Getting our priorities straight

Right now, if you turn on the nightly news, open a newspaper, or, god forbid, peruse the blogosphere or tune into an insipid 24 hours news channel, then chances are that you will only hear about which politician made which gaffe, and which parliamentary secretary had sex with what early hominid. It's almost a relief to read the pseudo-informative horse-race coverage of the latest polls and focus groups. But Ignatieff finally making inroads with Mormon Filipino-Canadians between the ages of 42 and 47 isn't news: it's filler. Shouldn't the news media provide the public with the knowledge they need to understand the world instead of just offering mindless entertainment?If the media deserve an F for confronting the true problems of our society, then politicians and political parties deserve to be expelled. None of the major parties in Canada pay attention to who really runs the show, and no Canadian political party has real principles beyond partisanship, stale ideology, and petty regionalism. The Conservatives don't stand for anything beyond defeating the Liberals, and the Liberals never even claimed to stand for anything at all. The NDP only chants tired left-wing cliches from the 60s and the Bloc is little more than a nonviolent Canadian analogue to Colombia's FARC guerrillas: while they started out fighting for a ridiculous ideology, they're now content to extort money from the rest of the country. And the Greens, with a whopping zero members of parliament, are the biggest joke of all.

In Plato's Republic, Socrates compares the ordinary condition of mankind to prisoners who only see shadows on the wall of a cave. They mistake the shadows for what is real, and cannot imagine true reality. Worse yet, any brave thinker who returns to the cave to enlighten the prisoners will be disoriented by the darkness of the cave, and mocked by the prisoners for her lack of knowledge of shadows.

The same thing happens today when intellectuals who possess supposedly sophisticated tools for understanding history, society, and the economy will dismiss any mention of the truth. Here at the University of Toronto, we can take any number of classes on cataloguing shadows and predicting their behaviour, but where in our prestigious and progressive university can we find classes on the blood-drinking, shape-shifting lizard people who pull the strings in the puppet show that we call history?

The media has no interest in telling the truth and the political establishment has no interest in fighting for what is right. Even our educational system is but a machine to propagate convenient myths. So Canadians are left divided and ignorant against the malignancy that confronts them every day. Our situation may be bleak, but if we can speak the truth and stand together, all is not lost.

The first step is to spread the word. The struggle against Soviet totalitarian oppression would have never succeeded without samizdat copies of dissident tracts, and if democracy comes to Iran, surely bloggers and Twitter will share in some of the credit. In the spirit of the pamphleteers of the Age of Reason, we must use all the tools of our networked, wireless, globalized world and we must employ all of our hard-won freedoms to stop the blood-drinking, shape-shifting lizard people who came to Earth from the constellation Draco in 10,500 BC in search of the monoatomic gold that is the source of their power.