Altered States: From Reality to Illusion

I remember the Canada of my father. Fresh home from serving the army in the Italian campaign, he brought back to his country the sense that it was a largely a disciplined effort that kept it together. He also possessed a new sense of confidence about what Canada could be, and what his own part in the national scheme might be. I was born in 1950 and grew up watching that new sense of possibility he took to community and national issues. His view of Canada, in his mind, was realistic: people paid their way, citizens were their brother's keeper, evil elsewhere was a possibility and had to be held in check, moral discipline was a bedrock of personal growth, money was to be invested, not wasted.But there was more, things he didn't know prior to the war. The country contained enough prosperity to assist the less-fortunate; not enough emphasis had been placed on education for all; it was time to recognize the need to acknowledge and enforce the equality of women; more emphasis had to be placed on peace as opposed to sudden preparations for war. He maintained his discipline but exercised his imagination.A country's moral decay is often mirrored in its physical decay. My father believed farmers fed a generation; today we watch them go broke while we substitute their remarkable output with junk food. Proper roads and sanitation were symbols of a adventurous and healthy generation; they presently lie in disrepair in every region of the country. Polluted water, significant loss of topsoil, a throw-away society, a receding polar cap, fish stocks depleted and garbage dumps bloated - physical signposts to all of us that we have lost our way. We can no longer summon up our own collective moral stamina to protect our country, let alone our planet.Youth culture was to be carefully connected to elderly wisdom so that the torch of historical memory could be possessed and progress built upon; currently most of our economy and entertainment industry loosely runs after the new generation while offering them pulp. We forget to inform our youth that debt leveraging is not the same as wealth creation.And then there was government. It mattered to my father, and millions like him, because it was what he fought and rationed for. The House of Commons, for all its flaws, was led by people of restraint, who survived the Depression and won a war. But in the last two decades we have blithely sat back and watched a political system that permitted our manufacturing sector to be decimated with little consideration for the green economy jobs of tomorrow. We lost our financial surplus and indebted our children in one foul swoop. Worse yet, we corrupted our democracy by talking about reform without delivering anything of the kind. All parties have been fooled into thinking the changes in EI are the same thing as job creation when, in fact, they are evidence of our poverty.Watch and see; we will come out of this recession with our businesses and governments rushing back into the financial bubble that looked like wealth but which lived on massive borrowing and cheap lending. My parents saved for 20 years to buy a house; today mortgages cost little but the price paid for the lack of serious saving is stripping us of our vibrancy.I leave for Italy this Friday to retrace my father's steps from Sicily through the Italian boot, where he fought for the Canadian army and was wounded twice in the battle of Monte Cassino. It's something of a spiritual journey I suppose, and in that mood I will coming back to a Canada that isn't what it was when he returned. And, sadly, I'll likely return as something of a lesser citizen in strength and commitment than he was.