Does it matter...

There is a common complaint that arises every time an election is called. It is the whine of the isolated individual who feels that they are entirely irrelevant to the political process. It is the the voice that despairs about the power of the single vote. It goes something like this. "Why should I vote? My candidate won't win." Or like this. "Why should I vote? My party won't win." Or like this. "Why should I vote? They're all the same - in it for themselves."

Well the answer goes like this. "It all depends." It depends on whether you think that in a nation of 36 million people you can somehow expect the opinion of a single vote to immediately resonate through the system. Not likely to happen. It depends on whether you can see yourself as a member of a community. It is the communal voice that matters and that voice is created by the accumulated votes of individual citizens who understand that at best they can express their desires and hopes only in the broadest ways. The nature of democracy is that we must be willing to assign the control of our nation to the people we elect knowing that we will from time to time have the opportunity to chastise or reward them.

Is this an imperfect system? Of course it is. All human systems are imperfect not because we are imperfect but because we are complex and the role of government is to listen to the cacophony of the electoral voice and then to somehow respond in a coherent fashion. There are ebbs and flows in the political landscape as we lurch through time and space. We proceed and regress, flourish and decline. We experiment and and build. We destroy and we restore. It is the nature of our very existence and it is terribly imperfect.

And despite this we must not let ourselves to fall into the kind of nihilism that would have us abrogate the greatest gift we have as a free people. There is a simple task that each of us must undertake; we must fulfil our central role in the system we have constructed - we must vote.

Why I sometimes fall into despair...

I am an optimist at heart. I have to be to even want to to live in this insane world where we consume at a rate that we no is unsustainable. Everyone of us is well aware that the average westerner, particularly North American is ravaging this planet in a frenzy of consumption that makes the piranhas of the Amazon look like Buddhist monks.

Our oversized houses and vehicles are designed to contain our oversized egos and declining IQs. How else are we to explain our epidemic of obesity and pollution in a world in which over 20 million people live from meal to meal always near death from starvation? Meanwhile the ranks of the homeless swell every year. Our government wants us to beleive that these are the losers who simply fail to apply themselves and so naturally end up on the streets.

I almost hunger for the great cataclysm that will humble us all and reduce us to the level of subsistence that is the birthright of so many of our brothers and sisters. It is not as if we even need to look outside of our own borders here in Canada. The bitter legacy of colonialism has left so many indigenous people living in Third World conditions. For some so-called experts the answer is simple. It is their fault because they refuse to be assimilated so that they could live the great consumer dream.

This world does not need more consumers. This world needs abstinence. It need each of us to find the moral courage to accept our greater responsibility to all of humanity and to curtail this madness that is the consumer society. But if that fails I can at least take comfort in knowing that it will eventually collapse under its own bloated weight like the great rotten carcass it has become.

Please do not take this as some sort of anarchist rant. It is the despair of a moderate person who sees the possiblity of a far better world in which all of us get a fair and sustainable share of the resources of this planet - a hope denied by the avaricious consumption of his fellow citizens.