Sometimes I fool myself into thinking that the world is going to get better; that people will wise up about the damage being done by genetically modified foods, and mass consumerism, and fossil fuel dependency, and corporate excesses. I think I am delusional about these things because I have surrounded myself with people who share my outlandish opinion that the wave of conservative governance breaking out around the world is a turn for the worse. These people, when I have them around me, appear like a majority to me, but they are not.
I remember that I travelled from Quebec (which is, ironically, now the last bastion of the old vision of Canada yet untouched by Stephen Harper's Reform Party) to Ontario, during the last election, honestly believing that the NDP had a chance to win. I sat down outside Union Station in Toronto watching a crowd of people coming out of an afternoon baseball game; column after column of potbellied swaggering men with sunglasses balanced on the brims of their baseball caps, flanked by their mulleted wives and medicated children, digging around for the keys to their pick-ups and sport utility vehicles, satiated by their short trip to the exotic city core and primed and ready to drive back to suburbia to catch the game highlights on a giant screen TV down in the rec room, and I suddenly had a vision of Canada as it actually is:
I saw chain after chain of Tim Horton's restaurants, glowing on the map like urban areas viewed from outer space, I saw the lines drawn between glorious Canadian military service and donuts and I saw the insularity of it all—the blackening disinterest in anything other than a life of sequestered extra-urban comfort—the death of the arts, the death of compassion, the death the silent North under a blazing din of small lawn tractor engines—and I thought to myself, "we're going to lose this election, you know."
And, do you know what? We did lose.
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