Bamboozled

ORIGINALLY POSTED Sunday, March 25, 2007

I had a conversation with a highly educated nephew (40) during the last municipal election. He told me people are completely turned off from politics. “Politicians lie to get elected,” he said and pointed to Jean Chretien's 1990's promise to cancel the GST.

He is a geologist. Must have taken him more than fifteen years to complete his education. He is now at the point of making a very comfortable living. Travels a lot. Converses regularly with educated professionals. He is married to an intelligent woman.

In my gut I knew it already, still, his glib remarks and shallow understanding of the mix that is politics astounded me. How can a person reach that level of maturity, be exposed to academia all of those years and be so abysmally bloody ignorant?

Jean Chretien 's minions no doubt did what political parties always do. They studied the field. Paid pollsters to discover the public's greatest aggravation and how it could be most effectively used against the opposing
party. At that time, it was the GST.

With complete predictability, they promised to get rid of it. Then they didn't. And that too was predictable.

How then can presumably intelligent and well educated people profess to be disillusioned? What excuse can they have for being so easily bamboozled?

What could they have been talking about at their cocktail parties and during lunch at their conferences? How could they imagine programmes paid for with revenue from a tax that raised 8 cents in every dollar spent on goods and services could so easily be wiped out? Maybe even some of their high priced jobs could be gone. How could they then turn around and heap scorn on politicians for deceiving them when everything indicates they were more than willing to be deceived?

How can politicians be blamed for following the path that is tried and true and thus far fool proof? If the so-called intelligentsia are too lazy to think things through, why do they expect politicians to be more energetic and principled than they are themselves?

Again, we arrive at the point where we ask ourselves, “What, in the name of Heaven, is going on in our universities? Are 53% of students who cheat the only ones not doing what is expected of them?