Loosely inspired to write this by the new successful Steven Harper's ad campaign; the appeal to the clean living Liberal to vote Conservative and the Conservative attempt to get the Native ( and sympathizers) vote, by stating that "the Conservatives intend to really make the True North Strong and Free." On the heels of his statement I believe I heard the collective groan of downtown Toronto float in through my window.

A psychologist friend of mine once said "for every successful man, there are 99 broken ones." I would add that the successful man is standing on a heap of 99 broken men. That the successful man's success is, (at the very least) dependent upon the failure of the 99 others. The successful have the broken to thank. Nobody gets anywhere on their own.

We all want to believe in the American Dream, or our Canadian version of it; that is that you can be successful if you work hard, apply yourself, be organized, yadda yadda yadda, we've all heard it, and damn! You too can become the Prime Minister, so long as you have all your faculties, an ivy league education, be from an 'old' Canadian family, and are white. But who the hell wants to be the Prime Minister, what a shitty job, too much responsibility, headaches, and you have to be boring these days to even get the job.

So what we're talking about here is success, but by who's definition? Let's Forget the Spin here for a minute and really think about what would make us individually feel that we have reached success. Let's set the bar for ourselves. It is a subjective question. What is success to you?

It's infuriating to know that the bar for success is set for you/us by multinational corporations, whose very survival depends on the amount of their products that we consume. The spin in capitalist consumer culture is then that the more you own (read consume) the more successful you are. This is bullshit, out and out B.S.

A really abrasive example of this is how the pharmaceutical industry manipulates human health organizations because they find cures to diseases in pill form, which they need to create a market for. They lobby to make us sick, and it makes me sick that's for sure, but I am not buying any (dumb down) pill to cure this illness. A good example of this is all the clap trap about 1/3 of (American) children taking drugs for Attention Deficit Disorder. There is no way that you could convince me that 1/3 of American children have ADD; I call bullshit, again. Social ills cannot be resolved with a pill. If the children can't sit still in class, maybe it's because they ate fruit loops for breakfast, maybe the curriculum is damn boring, maybe they are just being kids and our system of education is a construct that best accommodates adult behavior, maybe there is something wrong with the system, and not the children. It's evil for a culture to place blame for its failure in educating children on the children themselves.

Again, it's in the definition of success: what is it? If success is culturally defined and we have a culture that embraces all other cultures (multicultural, melting pot), doesn't the definition of success need to be broadened as well? Who is setting the bar these days anyway? Gladly, the notion of assimilation is all but dead. And don't even think about consensus or I'll laugh you right out of the room. This question begs to be asked and the answer we come up with could be entirely subjective, and I suggest should be entirely subjective. Individually we need to set our own bar, regardless of the Spin.

Individuate from your dominate culture and write your own damn script.