One Morning I Woke Up and I Just Wasn't As Mad Anymore . . .

I’m going to disappoint a few of the people who like to read my blog for its sometime (of late,

Initially these oranges were on the right side of your page, but that felt wrong. 

frequent) political commentary. People looking for my response to the result from Alberta’s provincial election on May 5. This anticipation is borne from—and I won’t apologize for this—my known utter disdain for the incumbent party and its (then) new premier, their disastrous and uninventive proposed budget, their cronyism, their corruption, their contempt for the average Albertan. Perhaps the anticipated result would be me exploding in a rave of pro-Notley huzzahs to balance a month of anti-PC rants.

                I didn’t do that, and I won’t.

                The reason is this: I am not and never have been a pure ideologue. I feel supporting a single party every election is the worst kind of democratic sin—that is, after taking no part at all. I am not partisan. I simply vote for the candidate in a given election who I feel best represents my own values. Traditionally, those values have been found in the parties on left, but not exclusively and not because they are the parties on the left.

                I suppose it sounds dubious considering how emphatically I was bashing all things Prentice to say I’m not partisan, and there’s no doubt I was elated that the NDP was elected. I hate that that elation came from negativity because though I support the majority of NDP policies, this was just secondary. I felt the Prentice PC policies—that budget as the iceberg’s tip—were so destructive for our province, and the Wild Rose more of the same only worse that near anything would have been better. I’m cautiously optimistic about Rachel Notley as premier in that she can in four years undo some of the damage the PCs of late have done and were determined to do. I’m hopeful.

                But that’s really all I have to say about our new NDP government. For the remainder I wish to tell you a story.

                When I woke up on the morning of May 6, I didn’t know what to feel. I have lived in this province for twelve years, and I had resented its ideological and political values for at least a decade longer than that.

                For as long as I have lived here I’ve been embarrassed about one thing: how Albertans vote. That in keeping this party in power so long, especially since 1993, Albertans were telling the rest of the country and the world that we valued oil over the environment, money over services, that we cared not a whit about the needs of our fellow man. Poor people are poor because they’re lazy. A place of maddening contradictions, where the south is rife with religious extremism that preaches loving your brother and yet politically supports the two(!) parties on the right whose mantras are “Mine, mine, mine.”

                I didn’t know what to feel on May 6. I had suddenly awakened to a world gone surprisingly sane. Alberta was making sense. The joke was so old I didn’t know why it was funny anymore, and then suddenly it was gone. Poof. No joke. A party that wanted to cut services to the public, insulate private interests, and tell Albertans what they think had gone to those Albertans with a contemptuous request: "More."

                And Albertans said no.

                Like a high school rebel always bristling against conformity, always challenging any authority, I’d grown so used to being angry at the power at the top that I was unprepared for a time when I agreed with the majority, when I accepted the decisions of the leadership.

                I’d like to say that a weight was lifted, but really it was confusion. When you’re mad at something for so long, when it’s gone you feel a void.

                I found myself wondering what the Rebels did after the Death Star was gone, after Darth Vader and the Emperor were dead. When your energy is so focussed for so long against something, where do you turn it afterward?

                I’ll admit that it’s a nice problem to have, once the initial surrealism has passed. For almost a month I have found myself realizing that it was not all a dream, that we’ve come to our senses. I’m no longer proud with a catch of living in Alberta. My every day is not approached with irony.

                I know it’s going to be a long four years, and the new leadership walks a razor’s edge to not do too much and yet still do enough, to not just see the province fall back to the right in 2019. The critics already have their knives out, attacking everything they can set their focus on. For once and for now I am not on the side of these critics, and I find myself going, “Wow, so THAT’S what this feels like.”

                For now it’s a question of how it will work. There are doubts, but mostly they are outweighed by hope, by faith rewarded. By belief in rational, logical things happening in the one place no Canadian ever thought was rational or logical. Today we have hope.

                And now for Harper.