How my wife’s liberal friends see me. Deplorable.
A few months ago my wife and I made a trip into the city from our small rural community for an evening of dining and visiting with some of her old childhood friends. We started our date with just the two of us at a well known vegetarian restaurant. Later we met up with the rest of the crew at a local park near the beach to watch some skits and some dancing while the sun went down over English Bay. It was a beautiful sunset in an amazing setting.
While we’re sitting and chatting in the bleachers of the small amphitheatre my wife’s friend asks us at which restaurant we ate. We told her and with a raised eyebrow she replies: “Really, Francis actually ate in a vegetarian restaurant? Wow. That must have been quite an experience for you!”
I guess I don’t have a reputation amongst her city dwelling friends as being very cultured. But the truth is I like lots of things that aren’t redneck staples. Even vegetarian and vegan food. Hell, I just like to eat and so long as it’s quality it doesn’t much matter to me whether there’s meat on the plate or not. At the end of the meal I am concerned with three things: did I get enough, was it prepared properly and was the service more than adequate? Simple.
But that off the cuff comment set the tone for the evening and it was obvious by the end of it, that with the exception of chit chat about the old days, that I didn’t have much to say to these folks nor they to me. Not that they’re bad people but from my perspective their lives are narrow, kinda fake and frankly, completely out of touch with reality. They rarely leave the city unless it is to hop on a plane to another country or another major metropolitan area and in all the years that we have lived a short one and a half hour drive down the road from them they have never come to visit that I can recall. In fact, when we see them in the city (for me no more than once every two or three years now) the conversation inevitably ends up with them wondering how we can live so “remotely”. We’re an hour and half drive from the city for Pete’s sake. And they figure that’s remote?
What I came to realize from the visit that evening and from others in the past is that our nations have truly begun to polarize themselves culturally along geopolitical lines. We have become nations divided. And it’s not something that’s likely to change. Ever.
Indeed, where there is heavy urban population the social and political culture is highly liberal. In the hinterlands where there is no economy to speak of and the government is the primary employer, well, guess who gets the votes?
2016 Election Results By County
2015 Election Results by Riding (Blue Conservative/Red Liberal/Yellow NDP [socialist])
This is a pattern that has been repeating itself with more and more frequency all cross the western world over a period of decades. The liberals and the elites that grow up around these patterns of ‘decadence and dependency’ are a different breed than those of use from the conservative and normally productive heartlands of our nations. Indeed, I wonder, what do people like this, a product of liberal moral nihilism living in a densely populated urban enclave have in common with the rest of us these days? And they have the nerve to call those of us in flyover country “deplorable”?
Now that’s not to say that there aren’t exceptions to all these patterns, of course there are, but as a rule of thumb the trend has been one of division and distancing ourselves from one another along the lines of both philosophy and geography for at least the last 50 years or more. The last two elections, both south and north of the 49th parallel, prove it.
And as time goes on we are beginning to see just how deep those geographical and cultural divisions truly are. Makes you sort of wonder: Why are we fighting it? Maybe, like a marriage gone sideways, it’s time to admit that we’d be better off living separately than together. Maybe it’s time to say farewell? As a person with a family living in the toe of the conservative heartland of Canada I can tell you I think our posterity would be better off for it.
Moreover, I think the time is approaching when we will have to address this issue one way or the other whether we want to or not. It would be nice to think we can do it peacefully and in a civilized manner. But as the links above show, I’m not real clear on just how civilized the guys on team liberal can act. Frankly, I’m unclear as to whether or not the word is even in their vocabulary. I suppose time will tell.
But whether we want to address it or not the reality is our societies are evenly and very clearly divided. The purpose of elections has now become a contest to see which political ideology can wield the hammer of state so that it can subjugate one side to the other. So perhaps instead of spending the next four to eight years in both countries trying to shore up our defenses so that when the other side wins back the hammer it is harder for them to beat us with it maybe we should just start drawing up the framework to go our separate ways? From my perspective, particularly in the US at this stage, it is better for conservatives of all stripes to begin this dialogue from a position of political power. Not because you wield the hammer of state but because the dialogue right now can be viewed as more honest. Under the current circumstances you can’t be accused of leaving because you are a ‘sore loser’ and in the case of those liberal enclaves who might like to leave you can even appear magnanimous.
On the North side of the line separatist movements are nothing new in either the East or the West. For Canada, our status as a nation has been tenuous for a very long time, with the West occasionally grumbling about leaving on and off since the 80’s and in the East where Quebec nearly made it a reality. Truthfully, many of us wish they’d been successful.
Of course the other option is we can keep doing the same thing over and over again and hope for better results. But we all know how that story ends now, don’t we?
At any rate, these two say it better than I can: https://youtu.be/4L_yCwFD6Jo
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2016/11/30/time-to-say-goodbye/#more-137349