-by Curtis Healy
Today I finished Pierre Berton's 'The Great Depression'. And it may come as a bit of shock to some when I describe it as a bible for our times, these events precipitated 86 years ago, seem to parallel our own exactly. In it you will find the absolute psychosis of national leadership, clinging to principles that make no sense in hardship, crying balanced budgets, over empty stomachs, nakedness from destitution and evictions, the heap of treatment done to 'communists' and 'Jews', like is being done and talked about toward 'environmentalists' and 'Muslims', in our own era, to the fine razor's notion of similarity.
'Maybe we can take 10,000'. Mass deportations, detainings, brutal street violence conducted by police under the sacrimonious 'we have our orders', search and seizures for the sake of having a differing political opinion, that make things like bill C-51 scream 'Padlock Law' all over again. You'll find Canada's history ofwealth prejudice, a thing not much discussed, in which people desperate to live with a sense of meaning and purpose were classified as those who simply didn't want to work, and washed from the hands of government responsibility- in a time when there was no money, and the government would not intervene. A time when authority's fear of Marxism literally turned them into fascists, for which the reading of Berton's book puts the chill down your spine as to why Fascists burn them, so that people cannot see what they're pulling farther along in time, like is happen now, again, before our eyes. And you'll find the proof of the war exposing the lie of leadership which claimed 'there's nothing we can do', until the bravura of dropping bombs on people, whom they couldn't stand up to before it got so bad, came along. You'll find the lack of nerve to stand up for their people, and stand up to injustice, because they themselves were unjust, clinging to the divine right of economics over the divine democratic fact of human and ecological value.
But you'll also discover something else- that many of the things our former government has taken aim at, to hack and slash in the name of fiscal responsibility, that reduces government to an empty shell of purposelessness- Like EI, Universal Healthcare, relief payments, public works programs, The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation- these are all staples brought about in response to those hard times 86 years ago, which have held us on, to the point that we can still call this only a 'recession', in our own hard times- things that have helped us hold on, which people are now attempting to dismantle.
You'll also learn how people, the ones we descend from in a long line of history, who stood up and defended life and mercy, FOUGHT BACK! But here and now we face the root of it all: 'A weary country and a disillusioned people have been in a mood of drift. In such conditions charismatic leaders often emerge to short-cut democracy... [catering to the return to 'traditional values']... it had happened elsewhere. Could it happen in Canada?'
