I first heard this Latin proverb from my father. Life was not very kind to him, and he used it to express his calm, good-humored resignation to this fact. His attitude was philosophical fatalism.
For me, it signifies our place in time. The times are changing and we are changing with them as our actions are changing the times. I have a few decades worth of observations behind me to both appreciate and question the changes. I don’t want to sound like a grumpy old man, but I must ask some questions…..
We can start with signs that started appearing in the past decade in just about everywhere where services that we paid for with our taxes are provided to us.
ZERO TOLERANCE STATEMENT
Our staff comes to work to care for others, not to become
victims of violence, threatening behaviour, physical,
verbal, racial abuse or discrimination.We operate a ZERO TOLERANCE policy towards abuse of
staff.Anyone attending the clinic who abuses staff or patients,
be it verbally, physically or in any threatening manner
whatsoever risks being denied services.We reserve the right to summon the police to remove
offenders from the premises.
If you search for ‘Zero tolerance statement’, you can find hundreds of variations on it. They are part of the postmodernist/neo-communist dehumanization project.
I came to Canada in 1980. My first family doctor had a receptionist, but no nurse. His office was open 10-6. At 6pm, he locked the door from the inside. Everybody who was in the waiting room was seen by him before he left for the day, even if it took him ‘till 9pm to see them all. I never had to make an appointment; I only had to show up before the door closed.
The doctor I have now, have a receptionist and at least one nurse. I have to make an appointment, for which I must wait for at least a couple of weeks, sometime over a month. If my need is urgent, I am told to go to a hospital emergency, where it takes 6-10 hours for someone to look at me, and sending me back, of course, to my family doctor. If I know what my problem is and I need a specialist, I cannot go to see one directly. If I need to see, let’s say, a dermatologist, I would have to make an appointment with my family practitioner’s receptionist. When I get there weeks later, I will have an interview with the nurse after which I may see the doctor who will tell me that someone will call me from the specialist’s office with an appointment time. The whole process will take months.
There are no shortcuts, I cannot just walk into the office to ask for a referral or to ask to see the doctor for just even a minute.
The doctors do not work overtime and not even a full week. Mine is only available four days a week. I don’t know her hours, it is the receptionist who is the gatekeeper of that information. There is no way to know how busy my doctor actually is, as I can only walk into her office with an appointment. Calling this whole process Kafkaesque is an understatement.
Sitting in the waiting room and reading the zero tolerance statement is like rubbing salt into a wound. Adding insult to injury.
We, the people, with our taxes, through our representatives employ them to serve our needs. Yet, we have no control and cannot even complain. The statement is just a reminder that we are powerless. Once they have our money, they are in control, they make the decisions, they decide what is threatening, abusive or discriminatory. They have the power. If we don’t like it, we can just FO. They keep our money while we can die on the streets.[i]
I keep asking myself, what made us so uncivil that we must be reminded of the consequences at every turn and in every place?
I do not remember any such problem in the eighties… Were we better people then, or did the problems we could complain about got worse?
My doctor then had all the power to refuse to treat me if he considered my behaviour unacceptable and I did not have to be reminded to show him respect. Potential praise and scorn were both part of social expectations. The rules and expectations of society are mostly unspoken. Spelling them out turns them into policies, just a step away from laws.
Spelling them out makes the expectations confrontational. Relying on social expectations is presumed innocence; zero tolerance statements are assumed guilt.
You may say that I am overreacting, but shouldn’t we wonder what happened?
How did we get to a point, where making judgements as an individual is not only frowned upon, but potentially criminalized, while on the other hand, we are constantly judged by the various instruments and institutions of the state and ‘progress’?
How did we get to a point where our servants are ruling us? Reminding us at every opportunity that they are in control and we are nothing. That we are powerless. That we are at their mercy. We are de facto slaves of our own (Public) servants.
How did we get from “we the people”, masters of our government, to a world where we cannot trust our politicians, where we are afraid of our police, show deference to our censors, where we can be locked up for thought-crimes, where we must pretend that we believe the official lies and obey our masters, the public servants?
How did we get from singing We shall overcome, through the George Floyd riots to de facto legalized criminality?
How did we get from presumed innocence to assumed guilt?
How did we get from championing rights to dishing out privileges to favoured groups?
How did we get from celebrating achievement to worshipping victimhood?
How did we get from accepting our limitations to expecting others to entertain our delusions?
How did we get from the American “land of the free and the home of the brave”
and the Canadian “True North strong and free!” to a citizenry of submission?
What happened to our societies in the past forty years? Did we do it, or was it done to us?
How did the times change and how did it change us?
When I came to Canada, it was a desirable place to be, almost as much as the USA.
But times change, and Canada is not the place it used to be. Now it makes me wonder, what happened to the ribbon cuttings?
When I moved out of Toronto in 2019 this is what my closest highway intersection looked like:
In 2022, they started working on replacing it. This is what it looks like today:
It is an OK job, but it took three and a half years to produce it.
The Chinese completed the second phase of the Qinghai–Tibet Railway (Golmud to Lhasa) in five years. That section is 1,142 km long; it has 675 bridges, 9 major tunnels and countless underpasses and wildlife crossings. IN FIVE YEARS! While in Canada it takes three and a half years to rebuild a single underpass. We don’t have ribbon cuttings and celebrations anymore because most projects are finished over budget and passed deadline. Celebrating incompetence is still embarrassing.
According to the Quebeqois French MSM after Covid, the number of government employees increased by about 30% while their overall productivity went down by about the same rate. This observation is, of course, anecdotal, but far from unique.
I chanced upon this video yesterday: GEN Z CAN'T Answer BASIC Questions! With a little effort, you can find dozens like it. We must keep in mind that these are college students. The smarter half of their generation…… Feel free to despair.
The USA ranks #17 on PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment)
The present no longer has the promise of a better future.
The whole of Western civilization seems to be coasting on its past glories refusing to adjust to the new realities. As if we had a collective suicide pact. “The times they are a-changin” and we readily going with it in the wrong direction.
How did we get to this?
How did we, the people of Western civilization get from being on the top of the world to standing on the edge of the precipice?
Yogi Berra astutely observed that “the future ain’t what it used to be”.
That is depressing enough already, but the truly scary part of our present is the fact that our past ain’t what it used to be either.
A few weeks ago I decided to watch House of the dragon, the prequel to The Games of Thrones. I do not recommend it, but still, the central concepts of the story are worthy of attention. These concepts are heritage and legacy. How to live up to the expectations of the past while creating examples of greatness for the future. Legacy is continuation and permanence.
To be able to function in this world, we need a sense of permanence. We need a certain degree of predictability.
We need to know that what we found to be true today, will be still true tomorrow.
We need to know that the words we use today will have the same meaning tomorrow.
We do not need dogmas, but we need a sense of ‘pragmatic permanence’, and, obviously, the past must be part of it. Erasing history is cultural lobotomy. Contrary to the claims of the perpetrators it does not make us better people.
Whitewashing our past diminishes us. It deprives us of the lessons we can learn from history. Our identity is our culture, history and experiences. We cannot change it willy-nilly. Besides, we cannot, actually, change history: we can only lie about it.
The past is our identity; the future is the canvas of our legacy.
By erasing our past, we paint ourselves out of existence.
The books of my childhood, the classics are disappearing from bookstores and libraries.
They are bastardized by an endless stream of abridgements, adaptations, reinterpretations, bowdlerization, Disneyfication and summarizations. This latest became a cottage industry on Amazon making the original works more difficult to find. They still can be found, but you must know exactly what you are looking for.
And this is still not the scariest assault on the past.
What we are evolving into is a world of permanent gaslighting.
When I started writing this post, I tried to find information about the infrastructure project pictured above. I remember the signs showing the deadline. When the deadline passed, the signs disappeared and when I looked for the information writing this post, I found all available sources saying that the project is on time and on budget.
It is an ongoing problem with this blog, that I can never be sure that the things I reference will not disappear without a trace. Changing information or making it disappear is becoming easier by the day. Orwell’s nightmare is already our reality in many ways. We have always been at war with Russia, Epstein did NOT have a client list and Donald Trump was most definitely not on that non-existent list.
In the beginning there was the Encyclopedia Britannica which was the ultimate source of authoritative knowledge for 242 years before it went online in 2010. EB has around 120 million monthly users, Wikipedia has 1.5 billion.
Wikipedia is not reliable and getting increasingly biased and partisan, following the leftist trends in the zeitgeist.
In the latest season of Black Mirror, there is an episode called “Bête Noire” taking the idea of rewriting the past to its extreme, but like in most Black Mirror episodes, the science for the fiction is already around. It is just a matter of time before it catches up with reality.
The future of the past is not bright. It definitely ain’t what it used to be.
"Historia numquam mori debet."
"History should never die"
….but it is already on its death-bed.
I must leave you with a few questions again:
Can we save the past?
Does the past have a future?
Are we the product of the times, or its makers?
These are important questions, so please comment, share widely, and subscribe so that you will not miss my next post which will be a lighthearted addendum to this one.
References
Qinghai–Tibet railway - Wikipedia
Qinghai–Tibet Railway: The Longest and Highest Railway in the World | China's Infrastructure
We Shall Overcome: Martin Luther King, Jr. (Video 2010) - IMDb
The Strawberry Statement (1970) - IMDb
GEN Z CAN'T Answer BASIC Questions!
PISA Scores by Country 2025
25 Classic Books That Have Been Banned
Banned Books: 10 Literary Classics That Faced Censorship | HISTORY
Wikipedia Or Encyclopædia Britannica: Which Has More Bias?
[i] Saying this is not an exaggeration, but a point. Any time anyone is questioning the ever-increasing role of the state in health care, they are accused of wanting people to die on the streets. The left’s default strategy: when criticized for the bad outcome of a socialist policy, point to the good intentions behind the policy and accuse the critic of having bad intentions. I am just mocking that argument.
Yes, I am constantly accused of "wrong-think" by family members. Loyalty, honor, integrity, and respect bit the dust. The censorship and RESET is the biggest part of the whole smurfaroo, or just as big as the de-pop shots & chips forever plan.