From Rex Murphy writing at the National Post:
Cherish your suffering, Ontario; Premier Wynne’s green gods know of your sacrifice
It cannot have escaped the attention of many that Ontario is most unsettled these days. That its industries are anxious, its debt colossal, its citizens not in a pleasant mood. Ontario is in a lot of pain. But let me assure readers outside Ontario that it has not all been for nothing. There are rewards. They are subtle, intangible, but they are real. Let me explain.
Those who share the faith and endorse the morality of global warming derive very much the same satisfactions that attended fidelity to the less demanding dogmas of earlier and less ambitious creeds. The carbon regime, tax hikes on gasoline, failed or failing long-term contracts, fear and trembling in the manufacturing sector, the gnashing of teeth in poorer (and now colder) households, Ontario Hydro’s ever-swelling levies, the despoliation of rural vistas by towers of whirling, bird-bashing windmills: These, each in itself, and all in combination are the acknowledged costs of the Great Greening.
Those outside the faith, and mere loitering agnostics, see nothing here but a catalogue of burdens. Shackles of an alien god. But to those within the covenant, they are the way stations on the hard and stony path to delicious rewards reserved for the elect. This is the true chemistry of belief. What appear as obstacles to heretics, appear to believers as smooth escalators to a higher state. Accepting, embracing what must be done supplies them with a sense of inner sanction, endows them with that peace of mind which a lesser scripture records, rather churlishly, as passing all understanding.
It has always been thus. Think of those Lenten pilgrims of old scuttling from hamlets all over Europe to visit Jerusalem for a glance at the bone splinters of some of the lesser saints. The “ways [were] deep and the weather sharp” but the end transmuted the journey into something sweet and fine. So it is now.
Much more at the site - Rex does have a way with words.
Reader Doug McLeod from Victoria, British Columbia offered this bit of history:
The one thing the French did far better than the English was when the ruling class had lost touch with the people, they put a guillotine in pretty much every town square and started reminding the elites who they worked for and who supported them. By the time it was over, there was hardly an elite or an aristocrat that could walk through one of those squares without twitching nervously. While I rather doubt that we will suddenly see a flood of guillotine populate squares around Toronto or Ottawa any time soon, its clear that same lesson is once more overdue on this side of the Atlantic.
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