“Share the anxiety,” I always say. Whatever one is anxious about, it often feels better to talk to people you know. Just talking helps put a different perspective on your worries, just the act of sharing can make one reconsider whether things are really going to be that bad. So I’m doing that, I’m sharing my anxiety about the upcoming election. But I’m not referring to the BC election, nor the upcoming Federal election that we all know is coming next year. No, I’m not anxious about the state of democracy in Canada, (yet)…
What keeps me up at night is the fact that the most powerful nation in the world is no longer a stable democracy and this coming November could set the scene for even more political chaos. I have faith in Canadian politics. I’ll be OK if my party doesn’t win. But I have lost faith in American politics. When a person who is an amoral compulsive liar and a psychopath is one major party’s Presidential candidate, and he has, according to the polls, a fifty fifty chance of winning in November, it scares the living daylights out of me. Here’s a guy who every day sounds more and more like Adolf Hitler, and fifty percent of America is OK with it. We’ve seen enough of Trump from his first presidency to know he won’t be any friend of Canada’s. And this time he’s running on a campaign of retribution against his enemies and starting a trade war with the rest of the world. He says he wants to be a dictator on day one, and that, “one really violent day”, where the police could do whatever they want, would be just the thing. This year, the U.S. Supreme Court granted him virtual immunity if he so happens to get elected again. What could possibly go wrong? It seems to me that the entire world is on a knife’s edge, that things could be OK, or they could go terribly wrong, depending on who gets elected in this very close American election. It is not a pleasant thought. And so I share my anxiety.
