Easter, Sickness, and Resurrection.

 

Easter, Sickness, and Resurrection.

It is Easter again, and I am thinking about resurrection. We humans have been doing that for thousands of years. The major religions all have stories of rebirth repeated when nature makes things bud in the spring. This year the need for a spring promise is greater than every other year in my long life. It has been a long, scary winter. Like many millions of the vulnerable immuno-compromised people living in a worldwide pandemic, I thank the Lord. Resurrection sounds promising.

Around me, family and friends are groaning about how they suffer from isolation, lack of shopping, and missing vacations. Others are bitterly mourning the loss of older family members who were expected to live on. We had it pretty good for a long time, and everyone wishes for the good times to return. Little do they know we were borrowing from the future and it’s time to pay up. Our economy based on extracting limited resources combined with using cheap labour of others is ready for bankruptcy.  Our politicians who held power by selling lies run out of masks and their true faces are showing. More of us realize that just wanting a carefree life doesn’t provide it for us.

Taking the rosy glasses off, I look at the reality in front of me and wonder what will bring resurrection in our case. My religious teachings emphasize a need for change. Repentance the Bible calls it. I look around and see many people assessing the situation soberly and advocating a mature attitude, while so many others wish to be careless and apologize with crocodile tears for the damage they cause.

My choice of solution is to buckle down, do what’s necessary, and rebuild. It will be an interesting project and we can do it. I am met with the distant gaze of those who wish to dream away our problems, hoping that someone else will take their suffering away and be crucified while they will party on. Included in that group is my current Provincial leader. A quick scan of the newspaper confirms my feelings.

The editor brings to life a past premier who predicted our present situation and told us to save and build. My emotions rise to joy and I put the paper down thinking, there is hope. A sentence from the editorial said, “I voted for Jason Kenney, I door knocked on his behalf and I can’t tell you how disappointed I am in him and the decisions he’s made as our political leader.” I assumed we are winning.

People who have been voting because their parents voted a certain way realize that the Conservative party today is not at all what it used to be when it began. It is a political organization created and financed by corporations as an investment that will pay back dividends. The politicians look forward to personal gain from politics, and I see Jason Kenny’s cabinet do that.

He made impossible promises before elections and counted on money from mysterious donors to buy votes using professional marketing. He gave away large amounts of tax money and bragged about cutting the price set on pollution. Soon the Alberta health care and education was in turmoil. Physically Conservative efficiencies translated into cutting jobs and reducing pay for my kind of people. Money went into pipelines that were almost guaranteed to fail, and the bailed-out oil companies were leaving us fast. Speaking as a layperson, I see nothing good.

Next came the pandemic, and it was not handled well. The understaffed seniors care facilities didn’t improve performance, and doctors were looking to leave the province. The premier didn’t use his power to make the right decisions and tried not to upset the people who believe in Covid denying conspiracy theories. It costs the lives of people like me. I saw my daughter and other health workers get ill with mental stress, and old Conservatives like the editor I was reading changed sides.

To be honest, I look at what already happened and what is happening and I feel like we have no government. In comes the coal controversy. There were good reasons why Peter Lougheed’s very pro-Alberta government decided not to dig up the eastern slopes. They knew the benefits and studied the risks. I knew some of the people who did it. Now Mr. Kenny with little public debate changed a Conservative decision and made promises to foreign investors that he can’t keep. I talked to miners and to farmers and ranchers. I am sure that he cannot keep his promises. Money is significant, a new golf course is great, but water is the lifeblood of the province. Destroy the water and you may not only lose the next election.

Well, back to the resurrection. The Feds most likely will get us the vaccines even without the medical expertise and factories that previous governments sold and chased out. The real resurrection should come from the proper education of our young people. Here we stumble again and may suffer damage that hardly can be healed.

While the world is moving forward with education, we are not studying success stories like Finland; we are going back to the failed methods from days gone by. Not only new schools were cut, universities and colleges underfunded, but the curriculum itself is being set back. We did not train our teachers in teaching using historical outdated systems.

I sit here waiting for the end of the dark times and the joy of the resurrection, and there is a lump in my throat. Winter may be over, but all I have to go by for hope are the words of people who proved that they don’t speak the truth. While I am suffering, they probably are enjoying themselves thinking about how to fool us again and blame someone else. Let someone else be crucified for our sins.

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