have certainly had many years of observation, some at least reasonably keen!
After my wife informed me of this wisdom thing, I got to thinking that there is probably no one in this country who has discussed, debated, and downright argued with as many people about as many important issues as I. Similarly, I doubt very much if there is anyone in the country who has paid as close attention to daily events and their ramifications for as long as I. Thus it is that I am not sure whether it is the wisdom of my advancing years or the practical knowledge acquired from spending almost 50 of them at a microphone talking to thousands of people that has convinced me we’re doing just about everything we can to screw up what used to be a perfectly good country.
Just to give you an idea of how long I’ve been at this talk-show business, and how much the nation’s mores have changed, when I started “The Greenline” in Ottawa in 1966 I could not use the word “pregnant” on air. Any reference to an impending birth had to be extremely circumspect—“in the family way” was the usually preferred description. “Blessed event” also received the censors’ seal of approval. I came close to spending a few nights in jail when in 1967 I allowed someone on the show to talk about birth control. Until Trudeau came along and told us government had no business in the bedrooms of the nation, it was illegal, and a very serious offence, to discuss any form of birth control in public.
We’ve come a long way, baby! Not all of it necessarily in the right direction!
Call it wisdom, call it common sense, call it what you like, but one of the things I see that has really begun to screw up the country is our amazing inability to learn from past mistakes.
There is an element in this country, for the most part on what I call the hard Left of the political spectrum, which simply cannot bring itself to admit that when a policy continually fails or even exacerbates the problem, it is time to change direction, try something new, learn from failure. In many instances, some of these people are so blinded by ideology that they do not recognize failure, or even disaster as such.
Later in this book, I will give you example after example of where policies which have clearly failed are continued for no other reason than those who promoted those policies have convinced themselves and much of the rest of the country that failure is really success! That disaster is really triumph! And in the process, many unwary Canadians have been persuaded to ignore the way the world really works in favour of a rose-coloured vision of how they would like it to work.
Much of our social policy as it applies to family values, crime, education, immigration, the environment, multiculturalism, health care, even bilingualism, is based not on reality but on a politically correct utopian dream.
If Erikson is right, if I have truly entered the age of wisdom and have a duty to try and share some of it, then I must have passed through its portals on a cold and rainy night in 1993 in Toronto when Helen called…
THREE
The Call
It’s been more than 12 years but the call still gives me nightmares! Helen is her name. She is probably still in shock. Her voice is almost too calm. Her words chilling. “My father died right out in front of your building last night,” she says. “They walked right over top of him. They were so anxious to get on the damn streetcar they stepped right over him. They could tell he wasn’t some falling-down drunk. He was dressed in a three-piece suit, for heaven’s sake. He was a businessman having a heart attack during rush hour on St. Clair Avenue in downtown Toronto and no one could spare him a minute.” She hesitates for a moment, her voice beginning to break. “The last thing he must have seen was people’s legs walking right over him. Is our civilization starting to crumble?” She begins to cry. “What they did to my father. Was that civilized?”
I am dumbfounded. All my years of hosting radio talk shows has not prepared me for this.
The call comes near the end of my evening show on Toronto’s CFRB, at that time the most listened to radio station in Canada. The question I posed was whether the Canadian civilization as we knew it was beginning to deteriorate. Most callers seemed to think it was and related stories that proved, to them at least, that while the country may not be going to hell in a handcart, we are faced with very serious decay—moral and otherwise.
The first call of the evening sets the tone. It’s from a woman who only a couple of weeks previously had smashed her car into a pole on Avenue Road. “I’m lying there behind the wheel,” she says, “my head feels like someone’s taken a sledge hammer to it, I’m bleeding like a stuck pig when this guy comes rushing over, rips open the car door, grabs my purse, which has fallen onto the floor, and runs off. For all he knew I was dying. He couldn’t have cared less. I couldn’t believe it. We’re not living in a civilized society anymore. It’s a bloody jungle!”
As I recall, there were a few calls a bit more uplifting than that, a couple of the stories were actually kind of funny, but for the better part of three hours it was mostly a chapter from the sorry side of life in the big city today.
A mugging with dozens of people standing around unwilling to help. A father in a fit of road rage giving the finger and screaming some unpleasantness at another driver, undeterred by the two kids in his back seat. Teen punks cursing and swearing in the back of a bus; that sort of thing. None of it supporting the thesis that we are building a better society in this country.
And then finally the call from Helen. Only one young woman had stayed at the streetcar stop with her dying father. “I asked several people to dial 911,” she told Helen, “I’m not sure if anyone even did that. Most people wouldn’t even look down as they stepped over him to get their ride home.” By the time an ambulance arrived it was too late. Sad, sad, sad.
There was a time when that kind of callous disregard for human life would have been shocking. Not today. Nothing in our society today seems to shock us anymore. Being shocked at human behaviour in Canada today seems kind of old-fashioned, quaint even.
‘What’s happening to us?” ask several callers. “Where are we headed? How did we let this happen?”
As usually occurs in discussions of this nature, responses to those questions range from the ridiculous to the sublime but almost everyone seems to agree on one thing: Canadian civilization is in a serious state of decline. And after some urging from me, all agree that there is such a thing as a Canadian civilization. Not as powerful, not as influential as the American civilization, but nonetheless distinct. Surely most of us agree that we are different here in Canada. We are a people quite distinct from any other. We are different from the European civilizations from which most of us sprang and different as well from the American. Most callers agree that one thing we share with the American civilization is that we find ourselves facing very serious decay, moral and otherwise. The Canadian civilization, like the American, is in decline. When I suggest that this decline is occurring while European and some Asian civilizations are in the ascendancy, I meet with serious opposition. The consensus that night on my CFRB show was that Western civilizations, right across the board, are in decline.
One of the more intelligent callers suggests the decline— the decay—is not political—“it is not economic either,” he says. “Those are only the symptoms. It has to do with the question of our entire way of life—our civilization is unravelling around us.”
It’s awfully hard not to agree. Everywhere you look you see evidence of it. You don’t have to go back to a Toronto talk show more than a decade ago to see it and hear it. Even as I am writing this book, a caller to my show on CFRA in Ottawa steadfastly maintains that an extra ten dollars a month on his pension is just as important as anyone’s life. We are discussing a threatened strike by some 120,000
