If you feel like you’re being hosed. You are. We’re in an era of non-confidence and nobody wants to own it because the exclamation lacks personal power. You hate ceding your power and I don’t blame you.  Ideally, you pick your choice worthy battles. You fight them thereby appeasing your conscience while incidentally assuming that bigger fights with more moving parts will be handled effectively by those in higher power structures. Here’s the thing…..the credibility of those higher power structures has been eroded. The affect is not necessarily apparent on the surface but once you get behind the doors of a broke household or board room…..the scene may look more vivid.

Whether it be a deceitful president of the United States, a government authority overstepping its jurisdiction, a tepid minded Prime Minister, protesters impeding commercial activity, a police department being indifferent, a legal system operating atrociously slow, a tax system redistributing wealth, or an electoral system exercising regional disparity, people in my opinion are feeling more powerless now than in the past. This is my sense. What are the implications of this? Not much happens in the beginning. Fringe movements rise up and energies fade. It’s not until groups in large numbers feeling similarly aggrieved amass that any traction takes hold.

Insular leaders living in a vacuum clueless of what’s being discussed at the supper table is a phenomenon of the day. The election of Donald Trump should not have been a surprise for elitist liberals but indeed this pompous bunch had their worst nightmare come true. The wide swath of political blue painted across the map of the Canadian prairies in 2019 should not have come as a surprise. Elitists again were caught off guard. 

People expect competent leadership with commercial interest playing a vital part in decision making. People expect merit based pay. People expect entrepreneurial risk to be rewarded. People expect their tax dollars to be spent wisely. People expect the responsible development of resources within environmental guidelines along with the permitting process to be reasonable. These are not difficult concepts but the intransigence at every turn by figures of authority mixed with a political landscape of deceit and unreasonable demands by First Nations people are more than just getting on the nerves of ambitious Canadians.