politics” that we call an election campaign.
- 2016/02/28

Uncanny Predictions Sealed Our Fate

Nikola Tesla didn't invent techno-hype.  That had been going on for generations, picking up tempo when railways first linked communities, spanned continents and spawned electronic communications.  But his astonishing  predictions, captured in the pages of Colliers magazine in 1926 were perhaps the most accurate of any.

What Tesla and his colleague Hugo Gernsback energized after the  first world war, others inflated into a cultural tsunami, with the proliferation of consumer-based economics and the explosion of mass media after WWll.

Most of Tesla's followers were less accurate, even careless.  But their purpose wasn't to be prescient. They filled the print  media and the airwaves with predictions to generate demand for consumer goods.  They succeeded beyond their own fertile imaginations, driving economic growth and prosperity throughout the 20th Century.

Industrialists and businessmen soon realized the potential of future-hype.  Their zeal propelled the advertising industry to unprecedented heights.  It created the futurist  movement, when they began to worry  that the engines of commerce were producing a population saturated with choice.

Only now are we beginning to understand the real cost  of expectations inflated by decades of  hype. Crippling consumer debt has collided with income inequality to create a middle class only now waking up to the fact that economic growth doesn't follow some trickle-down theory.

This new reality may  have played a role in Justin Trudeau's election victory October 19.  It is now certainly being played out in the U.S. primaries, where voters are  ready  to choose any option as long as they believe they aren't being duped.    

           

Falsehoods and Faery Dust

Here's an insightful look at how North Americans have come to understand 'the big lie' that  we can all share in trickle-down economics.  As a result, both Republicans and Democrats are shifting their support from establishment candidates.

Populism is in political vogue here too.  Justin Trudeau's Liberals enjoy 70 per cent support  from Canadians -- for the moment.  But a day of reckoning is at hand.

If the U.S. elects another wingnut as President, the disappointment and  the self-induced chaos will tear apart the fabric of America.  If Trudeau finance minister Bill Morneau can't find the right balance in his first  budget ... if Justin can't forego the selfies and faery dust act ...  if he can't at least look like he's paying attention to the balance sheet, Liberal fortunes will begin a downward slide that may not end until the next election.

But  for the moment, it's worth reflecting on how we got  here.    

Justin's Faery Dust Dims

It's somehow fitting that our new prime minister is tying Canada's future to the "fourth industrial revolution" at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week.

Klaus Schwab in 2012

Just four years ago Davos co-founder Klaus Schwab astonished observers with his keynote remarks at the opening of the 2012 gathering of world political leaders and businessmen.  At the time, we posted a blog item that we called a placeholder in the Conversation of a Generation.  That was because we frankly didn't  know what to make of Professor Schwab's assertions that capitalism, in its present form, has outlived its usefulness.

The professor's analysis came on the heels of the Occupy Wall Street movement that caused people to question the sustainability of the gulf opening up between the economically disadvantaged and the crony capitalists who are killing their own golden goose one big slice at a time.

This time Justin Trudeau is the keynote speaker, an acknowledgement of his miraculous political upset of Stephen Harper only three months ago.  With the global economy sliding toward the brink of the unknown,  organizers undoubtedly felt that some boosterism might help. 

 Trudeau rose to the occasion  with the pitch that "My predecessor wanted you to know Canada for its resources.  I want you to know Canadians for our resourcefulness."

Neil Nails It

It took CBC correspondent Neil Macdonald to rein in this show horse: "prime ministers have to cheerlead; they all do. But Trudeau's ... happy talk is beginning to sound a bit detached from certain realties that the unimaginably important heavy-hitters in Davos are probably quite aware of".

In other words, enough of the faery dust already. When Trudeau gets back on Canadian terra firma there are real issues to be addressed with more than incantations of diversity, cooperation and inclusivity.  It's time we had more to tell our partners in counter-terrorism who didn't invite Canada to the NATO conference on that subject this week.  Provinces and municipalities deserve a better sense of how the government plans to deliver its infrastructure commitments than Trudeau's standard reminder of how many 'just  folks'  he listened to while he was wandering in the political wilderness as leader of the third party.   

Leave it to Neil to state  the obvious:  "... we must all have internalized that there is value in diversity, and that we must work together as Canadians, and that we are an incredible, wonderful, virtuous place."

"We also have problems, though. Time to get at them, no?"

Is Gravity on Justin's Side?

The Occupy movement may have fizzled out early in this decade.  But this writer in The Atlantic argues that by launching 'income inequality' onto the public agenda, Occupy activists have helped to shift the political center of gravity to the left.  An interesting thesis with at  least as much evidence as forecasting the demise of the 'Laurentian Elites'.  Recent ballot box evidence seems to favor the analysis advanced by The Atlantic's

Are North American leaders going with the flow?

Peter Beinart, who goes on to say that police violence against  blacks has produced another tectonic shift to the left in the U.S.

Only time will tell whether the newly refreshed Trudeau Liberals were rewarded for extinguishing the dark political arts of Stephen Harper or whether they're onto something bigger.  If you follow the writer's argument, Justin Trudeau may be in the vanguard of a continental drift to the left.





    

Let Sunny Ways Occupy Us

Justin is in the house

A thoughtful deconstruction of the Occupy movement from 2011 reveals the confusion that keeps people from meaningful political action.  This insider's account of what caused the Wall Street movement to fade away isn't so surprising.  Newcomers to social activism often shun the tools that allow dissenters to disrupt the status quo.  It also wasn't astonishing that it happened in the U.S., where the republic's usual mechanisms are so tightly seized.

Since October 19 our own form of parliamentary democracy has shown it still has the flexibility to break the grip of the vested interests.  Working within the parliamentary framework that Winston Churchill called the worst form of government except for all the others, the new Liberal government of Justin Trudeau has declared that it will use the parliament itself to consult Canadians on how to reform their first-past-the-post electoral system.  The self-interested are already starting to howl.  Like their recently-deposed leader so often did, they would rather dump the conventions that  have sustained this nation through war, depression and existential crisis.

Improbable as the new Trudeau mantra may be, it offers possibilities for change. Until somebody conceives of a better system, it makes no sense to abandon the procedures that history has bestowed.  But if tweaking can make them work better -- that is, to respect principles of democracy that vest power in  the  majority instead of  a privileged few -- why not support it?.  

          

A Season for Seeking

Oliver Boldizar appears to have had a remarkable life, to be sure.  I wonder who’s going  to document it.  Seems like his journey was designed as a lesson for others in the consumer-crazed and unsustainable society  that  we inhabit.  I had a nephew who broke the mortal bonds on his 33rd birthday in despair over the life he was living.  Although  he only left home for a year in rehab, he couldn’t come to terms with his existence in a culture that celebrated inane behavior and worshipped consumption.  In the end, his vital organs gave out too. 

Oh, and compliments of the season to you.  Increasingly, I’m with the reactionaries who want to strip the pretext of religiosity out of Xmas.  But there should always be a time to step off the treadmill and think about what we’re doing.

Citizen of the World

The environmental movement has been around since the early 1970s, more or less thanks to Maurice Strong.  Thousands of people have subscribed to its principles.  But Strong was the towering figure who transformed principle into action.  From  the beginning, Strong understood the extent of the threat from carbon emissions.  He also understood that nothing would be accomplished unless the environment and the economy were managed together, in a balanced and coordinated way.   And he gave effect to his  beliefs not from the head of a line of demonstrators, but as chairman of some of the most powerful energy industry leaders. The  point was, THEY had the power to make changes.  NOT the demonstrators, who could only pressure them to act.  Strong also understood that traditionally, politicians follow public  opinion.  They  don’t lead.  So, after one aborted attempt to run for office, he never aspired to political office again. 

There has been a disinformation campaign under way for many years, initiated by people who want to debunk environmental leaders like Al Gore and David Suzuki.  The criticism is usually that they have  profited personally from their preaching.  Because Strong has centered his efforts for the last  30 years or so around a think tank based in the West he has also been dismissed as an elitist, new age kook.  But Strong also understood that one answer to climate change is innovation.  Not more innovative consumer products so much as new ways of thinking by people with the power and influence to organize societies to act sustainably. 

Like Pierre Trudeau, Maurice Strong was a Canadian who became a Citizen of the World before that phrase was coined.  In a way, Justin Trudeau’s introduction to the world stage in Paris this week closes a circle that his father and Maurice Strong helped to create.  As a middleweight nation, Canada isn’t going to solve this problem single-handedly.  But we can show others the way with a credibility that warring superpowers have long since surrendered.  If they’re successful, I believe it will be people inspired by the likes of Maurice Strong who will make it happen

We're Back!

Hi there folks -- family, friends and fellow skeptics.  So you've had a break from my perpetual pestering.  Well that's all  over now.  It's been three years since I went missing from this forum to discover the true meaning of press freedom in  this new information age.  Thanks to some personal experience with the online news media, I've discovered it means working for nothing.  If I'm going to do that, I'll publish my own views.

According to today's contribution from the  CBC's Ideas series that may be a good thing.    Hard as it is for an old ink-stained wretch to accept, I understand the point that  writer Paul  Mason has made in his latest book entitled Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future  If you think that idea is too much to swallow, have a listen. It will only take a few minutes and I promise you it won't hurt.  What WILL hurt  is continuing to live with  this unsustainable system that rewards greed and ignores all other reality.

Oh, and by the way, if you're among those who cringe every time you've heard that "We're Back" since October 19,  that too is a good thing.

Of Pygmies and Giants

Nearly a year after the Occupy movement burnt itself out there's reason to believe that its message may be getting through.  The rejection of Romney's bankrupt economics by voters from the 99 per cent cohort gives one pause to think that America could come to its senses again some day.  But Obama will need to be a great president to pull it off and there's little evidence he can rise to the challenge.  After all, he too is a product of his own experience.  And in today's America, vested interests seem to be pulling too many of the strings.  If this assessment seems harsh, click on the link for a slice of American culture that lays it bare.  The fact that somebody can still bring this message to air is one of the few reasons to believe that the situation could ever improve.   
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7lKNjtvfpc

The Bless-ed Generation

 

By Phil Gibson

 My maternal grandmother was a holy person.  Not in the Mother Theresa sense of the word, but in the small town, churchy way of mid-century Ontario where religion still played a large part in peoples’ everyday lives.  Although her usually unsmiling, thin-lipped appearance made her seem more severe than she ever was with me, she was seldom quick to anger.  But when her thin face reddened, the only expletive I ever heard her use was “bless-ed”, as in: “… that bless-ed delivery man didn’t leave any milk again!”  The milkman wasn’t blessed in the clerical sense.  He would have been damned for his oversight if she had allowed herself to use the word.  But she was a product of her upbringing – one in which restraint, respect and community were paramount.  Instead, with the simple pause and the emphasis on the first syllable, Nana turned an otherwise sanctified phrase into a useful expression of her ire. 

 If she had lived to see what we have wrought, the boomer generation would have earned the same gentle condemnation as she reserved for the milkman.  While she never saw wrong in anything I did, she didn’t know all of it.  If she had been around for the great reckoning, she might have turned a phrase or two of disapproval with some of the excesses.  Instead, she went to her grave believing that the world was now safe from the Hun and that the good lord would look after the rest.  She would not have imagined how kids who could exhaust their baser instincts chasing frogs all day in the creek could come to believe they needed much more out of life.  She would not have understood how an acquisitive nature would one day supplant the simple virtues that she and her community had instilled in them and tried to instil in us.

Raising Uber-consumers

It is received wisdom nowadays that it takes a village to raise a child.  Well I was raised in a post-agrarian community, where doors were never locked because nobody had much to steal, and people greeted each other by name on the main street.  I knew I could have anything I needed by going to a neighbour’s door and asking for it.  Our expectations were so limited at that early stage of life that it would never occur to us to ask for more.  But by the time our generation was out of our teens, things were different.  Unlimited access to the trappings of postwar industrialism, fuelled by low energy costs and mass marketing, had unleashed the űber-consumer in all of us.   I often wonder if it takes a village to raise someone who turns out like that, is there any limit to what a whole city can do? 

Our generation was blessed in so many ways it’s hard to count them.  When my parents celebrated their 60^thwedding anniversary, I thanked them for bringing us into a world of such promise that it gave us the confidence to experiment with our future.  Bracketed by the Great Depression and the Second World War, their own youthful lives permitted no such freedom.  They took pleasure in simple things, like home and family and weekend escapes to the rural backdrop of their own upbringing.  They also paid the daily price of a psychological burden, knowing how easily their lives could be disrupted again. 

 Their experience produced two people who could wear adversity like a comfortable old coat.  They had a tolerance for things that would have sent weaker souls into a tailspin.  They also had, if not a joyless existence, a gritty aura of forbearance about them that dampened enthusiasms while it armed them against hardship.  Theirs was not a singular experience, but rather the continuation of an ageless way of life shared by the less advantaged in every era.  Lived within its boundaries, this existential homestead left you with the sense that heightened expectations could be more trouble than they’re worth.      

Engines of Hope

 That was not common to everyone.  The result of putting war-time deprivation behind them  was a mindset of optimism among the post-war generations that may never have been equalled in all of history.  The Second World War was played out on such a wide scale that it marked the existence of human beings everywhere.  The engines of war-time devastation required such ingenuity in design, production and distribution that they drove an unprecedented postwar economic boom in Europe, the Americas and many parts of Asia.  Rather than draining away all youthful verve, the war caused an explosion of demand and a juggernaut of productivity that has been with us ever since.  .             

On an historic scale, it’s hard to imagine a similar experience.  Since the Middle Ages, when everyone was impoverished, the underclasses have been downtrodden in every way.  Not until the revolutions of the 18^th and 19^th centuries did the masses get to fondle the golden ring.  The First World War produced a splurge of optimism throughout the 1920s that was nearly extinguished by the Great Depression.  Not until the middle of the 20^th century was prosperity broadly available.  Then mass communications, in the shape of the ubiquitous TV screen, sparked an explosion of expectations to match all the output of the industrial age. 

 Against the ensuing backdrop of my own charmed life, the deathbed admission by my father was stark.  He was muttering weakly to himself when I entered his hospital room on one of our last visits … something about seeing that “the kids” were taken care of.  My next eldest sister and I were in our sixties at the time, with decades of experience fending for ourselves. 

 Then this whispered declaration caught my attention:  “Mother was never happy,” he said, with a resigned shrug. 

 ‘Why?’ I asked, less surprised than riveted by his sad admission.  I couldn’t help intruding on the privacy that his semi-consciousness afforded him. 

 “Because she never had the things in life she thought she should,” said Dad. 

 Then, without prodding, he added in the same feeble vein:  “I was never happy”. 

 “Why,” I asked again. 

 “I guess because I never was the man I thought I should be,” he concluded with another shrug.

 Revelations like this were occasional during the long period of my parents’ decline.  They came as no great surprise to anyone who knew the secrets of their lives together. 

 Contrary to Dad’s perception, Mother wasn’t any more motivated by things than many of her generation who survived Depression and war-time uncertainties.  She emerged from the experience with a homemaker’s pride of place and a healthy appreciation for what she had.  But she was easily content with the household improvements and occasional vacations that their modest income could provide. 

 Dad bought her a diamond ring for their sixtieth anniversary – a peace offering as much as it was a symbol of their six decades together. 

 After she died, living on several pensions and the proceeds of the sale of their home, my father broke down several times, exclaiming:  “I never had so much money.”   The tears weren’t for the bounty.  As he said so lucidly after a lifetime of saving:  “My only regret is that mother never got to enjoy it.”    

  Living the Dream                

 Living the dream has been a rare trip for those of us who were cosseted in the postwar era.  As I add these words to my memoirs on Canada Day 2012, I am reminded again that my bless-ed generation lived a charmed existence spared of war, famine and pestilence.  Maybe unique among the inheritors of the earth, we enjoyed a splendid isolation from the burdens of existence that have weighed on most mortals for millennia.

The legacy of our ancestors among the two founding nations was one of optimism, resilience, initiative and progressive thinking.  It also left us with a reservoir of self-importance, determinism and yes, of entitlement. 

 These same circumstances left us with qualities that have evolved from our common experience:  of openness, tolerance for diversity, adaptability and so far, an unshakeable resolve to succeed together. 

 In recent years we have been blamed for the uncertainty our offspring have to deal with:  a broken health care system, underfunded pension obligations, as well as free will and individualism taken to extremes.  It is understandable, in the historical context, and not all of it is undeserved.   Given where we came from – our roots in a post-agrarian society whose bedrock values left little room for artifice or extravagance – it is sometimes a heavier burden now that the impending collapse of the global economy has forced us to recognize our excesses.

 On this national day of celebration I find hope in the fact that we are Canadian.  Together we have overcome adversity, defied all odds against our survival as a nation and enjoyed the prosperity that our initiative has brought us.    

 As the connective tissue between our ancestral generations and our descendants, I hope we have passed on strengths as well as the weaknesses. And as a Canadian from a line that reaches back to the 1830s, I still have faith and hope that these values will see our offspring through their challenges as they saw our forefathers through theirs.      

West Quebec

Canada Day 1 July, 2012