When the public health officer is advising people to breathe deeply, meditate & bake cookies in response to the ongoing pandemic which they took premature victory laps about last year, and the chief coroner is pleading for all three levels of government to do something about the toxic drug supply and prohibitive conditions that are killing around two hundred BCers a month with no end in sight while the feds and Nihilist Democrats dither and fuddle over unneeded further studies, you know things are in a bad place. 

Wouldnʼt it be nice if Horgsyʼs Anti-Heroes took some level of accountability for anything that goes wrong in their domains? Farny struts about fascist-style like a man who knows he has his privileged job forever somehow due to some shady yet guessable back-door deals and complicit old-boy scams that heʼs worked out for himself and his fellow harmful “Safety” ministers like Bilbo Blair. Youʼve got floods, food shortages, food-bank lineups, toxic drug supplies, Indigenous conflicts caused by imperial governance, labour shortages, rising inflation, shrinkflation, boiled-water advisories, contaminated wells, inadequate dykes, destroyed highways, burnt towns, “essential” rail-lines and pipelines that are extremely vulnerable to climate extremism, “new normal” wildfires & deathly smoke forecasts for months, etc.! Does that sound like a fun place to live, especially when the governments in charge paid by us the citizens to protect us are obnoxiously insistent that everyone and everything is responsible for the myriad disasters under their noses but them? Thereʼs always someone else to blame when itʼs bad, right, Trudy? 

We have rogue paramilitary forces operating on stolen native land, yet the federal Anti-Indigenous Minister and Unsafe Minister Farny canʼt even agree if they or anyone else has control over the Mountiesʼ overarmed toxic masculinities. Again, our deputy premier of criminalized corruption disagrees with our former federal health minister (who failed the covid test of a lifetime.) about who holds the leash on their pitbull cops other than the fascistic circle-jerks themselves. And if the hellhounds are running the show without strings or puppet-masters at a national level, does that mean Queenyʼs the only one between us and whatever the police state wants to do to us that day? If so, thatʼs super scary, cuz Tin Lizzyʼs got enough going on right now for a 96 year-old widow who shouldnʼt have to worry about how her overly hot fuzz are treating the commonwealth Indigenous people her Crown has sworn to serve and protect. 

Closer to home in this desolate land of bleak headlines, one out of five people are considered to be unemployed in the CoN according to their latest reports, and this shameful above-averageness just accounts for those who are still looking for a job versus those who gave up long ago due to the paucity of properly safe and sustainable jobs here, unless you want to be involved in tech or booze-related industries. At present and for the indefinite future, you canʼt get to these inland backwaters from BCʼs coastal metropolis unless you have an “essential” reason to travel here, so how is anything going to get better for our poor residents in food lineups and drawn-out debt, let alone the devastated tourist and event fields or the beleaguered live arts community? You canʼt even fly here affordably or reliably, and you canʼt catch a train to anywhere from Railtown, so how is our tourist-trap going to survive off the limited pandemic and flood-related traffic that weʼll maybe get from Greater Alberta and the Disunited States for an unknown number of weeks over the holidays while everyone deemed “non-essential” by the authorities is banished? 

If you pay attention to our local headlines and the resident ostrich population, youʼd think there was nothing going on in the world other than sports stories, feel-good insular fundraisers & debates over which stolen lands are logged and which are set aside for fossil-fuel dependent recreation by colonists who pretend to be social-justice warriors. The world is falling down around us even for the white dudes in the construction industry who the politicos pretend to love despite being seemingly fine with thousands of their tragic drug overdose deaths; but if you live in the CoN, youʼd think everything is just “awesome” based on how most everyone in the privileged mainstream cluelessly goes about their sycophantic hypocritical business. Our mayor, council & MLA have gone AWOL on all the big issues, as they focus like King Trudyʼs foolish court on a distant future of doubtfully reduced emissions, when the climate monster is already snarling in our backyard and tearing out the foundations! 

#forstmedia #goldenheron #opinion #pandemic #politics