Dear Editor,
I expect I’m presently feeling a bit like others squeezed between 3 Ranges, in the aftermath of provincial election results as the final count materializes. I’m having trouble making sense of it regardless of who we have elected to lead British Columbia for the next 4(?) years.
It seems illogical today that students among the 57-percenters realize limitations of ‘the best system we’ve got’, and implications of economic system alternatives… post feudal and post industrial age era. The 21st century is now.
Science and very reluctantly the OG Industry research, years of independent data collection documenting accelerated species extinctions and (life) decline, ongoing field work results, anecdotal aboriginal knowledge and stories, even AI has established the logarithmic rate of detrimental climate change and consequences this (closed system) planet, our world is facing.
What is real poverty? With evidence in and mounting not by least at the end of the 1980’s and reporting from the historic Rio World Conference on the state of the planet, effects of global warming and impending climate changes, and effects of a burgeoning human population predicament were coming to roost, recounting history and contemporary findings and and what we would be facing.
We are a collective of nearly five billion now, with many well educated minds among us, increasing numbers just beginning to acknowledge our human impact, our footprint leveraging that tipping point and statistically precise projections (in retrospect) of what’s ahead should elect to do nothing. I’m not sure it’s fair to blame the educators or teachers beyond the 1960’s when counterculture was already ‘tuning out’.
Beyond WW2 a rudimentary grade four or six education was already widely known not to get you very far in life, or to cut mustard as it were as a largest human cohort, the boomers were set to emerge. And by this time, also well beyond the advent of the scientific age, minimum provincial standards were already set- including across northern and rural districts of Canada.
So, is it malaise or hopelessness?- the reason for pretenders and showmen to use kindest possible terms (in the BC interior, in AB, in the USA) were allowed to emerge as the seeming only political (democratic) alternatives? Presently, is it some organizational failure to simply get the message out? Or is it willful ignorance or attempt to disenfranchise ourselves- quite bluntly, to the point of human extinction? Words and life examples are called to mind of Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead, even Nelson Mandela all come to mind as we await the final vote count and results, ultimately to come in. It seems appropriate to redress the power of one to change the world.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world.
In fact it’s the only thing that ever has. This goes out to all those who could not summon the strength, perceived some futility, or that their single vote could not make a difference.
Peter Fox (mal a coeur), Valemount, B.C.
