Citizenship - "If Only I'd Been President"

I was joking to a neighbour last week that getting out of politics is a lot harder than getting in … well, sort of. Part of it’s true though. There are a lot of details to transition through as you move back to private life and one of the more difficult aspects is what to do with all that you have accumulated in both your constituency and Ottawa offices. Anything acquired on the taxpayer’s dollar is given back to Parliament, but then there are all those photos of special events and trips, the small but meaningful gifts presented by ambassadors, favourite correspondence, the books you acquired to help with your tasks as parliamentarian, and other odds and ends.I now have a garage full of all those things and I have no idea where to put them. And then it struck me: this is partly why American presidents establish their own libraries. I’ve frequented a few of these edifices in my years and they’ve been great; but, seriously, if they didn’t build them, where would they put all their acquired stuff? Plus they get other people to pay for the impressive structures that house much of their history. Must be nice.So here I was yesterday, sitting amidst all those possessions, and realizing that human beings seem coded to collect.  We believe that so much of our identities are to be found in what we own, only to discover that we’ve lost ourselves in our acquisitions. I also realized that in 1900 the average Canadian lived in a house the size of today's average garage – a sobering thought. In fact, research reveals that we have used up more resources since the end of World War Two than all of previous history combined.I grew up during those years and learned some very salient truths. As far back as 1991, environmental researcher Alan Durning discovered that the average family owned twice as many cars, drove 2.5 times farther, used 21 times more plastic, and traveled 25 times farther by air than the average family of only 40 years earlier (1951). And, in effect, we are living three times as large. The size of new houses has doubled since 1970, while the number of people living in houses has shrunk. One of the biggest industries to take off in the last decade has been citizen use of storage lockers; they are now everywhere and more are being constructed each week. Perhaps conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza had it right when he proclaimed, “we have created the first mass affluent class in world history.”What has been the cumulative effect of all this build-up? We are richer, more educated, have more possessions, travel more, enjoy more entertainment, and eat more than any other generation that has ever lived. Yet it feels like the more consumer goods we can summon from across the globe, the greater challenges we face as a society.There was a point to acquiring all of these blessings but it might very well be that we have now passed its overall benefit to our society and the world around us. By putting our private accumulations and interests above everything else, we have ended up cluttered and crippled. My right to acquire and accumulate cheap goods has often pitted the hoarder against the citizen in me. Just as I’m purchasing all these things, the society I live in can’t find new jobs, environmental responsibility has gone down the dumpster, we have more private debt than ever before, education and healthcare are slowing moving out of reach, and the stability of our future security now seems suspect.In other words, the private citizen and the public citizen are at war in me and half the time I don’t even detect the tension. My internal desire for goods has not only blinded me to the greater good, but might also be harmful to overall society as a result. These are calculations that should be running through my head more often.Citizenship is essentially a demanding task because it implies stewardship. If the mountain of things presently occupying my garage could be keeping me from my larger responsibilities to my society, then I clearly have work to do.This is where our present politics is failing at its core. Where it should be challenging all of us to build a great society and caring for our neighbour and our world, it is instead asking precious little of us in our pursuit for a rich society. Until the modern political order calls us to build more instead of accumulating more, our great challenges will forever stand in our path. If only I had been president, I could have farmed this problem out to others and had them pay for it. As it is, I’m a single citizen with no such privilege. I’ve got a lot of work to do and some sacrifice to make.