Funny, Isn't It? What Goes Through Your Mind When Your Parachute Malfunctions?

What do you do when the old "oh, they'll think of something" line doesn't work any more?

Judging by what I'm reading online, especially what's appearing on supposedly progressive blogs, we'd just rather look the other way. Turn our heads to a different horizon such as those damned dirty Conservatives, that's the ticket.  Or the foibles of Jason Kenney or the latest outrage in the US. 

So Canada is now cut off by road and rail from coastal British Columbia and its largest sea port, its portal to Asia Pacific. All four highways are gone, impassible, and both rail lines are down to boot.

Ah, don't worry. Justin is going to send some troops. We like soldiers, don't we? They'll think of something, right?  Did you hear about that Bernier guy? What an asshole, eh?

But we're civilized people and that means there are things we don't bring up in polite conversation. We don't talk about the damage the petro-economy is wreaking on the world. And we certainly don't talk about the climate emergency and the horrible mess we're in. We don't talk about how our essential infrastructure, without which we don't have an economy, is failing. No, that just gets people upset.

When it comes to climate breakdown, British Columbia is the canary in the coal mine.  The telltale signs that climate change has us by the throat are everywhere from the atmospheric river overhead to the mass migration of marine life (fish, marine mammals, sea birds) out of the south and into our waters to ever worsening wildfires contaminating the air so many breathe to record-setting heat waves (three all-time records set on three consecutive days before the town was erased by fire) to lethal heat domes that kill the vulnerable in their hundreds (for now), from invasive pests that, spared from winter freezing, now proliferate, even crossing the Rocky Mountains, to infrastructure that collapses from a single day of torrential rain. Wow, if you string these all together they begin to sound a bit apocalyptic.

You might not see this shit in Toronto. Doesn't matter. That doesn't make it any less real. It's real alright, as real as a heart attack. Yet we don't talk about it. We change the channel, we switch the topic, usually to something, in this immediate scheme of things, relatively frivolous.  We'll cross that bridge when we can no longer cross it. Say what?

In 1886 a relentlessly progressive Leo Tolstoy wrote a book, "What Then Must We Do?" about the historical path of poverty. He  "developed a vision of a way of life that would deny the possibility of the exploitation of one person by another: a vision of self-discipline and responsibility, of joy, passion and compassion, in which work for its own sake plays an essential part as a means to a healthy and kindly life."

Tolstoy was a genuine progressive, eschewing the aristocratic milieu in which he had been born. He took that belief to his grave.

Just before his death, his health was a concern of his family, who cared for him daily. In his last days, he spoke and wrote about dying. Renouncing his aristocratic lifestyle, he left home one winter night. His secretive departure was an apparent attempt to escape from his wife's tirades. She spoke out against many of his teachings, and in recent years had grown envious of his attention to Tolstoyan "disciples".

Tolstoy died of pneumonia at Astapovo railway station, after a day's train journey south. The station master took Tolstoy to his apartment, and his personal doctors arrived and gave him injections of morphine and camphor.

The police tried to limit access to his funeral procession, but thousands of peasants lined the streets. Still, some were heard to say that, other than knowing that "some nobleman had died", they knew little else about Tolstoy.

According to some sources, Tolstoy spent the last hours of his life preaching love, non-violence, and Georgism to fellow passengers on the train.

What then, as progressives, must we do? We can't avert our gaze any longer. We have to take responsibility for this emergency even if we have convinced ourself that others are to blame. We need to demand, insist on governance a hell of a lot better than anything on offer today.

As Nikiforuk said yesterday in his Southam lecture: 

...he urges people to withdraw from the technosphere whenever possible; become rooted again in the natural world; dig a garden, walk into the forest, clean one part of a stream, get your hands dirty; and, above all else, defend the value of creation, nature against the cult of perpetual growth.

We've got to start talking about things we would much rather avoid. If we can't find the moral courage to take that first step, we're done.  For genuine progressives, that is not an option.

Footnote: 

If you're interested in Tolstoy as a progressive pioneer you might explore how, in his final years, he inspired Mahatma Ghandi.