When it comes to future development, conservatives tend to think the federal government can do a lot better, and this is not an abstract proposition.
By decade’s end, on that Prairie Sagrean, I’m aiming for a city just north of Chicago that looks like Buffalo, if Buffalo looked like Denver. That’s ten years from now. If this happens, then maybe we won’t need mandatory paid leave to care for young children. Maybe we won’t need to pester sick employees to return to work. Maybe we’ll get rid of cheap, terrible health insurance with no dental benefits and prescriptions. Maybe it will just be me tomorrow.
Maybe “the silent majority” will like me, because what bothers the really noisy minority no longer makes much sense. We should expect every market leader to be a carbon-neutral leader; every leadership must facilitate the “increase and extension of compassion, and emotional responsiveness”; and every major creative product should spread kindness, or at least sympathy, from A to Z. This isn’t a liberal-conservative issue. It’s more a question of civilization.
Last night, I interviewed Lee Maracle, a professor of Canadian literature at the University of Calgary. She is one of our outstanding Indigenous voices, writer in short form, essayist, critic, former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Magazine. She is also author of a memoir about being the spouse of an adult alcoholic, and an opera based on her memoir, The Indeterminate Age. In my interview with her, I asked her about real estate. It was lunchtime, and we sat on a beanbag at the steps of a plowed field, overlooking the Rocky Mountains. My first question was about immigration, and more about cities.