……………!!!?  No, not me!  I have the staying power.  No, no, no!  Don’t worry about me.  I’m here!  I’m staying!!!

I am talking about the robo-call scandal.  I am afraid the momentum of public outrage and interest is waning.  GAWD!  I hope I am wrong.  But the signs are there.

You know the signs, don’t you……?  The story seems to have slipped in the consciousness of the newscasters?  It no longer leads?  When it does surface, the piece is shorter, has less ‘tone’?  The words are read with less feeling?

It is the way of news today.  The public actually feels the loss of feeling on the topic briefly before they forget about the whole thing altogether.  It’s like a mental sleight-of-hand.  The media are slowly dragging us away from that particular car accident.

The pace at which we are distracted is almost pre-determined.  It takes usually about two weeks for a topic to drop completely off the radar once the initial drop in momentum has been noticed in the newsroom.  Many citizens, of course, aren’t conscious enough in the first place to notice and so the topic fades even faster for them.

But even for those of us with a bit longer of an attention span, we are reliably diverted by a new topic.  The sexier it is, the faster we move on.  Nothing like a teen abduction or a sex-trade ‘story’ to get us to mentally move on “…move along, folks.  Nothing of interest here.  Just move along, now.  Hey!  Didya hear about the teen sex-trade worker?”

The US soldier who ‘snapped’ and killed 16 civilians in Afghanistan almost did it.  Not quite.  CBC needs something more Canadian.  Push comes to shove, they got hockey.  Serial killers are best.  Pig-farmer Pickton was good for well over a year of real news suppression.  Easy reporting, that.

The hockey riots conveniently outside the Vancouver CBC building was a gift to the entertainment/news industry.  Talk about cheap air-time.

“Investigative reporters?  We don’t need no stinkin’ investigative reporters!”

The worst part of this ‘subtle suppression’ is that it may be justified in this case.  Damnit!

Elections Canada did NOT get 31,000 complaints on the robo-call issue that were, in fact, based on personal experiences of the allegations.  Instead, they got 31,000 people who were mad enough to write in saying they were mad enough to write in!  Seems only 700 or so were actually from people who had some relevant information to pass on.  Seven hundred is still bad.  But it is not 31,000.

The Conservatives will throw a few more Pierre Poutines under the bus when the time is right and that will be it.  File closed.

And I am angry.  It is not that I want anyone to burn in hell for a small matter.  Even tho a scandal limited to a few Pierres in Guelph is still not a small matter.  No, it is more than that.

I know, you know, we all know that the system is rotten.  Judging from low voter turnout alone it seems the majority of people have lost faith in the democratic process to make meaningful change in their lives.  We don’t trust the bastards and now we don’t trust the system.  And the people have been saying this for decades.  So, I am angry because this issue will not be the catalyst I was hoping for it to be.

“We are angry but we have decided to keep on taking it some more!”  (not quite the ring to it that I was hoping for)

Think about it: The feds are threatening our coast with oil spills and the nation as a whole doesn’t seem to care.  DFO has been criminally negligent in protecting our fisheries for close to fifty years and they still exist without so much as a formal rebuke.  The provincial government has a list of crimes to answer for not the least of which is huge fiscal mismanagement, the exporting of raw logs, the gutting of BC Hydro and the fiasco that is now the annual official budget lie.

You know what made us mad?  You know what got the citizens riled enough to make a difference?  HST.  That’s right.  They took another 1% from our wallets and the people threw a fit.  They didn’t rebel over the BC Rail debacle.  Run of River was no big deal.  Legislation erasing public input was sleep-inducing to the average Joe. But that they visibly and blatantly took another 1% and we went nuts.

That the crooks destroy our habitat, undermine our services, neglect the average family and pad their own personal accounts is not as important as an increase of 1% in our miserable little purchases. Even though they steal way more than that from us all day long in more indirect and subtle ways (health, education, justice, pensions), it is the theft-we-can-see that raised our ire.

Lying and cheating?  It has staying power.  Why?  Because we don’t.