A louder voice

We need a break. Some time to spend with family and friends. To soak in the warm feelings that abound at this time of year. It hasn’t come a day too soon.

It was a tough year. We feel less safe than we did a year ago. We are less sure that our institutions work for us as we near the end of 2015. Less sure the world is headed in the right direction.

Our American neighbours wake up these days with the looming prospect that someone they truly despise may soon become leader of their nation. Meanwhile, many have become so distracted by external terrorism they overlook the homegrown terrorism in the form of gun violence. For the first time in 60 years, more Americans were killed by firearms in 2015 than motor vehicle accidents. It is an impressive milestone. It’s unlikely to make a difference.

The trends look poor around the globe. The Middle East continues to slide further into tribal warfare. Ukraine has slipped from the headlines, but Russia’s designs on the eastern part of the nation—indeed around the Black Sea to Moldova and around the north to the Baltic nations—remain unsated. Vladimir Putin’s ambitions continue to metastasize across a once free land. In Africa, thousands more civilians fell victim to fighting in Niger, Chad, Nigeria and Cameroon as Boko Haram inflicts terror upon a land that has seen far too much of it. In Afghanistan the past decade’s hard earned gains—security, democracy, justice and education for girls and boys—are eroding as Western forces head home. In the Pacific, a handful of well-armed nations are playing a dangerous game of battleship—as China seeks to use might to champion its claim to dozens of islands and wide swathes of sea. And let’s not overlook North Korea, where its young leader is just one tantrum away from unleashing a thermonuclear maelstrom.

Look hard enough at any point in history and conflict can be unearthed— much of it far worse, more brutal and much more deadly. It is the trend that is most worrying at the end of 2015. We are becoming a more fearful, more tenuous global population. In the wake of the West’s retreat from hotspots around the world, strongmen and thugs are rising. Sadly, some in the U.S. believe they need a thug of their own in Washington.

Closer to home, we don’t live with the daily threat of barrel bombs raining down on our heads. Nor do we fear child soldiers emerging from the woods, with orders to slaughter everyone in sight. Neither do we worry in the same way that our lives, or tthe lives of those we love, will be cut short by gun violence.

Leaving aside the federal level—where many feel more hopeful with the election of a new government— there is plenty, however, to suggest a widening gulf between citizens and the institutions we have created to protect us.

It is troubling every day to wander into a town hall in this County to witness lawyers for the Ministry of Environment aligned with a procession of lawyers representing a developer, arrayed against a handful of weary, retired folk working to protect their homes, their health, endangered species and their habitat. It is demoralizing.

Similarly, our community hospitals continue to be eroded by provincial institutions that, despite 17 years of abundant evidence to the contrary, continue to believe the only solution to their withering finances is further centralization.

Meanwhile, the folks managing the province’s energy file have not been chastened by a devastating report by the Auditor General pointing to billions of dollars wasted. They know better than you and me and the auditor.

Even as his deputies answer criminal charges for covering up Dalton McGuinty’s political decision to cancel two gas generating plants, moving them to Napanee and Sarnia, the former provincial leader and his successor, Kathleen Wynne, claim it has nothing to do with them. They do so with a straight face, staring directly into the camera.

Here in the County, another year has passed and little has changed. At the end of its first term, Council has discovered the best way to get along is to stay quiet and do very little. Nearly a decade into the debate, council remains at 16 members as they whistle past surveys, ballot box results and voters demanding change. Meanwhile, the pile of money the County spends increases faster than the cost of living—meaning residents must reach deeper into their pockets to pay more each and every year to get the same services. In an age when up is down, council shamelessly wears its failings as a successes.

What links all these headlines? Citizens are shrinking— or being pushed aside—from their role in the public conversation. When elected officials and institutions stop listening to—or actively ignore—the voices of ordinary citizens, too many of us, I fear, shrug our shoulders and carry on with our lives. It is a natural and understandable response. But it’s a mistake.

We look back upon historic atrocities conducted over many years involving a great many people and we ask ourselves incredulously: How did ordinary folks stand by and do nothing?’

So let us take these days and weeks to be with family and friends—to shut out the noise of the world and our responsibilities to it for a few days. But in the new year, let us resolve to become a louder voice against the injustice we see around us—wherever we find it.

Our species has a bad track record of waiting until the horror is thrust in our face before responding effectively. We have a huge capacity to shield ourselves from the noise—to dismiss problems outside our immediate lives as intractable.

Let us in the new year resolve to assert the values we hold dearest. Let us proclaim them just a bit louder—so that others might share them too.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca