-- Download Mark Steyn, Unfortunately, on Labour Day as PDF --

Sometimes, I just have the stomach for reading smug, dismissive, condescending writing. Today is such a day as I strolled to Mark Steyn’s website and read what he wrote for Labour Day three years ago.

My favourite line that helps me appreciate his uselessness at commenting on broad, authentic human experience is this: “the intellectual left has been scrambling for decades to come up with explanations as to why, if everything’s so bad, everything’s so good.”

Everything’s so good. In the last two generations in the western world, particularly North America, individuals are working more hours per week with fewer benefits and lower real wages. The single income home has virtually vanished. McJobs are abundant. Starbucks provides full-time benefits at 20 hours/week, yet such limited hours provide insufficient wages to work just at that job alone.

Oh yes, income disparity between the richest 20% and poorest 20% of the developed world [and the whole world as well] is widening.

Big Pharma has caught on and markets anti-depressants as major revenue sources. Families are internally alienated, kids hardly read anymore and resist critical thinking, and political apathy is the norm while whole populations can easily ignore the profound disrespect inherent in the federal Liberals’ sponsorship scandal and a vacationing president during a hurricane disaster, a president who has attended a total of zero funerals for soldiers he ordered “into harm’s way” [and if I hear that phrase from his mouth one more time I might lose my mind].

But Mark Steyn thinks we’ve got it all so good.

And after some perverse interpretations of doom-sayers like Maude Barlow, David Suzuki and Bill Moyers, he thinks we’ve go it so good that:

There’s no such thing as “sustainable” development. Human progress and individual liberty have advanced on the backs of one unsustainable development after another: When we needed trees for heating and transportation, we chopped ’em down. Then we discovered oil, and the trees grew back. When the oil runs out, we won’t notice because our SUVs will be powered by something else. Bet on human ingenuity every time.

The trees grew back. Something else will power our SUVs. Invention and technology will save us.

I’d like to know which trees he’s talking about.

If the ignorance of consequence is the stupidity of man, Mark Steyn is our king because trees simply grow back: problem solved.

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Stephen Elliott-Buckley

Post-partisan eco-socialist. at Politics, Re-Spun

Stephen Elliott-Buckley is a husband, father, professor, speaker, consultant, former suburban Vancouver high school English and Social Studies teacher who changed careers because the BC Liberal Party has been working hard to ruin public education. He has various English and Political Science degrees and has been writing political, social and economic editorials since November 2002. Stephen is in Twitter, Miro and iTunes, and the email thing, and at his website, dgiVista.org.

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