On Saturday, Lorna and our guests and I attended the Charlie
Angus Resistance Tour event in Charlottetown, PEI. It was a sold-out
event in which we were given an inspiring talk by Charlie Angus who is a former
long time NDP member of parliament. It covered a lot of ground about the
challenges we are facing in the world today with the rise of totalitarianism
from leaders such as Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, and Orban.
There were two of the many things in the presentation which
really stayed with me. One was his classification of our times as being
the Age of Monsters. This may seem to be somewhat hyperbolic. However, if
you are paying attention to what is happening in such places as Ukraine and
Gaza and the United States – to name a few – I certainly believe this is an
accurate naming of the evil that is rising. Indeed, I think of the
closing lines of the poem by W.B Yates, the Second Coming:
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
The other part of Charlie’s talk that stuck with me was
addressing what we can do in response to this threat from the rough beasts that
are slouching towards our Bethlehems. He noted a study that had been done
on the resistance to the Nazis in a town in the Netherlands in which residents
were most likely to hide Jewish fellow citizens despite the threat of death to
themselves from the Nazis. The study of this phenomenon concluded that it
was because of social pressure – people were asked and encouraged by their
neighbours to do these heroic acts.
In this context, Charlie also spoke about what, I believe,
he called the theory of zero, ones and twos. AS he described it -at least
as I remember it – it begins with zero which is the start of any movement by
one person’s action. This in term is acted on by two, which then becomes
four – and so one. In this way one person can make a difference. It
also doesn’t require big, momentous acts. The small, seemingly
insignificant act can have unimagined impacts moving out like the ripples when
a stone is thrown into a pond.
As Charlie states he is not optimistic, but he certainly is
hopeful. It is vital we do not give up hope.
