Attitudes of service are the rainbow of promise
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Let's compare ways and means of improving our society.
A year or so ago a rabble-rouser in British Columbia sent a message to his followers. Occupy Wall Street. He forgot to tell his stooges what they were to demand and you know how that played out. Did the guy who precipitated the movement try to correct the course? Nope. He was on to his next project, another anarchic mare's nest.
A village in the flood plain of Hudson Bay fell into ruin and Canada was held up to the world as a country that let its indigenous people freeze in the Arctic night. When it became known that the village elders had been handed enough money to turn their community into if not the Garden of Eden, at least a place with comfortable shelter and clean drinking water, did the elders admit what became of our tax money? Nope. They raised a ruckus about interfering with their internal affairs.
Now the chief is bullying the prime minister and the governor-general, using her version of Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent resistance. Ghandi took his lead from Henry David Thoreau who spent some time living in a shack by Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He used the media of his day to spread his propaganda. The rabble-rousers of today have a far more powerful set of media to get their messages out, and like Thoreau, they don't stick to the whole truth.
Here in Ontario teachers are bullying the government and by extension all of us, using semantics to do an end-run around the law. We are not on a one-day strike. We are on a one-day demonstration. Are teachers that unaware of morality? Do they believe we are too stupid to see through their games? Their students know they are pawns in this wrong-headed business, wrong-headed on both sides of the conflict.
Elgin County, like lots of other places, has produced men and women who stand in blazing contrast to the ones we've been glancing at. Let's look at two, both men, as I admit a certain amount of sloth when it comes to research.
In 1908, John Kenneth Galbraith was born near Iona Station. He studied at Guelph and went on to university in the United States. He taught economics in Harvard, was advisor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, author of the New Deal, an attempt to restore the lives ruined by The Great Depression. Galbraith followed the methods of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who worked to level the boom and bust cycles of business and industry.
Both Keynes and Galbraith were declared to be wrong in their methods, but in fact the people with their hands on the tiller of state practised only half their system. They were happy to lower taxes in times of bust but lacked the guts to raise taxes to refill the coffers for the next slump.
Trickle-down economics became the new scheme. Let the wealthy keep their money and as they spend it some will end up in workers' pockets.
Galbraith in his mischievous manner described it as feed the horse more oats and the sparrows will have more to eat.
On 12th December in 1935, John Wise was born, not far from Iona Station. John was a dairy farmer. He began his political career in local government. In 1972 he was elected Conservative MP for Elgin and was re-elected four times with large majorities.
While serving as Minister of Agriculture John established new research labs locally and across Canada. You may read of his many interests and services in his obituary. John died last Wednesday.
Unlike the other John, John Wise never acted to draw attention to himself. The good works and example he set will ripple among any number of institutions and social groups for years.
If the indigenous people were taught trades and management there would be jobs for many right in their communities using the wealth that is already poured into their hands. No need to blockade transportation routes or pipelines.
Attitudes of entitlement, whether in teachers or any other segment of society, destroy personalities and wealth. Attitudes of service are the rainbow of promise.