Like many people with a troubled upbringing, I have been a very anxious, fearful person for most of my life. I am afraid of an awful lot of things, chief among them my own emotions. Don’t believe me? Just ask any of the women who have made the mistake of living with me!
So, my normal reaction to being angry for a protracted period of time is to develop flu-like symptoms of nausea, fatigue and fever. As a result, I am a strangely conflict-averse person in the parts of my life that are not on public display. For me, politics serves a vital function in my life: it allows me to be aggressive, hostile, even angry in a highly structured, pro-social context. Until the Canadian public square went into retrograde over the past decade, at least, when the norms, traditions and rituals that structured political debate began to fall away.
My preferred adversarial sport, for as long as I can remember, has been political debate. Even on my worst day, I can usually win a political debate on an issue with which I am familiar. Consequently, debates I have lost loom large in my mind; and one of these rare events took place just down the road from the Halfmoon Bay School/wild bird refuge three years later in 1993.
