More political stuff...

I used to be *heavily* addicted to Usenet.
Today, there are many people who don't know what that is, despite the fact it still exists. Usenet is a collection of newsgroups covering every imaginable topic. You can post articles, and people all over the world can read them. Kind of like a blog. *smile*
Anyway, a search on my name turns up 1310 posts. That would have been over a period of two or three years at most.
Oh, it's so much fun to rediscover stuff you wrote ten or twelve years ago. There are things there I don't even remember writing. Who knew that at one point I was a baseball fanatic?
Anyway, this post came up...it stems from a debate on Canadian culture and government. I found myself nodding vigorously several times. So here it is:


Actually, Canadians _do_ have culture, and I'm not just talking about
Quebec.
Supposedly, the key point in the elusive identification of a Canadian has
to do with apathy. Well, not entirely...we care about many things, and we
hold strong opinions on EVERYTHING...but the general character trait
denies translation of these opinions into collective action.

For instance, there are many places in the world where a man with the
popularity figures of Brian Mulroney wouldn't be left to his own devices
so long, let alone elected to another term. The way you hear people
talking about government in general, you'd think they were going to go out
and bomb a government building tomorrow. (Of course, most complaints may
be valid, but on the whole they are not well thought out; rarely is a
viable solution offered.)
Has it happened yet? Well, yes, actually, in Midland last month.
Once.

I think a lot of this "bitch bitch bitch bitch--ah, hey, who really cares,
eh?" attitude has something to do with the isolation of government from
the governed here. We tend to view government as remote gods/demons who
giveth and taketh away at will, for no reason at all. (And maybe they do.)
Media has something to do with it too, I'll warrant.
Look at income tax. It took me 20 minutes to do my taxes this year.
Granted, I am only a student and they weren't complex, but look at how H&R
Block etc has intimidated people into thinking taxes are impossible. For
God's sake, they involve addition, subtraction, and multiplication. I
learned how to do these by grade four. I knew how to look at tables even
earlier.
Just one minor, not-entirely-irrelevant example.

Welfare. It just kind of filters down to you. Legal system. No real
control over it. And so on. It gets so that you can live your life and
deny governement exists. Why not? You never see them--you just see their
actions from a great distance. You lose your job to free trade. It just
kind of filters down to you from on high. No control.

What we need is accountable, accessible government. The MPP for Oxford
County, Ontario, has distributed a balance sheet to interested
constituents, showing government expenditures and budgets. He has invited
them to make whatever changes they feel are necessary on the sheets and
return them to him.

Great idea--in theory. The problem is, we all know he won't actually look
at them, and if he does, he won't do anything about it, and if he does,
our ideas will somehow die on the way up into the rarefied air where the
government actually does things...

Show me how much government wants to serve the people, and I'll show you
how much I really care about it...