Liberalism - The Disenchanted

Americans woke up this week to some troubling news from the Rockefeller Foundation, showing that citizens are more economically insecure now than they have been in a quarter of a century, and the trend lines suggest the worst is still to come.  That life so painstakingly put together by the Great Generation following World War Two is crumbling around them.Canadians like to believe we’re better off, and we likely are, but our country, too, is sliding back.  Trouble is, we won’t admit it.  As previous posts have noted, from municipal infrastructure to declining world influence, our children are facing a bleaker future than we did.Yet there are plenty of citizens out there who have picked up all the signs and are using everything at their disposal to call upon us to act.  They are dedicated citizens, but in most cases they are issue driven: the environment, anti-poverty, democratic reform, save a school, and the like (more on this tomorrow).  They are pressing for change from their own discipline and they all share the same fate in that they can’t get the majority in the country – the comfortable – to awaken from their slumber.  They are not small in number but neither are they sufficient enough to shift the critical mass of citizenry.In many ways these perceptive people are like our parents, possessing the ability to look beyond their own personal satisfaction in concern for those that have yet to share their blessings.  They see the more distant dangers that result from short-term thinking and a preoccupation with individual comfort.  The growing gap between the rich and the poor hasn’t gone unnoticed to them.  When they read in the news today that a pipeline carrying oil to Sarnia, Ontario, has leaked more than three million litres of oil into a creek in Michigan that endangers birds and other wildlife, they scour the Internet, seeking what can be done.  Those same people that rejoiced when the aboriginal policy was given by the government, now listen to the same native leaders say that the apology was words without substance, and they self-organize to mobilize policy makers to turn words into reconciliation.People like this are fighting all over the country for every issue that truly matters, and they put their blood, sweat and money into it.  They are the abiding example that idealism, a sense of justice, and compassion are not yet dead; on the contrary, their collective action is likely the most reputable form of Canadian citizenship that exists at present.Across this vast country, our highways, bridges, sewers, mass transportation facilities and public structures are falling into decay, and yet the comfortable shake their heads and ask in wonder: “What are our politicians doing?  How did it come to this?”  Yet these things are all falling below future need because we ourselves aren’t planning for the future.  We can’t just blame politics, though it’s culpable as well.  By resisting the kind of democratic and political change the future will require we reveal our own selfishness.  Present costs and taxation are real, specific and come with some self-sacrifice.  Instead we ask: “Why should we pay for people we don’t even know, who’ll live sometime in the future?”  The most logical answer to that is: because our grandparents and our parents did, and we’re where we’re at now because they looked farther down the road than we have, and were willing to pay for a better future, for us. Why not do it for others and recapture that spirit of an earlier generation that fought a war and solidified remarkable domestic peace?Our community activists are perhaps the best part about us at the moment.  They fight for our kids, not just theirs.  They struggle for their planet, and for better education.  They fight the stupidity of urban sprawl and for the future of green technology.  They fight to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless – fallout from the comfortable generation.  They build schools in Africa, fight for their faith, and staff health clinics on aboriginal reserves.  They volunteer for eldercare and teach our kids at camp.Almost every single one of these citizens is disenchanted.  What they are witnessing right now is not the country they knew.  Yet they can’t afflict the comfortable enough to prompt them to comfort the afflicted.  Like political parties, they can’t rouse the populace to seize its own future.  They are the remnant, the faithful, the passionate lovers of this country, and yet they feel homeless.  Something’s wrong.  They can’t muster up enough citizen support to even save a river or preserve a school.If liberalism is to ever find a future, it will be among these people.  While the middle class moved up, these folks moved out, facing every challenge with citizen zeal and a desire for the common purpose.  It would be true to state, regardless of their political persuasion, that these are the children of liberalism.  They are alive, but not well, because politics too often played to the comfortable, and the comfortable all too frequently blew them off.  The heart of liberalism is living among these people and must be rediscovered in their midst.