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.

In Toronto, particularly for my faith community, it has been a hard year as well. In addition to the struggle to support the poor and dispossessed in a society that seem to be steadily descending from callous indifference to the poor and outcast into outright hatred of them, the Anglican community of Toronto suffered a terrible blow when St. Anne's church was almost completely destroyed by fire. This beautiful byzantine church had been one of the gems of the diocese and indeed of Canadian art and architecture. The interior, in particular, had been one of the great art treasures of Canada with the only religious murals done by this country's iconic Group of Seven painters. While at least one of the murals may be salvaged, others are gone forever. 

It has been a bad year, and the outlook at the beginning of 2025 is bleak. Too many people in countries across the world seem seduced or mesmerized by the siren song of authoritarianism. Once, political disagreements primarily consisted of different perspective on the best way of responding to a shared understanding of reality. As the evidence that our current runaway consumption and unrestrained inequality mounts, this has changed. A dispiriting number of people are profoundly determined to believe anything except that change is possible and beneficial.

If writing a blog with some individual, undisciplined and idiosyncratic opinions is in any way lighting a candle in the dark, this one has shed very little light. Some months it has gone almost dark. But it has not burned out quite completely, and to put it mildly, I have not succeeded in getting everything I have to say off my chest. So I intend to keep publishing entries during the coming year if I can. Call it a hope rather than a resolution.