Cheers, Boos and Yeah!

[talktooloose]

Yesterday was the best LGBTetc. Pride day I've been to in years. The last couple of years (was it just my mindset?) seemed like endless ads for corporations. But this year, there were few purely corporate floats and a long and heartening line of community groups, plus a wide distribution among marchers of small signs encouraging everybody to vote today.

We roundly booed the one Conservative candidate who dared march, claiming that he personally supported equal marriage at the same time as his party leader was telling hardcore supporters out west that he would give them a voice to stop the redefinition of marriage.

A rather scraggly group of anti-corporate pride marchers walked with their signs, one of which was the wittiest of the day: "If I can't have a revolution, I don't want to be part of your dance." (points if know the original)

I made my best line when the parade had yet to start twenty minutes after the set time: "If the fascists were in charge, Pride parades would run on time!"

Comments

[talktooloose.livejournal.com]

First of all, the Liberals with their pusilanimous leader are no leaders in the fight for gay rights. At the Pride parade, the spent bucks on a rotating sign showing Trudeau on one face, Martin on another and Trudeau's ground-breaking "The nation has no place in the bedrooms of the nation" line on another. As if! As if Martin were Trudeau! As if his "stand" on gay marriage were more than just, "Um, I'll abide with the decision of the court whether I agree with it or not. Which I won't tell you."

Okay.

My problem is that I have yet to meet the fiscal conservative who is anywhere near my views on social concerns. I have yet to meet the fiscal conservative who understands the dynamics of poverty and who can empathize with it. I have yet to meet one who's policy ideas are not based on greed. Since the ascendency of the neocons, income gaps have not just widened, they have gaped. Public education and other institutions that can work against the extreme gravitational pull of ruinous, hopeless poverty have been eroded severely and the middle class have reacted by circling the wagons, pulling out of public schools, and voting conservative because the tax cuts will at least get them a few bucks to ease their debt load.

Harris and Bush and the newest neocons don't even make sense fiscally! They run huge deficits with their programs and the only ones to benefit are the wealthy.

I know there is a difference between Joe Clark PCs and Harper's Reformers in Bay Street drag. But neither side has a vision that does not look like pig-headed self-interest to me.

Maybe socially liberal, fiscally conservative people exist. I hardly know enough about economics to say that their policies, fairly enacted, would not be the best economic solution we have seen. Maybe I just hang out in the park with the wrong type of people, but, I'm sorry, the Conservatives are my nightmare. The Liberals are my extreme annoyance and must be held in check, but the Tories are the end of my Canada.

I'm voting NDP because I want their voice louder in Ottawa.