Читать книгу How the Granola-Crunching, Tree-Hugging Thug Huggers Are Wrecking Our Country! - Lowell Ph.D. Green - Страница 4

My wife, who knows such things, says that according to the famed psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, I have now entered the age of wisdom. Which delights me since I was beginning to believe my increasing inability to deal with political correctness, bafflegab, and buffalo chips is due entirely to creaky knees and a declining golf game!

I’m not making any claims that my brain power is superior, or even that it matches that of the great minds which have run and continue to run things around here. No doubt many of them have spent far more time than I at what my grandfather used to call “book learning,” but according to Erikson that’s not necessarily wisdom. Wisdom, he says, is achieved in the final stage of human life, “the integrity phase,” and can best be described as the ability to utilize knowledge, experience, and common sense coupled with insight that is hopefully acquired after many years of keen observation.

I have certainly had many years of observation, some at least reasonably keen!

After my wife informed me of this wisdom thing, I got to thinking that there is probably no one in this country who has discussed, debated, and downright argued with as many people about as many important issues as I. Similarly, I doubt very much if there is anyone in the country who has paid as close attention to daily events and their ramifications for as long as I. Thus it is that I am not sure whether it is the wisdom of my advancing years or the practical knowledge acquired from spending almost 50 of them at a microphone talking to thousands of people that has convinced me we’re doing just about everything we can to screw up what used to be a perfectly good country.

Just to give you an idea of how long I’ve been at this talk-show business, and how much the nation’s mores have changed, when I started “The Greenline” in Ottawa in 1966 I could not use the word “pregnant” on air. Any reference to an impending birth had to be extremely circumspect—“in the family way” was the usually preferred description. “Blessed event” also received the censors’ seal of approval. I came close to spending a few nights in jail when in 1967 I allowed someone on the show to talk about birth control. Until Trudeau came along and told us government had no business in the bedrooms of the nation, it was illegal, and a very serious offence, to discuss any form of birth control in public.

We’ve come a long way, baby! Not all of it necessarily in the right direction!

Call it wisdom, call it common sense, call it what you like, but one of the things I see that has really begun to screw up the country is our amazing inability to learn from past mistakes.

There is an element in this country, for the most part on what I call the hard Left of the political spectrum, which simply cannot bring itself to admit that when a policy continually fails or even exacerbates the problem, it is time to change direction, try something new, learn from failure. In many instances, some of these people are so blinded by ideology that they do not recognize failure, or even disaster as such.

Later in this book, I will give you example after example of where policies which have clearly failed are continued for no other reason than those who promoted those policies have convinced themselves and much of the rest of the country that failure is really success! That disaster is really triumph! And in the process, many unwary Canadians have been persuaded to ignore the way the world really works in favour of a rose-coloured vision of how they would like it to work.

Much of our social policy as it applies to family values, crime, education, immigration, the environment, multiculturalism, health care, even bilingualism, is based not on reality but on a politically correct utopian dream.

If Erikson is right, if I have truly entered the age of wisdom and have a duty to try and share some of it, then I must have passed through its portals on a cold and rainy night in 1993 in Toronto when Helen called…