Hope on Canada Day

     It's become a habit of mine to write a sort of state of the union composition on our country's birthday. I
may not always post them on this blog, but July 1 has become a day for me to assess and look outward across our country and culture.
     That sounds grand, but it's not intended to be. Really, this is just a blog about wanting to be hopeful.
     Last year I was still haunted by visions of rushing water, of streets turned to brown sludge riverways, of military trucks screaming down the QE2, embarking on the most un-winnable of battles, of that now infamous shot of a mud-splattered red Canada hat. Last year in Southern Alberta, Canada Day was about clean up. That evening, as we always do--and will again tonight--my band took the stage before the local fireworks. I introduced a Big Sugar tune and thought the words "All Hell for a Basement" had a bit different meaning that day in this song Gordie Johnson wrote about Alberta.
     Today, I'm thinking about hope. And its loss, or at least its weakening in Canada today.
     For some reason, after a drink or two the other night I got thumbing through YouTube music videos from my youth. Deeply down the rabbit hole, I let fly the Scorpions' "Wind of Change," that hair-rock power ballad from the tail end of the hair-rock era, that whistle-solo piece of schlock that was one of the go-to closers of high school dances (along with Extreme's "More Than Words," of course).
     I was moved with the cheeseiness of the song, its over-dramatic nature juxtaposed against eighties rockers in their greasy finery, with far away eyes and slowly swaying hips. But it'd been twenty years at least since I'd seen the video, and I'd forgotten the images of the fall of the Wall, of the toppling of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. For those of us alive then, there was this overwhelming sense that we were going somewhere right, that the world may actually be getting some peace. Growing up as a kid in the tail-end of the Cold War, some of its most volatile years thanks to the idiocy of the Western Powers and their Cowboy Actors and Bassy Irishmen and Iron Ladies, I and most kids my age had lived in an unannounced fear most of our childhood. Nuclear war seemed an unreal specter, but it was a specter that was there. It could happen, we believed that we believed.
     Then, at the turn of the 90s there was a feeling that we'd finally lifted the weight that started back in 1914, that a century of war and strife and human depravity had finally been shaken off. That finally, we were moving towards peace.
     You'll forgive my optimism. I was twelve when the Wall fell in Berlin, and my own innocence parallels nicely with the dawning of what the nostalgist in me wants to see as the best ten years because they were a pretty good ten years for me. I would be ignorant to ignore the strife in Bosnia, Kosovo, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Rwandan genocide, Oka, Oklahoma City. I have not forgotten.
     And yet, there was still hope. This summer, as I watch the sun rise over this Dinosaur Valley I call home every July, I'm thinking about what's on our minds as a nation and as a world. There are flood clean-ups in Southern Alberta again; granted, on a much smaller scale, but tell that to anyone who has lost their house. My home province of Saskatchewan has a dozen communities under severe flood threat. Ontario's been suffering tornadoes.
     This summer marks one hundred years since the great celebrations and mass enlistments as Canadians prepared to proudly and patriotically--as Britons--embark on the greatest stupidity the world had yet seen in the trenches of France and Belgium. One hundred years. One hundred years of those battles over the next few years, of Ypres, the Somme, of course Vimy, of a nation we were told was forged in those trenches--war doesn't make nations, not ever--and then of victory. Of the folly, the idiocy of 1919, and how it acted as a guarantor of the coming strife that has not shown a single year of pause since the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.
     The news has been thick with fear of Putin's Russia, and twenty years of convincing ourselves that so much has changed from the fall of the Soviet Union has proved mostly a lie. Our own boob prime minister postures and puffs against the Russian bear, while raising his fists out our cultural and legal institutions, and pushing for pipelines across Treaty Land. 2014 is the year that Harper finally and truly rang the death knell of the CBC, a Canadian institution I value like no other for its public interests, and for its import as OURS. When the dust settles, when the damage of this past decade of Conservative depravity has been assessed, that is one victim I hope we morn the loudest, for it was one of the most significant things that made us what we are.
     The past fifteen years have been hard. We've grown cynical. We see a world full of the next awful thing and the hope we felt at the end of the last century--even as ignorant a hope t it was--has long washed away. We find it easier to stomp quickly and heavily on the thoughts and opinions of others, as the speed we can respond to each other and the digital safety--a brand new Wall--allow us to sometimes be truly awful to each other.
     I'm never one to be given over to "the world is getting worse" thinking--tell that to anyone in a trench nintey-nine years ago--but I do wonder where are hope has gone.
     I'm not sure what Canada Day stands for, really. After the pancakes and fireworks and flags, what are we celebrating? Our history? Our culture? How we are feeling right now? Above I've listed how all of those can be dubious sources of pride.
     But--and this is the father in me talking--I think it's an important day for hope. In a province and a country and a world where sober cynicism is often touted as a mature reality, I think there's more than a little room for some hair straight back hope. From hope, we can stand and look at the awful in the world and work better against it, because we can see another side where the problems are solved. I would much rather count myself there, than amongst those who shrug their shoulders and tell the rest of us that that's how it is and we're immature not to accept it.
    Happy and hopeful Canada Day.

Your Childhood Is a Lie

Your childhood was nothing like you say.

                You see it on the social media updates, memes posted here and there, opinion pieces in the news. At times it gets heavy enough that it’s given features in credible news magazines, time on radio or television, bloated, stat-heavy reports. Jokes, commentaries, studies. Attacks, basically—because they’re rarely disguised as anything else—on these gat dam KIDS these days.

                Yes. Kids. Those spoiled, egocentric, entitled, obese, lazy, sheltered, narcissistic, shallow kids. Oh, and their phones.

                You can’t thumb through any news feed without seeing something ridiculing them, their values, their parents, their music (okay, sometimes that’s gotta be said), or their world. Their world.

                At some point in the past ten years we appear to have reached an agreement to say that Millenials are the very worst generation and everyone just sort of accepted it. Even them.

How could they not?

They were hearing about our childhoods. So simple. So pure. So hardworking and outdoorsy and satisfied with what we earned—nothing was given—so full of respect for durn near everyone. A time of values and motivations, goodness and manners.

Utter bullshit.

When I was a kid, I was pretty sure that my parents and grandparents were making their childhood suffering sound worse, their innocence sound purer, and their appreciation of everything greater. I know that we are doing the same. We are lying to them and to ourselves, and for once both are believing it.

Did we drink from garden hoses? Sure. Play outside? Lots. Have a single rotary phone and a party line? Damn straight.

But weren’t we also told that our feelings mattered and that we were each of us special? Wasn’t there winter eight months of the year? Did every household not have a Nintendo? Would we not have been all over smart phones had they been offered to us in Dukes of Hazard cases?

(And anyone who’s telling you smart phones are a Millennial problem has never attended a staff meeting or dinner party in a decade. No one pays attention to anyone else, not just them dag-blamed kids.)

Our hypocrisy is paper thin. We claim to have spent twelve hours a day outside unsupervised in a country where winter lasts until May, and yet we also managed to watch Goonies and Ghostbusters  eighty times each, as well as enough Transformers, He-Man, and G.I.Joe to choke a cat. We finished Mario Bros 1-3, a couple of Zeldas, and we managed to have every tape transitioning from hair metal to grunge.

We’re full of it. It’s a fantasy. And we expect kids to buy it because we’re buying it ourselves.

It’s gotta make you feel for kids these days. They are being told that they’ve inherited a dystopia that they're pretty much responsible for ruining. And yet, somehow, they also don’t appreciate it. They hear our lies of a gentler, nicer era (during the Cold War where our grandparents had once beaten up the town's one Chinese kid and parents disowned their pregnant daughters) and I guess they must think when they live extra especially sucks. Based on what they’re told.

Fact is, there were stupid and spoiled and selfish people when we were kids. And when our grandparents were.

This world we’re describing to them never happened. I don’t know if it’s built on resentment or  it’s built on self-delusion, but it’s balderdash and that’s that.

There are always going to be kids these days.   

We Went to Greece

Dedicated to the all those intrepid riders of the Sonstebus.

 

Athens. Pleasant surprise.

                We went to Greece. Me, m’wife, m’mom, and over 130 of our closest friends. Packed days, waking up at hours that most of us have never seen from the backside, funny food, ill-advised throwing star purchases, and food, food, food.

                Here, then, is Greece as seen through the journal I took so much good-natured abuse for. I will continue to attest that it’s stickers and word-smithing, not scrap-booking.

The notorious journal. 

                Reading someone write about a trip is about as painful as the one-time practice of holiday slide shows, so I’m simply going to break each day down into the best part and worst part and let you go from there.

Saturday, April 19^th

Easter in Glyfada.

J            Watching a midnight Greek Orthodox Mass ringing in Easter in Athens is special, and a lot more exciting than I remember Catholic masses being. Must’ve been the fireworks and kissing. . .

L            Jet lag sucks, but when you go travelling in Europe, do stuff! Sleep is for planes, buses, and home.

Sunday, 20^th April (Easter and m’wife’s birthday)

J            Athens is a much nicer and cleaner city than I had been led to believe. It’s a lovely place to explore on foot, especially on a 20+ April day, and extra-especially when you know it’s snowing in Calgary.

L            A 45-minute train ride with 130 people plus locals is an awful experience in a country where 20 degrees is cold and thus the heat is on.

Monday, 21^st April

J            If you’re going to tour Greece, see the islands. Cruise ships are decent and the Louis Olympia was dated but respectable. Mykonos has the best sea food on the Mediterranean.

L            Mykonos is also a labyrinth. Leave yourself lots of time to get back to your tender boat. Especially at night. Extra-especially when your wife falls in love with every second shop on the way back.

Tuesday, 22^nd April

J            A taste test of Turkey reveals that its culture is mostly parallel to Greece’s, just like it’s history.

Turkish apple tea. High-pressure rug sales. 

More lush than you’d think, but that wonderful culture is superseded by Roman, Greek, and Christian sites drawing most tourists. Ephesus is impressive. Apple tea is good.

L            Why is it every time I’m in an Islamic country I get caught in a high-pressure rug store?

Wednesday, 23^rd April

J            Rhodes is my personal favourite island. The Acropolis in lovely Lindos, the Old (Medieval) Town of Rhodes itself. It is a destination all on its own, and they drink beer out of three litre glass boots. My kinda place. Also, wine tastings are served in full glasses. Be warned.

L            There will always be people who choose beaches over culture, shopping over conversation.

Thursday, 24^th April

J            Santorini is all it’s billed to be. Gorgeous blue and white buildings hanging off of the side of a mountain. It’s what you’ve always imagined Greece to be.

L            The Island of Crete proved the greatest let-down of the trip. Knossos is interesting, but an ill-advised reconstruction of King Minos’ palace leaves the experience far lesser than most of the rest of Greece’s ancient sites.

Friday, 25^th April

J            Even if you find 2000 other tourists there, including those loud-mouthed-pointing-out-the-obvious American groups that seem to show up everywhere, at Delphi you will find beauty and you will find peace. I

The Delphiselfie.

guarantee it.

L            No matter what you tell some people, they still only see rocks and trees. Also, sea legs are much harder to lose than to gain.

Saturday, 26^th April

J            The Acropolis of Athens is crowded, hot, in rough shape, and a hike up. It’s also one of the most worthwhile postcards you can visit. I picked a poppy off the ground and put it in my journal.

L            The coastline drive to Sounio is worth it, but too many will stop at busy beaches before reaching the point where Aegeaus threw himself into the sea he would give his name to when Theseus mistakenly flew the wrong sails.

Sunday, 27^th April

J            Windsor is a heckuva place to spend a layover.

L            I have crossed the Atlantic ten times and the Pacific four, and I still haven’t got a fool-proof cure for jet lag. 

The Acropolis by night. 

Doing Good Well

Any good statement comes with an implied grammar lesson.

When doing anything on Facebook, you can be sure that you’re doing it wrong. If you spend even a paltry amount of time on the biggest re-definer of social interaction since the Internet, you’ll have categorized all of the people you know in your news feed based on their approach to using Facebook. Fact: you’ve probably shared an article or meme that breaks the people down and tags everyone into their Facebook stereotype.

                Everyone uses it for something, and no matter what, that use is going to be perceived as the wrong way to use Facebook by someone else. Another fact: someone is always willing to tell you you’re not supposed to use Facebook for something you can use it for. Confusing, I know.

                Let me ask you something: how often does using Facebook actually make you feel good? Have you ever temporarily quit using it (and announced on it that you were doing so)? Have you made a Lent-like vow to use it less? Do you set yourself limits? Are you glad your work blocks it? Have you changed your behaviour as a result of your interaction with others on it?

                Final fact: most of us use Facebook. I’m not about to quit, because, despite my personal pet peeves (people who announce their every behaviour all day long, people who believe idiotic conspiracies because they’ve been re-posted, people who confuse their homonyms), I still find it’s an excellent way to trade information, keep in touch with people, and, yes, to be entertained.

                Although those cheesy inspirational memes annoy me too, I do appreciate where they’re coming from, because I appreciate when people are attempting good. What I can’t get over is how quickly any attempt at doing good is ridiculed, criticized, or “well actually”-ed by folks who always find it easier to sit and do nothing but criticize rather than attempt to make life any better.

                You may have heard of the 100 Day Happiness Challenge.           http://www.rappler.com/technology/features/50182-viral-happy-days-challenge

                I heard about it on the radio and thought, “Sort of sounds interesting. I like challenges and discussing them with people.”

I got home and looked it up and, yes, there were a couple of articles online about it, but these were far outnumbered by those criticizing it.

If you fail the challenge you’ll be even more depressed. Forced highs guarantee colossal lows, study shows.

Let me get this straight: people were attempting to find reasons to rosy up their days a little, to not let themselves get caught in the muck of day to day, and it’s out and out attacked? Does no one see the irony in the unhappy challenging the happy’s right to be so?

Like all things you have to choose what side you’re on, but what I couldn’t believe was how quickly the trenches were dug and the salvos fired off. People are willing to hate so hard and believe anything so quickly.

I always marvel at the comments sections of online articles; most of the time I think they should be disabled because they simply support our keyboard judgements of one another. Lord help you if you’re ever trying to say something good, because you’re guaranteed to be called out immediately for your short-sightedness, your naiveté, by the so-called realists out there.

Let it get to you and it’s enough to make a person not want to be good anymore. But as the saying goes, it’s easier to criticize than create.

So do I have a solution? Well, not exactly, but I have a suggestion.

Don’t be stupid. 
If you want to do good—and you had better—than you can’t just blindly cast your deeds out to the wind and say “That’s just what I think” and cross your digital arms and pout your digital lips. Doing good requires just as much smarts as being a realistic cynic. More, because it's harder. Do your legwork, the risk is greater, because good things are harder to do than nothings.

Reposting a picture on Facebook to show that you support an end to world poverty doesn’t do a thing for world poverty. Liking a returned soldier does nothing but slightly improve your own sense of self-worth temporarily. If that’s what it takes, you need to do some work getting to know yourself anyway.

I’m sure you’re aware of the “no make-up selfie” challenge that went around the past couple of months. Women were supposed to post a shot of themselves first thing in the morning, no make-up, hair uncombed. Real. Their comments sections lit up at their “bravery” and their “natural beauty.” Aw, shucks, that’s awesome.

Very few were aware that this misaligned little game somehow grew from a campaign to raise cancer awareness. Like moustaches in November, what good is all this awareness actually doing us?

The game became louder than the cause, because no one was stopping to think, listen, read. Well, read this and then think:        

  http://daisyraphael.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/pretty-pictures-my-makeup-free-selfie-2/

Have you ever thought that doing good is so easily ridiculed, that it seems like the world is becoming a worse place because our attempts at bettering it are often so half-hearted? Like Hollywood’s ribbon campaigns or honking to show you support cause du jour, creating awareness of something does little.

If you want to put something out for the world to see, if you cringe at the thought of the potential commentary, take a long hard think before you do it, and decide whether the good you are doing is actually doing any good. 

Fictional Author Bios

         For the struggling artist, even after you see a few successes the most daunting task is not the creation or the editing, the painful process of submitting, the rejection, rejection, rejection. It's not choosing a font or a cover letter. It's that darn bio.
          Let me explain: most publishers or potential publishers want a concise little summation of your entire writing career that you compose for yourself in the third person. In the early days these sound hopeless and pathetic. "Jim Smith is a writer who really wants someone other than his mom to say so. He composes grocery lists in iambic pentameter and throws poems together while one the jon at work."
          As success comes, you have to be picky about what you put in, more specific. For one publisher you send them one set of details, for another you alter your choices to suit.
         So, I was thinking what it would be like for some very famous names, and how their bios would look if we were, y'know, honest.

Chuck Palahniuk wrote that movie you saw that you didn't realize was a book.

J.R.R. Tolkien is probably not to be blamed for how far it all went.

J.K. Rowling is actually deserving of how much she makes.

Alice Munro is that writer you read to get over feeling guilty about being Canadian.

James Joyce is pretty much just a name drop now.

Margaret Atwood is MARGARET EFFING ATWOOD!

Stephen King is hoping to die soon and finally get a little appreciation.

Ernest Hemingway is drunk.

William Shakespeare is hated for more reasons than Jesus, and just as undeservedly.

C.S. Lewis is really, really NOT an atheist any more. Really. Like he REALLY loves church and all.

Ayn Rand is who you would be if you went from starvation to buffet and had a thesaurus.

Leo Tolstoy is in desperate need of an editor.

Cormac McCarthy is in desperate need of a hug.

Margaret Laurence is not at risk of misinterpretation.

Geoffrey Chaucer is actually a really big fan of every job in society.

Frank Herbert is WAY smarter than you.

Mary Shelley is responsible for the "my eyes are up here" of literature, and wishes you'd see beyond it.

Yann Martel is still in Saskatoon.

Linden McIntyre knows what time the liquor stores close in Toronto.

Edward Rutherfurd is reading the encyclopaedia.

O. Henry is going to murder Alanis Morisette in a way that'll make you think.

Michael Ondaatje is cutting some of the plot.

Hunter S. Thompson is being liquefied and injected into Black Ops.

Edgar Allen Poe is not responsible for Stephanie Meyer.

Emily Dickinson is unaware that anyone's been reading her stuff.

Lynne Truss is reading this with a blue pen.

E.L. James is the reason you can watch football.

14 Things We Learned at Sochi 2014

     I'll admit I'm a Winter Olympics junky. Yes, as someone who is socially-conscious this makes me feel a

It was the ladies' show. 

little conflicted at times. There's a lot of money that goes into this extravagance, but eventually I always come around to thinking again that there are some things in this world worth celebrating. Pure, beautiful unity through competitive sport is one.
     As they begin the tear-down in the city by the sea, I ask myself, what are we taking from Sochi?

1. People talk about how Canada would have been nothing at these games without our Quebec athletes. Unity is stronger when Anglo-Canadians unabashedly embrace their Franco countrymen. But this undermines the strength of our team: the women. In the strictest sense, the winner gets the gold, and Canada's women won the most golds of any nation's females. This was really their games. Nice work, ladies.

2. My entire household is addicted to winter Olympic events. Snowboarding, skiing down or flatways, speed-skating, even curling! Nothing's mind-numbing when it's being done for Canada. Pardon the cheese, but it's true: we all take an interest.

3. When Canadians say "Olympics" we mean the winter version. The Summer Games truly have less and less meaning for our nation each year we get further from Montreal. We are a winter people, and these are our sports.

4. The Women's Hockey gold medal final deserves to be remembered as one of the greatest hockey games in our country's history. Along with Henderson in '72 and Crosby in 2010, Marie-Philip Poulin's name should be emblazoned on our minds as a sporting nation. It was one of the most purely exciting hockey games I've ever witnessed, and I throw that down without the "women's" adjective as a qualifier. (STOP THAT!) Just a great game.

5. I saw it and the men's semi-final  in a bar. I saw the men's gold on the couch with my family, nursing a Bailey's and coffee. No contest, just like the game.

6. Glenn Healy and Cassie Campbell-Pascal need to go into hiding for a few months. Way to turn an entire nation against you, loud-mouths, especially considering you were on the same broadcast team as Don Cherry.

7. The two best stories of these Olympics (for Canada) remain speed-skater Gilmore Junio giving up his spot to team mate Denny Morrison (who won silver), and Canadian ski team head coach Justin Wadsworth running to the course to supply Russian Anton Gafarov with a new ski so that the athlete could "finish with dignity." This is the Olympic Spirit in its ideal.

8. Speed-skating aside, Canada ruled the rinks with our hockey and curling double-double. Russia won overall. However, when it came to traditional outdoor winter sports (the stuff that really is the heart of the Winter Olympics), the games still belonged to the Norwegians, Germans, and Dutch. Nordic sports indeed.

9. There's waste, there's controversy, there's ridiculous security, there's Putin. Still, seeing the athletes mixed together at the closing ceremonies cheering each other on made me a little weepy.

10. Figure skating judges are still as crooked as an Alpine highway. I can't cheer for a sport that's so mired in corruption, sorry.

11. As a Canadian, I take too much sadistic joy in watching Americans lose. I try not to, but I can't help it. I really try. But watching Shaun White fumble his egotistical way to a nice juicy Also-Ran was just too good. (As a Canadian with Norwegian roots, it was also pretty damn sweet to beat the Swedes in hockey.)

12. After Vancouver, I really thought Finland was on the cusp of moving Women's Hockey from a two-team event. It hasn't materialized. European Women's Hockey really must start putting the work into making the sport viable, increasing their playing time, increasing their skill. Maybe the KHL needs to embrace women, because playing like girls might've done better for the Russians than playing like a bunch of prima donnas.

13. Putin may have successfully distracted from his country's anti-gay laws, but Ukraine still matched the Olympics for headlines. Much to Vlad's chagrin, I'm sure. Even with a monumental attention-grabber like the Olympics, the world was not ignoring the chaos in Ukraine (and Venezuela). Parade, meet rain.

14. South Korea is fourteen hours ahead. Poop.

Neil Young and the Tar Sands: Don't Be Stupid Enough Not to Listen

           

"Can you hear me now?"

    Let me put this in plain terms: I recycle. I reuse. I try to conserve water and energy in my house. I teach my children to be good stewards of the environment. I support unions. I deplore many to most aspects of capitalism. I am against the unchecked expansion of the Alberta tar sands. Hell, I use the term “tar sands” which is itself a political statement. I believe that Canada is going to be crushed post-growth and post-peak oil, and face one of the greatest economic crises in our history because of our short-sightedness after over-investing in a non-renewable pollutant, spending rather than saving.

                BUT. I also drive a three quarter ton diesel truck. I shower daily and I take a bath once in a while. I’ve had a coffee in a disposable cup this week. I’ve bought something at Wal-Mart in the past six months. There are a few products I insist on buying by name.

                I could explain away many of these (i.e. I walk to work rather than start my beast 90% of the time), but it won’t do any good because you’ve probably already made up your mind, haven’t you? If you stand on either side of the environmental discussion, on the Great Oil Debate, you’ve already painted me as too green or not green at all, and that’s that. You’ve found hypocrisy—real or perceived—and decided, and my hope that you’ll read the rest of this post with an open mind is, well, weak.

                “You can’t be an environmentalist unless your every behaviour is 100% dedicated at all times. If you take thirty seconds too long in the shower, every positive thing you have done this week is negated.”

                That’s our world. That’s the hyper-critical knee-jerk partisanship we’ve stooped to, where we judge each other freely, readily, ignorantly. We’ve become the stupidest smart society of all time.

                Neil Young.

                One of my musical heroes, but painted lately as Public Enemy #1 in Alberta (just ahead of David Suzuki and Justin Trudeau).

                One of the great frustrations I have with living in Western Canada is the view that oil is king, and that our precious petroleum-driven economy trumps all. You’re either with it or against it, and to criticize any aspect of the industry is to be called out as a hypocrite negating any valid argument you may have.

                That’s what Neil Young faced. Out here, when people get worked up over oil, they stop listening and they stop reasoning. They become partisan robots, goose-stepping to the beat played by Stephen Harper, Allison Redford, and Brad Wall.

                I encourage you to criticize Young’s proclamations, but you must do so rationally. You have to listen before forming a judgement. Albertans appear incapable of this.

               

                He said Fort McMurray looked like Hiroshima. Would I have done that? No, because I haven’t been to Hiroshima and I haven’t spent a lot of time in the tar sands. I wouldn’t lie to you.

                It was an extreme statement. It got attention. Sort of the point. He wanted to make some noise about the unchecked and irresponsible expansion of the Athabasca project and its dire effect on the Athabaskan Chipewayan. You weren’t listening to them. You listened to him when he dropped the Hiroshima bomb (pardon). Agree or disagree, you were paying attention now.

                Then folks started comparing him to Jenny McCarthy. Easy. She’s a twit who single-handedly (well, with a little of that Oprah oomph) started a wave of paranoia that saw reams of idiots failing to protect their children from diseases we’ve had beaten for a century. Neil is not a brainless playboy bunny with a pet cause. He’s been an environmentalist AND an activist AND a supporter of Native rights AND a royal shit-disturber for fifty years. Remember “Ohio”? “Cortez the Killer”? “Rockin’ in the Free World”? Do your homework. Read the damn lyrics. This is the man that Lynyrd Skynrd called out in their greatest hit. He’s immune to your criticism.

                They say he’s not telling the whole truth. Because he’s not putting the spin on it Big Oil is? I mean, have you seen their pro-tar sands commercials? They’re not exactly up front about tailings ponds and river pollution and water consumption, are they?

                Oh, and he has a tour bus and uses plastic: that makes him a hypocrite. You have to be a special kind of Tea Party Wild Rose nutbar to hear “Honour the Treaties” and understand it as “Stop Using Oil.” This is a man who has developed an electric car in the hopes of seeing it mass-produced. In our land of oil worship, whenever we question our dead dinosaur juice, we’re called out for our personal usage of petroleum products. Like because I use a product I can’t question how responsibly its produced? I don’t want milk taken from diseased cows. It’s okay to expect a little ethics from producers, is it not?

                Criticizing Neil Young’s extravagant delivery is fine, but it doesn’t mean you should be stupid enough to dismiss his whole argument. The fact is he’s right: Canada—Alberta especially—has an unhealthy dependence on oil and its revenues. Because the oil and natural gas sectors are booming and making many people rich, all the way into the tertiary industries, are we supposed to accept it with no question? That’s unreasonable. Even Hitler made the trains run on time.

                Yeah, I played the Hitler card. Are you paying attention now?

                Big Oil—the tar sand investors and corporations most of all—cannot go (and grow) unquestioned, uncriticized. It’s a democracy, we have the right to protest dumb moves, and our ever-precious economy shouldn’t cost us the future. Surely we can do better than this in preparing for post-growth, post-oil.

                It’s easier to criticize a “know nothing rock star” than to change. More convenient.

                Neil Young will be gone before the oil is, before the boom ends, before the belts tighten and we look at our empty sprawling suburbs, our immobile giant cars and trucks, our wasteland tar sands. He won’t have his chance to tell us that he told us so.

                Better to listen now than to be counted among the stupid who did nothing. 

http://www.thegreenmarketoracle.com/2013/09/neil-young-compares-canadas-tar-sands.html