The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Days of wrath, age of anger
When I say that we live in the age of not just anxiety, or testiness, but Incredible Hulklevel fury, I may be guilty of overstatement in that way that everything — emotions, rhetoric, the way we respond to big and little things — seems to be ratcheted sky-high these days.
Except I really don't think so.
I was alive but barely conscious of the world around me in the 1960s, so I cannot offer an opinion about how those chaotic years compare to today's.
I just know that we live in the time of the scowl, when hardly a conversation takes place, online or in person, without veins bulging and jaws clenched, when measured thought is viewed as weakness, and principles twisted to justify means.
Thus, to a certain degree, it has always been you could say, and be absolutely correct.
I will counter that the difference is the depth of the wrath, the way that people, who I have to think were formerly law-abiding, suddenly sound like John Wick, and how the bile seems to have spread into most every aspect of our lives.
Politics is where the madness is worst. The sunny ways the prime minister promised, the politics of hope, have descended into something bleak and apocalyptic.
We can in large part blame the impossibly fractured United States, and the way that Trumpism has hijacked the Republican Party down there, for the angry mobs, in some cases with children in tow, who have been dogging Justin Trudeau throughout the federal election campaign, disrupting Liberal campaign events, and forcing one to be called off completely.
Yet this is by no means novel in Canada. Janet Ecker, a former cabinet minister in the Ontario governments of Mike Harris and Ernie Eves, recounted Tuesday in the Niagara Independent how thousands of demonstrators stormed the Ontario legislature in 1995 and smashed in the doors to try and disrupt the swearing-in of Harris' newly elected majority government.
The harassment, she concedes, is getting worse, and extends far beyond the prime minister.
“It is far past time for everyone involved in our democratic process to look in the mirror,” she wrote. “Commentators and politicians who treat each other and their supporters with contempt are contributing to the problem. Media pundits who drive up their ratings by saying inflammatory and derogatory things about the government of the day help fuel the flames. Each one of us who refuses to listen to, or respect other views cannot escape our share of the blame.”
The campaign nastiness is vile enough that Civil Dialogue, which describes itself as “a new, grassroots initiative to help protect and strengthen Canadian democracy,” Tuesday reissued a letter, signed by 35 civil society leaders and organizations, asking all federal party leaders do what they can “to protect and strengthen Canada's democracy.”
There is only so much that governments can do. On social media and the internet, crackpot conspiracy theories, gossip and all manner of negativity is what gets clicks and shares.
Although the internet theoretically leaves all the information in the world at our fingertips, we flock to the ideas and sources that echo our views, ensuring that our beliefs harden rather than broaden.
So, the poison it does flow, unchecked, 24-7.
It does not help that there is so much for people to be genuinely angry about. The institutions that used to command respect — police forces, governments, organized religions — are now treated with disdain over egregious wrongs of the past and present.
The pandemic has cost lives and livelihoods, leaving so many struggling with traumatic loss.
I side with the scientists, wear a mask when asked to, and steer clear of those who do not. I believe that my safety, and the safety of everyone else trumps “rights.”
By the same token, the pain inflicted by the coronavirus is real and deep, and that anger and frustration has pitted Canadian against Canadian. It has also led to deep-seated rage against governments and leaders: the failure of some to handle COVID-19, the decisions by others to try to take political advantage of it.
So, perhaps anger is just in the air, searching, in the discordant summer of 2021, for a target wherever one can be found.
I am happy to report that, to my knowledge, the recent Nova Scotia election was mercifully short on ugliness.
Blake Brown, a professor of history at Saint Mary's University, and one of the signatories to the Civil Dialogue letter, told me Tuesday that the policy similarities between the different parties “perhaps decreases the amount of heat.”
Until now that has also been true of the decorous federal campaigns underway here. It would be nice if the tone stayed civil right to the end. The way the world is going, surprising even.