The only thing I'm sure of is that both things can be true
If you’ve had any amount of real conversation with me, you will have heard me say this: Both things can be true.
It’s a concept that I had to start wrapping my head around when I became a mother and the range of emotions and experiences was making my head spin. How was it possible that I could love my babies so much and want absolutely nothing to do with them in that moment? How could the role of mother be simultaneously so rewarding and so exhausting?
Eventually I had to embrace contradiction and settle in a place of uncertainty and murkiness, where both things were true. And once I accepted that, I became to embrace the contradictions and nuances all around me.
That good people can do bad things.
That bad people can do good things.
That people can be acting with the best of intentions and still do immense harm.
That something can be your responsibility, without being your fault.
(And taking responsibility means doing something about it.)
That all seems counter-intuitive — and surely the point of the truth is that there can only be one, right? That’s what evangelical christianity taught me, and that black-and-white this-or-that model has influenced so much of our culture, politics, and society as a whole.
There are a lot of problems that come with that line of thinking, partially because it’s just not how humans are wired. We are messy, we are imperfect, we are complicated. And, we come with this incredible capacity for growth and rallying together to create positive change.
But for that to happen, we have to move away from this binary, reductive way of thinking and open our minds to the possibility that while two ideas may seem contradictory, both things can be true. And instead of that being infuriating, it should be freeing. Because once we know what’s true, we can choose.
Let’s take my current favourite conversation: The Canadian Election.
The first truth here is that your vote matters.
People have literally given up their lives (and still do today!) so that we can exercise the democratic vote. “No taxation without representation” gave us the only chance we really have to level the playing field in a capitalist society; where the power of human numbers can speak louder than the power of corporate numbers.
We get one day every few years to call the shots, and our only chance to make that shot count is to work together. You know, the ocean is made of all the drops of water and stuff, and the power of a wave crashing into shore can decimate civilizations.
Our power comes from the collective, and we need be critical of and vigilant against attempts to divide and conquer.
And.
The second truth is that the results of this election don’t matter.
Not really — at least not in the way that people expect them to.
I know, I know. “But Justine, you implored me to vote!”
You’re right, I did! So hear me out.
The results of the election don’t really matter because the system is so fatally BROKEN.
We are attempting to patch holes in a rowboat that’s about to go over Niagara Falls.
The planet is on fire. The ivory towers of our economy are teetering precariously. Access to safe and affordable housing is abysmal. The average household debt continues to climb. And there are human beings WITHOUT CLEAN DRINKING WATER.
This isn’t because the resources don’t exist in Canada, but because they are distributed so horrifically.
(Note: If there is interest in this piece I will do more thorough research. But for now, I only have 30 minutes to write this thing and am going to keep this pretty general for the sake of getting my point across.)
Here are two images I nabbed from Wikipedia and The Toronto Star:
Last updated: November 20, 2014
From “Gap between rich and poor greater than most Canadians think” by Sara Mojtehedzadeh
To save you doing the math, in 2014 the top 15 richest families in Canada represented more than $110 billion.
Is it just me, or do words like billion, trillion, and quadrillion just seem like jokes. I can’t even take them seriously. It’s like hearing flibberty-gibbet or hooharami. Those aren’t real words.
I agree with Bernie Sanders when he says that billionaires should not exist.
It’s not fair that a select and powerful group control so much of what should be society’s shared resources; instead of supporting the majority, they’re hoarding.
Not cool, billionaires. Not cool.
A democracy should answer to the people it’s meant to serve, and resources should be taxed and redistributed so that we can provide social support.
We are social creatures, introverts included even though we are weird about it, and humans need each other. In healthy and boundaried ways.
While I’m not advocating for communism, I believe in a democrazy (that was a typo but I’m totally leaving it that way) that’s rooted in socialist principles. Because when we all contribute and work together, no one gets left behind. Everything that we need is here when the resources are managed appropriately — all that Garden of Eden stuff. (DOES THAT MAKE ANDREW SCHEER THE SNAKE?! WHERE DOES THE METAPHOR END?!)
The unfortunate reality is that our society doesn’t function like that because we’re human, flawed, and can’t help ourselves. Original sin anyone?
Greed and gluttony are two of the seven deadly sins for good reason, and capitalism has brought them to live in the form of a monster I fear we can no longer control. Not to go all dooms-day on you, but there are a lot of days that I find it hard to hang on to hope.
The world is on track to crash and burn, and grown-ass adults would rather berate a teenage girl than tackle the problem because they’ve been conditioned to believe that the beast that has been feeding them scraps is the only option that’s out there. And it is. Until it isn’t. (Frustrated with me yet?)
Thanks to the capitalist structure, our government is not set up to take care of its people first because it’s a business.
(And thanks to the white patriarchy, the lives it does take care of are first and foremost privileged ones. Myself included.)
Businesses need revenue (taxes) to pay for expenses (social services) but the values of people and profit are at serious odds and we can’t seem to reconcile the two. And the people who are benefiting from the scraps that are handed out are so afraid to lose what they’re getting, that they won’t even try to do things differently (cough O+G). That’s just not okay.
The obvious answer is to tax the rich.
That’s the plan of the NDP and the working class is hella behind it. But the most obvious answer is rarely easy to do — in this case it’s partially because the system is so entrenched that it feels impossible to escape without risking economic collapse.
The money comes here in the first place because we offered loopholes and havens. Housing. Corporate tax cuts. Big business payouts. It’s not fair to give the bully our lunch money but damnit they have so much power and they flex hard.
Because it you don’t cave to their demands (cough Trudeau and SNC Lavalin) they will threaten to pull out and then there go the jobs with them. I’ll be honest — I do not envy the positions JT or JWR were in. Without the jobs, there is no income. Without income, there are no taxes. Without taxes, there is no support for the structure. (You can see how the highest earners are given the loudest voice in this set-up.)
So. The bullionaires make their threats, and the politicians cave because it doesn’t feel like there’s much choice. The Money holds the Power.
And from the bottom up, we keep funnelling our resources; paying bills with credit, living paycheque to paycheque, and then banks continue to collect billions of dollars in penalties from people who don’t have any. It is literally just numbers changing on a screen, and it’s a system that penalizes the poor.
Holy hell. Feeling depressed yet? Join the millions of Canadians taking medication to help with that. #PointsForPharmacare
What does this have to do with your vote counting and being meaningless?
Critics of the NDP and Green platforms will be quick to point out that promises are great but where are the resources to pay for them? Because if you try to tax the rich in a way that is fair, they’ll pull the plug on our economy and then we’re really screwed. As a Twitter dude said, “I really wish there was a fiscally responsible, yet truly progressive party who understood business. It doesn’t seem that hard of an ask to me!”
But it is. Because in the capitalist world, profit > people. You cannot have more than one priority.
So when Jagmeet Singh makes the call for Canadians to vote — not from a place of fear, but from a place of choice — I think this is the kind of thing he is calling out: The fear that we are truly dependent on an economic model that is not working.
It’s how we’ve voted in the past — fiscally and for business sense — because that’s what we’ve been sold and it’s how the system is built.
And in that sense, our vote doesn’t matter. Business will go on as usual. The bullionaires will fight paying. The politicians who had really good intentions when they got started will be burned out and we will crucify them for being human and falling victim to the broken system. That’s what we do.
But at the same time, your vote matters so much right now. Because we may be going down, but we still have choice about whether or not we go down swinging. We have a choice to unite and stand up to the bullies and maybe go down, but just maybe we can fight and come out on top. We can call the corporate pull-out threat and deal with the fall-out. Because we need a revolution.
That’s the thing about human beings. We are so resilient, but we need to work together.
We can make a bold attempt to right the ship and honestly, we might capsize in the process.
But the other option is to stick with what’s always been done because it works for a few, even though it’s at the cost of so many. And that’s going to ruin us too. When we cast our vote from that place of fear, we’re voting for a system that continues to exploit the weak to fuel the powerful.
That’s not working either.
We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t so really, the vote doesn’t matter.
Except that it does matter. What we choose matters.
It matters if we go down fighting for what’s good and right even if the ending seems inevitable, because that’s hope.
And I cannot raise my little boys in a world that is devoid of hope for a better future for everyone, not just the top earners.
We may not change the course of this generation, or maybe even the next. But eventually something has to give, and I know for sure that there is a 100% chance that things won’t get better if we don’t at try. (Sorry Yoda. Agree to disagree there.)
So you can go ahead and tell me that my vote doesn’t matter, and you’re right. But that not depressing to me, it’s actually really liberating because it means I’ve got nothing to lose.
This vote won’t change my life because I’m privileged.
For some people, it will change everything because they’ve so much to lose…including basic human rights.
So even though it doesn’t matter, I’m committed to fighting for them — and with them — by casting my vote for change. And trusting.