... Then Again

The last couple of days have been filled with answering emails, telephone calls and holding private discussions with folks who politely took me to task over my last post stating that I wouldn’t be blogging for the summer. I have three books, all half done, that I want to finish writing and the next few weeks seemed like the prime time.Yet something is definitely happening out there. I began hearing almost immediately from folks asking that I reconsider the decision. There’s no need to go into the positive statements they made about the posts themselves because what was really interesting was what they were revealing about themselves. More than I realized, many of these fine people are in the midst of a journey. Dissatisfied with the lack of citizen involvement at various levels, they have apparently been sifting through these posts in the Parallel Parliament and attempting to grow in their own responsibilities as Canadians. To quote one reader: “I read all the blogs from last summer on liberalism and it opened up an entirely new frontier of thinking for me. Don’t quit now, even briefly, when I’m finally feeling the desire to get engaged.”How do you ignore that? This woman is just the kind of person politics (and liberalism) requires if we are to redefine the political order. So I shoved my three books aside, realizing that we’re all on to a good thing here and that I shouldn’t get something started that I’m not willing to sustain. Thanks to all of you for that reminder.And so, starting tomorrow, I want to cover citizenship in more detail. To put it bluntly, we aren’t the citizens our parents or grandparents were; regardless of how much we would state the opposite. In so many ways we are smarter, better educated, wealthier, more cosmopolitan, more in touch with the broader world, and more diverse in thinking than many that went before us. Yet at the same time we lack wisdom, their commitment to a better world and the future of our kids. We are enveloped far more in private debt than our forebears, and appear far more self-centred. In a phrase: we’re not who we think we are.Starting in the autumn I wanted to write more posts on the “refining” of citizenship and how a Liberal Party in the midst of rebuilding could assist in that pursuit. But it’s hard to refine something that has lost its sense of potential and responsibility. So this summer we’ll consider the “redefining” of citizenship before we get to that next stage. We’ll talk about why it isn’t what it used to be and why we seem to lack the resolve to rebuild our nation the way our parents and grandparents did. There are some wonderful examples in the opposite, but they are the proverbial exception to the rule. In the main, we have lost our way. We might grow weary of the adage that we have morphed from citizens to consumers, but accompanying that fatigue is the nagging suspicion it might be true and we don’t want to hear it. Yet hear it we must, lest Canada continue to slide without us attempting to reverse the course.Some observers strongly maintain that we have entered the “post-democratic” era, where citizenship is pointless anyway and the big decisions lie way outside of our control. Maybe not. I prefer to think that we have transitioned from a political democracy to an economic one and that we have stripped citizens of much of their moral fortitude in the process. What we buy has now become far more important than if we vote. What we possess defines us more clearly than what we give away in compassion or justice. We now believe that the decision to buy something is merely an economic one rather than the political statement it really is.You can probably tell where I’m headed and some of you likely won’t take to it. But I just don’t see the point in expending all of our energies in refining politics without also challenging the other side of the great democratic equation – the citizen.As author James Follows once put it: “People don’t live in markets, they live in societies.” But modern society is increasingly becoming an endless catalogue of merchandise that continues to eclipse the fundamentals of what it means to be a citizen in a world where my values and my vote can truly matter.I should also state that not one bit of what will appear in these posts has been filtered or authored by anyone in the Liberal Party itself. In fact, some Liberals won’t like the conclusions at all, not because they are necessarily wrong but because they can never envision how to get back to power by demanding that citizens mature the same way the political process must. I’ll be speaking just for myself. But that’s one of the enshrining principles of citizenship anyway – to think and reason as though each one of us matters and can shape the final outcome. A lot of us are in the pensive mode, as we reflect on why Liberalism is less important than liberalism, why conduct is more vital than consumerism, and why our politics is more important than mere parties. Should make for an interesting summer.