Let Sleeping Elephants Lie
More or less the extent of my astrological knowledge is that I am a Libra, which I strongly associate with a tendency to seek balance, logic, and rational judgement, and to shy away from impulsiveness. In a lot of cases, that describes me to a T. Whether those are actually things characteristic of a Libra is anybody’s guess.
Taken one step further though, being strongly “Libra-esque,” or any other astrological sign, inherently makes one unbalanced. Perhaps this is why I sometimes strive to leave behind the search for balance, and instead, embrace impulsiveness, spur of the moment type decisions. Because I seldom make a decision on the spot. No, I usually want to use just about all the time that I have before I come to a decision. This might be why, in high school when test writing was a frequent occurrence, I would usually be one of the last to leave the room. Had I less time, I’d still have completed it, but why would I use less time than I’d been given?
I broach this topic because for me, this seems to be a time of great upheaval. On the heels of being unemployed for longer than I have been since I entered the workforce, the array of possiblities and opportunites clamoring to once again engulf me is bewildering and overwhelming. Some of the few concrete decisions that I’ve come to are that by no means do I ever want to have an office job, but even that is not concrete, because it is at loggerheads with my recent interest in economics. Where, oh where, could economics ever lead but to a desk and a cubicle?
And yet, outside the realm of economics, where is the root of the inequities, failures, and injustices of our world? Surely it is not in our best interests to have a system where money is debt and debt is money. Nor to work until June or July just to pay the tax load. Nor to measure progress in the Gross Domestic Product while ignoring the Genuine Progress Indicator. Yet who, besides an economist can address these problems?
We’ve been through the 60’s and 70’s, when peace and love reigned supreme, when people stood up to their governments, and the general trajectory was towards weapons disarmament. Yet that was also a time of international tension, as a cloud of fear hung over the world as everyone waited for somebody with a happy trigger finger to jetison the world into nuclear hell. Fortunately, that never happened, and today the threat seems distant.
The funny thing is that I’m really talking out of my ass, because I’m no expert on the events post WWII. (this particular post is perhaps more of a confession of lack of expertise than anything else). Despite all the awareness of that era, and what I perceive to be a trend towards lightheartedness, the elimination of racial differences, and the valuation of the simple things in life but also freedom through eccentricity and individuality, where are we now? Not any further ahead, I think it’s fair to say. Perhaps the people who pull the strings at the highest levels don’t want the people to lose their sense of tension, of foreboding. Perhaps complacency really isn’t the goal, because as soon as the people become comfortable in where they’re at, and confident in the state of world affairs, they start to demand civil liberties. They become harder to control.
These are the issues which swirl in my head as I ponder a diversion into economics, and yet, that spectre of being nailed to an office chair leaves me trembling with angst. Better, perhaps, as some of my friends have done, to develop physical skills and competency, maximize the body’s potential, take premium care of it, and so journey throughout life, relying on physical skills for my bread and butter,, and working towards sufficiently strong community bonds to deter the folks who pull our society’s economic strings from getting too reckless in terms of letting equality and prosperity for the average person fall by the wayside.
That, to me, is a key area to focus on. Community through strong bonds that is attuned to what our government is up to. In BC, and Canada as a whole, we’re in a period marked by talks of cuts and deficits. Across the river in Mission protests recently arose in response to plans to close the emergency ward. Now advocates of our library system find themselves needing to mobilize to demonstrate strong public loyalty to maintaining the library system’s funding base. At the same time, The governing Liberals announced the introduction of a Harmonized Sales Tax a year from now, nicely timed so that they hope people will more or less have forgotten. In theory, the HST is a logical concept – why do the paperwork for two taxes when you could only do it for one? However, the HST means that more tax will be levied on some consumer items, raising more revenue for the government.
This revenue, of course, is what the government needs to pay for service maintenance, because with an ongoing recession, revenue is down. So to the best of my understanding, in the absence of new revenue such as that from an HST, the maintenance of existing library and health services will mean cuts elsewhere. That is simply unavoidable, unless the government is going to run a deficit, which is not something they want to be known for. BC taxpayers lose no matter which way the ball tumbles, whether it’s in higher taxes or in reduced services.
Advocacy groups are doing a fabulous job of mobilizing to create awareness and protect local funding, and I commend them for that, because even though protecting funding locally will mean cuts elsewhere, a healthy level of citizen displeasure sends the message to our governments that their population base is not happy, and pushing the envelope too far carries a serious risk of reprisal.
So watch it, Victoria boys. This elephant’s showing some signs of life.
