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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gao seng who wrote (257486)	5/21/2002 10:42:12 PM
From: gao seng	Respond to of 769670

Sliding toward meaninglessness Canadians have been warned they are allowing their nation to cascade toward a society of meaninglessness because of their apathy toward governments that have ruthlessly slashed budgets without regard for the things Canadians value. There is "a disconnect that has developed between those things we value and the world we are prepared to tolerate," Allan Gregg wrote in Canada's weekly news magazine, Maclean's. Gregg is chairman of the polling and consulting firm, Strategic Counsel. He conducts regular in-depth studies of Canadian public opinion for Maclean's and the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., and sometimes interprets those polls. His essay in Maclean's was titled, "Wake up, Canada." The decline in public interest and participation in government had its roots in the late 1970s when the "great experiments of post-war liberalism began to show some early cracks," Gregg wrote. But the public response "was not (as many at the time believed) an ideological shift to the right," he said. Rather, the public simply concluded the old rules didn't work. As a result, by the mid-'80s, there was a general and wholesale loss of faith in politicians and the political process. "Where once the electorate looked to government as the arbitrator and often the main provider of the public good, it now associated the state with waste, inefficiency and ineffectiveness," he said. "Rather than looking to government to guide the public interest, all the electorate demanded of it was more 'efficiency.'" Governments responded by scaling back their activities, Gregg said, and as a result now on issue after issue, the discourse fails to address "the fundamental litmus test of public policy -- namely, how do proposed changes meet the public good?" That simply reinforced the notion that governments are incapable of acting as positive agents of social change, he wrote. "This point of view, of course, suits the interests of those who benefit most from the withdrawal of the state from the public sphere -- the business community and the wealthy," he said. And the weak see government as the force that takes away the help they need and causes them to believe that the government that governs best governs -- dismantles -- least. "Fifteen years of government responding to the lowered cynical expectations of the public with even lower and more cynical performance has done little more than widen the chasm between it and the electorate," Gregg noted. "Protest against this drift is deemed at best fringe and at worst delusional. Within this intellectual jihad, dissent is rare and silence has become consent." Absence of moral discourse or ethical considerations as a central part of governing "leaves both citizens and government without a compass or creed that defines a nation" and the fabric of society begins to unravel, he said. Gregg concluded Canadians have been forgetting that governments are not "them," they are "us." "When we lose sight of or choose to ignore this fundamental tenet, we lose our capacity to organize society toward the ultimate ethical goal -- namely, generating the largest good for the greatest number. We lose, in effect, a free and democratic society."