Forsooth!
What is that bestirring in this sludge-soddened soul of mine? Unfamiliar to the echoes of dull dread to which I have become sadly accustomed. This thing, it twitches bright, and catches my breath rather than suppressing it suffocatingly. Mine eyes forced up from their downward inclination, up to the skies above where I see a starry constellation spelling out the word: HOPE!
Hope. That’s what this is. Hope. Bidding me wax lyrical.
Until the usual waves of lowered expectations come crashing in and attempt to douse the flames of possibility and optimism. The list of negatives. Oh, it’s that guy. Didn’t he finish third in his riding in this spring’s federal election? For a second time. For a party that got obliterated, wiped off the electoral map. He’s married to that women, isn’t he? That socialist power couple with their Leap Manifesto. Can he even speak French?
Etc. & Etc.
Look.
In the political dimness, any sort of light looks like a beacon. A little bit of fire comes across as a five-alarmer after a generation of moderation and triangulation. In an age of capitulation to our worst instincts, a simple shake of the head screams defiance.
Being afraid of your own shadow, it turns out, is not a winning electoral strategy.
So I’ll take my tubthumping wherever I can find it. If we hadn’t realized by now, accommodation with destructive, avaricious, spiteful and vengeful politics is an impossible position to maintain, a mythical centrism dreamed up by those too comfortable to fight back, to fight for anything other than their own interests. Chasing the illusive ‘middle’ does nothing more than abandon those who backed you for what you stood for not for what you’re willing to give up in the hopes of securing a spot at the table.
They are the money. We are the many.
A pretty jingly catchphrase, if you ask me. Rolls off the tongue, and clearly establishes the sides in this non-hyperbolic existential fight. Unafraid to identify the enemy combatants. The monied interests and the rest of us. Us versus Them. A concise synopsis of how we got to where we are today, in this dark, dyspeptic place, where the conventional wisdom says that there’s only political mileage to be had by taking on the powerless not the powerful.
If that doesn’t resonate just a little bit for you, comes across as too Up With People! with a side order of Woke, either there’s a deep cynicism at work that’s made you indifferent to the welfare of those around you or neoliberalism has swallowed you whole, insisting that if we just keep doing the same thing we’ve been doing for the past 50 years, doing it harder, doing it bigger, louder, Super Sizing it, we’ll all be able to get past all this, get through these turbulent times of ours.
I’ll take bold dreaming over wishful thinking anytime.
