What Matters to You – Stealing From Children

Stealing from children is not considered to be an admirable thing to do.  Not many people would say that a person who did this was a good person, let alone go around trying to tell others that they are the best thing since sliced bread.  Nor would most people take part willingly spending the stolen money of children on themselves or others to spoil them and then pretend to be a hero.  Most people don’t go around trying to make other people weaker than them to exploit them and make them dependents, to prey on their fears to exploit them for their own means.  I had parents that did this to one degree or another to me personally growing up as they went through their divorce.

In grade 9, I missed about a month and a half of school to be dragged from one “important meeting” into the next, being used as a tool to build up each parent’s case against the next.  The summer jobs that I worked where I was saving up money for college and a vehicle were spent by my father.  Although I had my own bank account and card, I relinquished that to him because he was “falling behind” on more than a number of things, so I needed to “Pitch in” to make sure we had some food in the house, my brothers had new clothes, and we paid the book fees for school. I was often told I was useless and would never amount to anything.

In a recent conversation, I realized that when the other person was trying to convince me of all the great things the socialist movement could do, how they could provide all the programs, how we just needed to spend more, that as a conservative, I didn’t care, it hit me again why I can’t drink that Kool-Aid. You see, stealing from children is cruel. Spending other people’s money that you didn’t make yourself had better be kept to a minimum. Playing the role of the hero with the money someone else earned it’s morally repugnant to me.

Presently, our country has accumulated more debt under one Prime Minister than all others who came before him combined. That same PM, and those that keep him propped up, have come up with every divisive trick in the book to make people who oppose the direction steal from our children’s future and turn families upon one another. We have the cost-of-living pressures that have not been around since the last time a PM from the same party and same last name was in control, but now even worse, we are being advised to “Just Transition” out of not only a fuel source but quite frankly a way of life that has supported a nation for as long as I can remember.

There is work, there are jobs, there is a future, and we have freedom. Here is Alberta: it’s okay to be part of the industry that provides energy on those cold winter nights, and it’s okay to grow food to keep people fed. It’s ok to put in a hard day’s work and be rewarded for it, it’s okay to help a neighbor when they need it, and it’s okay to have an argument when you don’t agree on something. It’s even better to devise a plan to fix a problem. Most often, that’s just what we do.
We all have had to go through some rough patches to get to where we are today, and by sharing some of mine with you, I hope you can see where I am coming from and why I ultimately became a member of a conservative party. You may not agree with me on a number of things, and that’s okay; in fact, that is better than okay. It’s only through having disagreements on items that I think we can sometimes come up with better solutions. We need to hear the other side. However, we can’t do that if we are turned on each other, running around being driven by all our differences rather than looking at the similarities. One I would hope that we could agree on is that stealing from children is never a good idea, and if you support a party that has that kind of fiscal policy, or are helping prop one up, then you are doing just that.

Sincerely,

Shane Getson