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So you want to change the world for the better?
A Saskatchewan version:
Step 1: turn 18 because you can't vote otherwise. Spend the first 18 years of your life without political influence unless you're an unusual character involved in party politics, student council and activism.
A Saskatchewan version:
Step 1: turn 18 because you can't vote otherwise. Spend the first 18 years of your life without political influence unless you're an unusual character involved in party politics, student council and activism.
If you're not 18 this year, you're probably too late to take the lazy vote-only route. You have to take the lead like Greta.
Step 2, you write the local newspaper to express your concerns about there being less than #ElevenYears left to make at least 6.5% / year reductions to carbon emissions if we want to have a hope of surviving the climate crisis.
Your edited letter appears next to a columnist
Your edited letter appears next to a columnist
who happens to be a climate change Denier misinforming the paper's readers.
Why is that happening?
Why is that happening?
You see it's just not possible to make enough money in the newspaper business now thanks to the Internet, to pay its hedge fund owners and ex-cons (when not getting pardoned by a corrupt President), so they need to make deals with political parties for their money and ours.
Step 3:
Write your MLA, ask why the province isn't investing more than a few hundred thousand into renewables, and isn't doing more to stave off certain destruction from record levels of carbon pollution.
Get a form letter back. Why would the governing party act to reduce
Write your MLA, ask why the province isn't investing more than a few hundred thousand into renewables, and isn't doing more to stave off certain destruction from record levels of carbon pollution.
Get a form letter back. Why would the governing party act to reduce
fossil fuel profits; guess who some of their top donors are? It wasn't long ago that the oil companies paid the Sask Party, who paid the Premier, who just happened to give keynote speeches to oil companies in Calgary about how he stands up for them.
#skpoli
#skpoli
It's the circle of life. Or is It corruption already banned in federal politics, and recently in crime riddled British Columbia?
#skpoli
Write the newspaper again, to have your letter appear next to an op-ed by a CTF troll citing a Fraser Institute non-fact to end healthcare.
#skpoli
Write the newspaper again, to have your letter appear next to an op-ed by a CTF troll citing a Fraser Institute non-fact to end healthcare.
Step 4: To stay healthy you sold your car and plan to bike and walk more, but you can't use the bus much because the service times are only every 30 minutes and it doesn't even get you home on Sunday night.
You write the Mayor to ask for better, but learn he prevented the bus
You write the Mayor to ask for better, but learn he prevented the bus
from serving your part of the city last decade to help out the NIMBYs who thought a noisy diesel bus going by their houses would damage their homes.
You ask for some bike lanes, but half the Council sells or services cars for a living, and don't care for people who bike.
You ask for some bike lanes, but half the Council sells or services cars for a living, and don't care for people who bike.
You learn the city is offered free electric car infrastructure and support that by appearing at a Council meeting to help them see the benefits for air quality, and they look a gift horse in the mouth and turn the gift away for no gains.
Step 5: Run for political office in the city. If you win, you get to work with people who voted to raise bus fares while simultaneously complaining the buses aren't full enough.
If you don't manage to get 5 others elected with you who also care about saving our world, dead end.
If you don't manage to get 5 others elected with you who also care about saving our world, dead end.
With your majority on Council you can buy enough buses and make fares free so people start to give up their gas burning cars. The newspapers start to call you reckless, jobs in the auto industry are being lost, and the city had to take on debt and there are not 11 football
games a year from all the hundreds of millions spent on trying to save our stable climate. What is the fun or economic purpose in that? Who'll pay for all that debt?
Reply that kids won't get to pay off debt on a destroyed world, so what will it matter if there's debt?
Reply that kids won't get to pay off debt on a destroyed world, so what will it matter if there's debt?
Meanwhile, voters have listened to the front page election ads and the decade of propaganda run against a #carbontax and anything to help our environment, so they elected Conservatives to Ottawa. You now get no federal help in rebuilding the transit system given up in the 1950s.
And the radio stations, owned by property developers bitter that they don't control Council still, run non-stop attack ads about how you don't stand up for Saskatchewan jobs.
Of course they do this while advertising the best deals on cars.
Step 6: Enjoy life.
You only get one (maybe two, like me).
It's an effed up city, province, and country, but it's the only one we've got. Until we, or crushing environmental pressure changes it.
Step 6: Enjoy life.
You only get one (maybe two, like me).
It's an effed up city, province, and country, but it's the only one we've got. Until we, or crushing environmental pressure changes it.
P.S. Some of this was hypothetical, not nearly all of it autobiographical.
