Well - pause in the action - Ernie is telling the health care workers he isn't thinking about any old elections - heck no, he just wants to get this SARS stuff fixed up, and by golly he'll do anything at all the docs want!! - ain't that great! - he's just so believable, that serious little face on the tv. Of course, if he and his old bud Mike hadn't spent the last 8 years or so decimating hospital funding and staff and any other thing in the province that worked for citizen protection (can we say Walkerton? can we remember Walkerton?) this problem (and many other lesser ones) wouldn't be causing the ruckus they are - but I guess ol Ern doesn't want to go so far as to acknowledge stuff like that, just yet. Truth in poliics - responsibility - accountability - what radical concepts! - "Yea, well, you know Mike's friends, and mine, well, they wanted these tax breaks, and felt they weren't getting enough government subsidies, and we wanted to help them, you know, since they helped us so much to get elected to these pretty cushy jobs (work hours and time off are great man!, not to mention the tax-subsidized travel - did you catch that quickie our pal Tony got to Switzerland a couple weeks ago? - got to take along a few buds too - what a life!) - so we felt we had to cut back somewhere - and since none of us real folk use them hospitals well, you know, no big deal to us if a few people die while waiting for ambulances or stuff like that - they couldn't be very important anyway or they would have better health care privately, you know, like we do - so we just figured there was lots of room to cut back on that fancy health care system some of them damn socialists started a few years ago... people here have been altogether too coddled the last little while, anyway, you know..."

Or a recent little number from one Robert Fulford of the Pispot, commenting on how lying seems to be fairly pervasive in our society - which, as you know, is something we are rather concerned with here at RM. Two interesting things about the column - although normal people kind of assume lying is bad, if you read Fulford's column carefully, he never actually says so - ambiguous at best - as an establishment shill, this may be a piece of ammo in the new Lies'R' US regime, working at making "The Truth", in the end, just another childish nonsense, like Santa Claus or something, that "grown-ups", at least of the NWO variety, rather scorn; also, he rather pointedly (at least so it seems to me - he can hardly be ignorant of the fact) avoids mentioning the fact that his employer is one of the major culprits of this activity in our country - pushing neocon nonsense continually (brain drain, tax cuts, privatisation, etc) "supported" by things from their tame "think tanks" that get very, very close to outright lies, with their presentation of one-sided polls, etc as facts when they are at best a very directed interpretation, or one-sided POV columns as news stories, with no response from those of us who speak for most of the people here, and so on.

Anyway - we have talked about truth and lies before, and don't have much new to add today, just noting the ongoing assault - but got a sort of thought-provoking message from a bud just now, asking - "Hey - why the hell are you so negative all the time? (paraphrasing!) - you know the place maybe isn't perfect, but it's still a pretty good country, and we sometimes don't really appreciate you talking like all the leaders are lying fascist scum or something and most of us normal working people some kind of stupid Archie Bunkers, you know. You ought to lighten up a bit - you're making more enemies than friends, and that's not the best policy. Old bud."

Well, like I said, food for thought. First impulse (re lying fascist scum) was the old - hey, if the shoe fits bit - if Dicky didn't want to be called a crook, he shouldn't have behaved in crooked ways. But I figured maybe this was worth a bit more.

To me, the world I see, the country I see, is kind of like being on the Titanic, looking at some big damn iceberg up ahead that we're appraoching what sure as hell looks like to me dead on, and wanting to alert people so we can do something about it - but nobody wants to listen - "Geez Rude, chill out, sit down, have a beer, laugh a bit!".

To me the problem is of this magnitude. Or another useful analogy is the frog in the water one (you know, I am sure, but for the odd one who doesn't - a frog is placed in a pot of boiling water, and immediately leaps out; the same frog is placed in a pot of normal water on a heater, and the water is slowly heated to boiling - the frog gradually grows used to the increasing temperature, and when the water boils, dies, of course, not being aware of the danger until too late.) Think of our society - the slippery slope theory - things slowly going awry, getting worse, but in that slo-mo situation, everyone has a chance to adjust to the new deteriorating conditions, and so does not recognise the big-picture danger we are heading for until it is too late. Big boats have a lot of inertia - even if we suddenly see the iceberg, it takes time to adjust the course of something that huge - the actual point where it becomes too late to avoid that berg is not something we can be sure of - but given the consequences of leaving it too late, isn't it better to act too soon rather than not at all?

I do understand the perspective of others who think the problems are less severe or urgent - but I don't agree with them.

And therein lies the rub. I (and others) have been trying to engage in somewhat more civil debate and discussion for many years now, but the main problem with that kind of thing is that the people listening, the people we are trying to reach, find "civil commentary" much easier to dismiss - "Yes, Mr. Rude, thanks very much for your input. Your opinion is greatly valued, and will certainly be considered. Yours, etc". Now if we're talking about whether or not Pine Street needs a speed bump or stop sign, because gosh darn it we've seen some people driving at least 40 KPH along there - well, ok, who wants to get too excited - the world ain't actually coming to an end yet. But if, like me (and I gotta say I am NOT alone in this!) you believe that things are pretty close to the point of no return in some way (quite a number of ways, actually), and the situation really is urgent, then that kind of brush off doesn't really make one too happy. Like when you find yourself in a car with someone who is driving like a maniac, and when you kind of politely mention that maybe they might slow down a bit - "Hey, dude! No problem! I'm in complete control! HAHAHA" - yeah right, at least until we hit the friggin tree.

Nor do outright denials or pabulum letters rather pointedly not addressing the main concerns we raise satisfy, when it seems there is a great deal of evidence supporting what we say that needs to be addressed some way - this is the main problem or frustration with letters to MPs, for instance, who send back some form letter with the corporate-government-media spin - well, shit, I know all that stuff you say - but I'm writing for these reasons that I don't agree with that shit man - answer my friggin questions willya??? - but in our modern democracy, it seems we have no right to civil answers to civil questions - SO - if we do not have that right, then why would we be constrained by the other side of that coin, which is civil debate? You want civility from me, pal, you gotta show it to me, as well. And I ain't been getting a lot, I fear the last few years.

Denials of problems - listen - if the cops have a whole box of evidence that someone, shall we call him George, killed someone - and George gets up on the witness stand, very serious look on his face, says "No! I did not do it!" - what happens? End of trial, everyone goes off home looking for someone else? Well, maybe if your last name is Bush or something, but for Joe Normalguy (or maybe Bill C), the first thing that happens is the prosecution rips him apart, and asks him all sorts of hard questions about the evidence they have, etc and etc - the analogy is losing its way so lets drop it - point being that our media seem very disinclined to ask a lot of questions of some people that it seems to me they should be asking - and when I try to do their job (or others - I am not alone, as I said) - why, we're basically ignored.

I think also part of the dividing line is between people who take it upon themselves for whatever reason to actually learn about the world we live in, and those who are content to get their entire worldview from the tv every day. The people running this place don't want you to get excited about things, so you get a constant diet of pabulum of one sort or another (that doesn't mean non-violence - violent stories are actually one of the main flavors of pabulum - far better that you spend several months, for instance, to mention a rather famous time, entranced with every detail of the OJ Simpson case on tv, rather than doing any thinking about American foreign policy in Yugoslavia - a much worse violence in the making), and are constantly told that things are being looked after, and your job is to stay home with the tv on (or if you dare to go outside in your (media-created) violent society, just go to the mall for some shopping, but not the community hall for a non-tv-mediated discussion with your friends) - don't get out and talk to your friends, don't find any information for yourselves - just stay at home in front of that big tv. The rest of us go and find things out for ourselves - and of course, the tv-watching crew call us cranks and conspiracy theorists (as they have been more or less told to do by the tv people - again quite ironcially, as they themselves are the real conspiricists, part of a rather large conspiracy to keep their viewers ignorant of the real world) when we talk about things the tv isn't telling them, and they don't want to hear. It's the price we pay. Name calling doesn't bother us - seeing the iceberg we are rapidly bearing down on does, however, so we keep trying.

But, as I said above, "civil" debate doesn't really cut it - it's too easy to marginalise someone writing polite little letters of supplication to MPs or newspapers, and too easy to brush off the polite couple at your door who want to talk about some of the bad things happening around us. "Geezus, lady, don't you know Survivor starts in about 2 minutes? I got better things to do than listen to your whacko theories about how bad our government is - if there was a problem, don't you think it would be on the news? Now getouttahere! - I gotta get my delicious tv dinner out of the oven to feed the kids before the show starts!"

One might also note that the "civil gloves" come off of other hands rather quickly when some of us start getting a bit close to the truth, or close to saying some things in public they don't want you thinking about, so must be ridiculed ASAP - just recently, for instance, the last couple of weeks, we have had major attacks on Patrick Watson when he dared suggest that the mainstream media (National Pispot, Sun Papers, Citizen Papers, Globe, and so on) were NOT doing a very good job of giving people a balanced view of things, and perhaps a government sponsored paper - a print version of the CBC radio, as it were - might be a good idea - man, that kind of talk scares these people who control what you read and think shitless, and they went apeshit, to coin a phrase, with several columnists and editorialists telling you all why you do NOT need such a thing (one column actually compared Watson's proposed paper to Pravda, the infamous Soviet government propaganda paper of the cold war years - I thought this was very ironic, since, in reality, the combined current mainstream press functions very effectively as our/your own very special Canadian Pravda already, giving you almost exclusively the corporate spin on events - and corporate non-coverage of things they don't want you worrying your pretty little heads about - back to Survivor!) - or when Michelle Landsberg of the Star (the best paper we have, although still somewhat under the bar in its acceptance of the corporate box as the defining boundaries of our society) dared mention that a few journalists (yes there are a few, and only a few, real journalists left - Conrad and Izzy and their ilk have done a good job of getting rid of them over the last 20 years) still want answers for the many, many unanswered questions following the 911 incident, and the complete stonewalling of any kind of investigation by the US government - again, the corporate press flagbearer of the Lies'R'US Repugnantigan North, the National Pispot, went apeshit, and tore into her like hyenas into a helpless whatever (not that our Michelle is helpless, far from it - but she was on her own on this one, with no support from her supposed peers, most of whom have sold their souls to the company store, as it were - with a few exceptions)(actually, in her fierce support of the "little people" and truth in this country, Michelle has few peers).

(Note - I don't say these people aren't welcome to their opinions - disagreement and discussion are what makes democracies happen, as (theoretically at least, through the dissemination of varying opinions (HAHAHA - NOTE THEORETICALLY!!) in the media) we find our way to a place most of us can agree with - but the kind of virtriol laid out against Patrick and Michelle was the kind of stuff people use to shut other people up, not merely "civilly" disagree. There's a difference - although most of our Elite don't really understand democratic discussion - they're more of the "YOU VILL DO VHAT YOU ARE TOLD!!" way of thinking, usually - as we see in the above)

So, really, to sort of wander back to the point of all this, it has been starting to penetrate this old and slow brain that this idea of 'civil debate" is really just another means of control - even though the most outrageous things are happening around us, we are supposed to confine ourselves to polite little letters to the papers of the enemy or the puppet MPs they assign to us, and oh yes, of course, we get to express our truly democratic preferences in elections every few years - ain't that just grand. Aside from the fact that very few of the real issues facing us are talked about during election campaigns (from the halls of infamy - during the 1984 campaign, Lyin Brian said not a word about any "Debt Problem", and as far as Free Trade - totally against it!! - really!! - check it out!! - but within months, both were front and center on the Canadian political scene, untalked about during any election, but occupying most of the government activity - with NO mandate whatsoever from the Canadian people - and, of course, not a word about this in the press to get the people asking questions they didn't want asked), but even more importantly, in the official Lies'R'US society, campaign promises are absolutely meaningless, and also overlooking the fact that these so-called democratic elections wind up always with parties with something like 25-30% of the support of the population having majority governments. But for me - even if all those things were somehow legitimate, that still does not remove my desire and, in my opinion, my obligation, to speak out against things I think are wrong - and not just a little bit wrong, but very, very, very wrong.

Democracy, as some old saying has it, takes a lot of work - a whole lot more than voting once every 5 years.

Well - just what is it I think so wrong, that evidently so few others see as a problem, then, that causes these periodic outbursts on my part, that make me so sure that the normal processes of our great Canadian democracy are not rolling along smoothly enough, and will take care of us all, as the advertisements promise, you ask?

Fair enough question - although you may have to get up from your deckchair and stroll along here to the front of the boat, where the berg is a bit more visible - and getting closer as we speak, I fear.

It's that the things we are trying to talk about are big, and urgent, and, as someone once said, "it just won't do" to casually dismiss them and get back to the "real" (i.e. unreal) world of tv and advertisements and spin. The National Debt situation - the Canadian people have been, and continue to be, taken to the cleaners, by some kind of conspiracy between the government and the banks and the shareholders - see the other stuff on this site, read it, think about it - no other conclusion is possible - and in the name of this debt, they are taking apart the socially caring, progressive, civilized society that our last few good, non-corporate leaders (pre-Mulroney) and governments fashioned, together with a large, engaged democratic citizenry, after the second world war, and replacing it with some dystopian capitalist feudal society - a regression of hundreds of years, for most of us, although certainly the elite will not suffer for it. Or the other current great lie of our time, the so-called terrorist attack on the world trade center - well, it was obviously a terrorist activity - but also equally obviously, if the evidence is looked at, a terrorist activity largely controlled by the American government, in an action against the people of not only American but the world, almost identical to the relatively bloodless coup which gave Hitler his dictatorial powers in Germany in the last century, which cost so much in lives and destruction to get rid of. The Bush cabal's so terribly cowardly invasions of two of the weakest countries in the world, using this manufactured terrorist excuse, are another example - it just does not do!! my fellow citizens, to say - oh well, it's over with, let's carry on - there has been such destruction, such loss of life, that something must be done about it!! - it really stuns me to think that, in my society, my Canada, that I once thought so great, that almost nobody will speak up, and say this must not stand. It really does - but that is what is happening. There are many others that we pay the merest lip-service to at this time in the history of our species on this planet - the millions affected by the HIV-AIDS epidemic (the US will not allow them to receive even cheap, let alone free, drugs - MNC profits come first!), the butchery in Rwanda and other countries (would a civilized world allow butchers to purchase the weapons they butcher with, or would civilized countries produce and sell such weapons?), so many atrocities we all allow, through our inaction, to occur, both against other humans and against the other species on this planet, the environment - all in the name of mammon and profit.

And all of these things (there are many others - the list of atrocities we have committed would take books and books to list, many of them have been written, that everyone should be forced to read, before they are allowed to turn off their brains by turning on that tv) are why I speak, why I speak so unpolitely, and so persistently, and with, I will admit, such anger, at times. We must do this, my fellow citizens!! We must think, we must talk, we must face the corporate behemoth that is trying to turn us all into its slaves at this time in our history. It is the price of freedom, if such a thing is valuable to you. We simply cannot allow the corporate controlled media to say - by their refusal to print certain things, certain stories, certain facts - that these things are of no importance. We must learn to question - to NOT believe the things they say on that tv.

I dare to stand and say - WAIT!!! - It IS important that I and my fellow citizens have been and continue to be scammed bigtime by these governments and the banks and corporations that own them. It IS important to say that the atrocities committed by the American government MUST be accounted for, those responsible held accountable sometime, somewhere - they must NOT be allowed to continually walk away from these things unpunished. Those responsible for the Second World War were held to account - at least many of them (unfortunately many of Hitler's financial backers have never been held accountable - the family of one of them is currently running the US - the connection is clear) - but we must never forget, as long as they not only walk free but continue their ravages. The Elitists who are taking over my country and turning back the clocks hundreds of years must NOT be allowed to prevail - they must be stopped now, before they have entrenched themselves and their power to a point where getting rid of them will be next to impossible.

And that, my friends, is the berg you must come to the front of the boat and look at - you must get up from your comfortable deck chair and television, where all you are seeing is a pleasant night on your tv screen, and look out ahead a bit - see where the journey is taking you, see what the future is going to be if you don't wake the fuck up soon.

And that is why I am not so civil as I used to be, why I persist in these "rants" if you will, why I will not willingly lay down and shut up - I have seen the possible future, the probable future, the future we are, like the frog, going to be in if we do not quickly realise what is happening, and it will not do. I have also seen that it is not inevitable, any more than it was for the frog - but for it to change, we must make it change. Not "me" - I am not going to change anything by myself, nobody listens to me, the letters do not get published, the MPs send back the pabulum they mouth on the tv news - but WE - many, many of us, acting together, because we care, because we all - each and every one of us - have turned off that friggin tv, burned their Pravda papers, examined the situation we find ourselves in through every information source we can find, and found the lies they are feeding us, the future they want for us and our children, unacceptable.

And if we do not do this thing, if enough of us do not care, if we do not confront the Captains of the Corps who are madly, insanely steering us to destruction and turn away from that damned iceberg - we will have noone to blame but ourselves as we sink to the cold depths of non-existence.

And that, I am afraid, pisses me off, too. This great big beautiful ship - we can do really amazing things, we people, we humans! a real credit and triumph to evolution, a joy in the universe, at our best! (and such a damned curse at our worst!) - heading to the deep dark cold bottom of the sea - because a lot of people find it easier now to watch their stupid tvs than to get up and do something when this beautiful boat and all of its beautiful people have been hijacked by some crazies.

Such an amazingly beautiful life, from the photosynthetic chemical reactions in the tiniest mitochondria of a cell to the eon-spanning lives of galaxies to the magical things coming out of creative curious knowledge-hungry human brains who love life and living so much - to the unbelievably contradictory lifeless sight of so many people content with survivor and malls to the flip side of the beauty - the incompletely formed, life-denying, fearful berserkers for whom destuction is their joy.

Maybe the cold bottom of the sea is where we deserve to be. Maybe not. One thing is fairly sure, given the great destructive power of the berserkers, and their avowed desire to use this power - we are at a defining moment in human world history, and one side or the other will soon emerge as the definitive statement of what Homo sapiens will be recorded as in the annals of the universe. Berserkers or a wonderful, intelligent, creative, life-affirming, beautiful race.

Me? It should be fairly obvious, I hope - I vote for the stars, for beauty, for peace and truth and knowledge, for getting the hell out of this cage, for growing up and joining the mature races of the universe, in comradeship rather than battle. It won't be easy - but the rewards will be great.

And that is why I rant and bitch.

What about you?