The Great Divide & The Need To Bridge It.

We, meaning the people of North America, are sitting at a crossroads. Our American neighbours are a little father along in this process having already suffered through three years of bumbling leadership or lack thereof and seen first hand the mess that greed and incompetence can make in a country.

Here in Canada we are just coming up, rather quickly, on an election where the Conservatives, from all indications, would very much like to see the same thing happen here.

All of this is in the furtherance of a political agenda that is being dictated to the political system by psychopathic businesses, who find it much more cost effective to buy politicians than to go through all the trouble of bringing their businesses in line with where they need to be to keep the pollution they cause from destroying us all.

And because corporations are not people, but basically intricate machines, they have no conscience and therefore don’t feel bad that their actions are harmful. All they care about is whether or not their actions are profitable.

The politicians they own, (and let’s be honest, any politician can be bought, it’s really all about what they want in return besides money), have become so obsessed with the power that they have and the wealth it brings them that in many respects, it hardly matters which side is in power.

The left is a little more benign than the right. But it’s still just a shit circus where the needs of the people are either non-existent (the right) or bringing up the rear (the left).

Thanks to things like television and the Internet we are able to see both sides of the political fight quite clearly, but what we fail to realize is that the real battleground is in the nether region in between.

At some point, hopefully before we become wiped out as a species, people have to start putting down their shields and wander into the middle. They need to look at the points of view that are different from their own and try to find common ground.

They have to stop automatically hating people because they see them as on the ‘other side’ somehow.

There is no fucking other side. There are no sides at all. There is just us. With all our warts and flaws and battle scars and fucked-up prejudices. There’s just us.

One day, hopefully before I shuffle off this mortal coil, I hope I can see the world finally come together, start to disregard the superficial bullshit that divides us like religion, ethnicity, politics and attitude, and start to focus on and build deep relationships based on commonality.

Today the most important point of commonality is that all of us, left or right, rich or poor, arrogant or humble, realize that it’s time to clean up this planet. It’s time to move to the next level of existence which isn’t about taking from the earth until there’s nothing left, but using the renewable things we have been given, like the sun and the wind, to power our cars and factories and homes.

This is, or should at the very least, be something we can all agree on.

It’s not going to happen overnight. Massive changes never do. But the first rule of problem solving of any kind is accepting that there actually is a problem.

And we have already started to attack that problem, at least the more enlightened countries have. But we need to keep pushing. We need to stop resisting out of fear for our futures and start embracing the new ideas that are going to level the playing field and make life better for all of us.

We need to start demanding more accountability from the leaders we elect. Because they fucking work for us. Not the other way round.

So next month, or next November when you cast your vote, make sure it’s for someone who is not looking to preserve the status quo, because the status quo was fucked years ago, but for someone who is looking forward, and wants to change this world for the better.

jim out