Watching what is happening world-wide, not the least here in the UK, where the experiment in Coalition Governing is taking place between the ‘ruthless and tribal’ (special thanks to Vince Cable) Right as represented by the Tory/Conservative Party and the fluctuating Liberal Democrats (made up on would-be liberal lefties and liberally inclined centre rightists) is proof of the pudding that The Right is Intrinsically Very Wrong.
It’s as if their blind dedication (or religious devotion) to forces of laissez-faire crimepetitive capitalism (thanks for that reference to my late Cousin Professor Gary Boyd) has deprived them of the ability not only to see consequences of their actions but even moreso, deprived them of their natural survival skills–and the trouble is they want to take the rest of us down with them into chaos and true dark ages.
I won’t bother to list all the places they are doing irrevocable harm and intend to do more beyond the UK (balanced somewhat by Alex & the Scottish Nationalist Team up in Scotland) and Canada–where they have been newly elected into a majority but at least my pals the sort-of socialists New Democrats now make up the official opposition. In our (so-called) democratic systems we need the check-and-balance drama of left, right and centre versions of same until we can graduate into some new form of more enlightened governance, and so we hope that we can take turns at governing, bringing in some relatively enlightened socially responsible, let alone environmentally responsible, programs that work–sometimes unfortunately one or the other gets in for too long (like the Liberals in Canada and the Tories in the UK) and things get corrupted more than usual one way or another.
Right now Conservatives (world-wide) are pushing on all fronts to return us to true dark ages from which some extra dark tyranny will be forced upon us to bring some sense of pseudo-order. Racism, patriarchalism, poverty. prejudice–all driven by fear nurtured at the heart of The Right. Who needs the ‘BNP’ (British Nationalist Party, seen as facist) when you have fascist Tories to do the dirty work, or for that matter, UKIP (the right wing UK Independence Party). Under the cloak of the UK Coalition government, one by one, and the NHS is the most prominent one, programs that serve ‘The People’ are being removed–and blame it on the need to cut The Debt–Canada’s Tories don’t even have to play that last card–which turns out to be a fantasy one, a means to convince everyone that we must all give up all the services we were just getting somewhat better at providing for ourselves to help the body politic function smoothly and for the good of all of us, not just an elite.
What’s amazing is how so many good working and middle class workers, reading their pulp newspapers and watching crap tv, are taken in by The Propaganda that will disenfranchise and deprive them, and making the rift between rich and poor ever greater, inexorably. Just like The Silly Right in the good ol USA, they fantasize that they too will have a chance to get rich and lord it over those who can’t manage. And anyway why should they pay for people who are less worthy than they imagine they are? And why should they pay for other peoples’ kids to go to school? Why should they pay for anything they don’t like or want? The answer is blowing in the wind: piles of garbage on all levels, the decline of the body politic, chaos.
The Far Right suffers from the most serious dose of selfishness that one can imagine. It forces normally peacefully minded people like me to have to go further left to balance their short-sightedness. The moderate Right has a hard time moderating the rest of their Z-team and so go along with them to mollify them–only later they remember that some of them are really ‘gentlemanly’ or ‘good-womanly’ at heart and didn’t really mean to put into power (unleash upon an unsuspecting public) such evil forces as Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan (and they then toss them out post-haste), embarrassed, replacing them with the likes of John Major and George Bush Senior (who unfortunately gave birth to a monster son). In Canada this has taken a particular turn in that a renewed Right has returned the terror from the West whilst the centre and left have placed the heroic Jack Layton in the ring with the Minotaur. We hope that Jack is indeed Theseus.
And who is his Ariadne who will lead him out of The Maze with a Red Thread? Probably, the Woman Vote–who recently have helped the Orange Crush phenomenon. But then the myth continues and it is said that he abandons her (the woman question of old), but other versions say she left him and married a Real God. The latter sounds more likely, eh gals?
Anyway, The Right can be Very Wrong and we need to indeed, ‘walk like an Egyptian’ to curtail their evil ways. We may be watching revolutions in North Africa and the Gulf on tv and laptop but any time soon we need to get out there ourselves and join the youth and activists who are already out there. An Arab Awakening needs to be backed up by a We Awakening Here in ‘The West’ lest we lose what our ancestors fought so hard for, The Right to Choose.