We call it luck. They called it planning

 

I was standing on the beach at Esquimalt Lagoon a couple of days ago, gazing out across the sea at the Olympic Peninsula and having that usual thought of how lucky I was to live amid such beauty.

But it isn’t actually luck, is it? It’s planning.

If the beach I was standing on happened to have been located in a different part of the world, it would very likely all be private property now, bought up by people who love the vista too but want it only for themselves.

Or it might be covered in garbage and plastics. Or reeking of raw sewage. There might be a factory on the shore, or uncontrolled industry spread across the landscape. Someone might have built a big casino there, or a 24-hour disco. There almost certainly wouldn’t be a protected bird sanctuary across from the beach, with nice paths in all directions and easy, safe roadside parking.

None of that had anything to do with luck. Virtually everything about my very pleasant experience at the beach that day directly tied back to the actions of previous generations, who understood their vital role in laying the foundation for a great community for decades to come.

That beautiful beach is there because generations of people born before me did the planning, rule-making, regulatory framework and enforcement to ensure it would be. The same can be said about so much of what we deem "lucky" about our daily lives, from the provincial parks that our grandparents invested in on our behalf to our sewage systems and storm drains, medicare, public housing, environmental protections, neighbourhood design, on and on. 

Now look at us. O Boomers and Gen Xs, what have we wrought?

The United States is the brutal example of the moment, where they’re actively tearing apart the planning of so many far-sighted Americans who have gone before while throwing a wrench into the plans of every country that used to trust them. We’re not there yet in Canada, but I wouldn’t for a minute suggest that we couldn’t be.

I still see many of our municipalities trying to do the right things. But their ability to do that is increasingly compromised by the strange and destructive politics we now have at the provincial and federal levels, and voting habits that have come to resemble a rabid audience cheering on their favourite WWF wrestler rather than anything to do with thoughtful consideration for the future.

And we’ve all got these teeny-tiny little spans of attention now. It’s not just flavour of the week anymore, its flavour of the hour. Social media has worsened that, but we were doing it long before there was social media. Old-style media has been playing the flavour game for decades, always feeding us new worries with no sense of responsibility for following up old ones.

Consider, too, the copious stacks of reports, commissions and special investigations packed with urgent recommendations that never go anywhere. That’s not just a problem of ever-mercurial political will, but because most of the public never thinks to read any of it, or ask what became of whatever issue was getting the scrutiny.

We once at least paid half a mind to having a stable, non-partisan bureaucracy, which would keep things going even while the politicized lords and ladies of the manor did their flips and cartwheels for votes.

But I’ve watched our own bureaucracy become increasingly politicized over the years. I know there are many good people inside our governments still trying to do their best, but how strange that some of them are actually having to hide their good work so that it can continue unseen while the insane, illogical political tides churn overhead.

At any rate, what’s going on in the US right now demonstrates just how quickly any entity dependent on public funding can be politicized, and that extends to the people working there. Most people are ultimately going to put saving their own ass ahead of upholding democratic principle.

If there’s a plan at any level of government extending even a mere five years into the future, you can bet that it will be fragmented, inadequate, terrifyingly politicized, and at constant risk of being fully abandoned. I hear us worrying about the future, yet doing so little.

We are the boiling frogs waiting for our governments to save us from the stove. But they’re locked up tight in their own weird stuff, and they’re not coming. I’m sure most of them got into politics for all the right reasons, but whatever inner reserves of pragmatism, passion and community ethos they had going in are gone in about 10 minutes when it comes to party politics.

Down here at the joe-average level, we are accustomed to thinking that systems are all around us to make sure our lives go smoothly. This is Canada, after all. That’s the Canadian way.

But then we fall into some new need – lose our jobs, have a major health crisis, have a child with special needs, grow old – and learn painfully fast that our systems for the most part are fractured, under-funded, and completely unprepared for a society so different than the one they were built for.

I saw this over and over again in my journalism years, and still. People reach out to me to tell me of this or that crisis that they’re in for the first time ever, and how outraged they are to discover that there’s no help for them. But where were they when all the other people were calling out desperately about their own crises?

Disasters small and large are happening all around us – no health care when we need it, toxic drug crisis raging on, wildfires burning, mountains and forests falling to development as we rush to build the next big housing development that nobody can afford to live in.

We are in a housing crisis because our governments pulled out of social housing and gave so much of the sector over to the investors, who seek only profit. We are in a social crisis because government after government cut services to suit their own political agendas and didn’t consider for a second how that would amplify and intensify social crises years on.

We have had 18,000 British Columbians die of toxic drugs not because the rate of use changed, but because the drugs changed and we just kept doing the same old same old. We don't have anywhere near enough support for elders who can't live independently anymore because we paid zero attention to decades of warnings about just such a crisis once the Boomers got old. 

We are in a climate crisis because we can’t get off the growth track, can’t stop ourselves from our insatiable consumerism, and tolerate political parties that have no intention of keeping the promises spilling out of their mouths during their election campaigns. We don't even expect them to anymore.

We gave away made-in-Canada hopes and family-supporting jobs for the allure of cheap goods made by countries who could do it for so much less. Now we posture furiously about having to buy our ferries in China, as if we haven’t been sitting in the front row for all these years while the death of manufacturing and the devaluing of trades happened in front of our very eyes as we clamoured for cheaper everything.

Visible and dramatic social decline in every community. Public school systems in crisis. The big-profit mongers all around us, expanding their global empires in ways that never work out in the common person’s favour.

It’s like we’re free-styling into a future that we’re pretty sure is no future at all, and that we’ve seemingly disconnected ourselves from caring about.

So yeah, lucky us to live in a part of the world that still looks like Eden and hasn’t yet been fully eroded by the carelessness and galloping greed of governance that serves only itself and a disengaged populace that leaves them to it. But the luck’s running out.