FORGITTEN PROMISES - OR JUST MISLAID?

FORGOTTEN PROMISES
When I launched my blog I was hoping to attract hundreds – no – make that thousands – of like-minded people with common needs, aims, and ideas. It was all about the retired, and the soon-to-be retired. It was all about staying relevant in a world that seems to be consumed with youth and needs of a rising generation.

I’ve missed the point. Instead of trying to rally like-minded and like-aged people around me with cogent and clear aims, I went back to being who I always was: a left-leaning social critic and burr under the saddle of the young and/or the privileged.
So my rants, which have diminished in number, partly because of my own physical shortcomings and partly because I realized I was singing all the old songs, go, un-listened to.

So I find myself today, far from physically well and 83 years old, striving for relevancy.
I have missed the boat. Instead of uniting people of like minds, I have gone back to be a crabby curmudgeon – railing at everything. I suspect that the railing may still reflect my sense of social injustice, but in fact, I am boring myself to tears. What, I ask myself, would I be saying and writing is I still had whatever media prominence I once had? Who would listen? Who would join the chorus? Very few people have, at least partly because they are, like me, a lot older and more tired than they used to be.

I ask myself what I can possibly say about the rain wreck that characterizes the American political scene? I ask myself why it is that the suburbs tend to be politically right wing and the urban centres a little more to the left. There are simple, perhaps too simple answers: in the 905 for example, the ring of suburbs and small towns surrounding Toronto, the central issue still seems to be taxes. They don’t ant to pay taxes. They comfort their stubbornness, not to self-interest, but with the fact that governments and politicians want to tax and spend. We get taxed. They spend.

It is prevalent. It is epidemic. It is Greece where the national pastime seems to be to outsmart the tax collectors, or simply to cheat. It is Ontario where the Tories’ election campaign consisted mainly of the notion that higher taxes kills jobs and that lower taxes create jobs. Utter nonsense, but it appeals to the discomforted people living from pay check to pay check with a huge mortgage overhanging their hopes; it is fuel for their political choices.

A few days ago on PBS, I watched a “debate” between Michigan Democrat Carl Levin and Georgia Republican Johnny Isakson. More of the same. The Republican mouthed the right-wing boilerplate about how government was stifling enterprise and initiative, and reinforcing that point of view with the “fact” that the proposed tax of people earning a million or more would hurt small business. The Democrat said, and he wins it statistically, that about 1% of small business earns over 1 million. (By the way, many of those so-called small businesses are hedge funds and their investment brothers.) But we are in a generation where emotion trumps statistics, where prejudice trumps knowledge and where an entire generation contributes to what we now call “post literate society.”

Finally thought, I know. I am a small voice in the howling wind of the illiterate landslide. I am too old, too cranky, and too irrelevant to be listened to. The only question I have let is: why do I bother.