Remembering Tooker in Election 2004

   So it’s federal election 2004 and Stephen Harper and his Conservatives are creeping up in the polls. Promising a new Canada … where the (CBC) Communist Broadcasting System will be gone … and let’s not water it down … women’s rights will be gone … we’ll have a Supreme Court of judges who will consult extremist MPs as to how to rule on matters. Not to mention an end to any support for Kyoto and green initiatives.

   And of course Charter rights will be chopped up … as Harper and his Conservatives can tell you. Who needs those lies that save gays from getting their asses kicked …       and who needs a rights guarantee for minorities and French people that have been ruining white racist Canada for so long.

   Let’s go on to foreign wars with George Bush, and kiss his ass as well, so we can forget about all the corporate tax breaks we’ll be paying for… in this end game of corporate media Canada.

   So as this rant progresses, you might wonder what it has to do with Tooker Gomberg. Yet I think it has all the reasons why he might want to be alive. He cared on all the issues, and had he known Canada was headed for this dark period he probably would have fought off the terrible depression of last winter. It wouldn’t have taken his life so easily.

   Tooker believed in peace and a green planet … he would not let Harper walk into power … he would follow him and haunt him every day … because that’s what has to be done … though no one is really doing that now.

   All of my life I had friends who found their ends in suicide. When I was fifteen, my best friend jumped into the canal and drowned … because his new girlfriend, that he loved so much … had gotten pregnant … she tried to abort herself and died. The baby didn’t live … she didn’t live … and he didn’t live. But I live to tell about it and ask if the Conservative Party of Canada should be allowed to go ahead in their quest to have us tell those kinds of stories again.

   Long years later and a few suicides later … I found myself with a best friend who was gay and dying from AIDS. He lost his memory … his family and others had little compassion. Perhaps if he had lived he would have wanted to marry another man … and found himself again facing people with little understanding and perhaps no compassion. So do we really need Harper to put us through this again?

   Or what about that time years ago when a pal of mine shot his leg off with an illegal rifle … he’s been crippled since then … and doesn’t really need to hear Harper talk on Conservative plans on a replacement of the gun registry.

   In the end the greatest person dies for peace and compassion, and Tooker died that way because he fought all his life … and he had more courage than most of us, who at this point in history sit back in self-imposed helplessness as the Conservative Party of Canada writes our new charter of intolerance.

Gary Morton

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