A little equilibrium

One week to the election, and counting.

I used the Chapters gift card I received for Christmas to purchase On Equilibrium, by John Ralston Saul (go figure). Here is an excerpt from the chapter "Ethics" (p. 102).

...the people who have set and who continue to set the ethical agenda of our time are absent from the chambers to which the citizens send their representatives. They don't want to be there. When pressed, they tend to respond that elected officials have no real power. But if they don't believe it is worth being elected, then they don't believe in democracy. If they don't believe in democracy, what do they think should replace it? And however much they believe they are right, do they not believe the citizenry have the right to make the final decision? If so, how, since they themselves have rejected the legitimacy of the legislature?

The people Saul is talking about are the people in NGOs. A page later, he goes on to comment that citizens aren't "interested in leaders who say they want power but protest they cannot actually use it because they feel victimized by forces of inevitability."

One of the major problems I have with the platforms on the table for the next week is that they all ignore the underlying social causes of so many of the problems they are trying to manage. How can the Liberals expect to do anything solid about gun control when they can't even control the corruption that goes on in their own party? What good are the Conservatives if they're sleeping with right-wing Americans, as the Liberals claim?

The people in charge would all protest that they are merely victims of the inevetability of trade and economics, and charge that they do the best they can, each claiming superiority over the other. Me, I have the heart of an NGO, and the desire to not only stand up to the so-called forces of inevitability, but to reshape those forces. I also know that neither one of us is better than the other, but together, we can do better. I'd probably get laughed out of the polling booth.

In my next entry, I will finally get around to taking a look at who's running for office in my electoral district (Burnaby-New Westminster).