Confidence in How Things Are

If there is a bill to be a challenge of confidence, surely, this "Clean Air Act" would be it, not only of our confidence in this current Conservative minority government, but of our confidence in our "democracy".

For nearly a century and a half, we have acted as nothing more than the transfer switch separating either the Conservatives or the Liberals from power. Throughout the history of our nation, we have been at the mercy of the volatile market forces, particularly those who aim to establish a foothold over said market forces. The Clean Air Act, presented to us by the Dishonourable Minster of Environmental Regression, Ms. Rona Ambrose, and by our equally Dishonourable First Minister of "our" House of Commonwealth, the Master of Asses himself, Mr. Stephen Harper, proposes "intensity-based targets", and, seeing as how money dictates every policy decision, one would be led to assume that this would be a ratio of pollutant output versus dollar intake, leaving the door wide open for our oil and gas pirates to secure as much bounty from the North and the West as they possibly can before having to give a damn about the destruction they are doing.

Many of us know by now that oil and gas have practically dictated foreign policy since the white Industrial Revolution. Things aren't going so well for our friends in office to our South, and the cat is out of the bag that an incredible amount of the gasoline used to fuel the nation's trucks and vans and sports cars and motorcycles, and formulate the nation's plastics and various other material needs, comes from Arabia and Persia, where their brothers and sisters are killing and dying by the hour. Luckily for them, our oil and gas has come to the rescue, ensuring preservation of all of society's combustion-based needs through its toothless "Clean Air Act". Leave it to our Fearless Leader, Stephen Harper, to be at the controls at a time during which fuelling the engine of the great machine that is America has become a critical situation.

This piece of legislation should be thrown out, as must the double-talking suits who comprise our government, the cabal responsible for this insult on all things living. This would make two consecutive national governments to have been terminated prematurely. The focus always seems to be on how one failed the other, rather than on the fact that they have both failed, so who now do we entrust the well-being of the land and the creatures who dwell within it?

We do it ourselves. We do it over breakfast. We do it during our water cooler and coffee break conversations. We do it during dinner parties, holidays, and nights out at the pub. We do it as we work together, as we eat together, as we share one another's company. We certainly don't need big business to do it for us, yet this is exactly what we've been doing throughout our history.

If my Bible-study serves me correctly, the story of the tower of Babel cited man's desire to ascend to where he believed he would discover Heaven, only to build and build without end and have his beloved perch crumble under his feet. George Orwell cited similar in his Nineteen Eighty-Four, using the three rigid Ivory Towers as allegory. I hope you are able to see what is at work right now: one percent of our population sits atop several Ivory Towers, trying to build and build and build with the belief that, the more and more they have, the closer they will be to Heaven, but, as we are discovering in a most painful manner, yet still unbeknownst to them, the cracks in the foundations are propagating at an alarming rate.

Try as they might to control the world, their world will collapse beneath them.