A campaign for all seasons

The last 20 months have without question been the most interesting campaign I have ever witnessed – and make the ’64 daisy ad look like a bouquet to Goldwater by comparison.

When I left Canada for “good” in 1979 it was because we had just had an election where the population decided that a government that read people’s mail and had the RCMP burning down buildings because they could not place listening devices in them (so that the FLQ could no longer meet there) was necessary for the public peace. When the Macdonald commission reported that police and administration had broken multiple laws in this process the electorate responded to polling questions with the amazing opinion that “if the RCMP had to break laws to protect us we should change those laws.”

And this was in a country that at that time had far fewer protections than our big neighbor to the south.

So I came to the United States – that I considered the last bastion of real freedom for the individual.

During the Reagan, Bush41 and Clinton years I saw those freedom gradually being nibbled away by executive orders (many initially classified) and wondered when the electorate would realize that the Constitution that I had such great respect for was being emasculated in many little ways.

But no amount of paranoia prepared me for the advent of Bush43.

All seemed quiet until 9.11 – and then I watched the country I had come to admire, respect, and yes, even love for all its merits slowly turn into a nightmare.

The erosion of our Constitution over the last 6 years is well documented elsewhere – but what has troubled me far more is the passivity of the electorate as those hardwon rights are taken away one by one.

And now, twenty years after making my home in this country I am at the same crossroads I was at in Canada in 1979.

With a population that seems to be willing to accept almost any limitation on individual freedom in the quest for national security and personal safety, even when those limitations have been shown to have virtually no impact on either, where does one go? What place on earth is left for those who believe in liberty of the individual? The right of the individual to redress for grievances against a government that is out of control?

Alas, I do not believe that even today any country is in a better position to allow for those things.

But if the Republican party wins this election, given the pronouncements of both the GOP candidates, I fear that the slide into repression of dissent, into the elimination of more freedoms, into a society that Orwell had nightmares about, may become irreversible.

I hope that those of my neighbours, friends, colleagues who DO have the right, opportunity, and obligation to cast a vote in this election will consider carefully the actual choices before them. Although I have no illusions that an Obama administration will be a panacea, or even be able to address more than a fraction of the issues they have claimed during the campaign that is drawing to a close, it is my fervent hope that a more transparent, and more responsive government may result.

My biggest fears are twofold at this juncture. The first is that there are enough crypto-racists – those who would never admit even to themselves that there is any racism involved – who can rationalize why Obama is “too much of an unknown.” The second is that with the virulent hatred that has been stirred up over the last few months that someone out there on the lunatic fringe will take it into his or her head that Obama must be eliminated to “save America” from whatever demon they imagine him to represent.

I pray and hope that Barack Obama has the most conscientious security detail in modern history.

And I pray and hope that enough of the American electorate can see past the rhetoric and vote for a return to the real values that made this country what it was – freedom, opportunity, and a concern for the general good.