Voting in Canada

Tags

election, harper

In Canada, as cannot be explained too often, it would seem, each electoral riding is voting for a representative in Parliament, and not for a leader or a party. How do we know who will work hard for the best interests of our area? If you have not met your particular representatives, even on a live telephone line, it may be an indication of how little they care about your specific needs and thus how little they will do for you in Ottawa that does not further their personal ambitions. If you dislike all candidates, you are perhaps ethically obliged to be the candidate yourself. One of a Canadian citizens major responsibilities is to exercise the privilege to vote. It is a foundation of democracy, one for which many principled men, and women, gave their lives over long centuries of slavery in many forms, and under conditions of backbreaking toil and grinding poverty. Only the dying or those on life-support have valid reasons for not voting on Monday Oct 19th. Anyone else can spare the few minutes taken up by dropping your ballot into a box never situated far away. If transport is a problem, every party HQ will be able to supply a driver or ten. Wasting a vote insults the tireless efforts of those who fought to create a true start for democracy. Aboriginals have the only plausible reasons for mistrusting a system responsible for atrocities of racism and determined to destroy their rich culture, reducing them to a sub-human status, violating treaties and disrespecting their traditional rights and lands. This is now changing dramatically, giving all First Nations a perfect opportunity to unite, demonstrate their power, and limitless potential in a future vastly different from any they have previously endured.On the 19th Oct, Idle No more will mean voting in unprecedented numbers, proving you are the only Old Stock on this continent, and recognize your primacy as spiritual fathers of Canada by revealing the force you can exert on any election with candidates of your own who will oblige Parliament to deal with all the grievances you rightly have, and all the lies told your people by those whose sole concern for the land was greed. Put the best man for you in Ottawa; he or she will ensure platform promises are kept. This vote is the most unpleasant of all electoral situations: one man, a Prime minister, so loathed for his deceit, corruption, scorn for the environment, and obscenely slavish attachment to big corporate business at the expense of our good society and its social and international values.  Vote with heart and purpose, but pick the right man because he or she is right, not because the current leader is wrong. Who would like to find this country branded Neo-Fascist in the excessive power handed to government? Sorry to say it, but we are in some nations now mistrusted for having a leader whose mode of communication is increasing the command; it used to be the sermon before addressing a majority government regarded as instruments of his will, not representatives of the voters who had no idea their vote would fill the House with lackeys, and pretend to to be serving a nation while really serving the oligarchs and plutocrats who own this shameful Prime Minister like an obedient poodle. Let no Canadian think his or her vote doesn’t count. It counts as much as if it were the only ballot cast. But never vote from hatred; it backfires, and will possibly lose your strongest supporter in Ottawa. Today, history itself depends on your vote, for a forked road offers no signposts. Your instinct and heart must act as guide.

Sincerely,

Paul William Roberts

Election Songs

Tags

Canada, election, harper, john lennon, justin trudeau, leonard cohen, politics, songs

Song with Apologies to Leonard Cohen

 

Everybody knows Harper’s sinking,

Everybody knows his truth is lies,

In his eyes there’s that awful feeling,

No one will mourn him when he dies.

Everybody knows defeat will kill him,

Everybody knows he scorned the House;

Where he was never asked the question if his tactics came from Leo Strauss.

But the neo-Fascist shows,

And everybody knows.

Everybody knows the man’s a racist,

Everybody knows he’s a corporate slave,

And the rich are who his base is;

The rest of us his knaves.

That’s how Harper’s vision goes, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows he’s bribing voters,

Everybody knows that greed works best;

Everybody knows he needs the floaters, but would exterminate the rest.

The Fascist shows, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows he rigs elections,

Everybody knows that to win’s his real goal,

But he cannot abide defections,

Over ethics or burning coal. They wreck his phony pose, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows he’s the one Prime Minister called ‘un-Canadian’ and even ‘sinister’;

No one cares where the hell he goes, but he’s gone, and everybody knows;

He’s now the stateless terrorist he dreamt up, the man in those media shows;

He caused the fear that crept up, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows the war is raging; everybody knows Mr. Harper’s fate is toast,

And nothing’s there to save him, not even the Holy Ghost;

It’s by fiction the cash pile grows,

And everybody knows.

Everybody knows he won’t play fair;

Everybody knows his dirty tricks;

Everybody knows that Justin Trudeau will be the one a voter picks.

That’s what honest polls show, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows his power is waning, everybody knows his platform’s fake;

Everybody knows his budget’s draining social programs into a filthy Tory lake.

That’s how corruption goes, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows he’d kill the planet, if his masters made a buck or two.

Everybody knows the way to end them is just a vote by me and you.

That’s what history shows, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows his business plan was just a one-trick sham;

The eggs were in a basket, without bread or even ham;

As a glance at The Dow Jones shows, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows the rich are richer, and we know where the money went;

Everybody knows the Middle Class is dwindling, the savings all now spent;

Everybody knows the banks are thriving, Thanks to Harper’s sly conniving, since that’s where our money goes, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows where the numbers never cease to grow, and no one can ever reap what they sow, as bank reports show, and everybody knows.

Spied upon, unfree, and over-taxed,

Poor even if we break our backs;

Such is the way our nation goes, and everybody knows.

Everybody thinks a vote for Harper is sure to make them rich,

As if cloth of gold could be fashioned by one single little stitch.

The deceiver in him shows, and everybody knows.

Everybody knows he sang Imagine, John Lennon’s utopian song,

Everybody knows this was pure cynicism, an almost sacrilegious wrong.

Everybody knows he can’t imagine, everybody knows his soul’s long gone; and inside is an empty feeling, a dull resounding gong, like the darkness he’s imposed; and everybody knows.

Everybody knows we’ll have that piano; everybody knows the song we’ll sing, with Yoko’s kind permission, as the bells of all faiths ring;

Everybody knows we’ll show compassion, as hard as it might be, and everybody knows we’ll sing Imagine, and what the words will be: as for the pose: everybody knows….

 

( Sudden change of tune, with thanks and love to Lennon)

 

Imagine there’s no Harper, it’s easy if you vote,

No tyrant’s vile agenda, an economy still afloat;

Imagine all Canadians living once again in peace,

No egotistic leader wishing wars will never cease.

Imagine wealth is shared, no poverty or crime; fair treatment for First Nations, and a mandate to be kind.

Imagine equality and decency accorded every race; and all who seek asylum with a smile on every face.

You can’t say that I’m a dreamer because most of us agree sending Harper off to nowhere will set this nation free.

Imagine there’s a vote card clasped in your hand, and that your vote would make life better for all living in this land;

Imagine you don’t use it, and have to live with that, live with a representative lazier than your very lazy cat;

Imagine that those not voting lose many other rights, returning what was fought for back to a medieval night, when the barons owned everything, including all your rights.

Imagine there’s no government to help you, would you want that vote again? Imagine you had broken something no one now can mend: a wasted vote is guilty of summoning such an End.

For Harper is a schemer, and he’s not the only one;

I hope that you will join us, for the worshippers of Mammon are already on the run.

Imagine there’s no Harper, you won’t need to imagine long; for the vote will go to Justin, then you’ll wish you’d helped him on.

Imagine trust and hope in Ottawa, it’s no easy thing to do, which is why the end of Harper is eight years overdue.

 

(Suggestion for Harper’s Farewell Song)

 

It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to, cry if I want to;

You would cry too if your party dumped you…

++++++++++++++++++

Remember, your vote not only counts but is your responsibility to use, not for any party, but for the person you feel cares and will do his or her utmost for your area when in Ottawa. If a candidate has not visited your house or home in person, it is a good sign that they care little about your needs and will do even less about lobbying for them. Think about the qualities of an individual, not the vain promises of party leaders, which will become increasingly desperate and fictional over the next two weeks. This is not the USA: we elect representatives not leaders. Think carefully about the representatives you know, and vote for the best one, regardless of his or her party. This is a system that has proven its worth over many centuries. Cherish your good fortune to have such a fine system and the glorious land smart enough to avoid adopting the unworkable chaos of Washington.

 

As always with love,

 

Paul William Roberts

Poem 5 and the Thing With Feathers

Tags

blindness, poetry, spirituality

In the mirror this old man sees

Nothing.

Where once his face would be

Looking back at its own changes

Is now a blurred grey emptiness,

Framed by distorted familiarities:

Frosted hair; glimpses of a Monet world.

That which sees can now never see itself;

The eye of ‘I’ has closed its windows,

The blinds permanently drawn,

Perpetually blind.

Those screens upon which ten-thousand things

Were once reflected, before transmission

Along the optic cable into that coiled chamber

Where I translated a sense into forms, the forms wherein I dwelt –

Those screens now hide behind a tattered curtain,

Behind shattered slats.

Yet each sense must go before this vehicle is ready to be devoured, just as it has spent its brief decades devouring nature in numberless forms.

Yes, they must all go.

Only in the stillness

Can I know where I will be

When there is no thing, no one

To feel; only silence to hear;

No means or object of tasting;

But perhaps an unearthly fragrance, a perfume which pervades and envelopes, nurtures, and supports rather than being smelt?

Perhaps.

Perhaps – because Mysterium  Magnum has not eluded ten thousand tongues and scrolls

And years

For nothing any man or beast can label under the

Illusion that objects names explain.

Names are flash-cards glued to stuff for the child or adult learning the trick of language.

As the mind dodders towards decay,

More and more is labelled ‘the thing that…’

It always was.

The labels taught us little about what they named.

There is a Hadron Collider in Cerne which has recently confirmed the existence of Higgs’ Boson, an energy particle so irreducible that some are equating it with God.

I state this series of labels to demonstrate that not one reader will really know what these words mean.

The Vatican owns two major astronomical observatories.

Cardinals and popes are very much more interested in the universe than they are in the poor and wretched.

Why not?

The poor are always with us, yet the universe may not be.

What does the Vatican seek out there in that glittering eternal vastness?

God? Alien life forms ripe for conversion to their archaic version of totalitarian tyranny?

There are no gods,

Because all existence is Divine.

Galaxies we view as they were a trillion trillion years ago:

Divine, holy.

The cicada singing its whirring chant in the dust – and the dust itself:

Divine, sacred. All.

Creator and Creation are one and indivisible, as every saint and sage has been telling us for countless millennia.

Only our senses persuade us otherwise,

And Death, of course, will be the final proof.

Why die without knowing, though?

Stillness and silence alone offer the experience of this blissfully eternal Unity.

I know my name.

Yet who is this knowing ‘I’?

Thoughts and memories, hopes and fears?

Are the thoughts me?

Watch them, but do not follow.

I discover they have no connection to the ‘I’ which adopts them.

They are generated by the unstill mind, through association, memory, desire, yet I do not generate them.

In the quiet mind only consciousness exists.

We exist, and are conscious of this fact. It is indeed all we truly know.

Pass the terror of an utter loneliness, and what awaits is pure bliss, the raindrop realizing it is the infinite ocean into which it fell.

When ripples cease, the little pond becomes a mirror reflecting, and no different from, the starry night up at which it now gazes, or which gazes down.

Stillness, silence: these are the answers that so many seek, and why ‘the Kingdom of Heaven lies spread out upon the earth, yet men see it not’.