Past and future mistakes.

Past and future mistakes.

I am delighted to see that we are fixing a lot of mistakes from the past. I grew up in a terrible world if we judge it by today’s standards. We were racist, abusive, and bullies. Parents beat children, husbands assaulted wives, and often sexual abuse was considered funny. The adults were talking routinely about Africans being cannibals and “Cowboy, and Indian” films were about savages.

My dad told us how in his school the teachers were beating children in front of the class and we witnessed animal abuse routinely. If my grandson could see the world my father grew up in, he would probably need psychological treatments for years. I am only slightly touching the surface and not including the worst abuses from the times of war.

Here in Canada life was hard for the people of past generations. I know a few people who remember the early days and many whose parents and grandparents lived and survived the “good old times.” It is not a myth; the good ol’ days were Hell in many ways.

Surprisingly, our suffering was not much of an issue in the not so far past. Even stories like the Chinese workers who built the railway and were left to die in the mountains didn’t shake people’s confidence in the country. The Japanese Canadians recovered from their abusive treatment during the Second World War, and recently even harassed gay people are beginning to feel like equal human beings.

In the Auschwitz concentration camp, there was a store where “model inmates” could receive rewards for good behavior. The name of that store was… Canada. Desperate people who were not destined to live long had one dream, Canada. Why is that important?

Our parents and grandparents believed that this is the land of opportunity and by retaining this dream made it so. We do it to this day, even when outside influence is pressuring us to adopt imaginary fears and halt our quest to be a moral, loving, fair society. What bothers me is that we are investing too much time and effort on trying to change the past, which we can’t do, while missing the opportunity to change the future. We should repent for past sins, but we will never be able to afford to pay for all the hardships that some of our ancestors have inflicted on other people’s ancestors. I wish to set up a course that will allow me to get to my destination instead of lamenting about slippery roads.

Presently we still have an existing problem with correcting some past mistakes. There is an issue of missing and murdered First Nations women; there are many remote communities without proper sanitation and water, and we still have a significant portion of the population being scared of people belonging to other races and or religions. We have a commitment from the government to change and improve, but it is a slow process which is often interrupted by changes in governing parties. At least we are making efforts which will decrease the need for future generations to apologize and pay for mistakes we are still producing.

Our most pressing need now is to change the way we deal with people needing jobs to make a living. We are advancing quickly into an age where human work will not be required unless humans will intentionally attend to it. New industries provide more jobs for robots than for people.

The needed change will not happen if we keep our beliefs that efficiency and production are the goals, which we now do. If we keep large portions of the population poor and give them social assistance, they will find ways to cheat. If we try to develop new industries, they will be taken over by clones operating where labor is cheap. Just laying people off while improving production also doesn’t work. We must place limits upon growth and divide the pie into many slivers.

I drive through the farmland and see every mile old farms rotting away while massive industrial farms took their place. I go through the streets and count the buildings that used to house small family businesses destroyed at the arrival of Walmart. I see the governments breaking and making laws to help “too big to fail” corporations or bailing financial institutions who gambled irresponsibly with our money, and I think. Aren’t we driving in the wrong direction?

There must be a better way. A friend told me long ago that we can’t stop progress, but I am not trying to stop it. We will never go back to lifting our somewhat oversized behinds and going to change the channel on Television. I will never go back to the old manual typewriter and kids will not spend years learning cursive writing or adding long columns of numbers. We do know, however, that government intervention coupled with strong regulatory discipline is a must for a modern economy to function safely and justly.

We worked and built a better world, and there is no going back. What we need to do now is evaluate our experience and see which parts of it don’t serve us well. If creating massive private businesses harms and destroys us, we should place limits or use taxation so the harm will not become a fatal mistake. I am sure that many people in those corporations would agree with me.

They will find away more satisfaction in playing a game with a few more rules and more competition, as they did only a short while ago when I was young. Corporations must have customers who can purchase their products and services. Executives like to have a beautiful healthy country to call home. Executives of corporations don’t fear change the way that poor people whose lives are on the line do. There is room for hope.

I know who I want for Prime Minister.

I know who I want for Prime Minister.

Until three years ago I never heard about her, but now I wish she was the Prime Minister of Canada. She was born in Vancouver in 1971 daughter of a hereditary chief of the We Wai Kai Nation and received top-notch Canadian education. If you look up her history, you see a record of what a Canadian woman can do. She devoted herself to improving the lives of first nations and branched out to work on improvements for international indigenous people’s rights. She applied herself equally to becoming a true advocate of law being above politics and showing integrity. In 2015 Jody Wilson-Raybould became Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. She has a good record of achievements which ended in 2019 when she was shuffled out.

Jody Wilson-Raybould has proven to me, and millions of other Canadians, that not all politicians are crooked. She was placed under persistent strong pressure to bow to political pressure and abdicate her judicial duties and did not cave in, paying a heavy personal price for her actions. I feel like my faith in people has been restored.

I expect the main political parties to be removed from principles and free of morals to the point of voting for the least evil amongst them, which is not right. I have been watching how we Albertans are demanding that the government will ignore a court decision and build a pipeline. In the depths of my heart, I was hoping that we would win, not with Trans Moutain Pipeline but with the Energy East, but that’s another matter. This week we are dealing with a brave, principled person of a kind which I thought no longer existed.

Our courts are judging a multinational giant Quebec based Corporation for using bribes (and sex) to get contracts. The government applies pressure to sway the courts, and it upsets Canadians. At the same time, we are demanding of the government to use its political power to build an export pipeline which is delayed by the courts. Complicated situation and caught in the middle is an honest politician who is unwilling to act against the oath of office even if it may cause her own party to lose the next elections, which it shouldn’t. Both major parties do that. 

Governments of all political persuasions routinely caved to big corporations in the past in consideration for economic needs and suffered no criticism. What is different this time?

Jody Wilson-Raybould made it clear to all who are watching that businesses who are “too big to fail,” are subject to a law that is different from what the rest of us are forced to obey because they have the power to pressure governments. When you or I break the law, we pay, but when a big company does, the law is circumvented because Corporations provide jobs.

I say this is a problem that must be dealt with sooner or later. If a large company can hold the rest of us for ransom, they should be allowed to fail, and other smaller businesses will spring up, provide the same services and take their place, jobs and all. This is the way of our capitalist economy.

At question here is who is running the country. Are we in the hands of lawless group of massive corporations, or does an elected government govern us? Are those corporations being responsible to Canadian voters or are they using the power of ill-gotten profits to build more strength?

Like the rest of you, I cringe when I see my government finding ways around the judicial system and using it. After all, we look up to our leaders, the lawmakers for a good example. If the people who we pay to lead us with integrity fail, we all fail. During my lifetime I never viewed the government as a good example which we should expect. As a matter of fact, I remember older people telling me before I was old enough to vote that “they were all crooks.” I lived and worked, never missing an election, never having faith in the political system.

One aspect I noticed a very long time ago. That is; that political parties varied in their level of deception. Some told lies boldly and very openly hid their actions, while others attempted to buy my vote by being more transparent. There was a race between them, and they kept switching places. Democracy, as Sir Winston Churchill said, is not perfect, but it’s the best system we have.

I wouldn’t want to live in an undemocratic country, but I know that many countries claim to be democratic while they are not. Even Egypt and Saudia Arabia are “democratic.“ The system only works if there are active, principled people in it who are willing to make it fair and are concerned mostly with the well being of the majority, while not jeopardizing the minorities. We have not yet discovered a law or regulations that can make people treat each other properly without risking a need to fight. Consequently, the prospect of peace, equality, and fairness is treated like a fairy tale.

Perhaps the closest we ever came was with the old statement, “love each other as yourself.” This is so old and has been ignored for so long that no-one even considers it as a real possibility. In a world where everyone is for themselves and three-quarter of the people don’t have hope, I see a ray of light.

Liberals, if you are listening, I hope that your next leadership convention will include Christia Freeland and Jody Wilson-Raybould. I want to see the female spirit used to repair our ailing society — no-one fights as fiercely as a mother protecting her children.

This is my opinion anyway.

Who is the Big Guy?

I remember much of my life from my very early childhood. I always could be enticed to talk to someone if they mentioned God. I don’t know why God never ceased to fascinate me, and I also had a real physical fear of the devil.

My father did not talk about God. He witnessed a lot of suffering during the second-word war and didn’t want to talk about it. He would say, “yes, I believe in God,” and change the subject. I grew up in Israel and was taught the old testament in school. We had our lessons and tests, but I was fascinated with the Bible, so I read much of what was not part of the school curriculum, on my own.

By the time I was in grade four I was able to understand, and my childhood faith was shaken. I read about a God who was so mean that I was horrified. He told his people to drag their enemies over spikes and rip them apart, to use the sword to kill babies in pregnant women’s wombs and he punished his own people in most horrific ways if they didn’t obey his messengers. God instructed people to borrow gold and things from the punished Egyptians and leave without paying back, and he used magic to destroy people who had no way to defend themselves against his power.

This was the God that later I discovered was the father of the Messiah that my parents and I believed in. We were told that we must love God above all else, but he was more concerned with making people fear him than making them love him.

I was in my late teens, and a declared atheist when I was exposed to Christian teachings, which I hungrily gulped. Here was a different message about a God who was born human and was teaching another message. Faith was all about love, promoting equality, caring for the community and telling the followers to give up material things and follow him all the way to what he calls “The Kingdom Of The Father.” This added to my confusion since the Father was a mean God, but not all the time.

It was later on that I discovered that the early Christians had a flourishing community of Gnostic Christians who believed that the God of the old testament was not always the same God. I knew a lot of Jews and Muslims who were very good people and believed that the true God is a kind, loving person, and at the same time I know many Christians who are willing to cause much suffering, often for their personal enjoyment and profit. Could the biblical God be different persons?

 

I like to have coffee in some of our wonderful coffee places on Main Street in Blairmore. Last week I was sitting with some authors at the Stone’s Throws Caffe. That seems to be where authors, artists, and intellectuals gather. Steve, a newcomer to the Pass, brought me his book about God, and it begins with asking me to define who is God.

My approach is to define who is not God. We think that man was made in God’s image, yet we are not permitted to make an image of God or try to imagine what he is. He told Moses that his name is “I am.” and he is a “father” in heaven. Our most repeated prayer begins with “Our Father” not his father or God or anything else. Some of us believe that the Bible descended from God, while others say that if I worship the book, I am worshipping another form of an idol. An idea that is abstract could be a human constructed idol. I am left with the question of who is God.

Back to the beginning, I go, again using the Bible. On my wall, there is a quote from (Mark 3.31 – 35) he said, “here are my mother and brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brothers and sisters and mother.” If he is the son of God and I am his brother than what.

I gather my thoughts. If you really have faith you don’t need belief. A fanatic of any faith has no faith at all. They force people to believe, and the people never do. God doesn’t need the law and ways to enforce it. God can’t be detected by human senses. We meet folks who say things like Jesus told me to do this or that. I think that they refer to their intuition directed by their consciousness. People who say they hear God, while others around them see no sign of it, display a symptom which can be treated. There are however a few recorded and verifiable cases of folks who witnessed apparitions of heavenly entities who imparted information. Those are often associated with (faith) healing and been tested vigorously. I am thinking about Lourdes in France which millions of people visited and been puzzling us for over 150 years.

I look again at Steves book, full of beautiful pictures quotations and questions, the first, “who is God?”

The answer is: faith in God is letting go. The highest knowledge of God is by unknowing and accepting. The question should be, not who is God, but who am I. I am all there is. Without “I am,” there is nothing.

Modern Love.

Being an older guy now, I find myself answering questions from young people who are curious about my opinion. After all, I have been around for a long time and seen the most significant changes that humankind endured. I am still around which makes younger people wonder if I have some secret knowledge.

A letter from a young person came over asking questions about love. Here it is with names changed to protect identities. The young man was married, had kids and been separated for about three years.

“That girl I told you about many months ago is still in my life — the one who I am always struggling to get to agree to see me. Not too much has changed, though it is getting easier and easier to get her to want to see me. I think I am slowly winning her over. She still will not agree to be my girlfriend, but she has agreed not to sleep with anyone else so I guess that is a start. I do worry that you are right, I am setting it up for history to repeat itself. Getting a really pretty girl who I am super into to marry me, only to have her be luke-warm to it when it actually happens. I also think it would be smarter of me to find someone more so in my situation, like a single mom or at least a girl who is divorced or closer in age. This girl has never been married, no kids, and she is only 26. But, the heart wants what the heart wants, and my heart is set on trying to win her over.

I am starting to think it might happen. I am falling in love with this girl, which is weird because I am also still in love with Dana. It turns out you can be in love with two girls at once. I keep thinking my feelings for Dana will fade a bit as I fall for this girl more, but that does not seem to happen. The feelings for Baily grow, but the feelings for Dana stay the same. I would marry either of them if I had the chance....isn't that weird? I talk to Baily pretty much every day by text. I see her about once per week these days.”

It has been a long time since I was involved in courting, marrying and even longer since the days of girlfriends. I never considered myself an expert about romantic love, but I do have some philosophical opinions about love. Being a Christian, Love is a central aspect of my theory of human existence and its chances of survival. I view selfishness as the domain of Satan and Love the main ingredient of my faith. To be honest, it is not just my faith. I lived with Muslims and with Jewish people, and I find them all to be on the same page. I don’t know about the religious leaders, but the ordinary people have similar ideas.

Here is my reply to the young man.

You don’t understand what love is, so wonder if it's possible to love two. Ouch. A girl is not a possession and restricting her sexuality when she is not married to you is showing her that you wish to possess her. When we LOVE someone, we don’t want to give the most intimate act, sex, to others. That is what WE offer. A girl is not a prize that you WIN either. You can’t win her, only her body and then she is your slave which she would never agree to be if she had a choice.

Every person can have a best friend, and the best of the best is one of the opposite sex who completes us. The biggest sexual organ is the brain, like it or not. When the two minds agree that the other one is the one best for them, you have what we call love. Infatuation, desire, jealousy, coveting, competing, winning and many more, are NOT LOVE. “My Babe” is a wrong term that I wish people would not repeat around teenage boys condemning them to repeat the mistakes of their fathers.

 

MY WIFE is a gift I received from the creator, a person that I gave myself to.

Love is giving, not receiving. The receiver must be able to TRUST the giver based on past performance and NEVER on promises that are not worth a penny. This is very scientific. People who are business oriented are known to make false promises, and one is a fool to believe them. You know the saying, fool me once you win, fool me twice, etc. Baily is a smart and beautiful person and when she wishes she may choose one of three and a half billion people to mate with. She will carefully assess what is available and determine the one who is her BEST friend. I think her parents told her what I am telling you now. If it is in her nature, she will be kind to all people but cautious about whom she chooses to vow to love and cherish, in sickness and in health and all the rest. Most of us do not wish to lie and when we do we call it a business decision.

My parental “lecture” is finished!

I feel that our society built itself a language which works for business, but is not suitable for feelings and understanding of the human soul. Consequently, we manage to keep a growing economy, but we are losing our humanity.

They stole our name, but we are the true Conservatives.

They stole our name, but we are the true Conservatives.

I wasn’t going to write about politics, but someone chastised me for not being a Conservative while supposedly I owe a lot to the Conservative party. I have been a Progressive Conservative Albertan since 1968 when I was sold on the Peter Lougheed message. He started the party from nothing and became the Premier in 1971 if my memory serves me right. He set us up so well that his party remained in power for 44 years until it was changed beyond recognition. A true leader, he was, concerned with the people of Alberta and proud of being a Canadian.

Lougheed was born and raised in Alberta, an athletic,  Harvard graduate and above all a privileged guy who shared his good luck with others for the good of all. His educated vision was for Alberta to use the temporary prosperity from oil and build a prosperous clean, attractive province for future generations. Investments in education, health care, and other social ventures are paying off to this day. Oil boomed, but oil corporations knew he was the boss. Hospitals and universities sprung up, Alberta Energy company insured that we prosper and Alberta became a destination for people seeking a good future.

After a brief change over, Peter was replaced by Ralph Klein who was the opposite. A not very athletic, high school dropout, Ralph sold the goose for a few golden eggs. My Conservative party now dismantled the legacy of Lougheed, sold the assets, spent the savings, and allowed us to become a one big company town owned by private corporations.

Move forward to 2019, when the contest is wedged between champions of the two theories. On the right side is Jason Kenney an Ontario born Saskatchewan raised, man who dropped out of a US Jesuit University, was active in the Young Liberals and moved to Alberta to be elected as a Conservative. He and another Albertan Stephen Harper led the Federal government for ten years never completing even one of our pipelines that we have going east which would have guaranteed Canada energy independence. A pipeline east now would have provided a market for the oil which Peter Lougheed invested so much of our tax dollars to develop.

On the left side of the rink, we have a small but smart Alberta woman who grew up seeing the Lougheed advantage and under another banner decided to revive the Alberta Advantage. Just like Lougheed, she believes that investing in the people, infrastructure and diversifying the economy is the answer. The only main difference is, she is doing it while the province is suffering greatly from low world oil prices and from mistakes made before her time. Most of Alberta’s advantage has been sold, and those who bought it are trying to squeeze the last few pennies out, often at the expanse of Albertans.

Not surprisingly the fight between “left” and “right” is most noticeable in countries and provinces where there is oil. The people who own the oil, since it is on their lands, often are pushing “left” since they wish to benefit from their resources. We have all known for years that oil will come to an end since we recorded Lougheed saying it. The question has always been, who will get the money and what will they do with it. Peter wanted to make the future bright for all Albertans, and those who followed him chose to give it to outside companies and friends in exchange for staying in power.

My Alberta which I invested a lifetime of work to make better for my children and their children is not going the way I thought it would. The lady Premier is investing in children, elders, public education, transportation, diversified economy, families and health facilities, just as, Lougheed did. Her efforts are challenged by a New party that stole the name Conservatives doing what I consider damage to those of us who built the place.

A party, supported by some rural Canadians and a lot of new immigrants is threatening to reverse the good work that she is doing. A political force that wants us to work for less, reduce taxes for those who are taking our resources, privatize our health care, charge us to use our roads, reduce money for our schools giving it to private schools and fighting against our efforts to reduce pollution, is gaining in the polls. They do it by spending vast amounts of money on marketing as I see on expensive electronic billboards.

I am truly afraid that The Conservatives of my generation, and probably the parents of most of you, are losing the fight to outside “investors”  who don’t have our province’ best interest in mind. They will skim the cream off the top and leave us to fight the floods and fires on our own. They will not worry about how we will afford to clean up after them and find ways to feed ourselves after the need for oil is gone. All those who came here in the boom times will go, and all of Alberta will be like a coal mining town after coal was no longer needed.

I have the fortune of remembering the last fifty years in Alberta and the ability to assess what I saw and pass it on to younger generations. I will not be affected much by what is taking place, but I care about my children and the future of this province and the world around it. I also care about the investment that a lot of people that are now gone made in this place.

I am a Progressive Conservative, as were most people who worked with me to make this a great place for our future generations. No one with a fake interest in what we were doing is going to say that I am not. This is my opinion anyway.

Here is a link to my blog: https://thesimpleravenspost.blogspot.ca/  Feel free to check other articles and comment.

The man who invented modern Alberta, and the woman who made it possible.

 7225136[1] From Montreal Gazette Published in the Calgary Herald 2012.

Choose Love or Greed?

Choose Love or Greed?

I opened my email. It is much faster than how mail used to be during my youth and so easy to open. I no longer use my old trusty letter opener which I had for fifty years. Thank goodness for modern conveniences, but just wait a minute. The first letter was addressed to me but not signed by anyone I know. The unknown person is telling me that he has pictures of me watching porn sites and if I don’t send him 400 BitCoins (whatever they are), he will send all my friends those pictures. I printed and delivered a copy of the letter to the local RCMP, but they can’t do a thing about it. They have lots of those letters. I am glad that I am 100% sure that no-one could possibly have the pictures they have mentioned.

The phone rang, and I answered. A mature female voice told me that a lawsuit is being filed against me… and I hung up. The variety of threats made over the phone is nothing less than amusing. Sometimes I wonder if we weren’t better of when we had no telephone, received letters in the mail and borrowed books from the library.

What we have now is the results of the culmination of policies which we allowed to take place over a long time. It didn’t happen overnight. At one time we lived in communities where we knew the people around us, helped each other and faced problems together. When things went wrong, all of us demanded changes and got them.

Now it is a different world. As the years past, we glorified any and all actions that make money and lost any sense of decency. Business became holy and what used to be revered became trivial. Family relationship, faith in God, pride in being honest, honor, personal integrity and many other qualities that we believed in, went out the window. Now people devise ways to hurt each other and extort money, mostly from the poor, and receive accolades. People arrest power by openly lying and use the power to intimidate others, force sexual and other favors out of defenseless individuals, and get away with it. Even wars based on false accusations are fought and only criticized for not profiting the powerful.

I remember older people complaining and lamenting about the loss of the good old times, and I don’t want to sound like them. Perhaps I am only another old person who became a chronic complainer, but I don’t think so. I see a noticeable number of people much younger than I being very uncomfortable with the state of society.

We used to regulate ourselves by choosing governments that provided needed services and controlled misbehavior. I witnessed the striking down of laws that were good in favor of giving freedom to businesses claiming that they can regulate themselves and that the “market” will take care of all problems. It didn’t happen. President Reagan stood in front of cheering crowds saying that the government is not solving problems but is the problem and we agreed. Elected officials abandoned any attempts to do their jobs properly and applied themselves to raising funds to market themselves to win elections. The system became broken.

We used to have laws forcing the news media to investigate and report all sides of issues. The media was held to account if they knowingly misrepresented facts. I remember the government providing inspections and protecting consumers. Police officers were a part of the community and provided a good example. Now the police organization is under investigation for systemic harassment of some of their own. I am scared of what the future may bring if we don’t take action very soon.

The movement of the far right which is demanding less or no government has gone off the rails. We can’t live in a society that is regulated by greed alone, where no-one can be trusted. We can’t have all government services privatized, and there will be no protections for anyone who is not well enough to protect themselves. We used to have governments responsible for public services and accountable to the electorate, but we let them go. Some want the government only to provide an army to defend their property, but I disagree with them full heartedly.

I watch movies like Star Wars where the last remnants of decent humans are rebelling against an evil empire, and I think, let us not become such a world. I see political organizations building platforms based on hate for taxes, and I wonder. Are we ready to give up all the good things that made our society what it is? Are we going to trust business to take care of the world and all the people in it just because they are good-natured caring people?

I look across our border at one example. We had public healthcare now for close to fifty years, and they didn’t. If a person walks into a health facility in either country, we find the service and care on par. Yet, many millions of their people suffer and die miserable deaths for lack of money for treatment, and high insurance rates, while here they don’t. Very credible institutions examined the costs and found out that the expense per capita for healthcare in Canada is only slightly more than half of what it is over the border.

I don’t know about you, but I am tired of having to fight all the time to protect myself from those who take advantage and extort money. I want a good government that will do it and will look for ways to make our society great again. It will not happen by letting foxes guard the hen house.

I have my computer, and I write. I have my vote, and I choose to elect people who will govern to protect me and build an economy good for average people, not on unregulated business. Most of my acquaintances who are business people agree.

Here is a link to my blog: https://thesimpleravenspost.blogspot.ca/  Feel free to check other articles and comment.

Mary Poppins in politics.

Mary Poppins in politics.

We went to see the new version of Mary Poppins movie, where there were more adults viewers than kids. The Disney Corporation obviously made the movie for kids since it is full of magic and only kids believe

in magic, or do they?

My daughter and her three kids visited us over Christmas, and the conversation veered off to the subject of magic. She sat there by the Christmas tree and said that when she was small she believed in magic and in a fair, kind world, but then she grew up. She saw that the world was a mean place in which everyone and everything is competing for domination over each other and only the shrewd and strong survive while others suffer. In our world, she said, you have to fight for a place and fight to keep it. She is right I must sorrowfully admit.

Many years ago, I left a country which was divided between Judaism and Islam, both Abrahamic religions just like Christianity is. My mother told me that if you live in a Christian country, you will notice a difference. Christians idolize a philosophy of sharing and helping the poor amongst them, she said. It's in their nature, and they learn it from the New Testament. We moved to the Christian world and lived and learned.

There was a striking difference between what was being preached in church on Sundays and what was going on in our lives on other days. Soon after I was promoted to a low-level supervisory position, and told by my boss to make business decisions. That’s the lingo for heartless choices based on profit.

Mary Poppins is a nanny that comes to families in great need and takes care of the children. Yes, as all fairy tales go, she uses magic, but not without people doing the right thing first. Here on the silver screen, we were watching a family in disarray devastated by the passing away of mom. Dad overwhelmed by his wife’s death neglected to make a few mortgage payments and the bank, which he incidentally worked for, demanded that the full mortgage will be paid in less than a week. He had shares in the bank, but without his wife, he couldn’t find the papers.

As the plot developed, the kids got absorbed by the stories that Mary Poppins told them, and I saw what my daughter realized. There are bad people around, who take advantage of people’s weakest moments, strip them of their rights and property and leave them destitute while absorbing all they have into an empire of riches. They do it with a kind smile and playing by rules that they set, convincing the victims that their way is the only way.

I look at the political game played in the world around me, and I see clearly how the game of power is shaping human destiny. Some years ago, when I arrived in Alberta, there were many opportunities and jobs. People like me were motivated to study and work hard, and those who did received good rewards. My dad was the sole breadwinner, and we lived a satisfactory life purchasing a house in the first five years. My mom had poor health but didn’t have to depend on private clinics for treatment but was treated by Medicare that had no incentive to prolong any conditions or medication for possible additional income. I was able to finish high school by evening courses, free of charge, and continue to University that I could pay out of my regular wages. I graduated debt free. The Province was debt free and helping other less fortunate areas of the country. Other people who were in my economic class started many little businesses and did just as well if not better.

Compare this to the world today. Just about all that I just described is gone. Many people work hard and lose their good jobs, lose their homes and often can’t even afford the medications they need. Kids can no longer afford higher education, and hardly a few manage to have little businesses. The newspaper in your hands at this moment is barely able to stay in business while just a few years ago this community supported two.

 

In the movie Mary Poppins stories changed the outcome. The children saved the day by rescuing the Bank share certificate that the family owned, and sticking it on a kite. The aunt, who was a Union organizer got the working men from the streets to turn time back by five minutes and an old man who owned the bank but was shoved aside took his business back and reversed the predatory decision to steal the family home from its rightful owners, the family.

 

I am not a child, and I don’t believe in magic, but I do reserve some room for miracles. I have seen too much evidence that miracles can and will happen. I believe that the good times can return and that the American and Canadian dream is not yet dead. If people realize that they can’t just vote for a political party which appropriated a name of a long-gone party that made us prosper, they will change the future.

 

We don’t vote for a name; we vote for a leadership that stirs us towards a better life. It is up to us to find out who is doing it and use our democracy and our numbers to make things right. We must take the time to discover who is lying and who is telling the truth and use the power that wise people gave us through a Constitution.

The young people are right, and we must fight for what we get. We fight like Mary Poppins, by telling ourselves the right stories. We are, after all, the stories we tell ourselves.