Connor wrote this article in response to "Sharp-eyed youth"...{Article: 31/05/04} from the Calgary Herald.

"It's just that the NDP's idealized view of society continues its historical resonances with the young, until they ultimately realize there's little filling beneath that flaky crust."

No doubt another informed secondhand summary of the experience of young voters who choose to support the NDP. Reading this wisdom brought home to me the difference between using words and knowing what words mean. For example, in the context of a CanWest newspaper "NDP's idealized view of society" refers to one's meager understanding and intentionally disorganized mass of uninvestigated "socialist" thinking, such as weighing the merits of neo-conservative tax schemes that aid the affluent free up more finance capital, against the gross facts of urban poverty and increasing material separation of the rich and the poor.

These ideas are labelled Socialist or idealizations of reality because sagacious older voters have decided that the present historical current of Canadian politics will not include substantive reforms to its fundamental structures and practices. This attitude is that of the defeated, those true conservatives who turn off younger voters from participating in the electoral process because they and their representatives ensure that managers and business people take up seats in Ottawa so as to perpetuate the status quo and the present lacklustre course. Conservatives in this country are angry about a Liberal-party culture of patronage and overspending because they weren't included in the fun or invited to the festivities in Quebec city or Montreal.

The "NDP's idealized view of society" includes a wide variety of sharp shifts in policy designed to change government. It is these proposals and admittedly earnest or partially untested thoughts that threaten our wise elders because they offer the necessary counternarrative to what has become reified as the realistic view of society so commonly understood by those unwilling to revisit and define the terms of political debate. In sum, this realistic view means that your parents speak for you and tell you what it is legitimate to expect as they set the limits of your vision. Conservative indeed.

Connor Houlihan.