Apologies, dear readers. This blog is a bit bleak. I do not want it to be but, well, I write what I see and this is what I see. But, but, but…it is NOT as bleak as it sounds. There IS an answer! It may NOT be the one we all want but, in the fullness of time, there is always an answer and I can see one looming……..so, here goes.….(continuing from the title)

….but that is not news, not really….c’mon. Incompetence is the norm in politics (except in authoritarian regimes). Dysfunctional is likely the prevailing theme in all modern politics – especially democracies – and, of course, is especially manifest in all those we elect who do not really see their role as working to benefit the people. Their role is to support their party, big business, friends and cronies and, of course, to get re-elected. Put another way: Democracy is an ideal that has never been reached and is currently more corrupted than ever.

I honestly cannot recall a single selfless, honourable, decent politician in my lifetime and I am no spring chicken. Well, there was Emery Barnes back in the day.…….Old EB was a very good and decent egg who worked for the people but he was pretty much marginalized by the party (NDP) and, because of that, largely ineffective. I suspect that the good ones of our more recent era are ignored, too. Mind you, we have a local politician in our area for the Regional District who is quite exceptional – a really great frog in a way-too-small-pond. I suspect that many who are tarred (by the likes of me) with the incompetent brush were/are good people, uncorrupted and sincere but also excluded from the back rooms where the REAL decisions are made.

For example: I like Elizabeth May but, of course, she was never part of the ‘IN’ crowd and never would be. She was a Greenie. And then there are the NEW Greens – currently AWOL from environmental concerns when they are most needed – who have opted for ‘other priorities’ than their name would suggest and, for the time being, are basically done as a party. They are beyond incompetent, they are suicidal. Total nincompoops. Very sad.

But, let’s be fair for a minute. Could anyone be a good leader under our current conditions? John Horgan, battling throat cancer, has been in charge during the ongoing Covid years, the two worst wildfire seasons of all time and now the worst flooding since 1948. He’s got the plague of fentanyl, the all-but-unstoppable inflow of ‘dirty money’ from China being laundered, a veritable museum of fat and decadent institutions and, of course, a rapidly decaying society in an industrially altered environment. A legislature of Einsteins couldn’t deal with all that.

Trudeau needs no similar description even if the result is the same. Justin is basically just an elite removed from reality and simply gliding through his sense of the universe unfolding as it should.

And Biden is playing out typically American. The US is becoming even more selfish in more and more ways (hard to believe) and two of the three amigos no longer get even neighbourly consideration.

And then there is the worldwide looming climate Armageddon and a UN of countries that keep dropping that ball……

We do not have a leader for any of that. We do not even have a leader for any of that in our country or province. IRONY…….the biggest leader on the biggest threat is little Greta Thunberg!

I may be exaggerating a little but, at a cursory level, that is what it looks and feels like to me. Inadequacy, incompetence and evil rules the planet and the challenges continue to go unmet. There are no leaders.

Racism, political correct-necrosis, corruption, greed and a pantheon of ugliness abets and supports that omnipresent bleakness every day according to the news. The challenges we all face are now daunting if not impossible. They seem to be headed for the decidedly impossible – the point of no return.

Woe is me! …..but there is some good news!

The good news is that all the old, rotten bastards will soon die off. Even if they are NOT rotten and corrupt, they will die off if they are old enough. We all get old and then we die. Nature’s turnover and possible renewal. Composting on a larger scale. The good, the bad and the ugly all die eventually. Keep a happy thought.

The flaw in that universally natural solution is our legally created ZOMBIE-creeps or, as they are more commonly known as, corporations. Corporations don’t die. We can kill ’em but they wouldn’t die naturally from old age. In that sense, they are immortal. Like the church but now better funded and diversified, they go on and on while the people who started them are long past. That zombie-ism perpetuates the problems we created longer than Nature would but it does seem as if Nature is trying to catch up.

That is also true for all institutions and all legally created structures. The Red Cross, the Community Chest, The UN….the list is endless….’lifeless creatures’ conceived in love and lofty ideals eventually exist well beyond their ‘natural time’ and live primarily for their own sake even when the goals that their founders originally set have been achieved (or lost). It is an exceptional organization that truly renews it’s purpose every now and then. Most just get hoary, moribund and self-serving. And the status quo slowly petrifies.

And that just might be the diagnosis for our larger, all encompassing first-world way of doing things. Governments, institutions, corporations – all unsustainably self serving and getting longer-in-the-tooth, and heading for petrification. We may really be overdue for a cleansing, purifying, idealizing revolution of some kind.

An apocalyptical end-of-days scenario seems a bit extreme but it is pretty clear that the ‘old ways’ are not working very well anymore and may, in fact, be so rotten that renovation and patchwork is no longer an option. We may have to rebuild.

The problem with that (and, trust me, I know) a new build is less work than a renovation but there is more down-time ‘without’ as you start anew. A rebuild or new build starts with a tear down. Then there is clean-up and then we go to building the basic new foundations. Building usually ends well but costs a lot in money, comfort and time. A build is hard.

In fact, a new build is so hard and so expensive and so time consuming most people ‘put it off’. And the old building/constructs eventually gets passed on to the youth and they, maybe, have the energy….maybe not. And so the whole thing repeats and slowly rots until a fire or an earthquake or a drunk driving a big truck takes it all down. In other words, there is plenty of precedent that procrastination and catastrophe are the real leaders in the modern world. We can’t seem to lead ourselves out of dead-end alleyway so we need Mother Nature to start the process by destroying everything we are clinging to……TEOTWAWKI.