Monday, July 21, 2014

Where We're Headed

It's been about a month since the PC Party of Ontario caved in on itself (again) and since we have a nice long period of undisturbed Pax Liberalis ahead of us with nothing to do until the mayoral election comes to a boil (and we'll get to that very soon, oh yes we will), I thought I'd just sketch out for all of you wonderful people exactly what lies in store for us as a species, because that's the kind of service I've gotten rather good at performing.

I want to paint for you a picture of a world where the very notion of fiscal conservatism has ceased to exist. We're talking absolutely zero concern about the use and misuse of public funds, where the notion of living within your means is about as quaint and outdated as reading The Saturday Evening Post.  Debt is not a bad thing or a shameful thing anymore; it's what we all deal with. It's an annoyance. The debt and deficit is at some comically huge number of digits, but things continue as before. Life goes on. People work two or three jobs and are increasingly stressed out and detached, and companies stretch further and further to make ends meet. But it's all good. Because it's a load we're all sharing together. Governments don't give a whoop about how hard it is for you and would rather tell you that we're living in times of unprecedented prosperity, but when you look abroad at places like the Crimea or Iraq or Israel or places in Africa where they kidnap school-age children because they can, you realize things aren't that bad. Then Game of Thrones comes on and that's all people can talk about the next morning.

This is the near future. It's a lot like the present. In the slightly farther future, we stop talking about debt altogether, because debt is a concept created by rich people to enslave poor people. Everyone knows that.  We'll be starting to look really critically at the very notion of money. Why do we have this stuff called money, anyway? All it does it create problems. And jobs. When was the last time you went to your job and did anything but work way too hard to earn money? Just what the hell is so fulfilling about that for you as a person?!

Is it your fault that your job sucks, that you're in debt, and that you don't have enough money? Of course not! You're fine. You're great! You have lots to offer the world and you're entitled to the best the world has to offer! All the time! Literally not one second must pass where you have to deal with something that makes you feel like less of a person. And that includes hurtful language, someone not getting where you're at emotionally, or having someone overstep themselves.

And if anyone commits any one of these social crimes, regardless of their intent, then you are absolutely justified in being as rude, as harsh, as confrontational as you can possibly be. These people are oppressive, are literal rapists, and contribute to assorted cultures of violence against underprivileged people. They need to be exposed, repeatedly, to the kinds of social violence that they perpetrate, consciously and unconsciously, against everyone else so that they understand and are properly EDUCATED and feel incredible amounts of shame about the role they play in maintaining the system that holds everyone else down.

So I'm sure you can see how in the happy and healthy society we are moving towards, in which everyone either believes the above or is socially terrorized into believing the above, we will have to do away with the notions of good paying middle class jobs, responsibility for yourself, fiscal discipline, the traditional family, and all the other stuff that we Conservatives were maintaining increasingly tenuous footholds on.

Now I want to stress that this is not the work of malevolent Liberals. People like Kathleen Wynne take advantage of this sort of thing, but they are not the creators of this entitlement virus. No, this is an authentic, crowdsourced creation of the people. They are simply done with sacrifice, and they're really done with having to sacrifice while other, more wealthy people stay more wealthy than they are. They're going to punish the NDP simply because they held up the Liberal budget for a month.

And- most importantly, even though nobody on the right wants to admit it publicly- not even Conservatives are willing to accept cuts. In what I will always consider the defining moment of Campaign 2014, Tasha Khierridin- a person who wrote a book entitled, "Rescuing Canada's Right,"- announced publicly that she wouldn't be voting for Tim Hudak because he was talking about doing something that would affect her child.

So no, Kathleen Wynne is not going to impose austerity or sell the LCBO. She's going to tell the credit agencies to go take a walk, and be lauded for it. Let the oppressive tools of global capitalism turn the screws on Ontario and downgrade our credit rating into the cellar. That's not going to stop Ontarians from greeting everyone they meet with a smile, even though the cupboard's a little bare.