Minority Report 1

The orange glow after the May 5 election has faded a bit.

May 2016

It's annoying when people complain about where they live. You don't like it? Change it. Or move.

That being said, there are a lot of things about where I live that I dislike.

I sometimes wonder, "What am I doing here?"

I am in the minority in the north. My lifestyle doesn't dovetail with my fellow northerners. I love art and theatre and live music and good coffee. I don't own a truck or a gun or a quad. I don't like chain restaurants. I don't care for hockey. But I have friends that make life livable. We try to, you know, do stuff. We work. We travel and read and watch films and eat good food we cook ourselves. We send our kids away to school. Sometimes they come back. Mostly they don't. Life is tolerable.

But politically? The differences go beyond matters of personal taste.  As a Social Studies teacher, I try to develop critical thinking skills with my students. I encourage them to use evidence to support the positions they take. I encourage them to be active citizens who are engaged and informed and speak out and connect with the people who have the power to make change. Yet some of my neighbours like their half truths and assumptions and they are suspicious of anything they don't understand. They love to spout off on social media instead of communicating with people who actually know the answers to their questions. They would rather bitch about their elected leader than send an email or make a phone call. They still confuse democratic socialism with communism. They demonstrate a kind of ignorance than no amount of education can overcome.

Ask any citizen about the feeling of powerlessness that comes with decades of never having a voice. It is debilitating. It is tempting to stop sending letters and emails. You stop telling people what your ideological beliefs are because you are sick of their judgement. In the lead up to the last provincial election, I told my husband that if the NDP didn't win this time, I wanted to move. Right out of the province. The first chance we got. Because there comes a point where it's no longer tolerable.

And then we won.

Yes, we actually won.

Immediately after the election we were driving through the night after being scrutineers in Wabasca. My husband got phone calls from his sister, his brother and his mom. I received a text from my cousin. "I feel like the world has tilted on its axis." In the days that followed, friends told me they found themselves crying in the middle of the day. Others said they woke up in the middle of the night feeling something was awry. For me it was as if something magical happened. You need to do everything in your power to protect it. An entire year later, only a little bit of that magic has worn off.

Now we are not the minority.

The response from those who now feel disenfranchised is surprising. People who were the majority for over 40 years - now on the other side. People who have never voted in their lives, now all riled up. Their response was immediate and for some, ongoing. People who could not hold back their bitterness. People whose nearly apoplectic fits of anger continue unabated. The gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. The rallies. The Facebook groups. The separatists. The Unite the Right. The superpacs. The damn tiny flags. Now they are the ones without power. Now they have to work with our ideology. Should I gloat? I will not. Because I know what it's like to be on the other side. I know what it's like not to be listened to. I know I might be back on that other side again.

But not being in the minority? 

After 37 years of being an Alberta voter, that is a very weird feeling indeed.