For All of Us Political Orphans

I have a cousin who is gay and left-wing. After listening to a political debate he dared to say aloud that the right-wing candidate had some intelligent sounding, financial propositions. He was cancelled by the gay community he belonged to because they stated that by agreeing with anything anyone on the right said he was anti-gay.

I was a lifelong left-winger. I always voted Liberal or NDP (I’m in Canada), which would be most similar to the US Democrats. However, now I am not sure I can. The Canadian elections are coming, and while the US ones are finished, some of the US readers out there might still relate to what I’m saying, and maybe others around the world as well. And, I am saying this so that if you do relate, you, like me, can stop being afraid to state it aloud. Because, us saying it, is the first step to things improving.

Just like the Democrats and Republicans in the US, the Liberals and Conservatives in Canada have slowly changed from political parties to political ideologies. According to Marriam-Webster an ideology is “the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program” (1). But, as Steven Novella points out, the problem is that strict ideology “leads to closed-mindedness, motivated reasoning, self-righteousness, and political correctness. It tends to stop skeptical inquiry and genuine discourse” (2).

As Socrates stated, “the greatest evil that can befall a human being is to become a misologist”(3), or otherwise known as a person who hates reasonable discourse. And that is why all ideologies, in their prevention of questioning and discourse, become evil. Right now, our political parties have become dogmatic ideologies, genuine discourse has stopped, and therefore, both sides are closed minded, self-righteous, and in effect, evil.

Right now, you must believe in everything your party stands for and does. If you don’t, if you dare to question your side, or God forbid, point out that the other side might have a good idea for solving a particular problem, then you are a traitor to the party, the beliefs, and everyone in the ‘clique of the ideology’.

In this way, you are allowing the political party that you follow to do whatever evil they choose…or minimally not do anything of any good.

Let me give some examples.

The Liberals pushed for a safe injection site in my city. I am not against the concept as a whole. However, with my husband being a medical doctor and myself being in the education field, I believe that addiction is a symptom. Giving out needles and doing absolutely nothing else, treats only the symptom and not the disease. In the case of addiction, the disease is generally severe trauma, or sometimes undiagnosed/untreated mental disabilities. Therefore, for safe injection sites to serve a real purpose they must be coupled with free therapy and diagnosis. That, is something that is not part of any injection site in Canada (that I know of).

The safe injection site in my city was additionally placed far away from any homeless shelter or food bank and is open during limited, morning hours. Therefore, a tent-city has formed all around the safe injection site with those with addictions freezing outside overnight, as well as starving, trying to be near the injection site when it opens. It is obvious that this will lead to crime and other issues in the area of the site. And, let’s be clear, my city is not the only one where the safe injection sites were horribly carried out.

Now, the whole neighborhood around the injection site is extremely unsafe and the numbers of homeless and addicted are not decreasing. So, what do the Conservatives do? They come in and state that safe injection sites are unsafe and unhelpful. They show the evidence of the deteriorating neighborhood around the site and the not-decreasing numbers of addicted and homeless, and they fight to shut the sites down.

If I point out that there could be benefits if the sites were carried out correctly but as it stands they are awful, the conservatives call me a druggy communist and the liberals call me anti-humanitarian. And while both sides are calling me names, what about the addicts on the streets? They are still freezing and starving in minus, winter temperatures on the streets of Canada.

I worked for many years in immigration and settlement. My parents are first generation immigrants. I am very much pro-immigration. However, it needs to be done for the right reasons and organized in the right way. The Liberals decided that we will use immigration to solve the crisis of decreasing family sizes. Additionally, we had an affordable housing crisis so the Liberals additionally decided that more immigrants will provide more workforce to build more housing. The problem is, they did not consider where these immigrants would live while they built new houses, making our affordable housing crisis even worse.

They also did not consider the fact that one of the reasons families have fewer children in Canada is because they cannot afford, either physically or emotionally, to have more. Childcare is unaffordable, parents are overworked and mothers are not provided adequate support. Let me vouch for that from my own experience. While I was on maternity leave, I decided to finish my Master of Education online. I thought it was a great way to improve myself while at home, in order to be able to smoothly return to the workforce. I was told that because I am in school I no longer qualify for employment insurance. So, with my husband in medical residency at that time as well, we were absolutely broke. I was punished for trying to remain relevant for the work force during my maternity leave. Later on, our son was diagnosed as autistic. I could talk for hours about the inadequacy of assistance autistic persons, or their parents, receive. We had initially thought of having more kids, but we were so emotionally and physically burned out from one special needs child, that we chose not to.

If I voice to a liberal that immigration needs to be carried out smartly and with moderation with our system being properly set up for incoming persons… and if I say that it will not solve unrelated problems (not fixing all the support issues that families face, but just bringing in more families who will again receive inadequate support is not the answer) I am called a racist and an immigrant-hater. If I tell a conservative the same I am called a hippy and a bleeding heart. I’m either supposed to love or hate everything about immigration.

And, on the note of immigration, the liberal government has poured millions of dollars into badly designed, social programs for newcomers to Canada — trust me, I worked with those programs when I was in the immigration and settlement sector. Why did they do that? Because as liberals, we must be unendingly humanitarian and focus on the ‘social’, even when it isn't the logical thing to focus on. The liberals choose to fund social programs over advanced language classes, professional employment assistance and again, childcare for newcomer parents. In fact, most newcomer programs do not provide any childcare or transportation. Therefore, good luck to you if you are a mom without the means to pay for babysitting or buy a car (let’s face it, public transport in most Canadian cities — aside from the largest ones- is horrendous).

So, what do the conservatives do? They point out that none of these social programs are doing any good and are a waste of money — that is obvious, since a new immigrant who is unemployed, broke and cannot even communicate doesn’t care about showcasing their traditional food at a multicultural fair. But, instead of improving the programming, they simply cut the funding. Period.

Again, I am in the middle, hated by both sides, because I cannot blindly follow either.

And let’s not even get started on the LGBTQ+ issues.

…ok, let’s start a bit.

Am I pro LGBTQ+? Yes.

However, while I am pro Pride parade and Pride activities, during a time when the economy is at its lowest, if it is my choice in how to re-distribute our public funds, I will choose to move them from funding the Pride parade, or any parade for that matter, to helping the homeless, improving the job market and creating affordable housing. That does not make me a bigot — though the liberals disagree. But, let's be frank, whether you are gay or straight, trans or cis, if you are starving on the street, you will prefer food, housing and a job over a parade. Yet, the liberals don’t think so. And what about the conservatives? Well, I just don’t disagree with LGBTQ+ enough for them to not call me a God-hating, hippy.

I am not allowed to say I am conservative unless I unwaveringly despise Justin Trudeau (the liberal leader)and every word that comes out of his mouth. I am not allowed to be liberal unless I believe that Pierre Poilievre (the conservative leader) is the devil incarnate and every idea from his side is evil.

As Steven Jonathan Rummelsberg stated, “Ideologies are not only dangerous, but deadly in their attempts to forcibly reduce reality into a set of inflexible ideas wholly unsuited to their application” (4). Alexandr Solzhenistyn, a Russian author who helped to raise global awareness of the political repression in the Soviet Union, wrote “ideology is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination….”(5).

When we cannot discuss, intelligently debate, disagree, or even question anything that a political party is doing, especially the one we follow, then the political party has formed an ideology; to be precise, a dogmatic ideology. And when we allow political parties to be dogmatic ideologies, we give them the power to do evil, or again, minimally nothing at all.

If we want things to improve then we must stop vilifying the other side and start questioning, and expecting more, from our own side, regardless of what side that is.

So lastly, think about it this way:

The focus of both the left and right has become almost solely on making the other side out to be evil. Simultaneously, neither side is doing anything particularly good. If the public’s focus is solely on how bad the other side is, and if we are called traitors for even questioning our own side, regardless of what they do, then it doesn’t really matter which side you are on, and which side wins, because in the end both sides have your permission to do whatever they choose to, be it good or evil, with the justification that they are the right side. Call me a conspiracy theorist but isn’t it starting to feel like the sides are in cahoots?

A note to our political parties:

You have become like a toxic, divorced parents. Rather than communicating and working together, despite your differences, in order to ensure the wellbeing of your children, you pour all your energy into vilifying the other side and working against anything positive they could have been able to accomplish. But, beware, just like the toxic parents, you will be able to wreak some havoc for a while, temporarily feeling like a winner. However, in the end, children grow up, smarten up, and cut both of you out of their lives.