BRUCE WILLIAM POWE

The origin of corruption in politics is surely in the thought that you are the bearer of ultimate virtue.

If you make things sound inoffensively obvious, then it is likely that no one will listen.

No rebellious heart is ever at ease with paths established by others.

Alienation and loneliness plant the seeds for rebellion and consciousness.

A just society will appear less spectacular, and less clearly defined, than a society with totalitarian leadership, theocratic goals.

There is, it seems, an unbridgeable chasm between the concerns of a Sri Aurobindo and a Pat Robertson.

The corporatist-economic model of society appears to be governing us. Economists, often in the pay of transnationals, are deciding, for us, what democracy is, and will be.

We remake the world through our technologies, and these in turn remake and extend us, in ever spiraling lattices of complexity. McLuhan uncannily foresaw the future, where electronic technology would shape and expand cultures and societies into a global membrane of communications.

Certainty is usually a sign of pathology.

May the ability to see many points view keep us gentle.

Electrical fire and the fire of greed kindle economies. In that flux, nations become digitized commodities on stock-exchange floors and on investors' rating screens. A country becomes a product to be rated for its obedience to paying of deficits and debts.

Here I find a puzzle of great beauty: Canada works well in practice, but just doesn't work out in theory.

Charisma is a sign of the calling. Saints and pilgrims are defiantly moved by it.

Each voice carries a portion of value, no matter how unpalatable or distasteful that voice may be: no one person, government, ideology, transnational, or religious institution can own and dominate the whole.

We have to learn how to contact one another over an enormous land space, across five-and-a-half time zones, in what as once a wilderness of scattered settlements, in what is now a sprawl of suburban edge cities and satellite towns. Technology forges connections and disconnections here.

Canada is like several puzzles that we are all working on at the same time. Everyone has a part to add, but no one has seen the whole picture yet.

Canada may be fast-forwarding, jump starting, into a new pattern, a model of communication linkages, a civilization that is more than a grab for power and dominance, a place that could channel the fires of the global wirings, where political alliances are subject to electrical ebb and flow, and the alchemical cultivations of imagination and perception, of the self, could precail of the ideology of capital.

We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.

Democracies should be a delirium of choices - more options, not fewer; more avenues to travel, not fewer.

The myth of Canada, its hidden story, is of a contemplative country, a place of inwardness, where people can question the idea of nationhood and ponder what values we wish to see expressed and achieved, and what solitudes of identity and reverie we wish to preserve.

There must be engagement: there must be protest.

Enlightenment should be a human right.

The Trojan War without Homer was nothing more than a battle over trade routes.

It began in images and it ended in symbolism.

Followers of another political party tell us that we will strengthen ourselves by ignoring our history, our traditions, our mythologies, our culture and vision, and by following the American way.