Saturday, January 21, 2006

"Its not him, its us"

Its like the old break-up line "Its not you, its me."
I fear a Harper election partly because of what he would do, but mainly because of what such a victory would say about us as Canadians.
Here is a description about what has happened to people in the United States over the last decade, which purports to explain why they vote for Republicans. It is what I DON'T want to see happening in Canada:
Looking at the data from 1992 to 2004, Shellenberger and Nordhaus found a country whose citizens are increasingly authoritarian while at the same time feeling evermore adrift, isolated, and nihilistic. They found a society at once more libertine and more puritanical than in the past, a society where solidarity among citizens was deteriorating, and, most worrisomely to them, a progressive clock that seemed to be unwinding backward on broad questions of social equity. Between 1992 and 2004, for example, the percentage of people who said they agree that "the father of the family must be the master in his own house" increased ten points, from 42 to 52 percent, in the 2,500-person Environics survey. The percentage agreeing that "men are naturally superior to women" increased from 30 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, the fraction that said they discussed local problems with people they knew plummeted from 66 percent to 39 percent. Survey respondents were also increasingly accepting of the value that "violence is a normal part of life" -- and that figure had doubled even before the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.
And when we also get the news that American conservatives are licking their chops about a Harper victory, that scares me too.

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