Last year

 
The year 2024 was a year of profound disappointments for many people, including myself. In addition to the challenges and painful setbacks that made the headlines, more insidious failures have crept under the radar of much of the mainstream press, such as the grim news that more people than ever before have needed to resort to food banks. 

Over the year, many of our opponents have taken the mask off. Their arrogance, their conviction that only their money and power matter, once relegated to the fringe voices they could deny, is now on full display. Their contempt for the poor is unrestrained. Their determination to maintain the order they sit atop increases in step with the daily manifestation of its failure. Hoarders of wealth so great as to have no meaning proclaim the meaninglessness of all things. Where inequality renders the wealth of the world's richest so great as to be meaningless, it makes poverty and insecurity more and more miserable. 

On all sides in politics, positions have grown more and more sclerotic, with cultural choices fusing with politics. More and more of our daily choices, from food to transportation have been labeled political and made into measures of our consistency and fidelity to various positions. As our positions have become more and more fused together, advocating for specific changes in the name of justice has become increasingly difficult. Instead of calling for one measure of decent treatment for one community, whether the homeless and outcast people on the street or Indigenous people facing pollution and despoliation of their lands, we are expected to advocate for a portmanteau of causes. The same disease has afflicted conservatives, leading to political paralysis  and changing politics from a search for solutions into a zero sum power game. This sclerosis naturally produces profound inconsistencies in all political coalitions, which must be papered over with absurdities we are expected to accept on pain of ostracism.

Our country

 I am a Canadian. This is my country.

This is my flag.

There went out a decree

Sometimes I imagine myself transported back in time, as a haunting from the future rather than the past, to the dreams of Gaius Octavius, more commonly known as Augustus Caesar. I imagine myself appearing in an otherwise placid dream of a man resting between sessions of the Roman senate, from days of commissioning yet more celebrations of his own part in the history of Rome in numberless statues and bas-reliefs. In my daydream, the sleeping dictator understands I come from the future to haunt his dreams, and asks me how he and his achievements will be remembered. I answer him: after your death, a religious movement will arise in Judea. About eighty years later, members of this religious movement will record its beginnings, and one of these accounts will mention your role in ordering a great census of the empire. It will record that your decree sent millions in motion, to the cities of their birth, and that among them were two very ordinary Galileans, a man named Joseph with Mary, his very young and very pregnant fiancee. It will record that she gave birth in Bethlehem of Judea, and lay her child in a manger for want of a proper bed. And that, Caesar Augustus, is how you will be remembered by millions in the hundred generations to come. You will be the man whose decree sent an expectant mother to give birth to a homeless child in a stable.