Watching and tending campfires is a contemplative affair, especially when the wood is punky and damp. As smoke billows out I think about the parallel to politics, politicians and policies.
Damp, slightly rotten wood produces little flame, or heat, but much smoke. This creates the illusion of light and warmth but holding your hand over the fire provides little measurable result.
The smoke smothers and chokes inspection, transparency or progress. If there is a flame, it is disguised under the smoldering pallor. It’s analogous to political or corporate spin, propaganda and deflection.
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By contrast, well-seasoned, dry wood burns cleanly, with little smoke and an evident flame that provides light and allows you to warm your hands. In a comparable political arena, there would exist clarity, transparency and accountability.
Contemplating something with too much smoke and not enough flame is a signal of inaction or inappropriate actions. Old ideas, soft and sodden, don’t produce much light or progress. As smoke is to punky wood, so too it seems with some politicians with agendas that require concealment, not the purifying light of a blazing campfire.
This can happen with the smudge of communications spin, leaving you feeling you’ve been smoke-tanned and tainted in the process. It detracts from plunging into the gloom to address the subjects that need attention for shifts in policy and legislation. But we can’t be distracted by the smoke from politicians and the corporate world.
There is the temptation to pour accelerant, like gasoline, on a smouldering campfire. It might provide momentary light, but not enough, or for long enough, to be of much use. No, the answer isn’t more smoke. The answer is to extinguish this crumbling pile of barely flammable wood and start over with a new, dry base with a chance of kindling a blaze of change.
In Alberta we can be under a pall of summer smoke, the tangible form from wildfires giving us burning eyes and runny noses. We are also subject at all times to the metaphoric smoke of politics.
To the uninitiated, political smoke is hard to identify. It swirls over you until confusion sets in and the creator of the smoke offers to guide you to clear air. Beware of a puree of platitudes, a bouquet of bromides and a gall of gestures. These do not offer clarity but are forms of obscuring smoke.
We seem to be enveloped in smoke from the current government related to the erosion of publicly funded health care; a cavalier attitude to the COVID pandemic; an education curriculum derived from the internet; a sense pension funds are not being managed at arm’s length; a balanced budget not based on fiscal prudence but rather a windfall of oil revenue; a dubious push for a provincial police force; weakened environmental regulations and the hype of “no-conflict” and “ethical” oil; and, climate change denial and foot-dragging in the face of wicked weather.
With these and other topics of concern to Albertans it seems like someone has started up not only the smoke generator but also the fog machine and the haze creator to obscure the truth amid billows of obfuscation.
Albertans are tired of real smoke and should be equally concerned about the political smoke. It’s said that politicians are motivated by two things — heat and light. If, like me, you are concerned that too much smoke means little heat and light, it’s time to build a new fire.
