What We Need

Mark Kingwell is my boyfriend.

That is, he is one of my favourite writers because he's so human and humane. He's young (under 50), he's local (teaches at U of T), he's had a makeover (he transformed from a geek with thick glasses to style icon with shaven head with the success of his book, In Pursuit of Happiness: Better Living From Plato to Prozac, though now he may be sporting a ponytail), he's full of himself (adopts that false humility so favoured by philosphers who ramble on).

But most of all, he expresses my views much more thoughtfully and eloquently than I could ever pen. You know that feeling of accord and being understood you get when you read someone and say, Yes, that's exactly how I feel too but he says it so much better. That's Kingwell for me. Him and Rick Mercer. Are you reading Rick Mercer's blog yet? His recent posts are about the Liberal leadership race - recruiting dead Canadians and the race between Iggy and Rae. I like that Rick stabs everyone. But I digress.

Kingwell specializes in theories on politics and culture. I met him one day at an author's reading and I wanted to be his groupie. I followed him around the room, but I guess I make a bad groupie because he never knew I was following him. Maybe following with the eyes doesn't count as groupie behaviour.

But it is the upcoming November municipal election that had me going back to Kingwell, to read his The World We Want: Virtue, Vice, and the Good Citizen. Not that Kingwell has all the answers. He's an idealist afterall. The question is, how do we build the world we want? By engaging in our civic responsibility to establish belongingness and ensure social justice. Easier said than done when we're so busy tending to day to day living.

Still, we need a guiding goal that at least put us in the right direction. And it's in reseaching this direction that I land on Philia, a site dedicated to the development of good citizenship. On their book list, I see four books that I have read in whole or in part (sometimes, one just can't get into this kind of reading). I guess I have an interest in discovering how to build the world we want.

So all groupieness aside, I count Kingwell among one of my inspirations.