Sharing POSTCARDS from CANADA

and adding my voice

Beginning with some self-deprecating humor, here is a two-liner that every Canadian has heard a thousand times:

What is a Canadian?

Not an American!

But it is no longer a joke. This has become deadly serious. However, I would like to depersonalize this and make this about our countries rather than our people.

What is Canada?

Not America!

The Shining City on a Hill now serves as a bad example of what not to be. Donald Trump is the President and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the Secretary of Health and Human Services and this has consequences for us all. And yes, we do need to talk about the COVID pandemic and vaccines, and Canadians are currently writing about this.

Canadian Doctor Responds to Kennedy's Vaccine Madness by Robert Issenman

Robert F. Kennedy’s conduct as head of U.S Health and Human Services is consistent with Trump’s “Put the Fox in Charge of the Henhouse” administration. Throughout his career, Kennedy has been a loud and vocal opponent of childhood immunization, a subject on which he has zero qualifications, but over which he now wields a massively influential megaphone. By contrast, after spending my career caring for children, I have a few thoughts to share with him.

This issue remains divisive in Canada and for me it is deeply personal. Recently a member of my extended family living in Alberta posted on facebook that all Canadians who voted Liberal are a waste of skin. I may travel home to Alberta next year but I do not want to sit around the dining room table with him pretending to play nice.

I have several other relatives, some close, who are anti-vaxxers. I suspect they voted Conservative. Somehow the Elbows UP Resistance needs to find ways around this deadly polarization and I will add my two cents.

Scott Alexander is probably not well known to most Canadians. Using Metamodern Wannabe insider language, I would describe him as a Game A Galaxy Brain. An article that he published on July 30, 2014, Meditations On Moloch, lives on in the metamodern community in discusions to this day.

On Wednesday Scott Alexander published an article that immediately stirred up controversy.

The Other COVID Reckoning

On Thursday he published a response to criticism.

The Evidence That A Million Americans Died Of COVID

But the Canadians we need to reach, including my relatives, are very unlikely to be open to reading these articles. I think I see a way forward, a strategy perhaps worth trying. But first I need to go all the way back to 2016.

"Basket of deplorables" is a pejorative phrase from a 2016 US presidential election campaign speech delivered by Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton on September 9, 2016, at a campaign fundraising event.

This now famous phrase proved to be a political failure that we can learn from. We will get nowhere labeling anti-vaxxers and Pierre Poilievre voters as deplorables. They will get nowhere labeling Liberal voters a waste of skin.

Perhaps we can find some common ground and perhaps we can use a common strategy, albeit one that I am not fond of.

At first I thought the 2011 Occupy movement had legs and I was disappointed by how quickly it faded. I thought their slogan - "We are the 99%" - was unifying. Perhaps liberals and conservatives can find common cause opposing Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and other billionaires. Perhaps we can find common cause opposing the worst of Big Business.

I am not advocating for a campaign against free markets. I personally like the approach of metamodernist thinker Lene Rachel Andersen. Below are a few quotes from her chapter in the book Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds: Crisis and Emergence in Metamodernity.

As the West is facing industrial productivity so high we cannot consume all the physical goods we produce, increased productivity no longer equals progress; it just increases the amount of waste, bureaucracy, the ‘need’ for wars and the abuse of nature.

The suggested metamodern economic model still contains many well-known structures and values, and it is not dismissing capitalism, which is usually the assumption (and fear) many have whenever somebody suggests a new economic model.

Nevertheless, the suggested metamodern economy is no doubt going to cause both resistance and anger, not least from some of the people who benefit the most from the current model and the current kind of globalisation. The people who thrive in a competitive global economy and who find it meaningful and fun to amass as much material and digital wealth as possible are probably not going to find gardening and growing carrots as meaningful as growing numbers.

I am not advocating for class warfare. Most high net worth people probably sense that they will not prosper in a society that has a very inequal distribution of wealth. But some attitudes are very problematic.

Wealthy Canadian Kevin O’Leary has called people "cockroaches," particularly contestants on the TV show "Shark Tank." He used the term in a derogatory way to describe entrepreneurs and their businesses, implying they would be crushed by bigger competitors. His attitude is unacceptable and reflected in his political views.

Kevin O'Leary says he wants to talk to Trump about a U.S.-Canada 'economic union'

The current politcal polarization does seem somewhat strange to me. Yes, there is much room for improvement in Government, whether Liberal or Conservative, whether Republican or Democrat. But it seems to me that the Mega Corporations and Billionaires are laughing all the way to the bank while watching our political infighting.

And we can learn another lesson from being Not America! There is a great tension in the Trump Administration between the MAGA Cult and the Billionaires. Trump cannot please both constituencies. It has been clear to me for some time that Trump will favour the money over the concerns of average and ordinary people. All hell will probably break loose in the USA when the cult collapses. In Canada, perhaps we can undermine Maple MAGA by finding paths to radical change that improve the lives of average and ordinary people.

I will end with another quote from Robert Issenman.

After all these years, I have accepted that you can’t talk people out of their belief system. However, I also learned that most people will allow you to share your own experiences. As someone who grew up in the 50’s and started medicine in the 70’s, I have a number of stories to tell.