No, not the temperature, although that too is getting hot. I'm referring to the tenor of our social and political discourse. We're turning venomous, turning on each other. Society is degrading into camps, tribes.
We write off others, denounce them, vilify them and call them stupid childish names. We write them off at the very time when we most need to reach out and find common ground to restore and rebuild the framework of social cohesion.
When I began blogging about 10 years ago there was a marked difference between our side and the Tory camp. They were much quicker to pick up on the degeneracy of hyper-partisanship as it took hold in the United States. If you weren't in their camp you were a libtard or a lieberal or some equally puerile epithet. On their side it was constantly positing us, all of us, as their enemy. We might criticize their leaders but they had no hesitation in demeaning all of us. It was a shameful thing, a petty nastiness that they appeared to share with their American cousins.
Flash forward ten years and that same contagion of darkness has a foothold in our camp. The same hyper-partisanship, the same derogatory names, the same rage and hostility. And so we have fallen lower. The thing is, this demeans us. The other side, they don't care. It merely validates their own view of irreconcilable and warring camps. We confirm what they want, even need, to believe about us to justify their own ugliness.
This is not a harmless indulgence by an intemperate few. It seeks to divide us, pull us ever further apart. Some quest to destroy a political party that predates Confederation and that still commands the support of more than 30 per cent of our fellow countrymen.
To those who boast about wanting to destroy the Conservative Party, what then? What do they want, a one-party state? Do they want their party in perpetual control of our country and our society? Do they really imagine their party is infallible or magically immune to corruption? It's not. Two years in and we've seen that this government has plenty of foibles and a good many failures. It has reneged on the critical promises that got it elected. It's a pretty face on some pretty shopworn politics.
The Trudeau Liberals, on the strength of some major promises they did not fulfill, got 39.5 per cent of the vote. 60.5 percent of the voting public supported other parties. By a 3 to 2 margin, the Canadian public was defeated in that election. Trump got a much better share of the popular vote in his country than Trudeau did in ours.
It is not disloyal, it is not aiding the enemy, to roundly criticize the Trudeau government for its grievous failings. It is not disloyal to expect far more and far better from the Liberals than we had to accept from the Harper Tories. Moreover it is not loyal to sit mute when our side strays and falters as the other side did.
I want to hear no more of this rabid nonsense about destroying the Conservative Party. This is stacking up to be a hellish century. We need social cohesion more than at any time in humanity's past. This is a time when we need to be reaching out, finding common ground, restoring consensus wherever that can be achieved. We will need to win them over, not alienate them and not create rifts among ourselves.
