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.