Over the course of two days this week I spent nine hours in my kayak, but not in my usu­al pur­suit of sooth­ing my soul by com­muning with the wildlife. I was part of an ongo­ing strug­gle against an inva­sive species, a seem­ing­ly Sisyphean task that serves as a metaphor for our trou­bled times.

The ene­my of my beloved lake is Eurasian Water Mil­foil (EWM), an aquat­ic weed with a Hydra-like abil­i­ty to propagate.
Its glob­al equiv­a­lent is the com­bi­na­tion of reli­gious intol­er­ance and the pol­i­tics of anger and hatred that choke off rea­soned debate, free­dom of choice and civil­i­ty in general.
Con­tain­ing that is akin to what it takes to cur­tail the encroach­ment of EWM.

The small­est frag­ment bro­ken off by a boat pro­peller or lost in the removal process has the poten­tial to drift away and start a new out­break. The fight against it involves divers pulling weeds out by the roots and lay­ing burlap mat­ting on the beds to shut off pho­to­syn­the­sis. A small flotil­la of lake res­i­dents (known as “cot­tagers”) armed with pool skim­mers, patrol in kayaks and canoes and on pad­dle boards to scoop up any bits that escape dur­ing the con­trol operation.
How­ev­er, not every­one affect­ed by the inva­sion is will­ing to con­tribute to the bat­tle against it. Some even see the growth of weed beds as an advan­tage, and don’t care that it’s a self­ish and short-term one.
Bass use the mat­ted weeds for shel­ter on hot days. Fish­er­men who pre­fer to hook their quo­tas with ease rather than patience, ignore the fact that snag­ging a lure in a mil­foil bed can con­tribute to the spread of some­thing that will even­tu­al­ly kill off the nutri­ents the fish pop­u­la­tion needs to thrive.
Politi­cians who cast for votes using the lures of MAGA and FOX News are tak­ing the same easy route, which is backed, iron­i­cal­ly, by sci­ence. “Cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gy and neu­ro­science stud­ies have found that peo­ple form opin­ions based on emo­tions, such as fear, con­tempt and anger, rather than rely­ing on facts. New facts often do not change people’s minds.”
The polit­i­cal weed bed intro­duced by that kind of non-think­ing has already turned what is sup­posed to be the august cham­bers of the U.S. Con­gress, espe­cial­ly the Sen­ate, into a dead zone. “Advice and Con­sent” has become “Dog­ma and Rejection”.

                                       IT’S EVERYWHERE

While the U.S. is the most egre­gious exam­ple of the pol­i­tics of hate and divi­sion, it is not alone. The Unit­ed King­dom and numer­ous Euro­pean Union nations have their own versions.
The col­lapse of civil­i­ty, tri­umph of trib­al­ism and dis­ap­pear­ance of the polit­i­cal mid­dle ground, once con­sid­ered so un-Cana­di­an as to be alien species, are spread­ing like mil­foil here, too.
Pierre Poilievre, the cur­rent front-run­ner and prob­a­ble win­ner of the con­test to be the next leader of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty, wants to take it on what polit­i­cal colum­nist David Moscrop called “a tox­ic, right-wing pop­ulist lib­er­tar­i­an turn.”
The ques­tion such politi­cians should ask them­selves was posed, fit­ting­ly, by one of the best-known vic­tims of the pol­i­tics of odi­um, the author Salman Rushdie in his best-sell­ing nov­el ‘Midnight’s Chil­dren’: “Am I so far gone, in my des­per­ate need for mean­ing, that I’m pre­pared to dis­tort every­thing — to re-write the whole his­to­ry of my times pure­ly in order to place myself in the cen­tral role?”

                                      BEFORE YOU KNOW IT

The Balkan wars of the 1990 are a les­son in the bru­tal con­se­quences of stok­ing hatred and intol­er­ance for polit­i­cal gain. As a reporter dri­ving through vil­lages where black­ened, shat­tered shells of hous­es cow­ered cheek-by-blood­ied jowl next to ones in per­fect order, I found it impos­si­ble to com­pre­hend how such dev­as­ta­tion could be will­ful­ly wreaked by neigh­bours. Men who had played sports, chased girls, maybe snuck their first smoke and had their first drink togeth­er, turned on each oth­er with con­cen­tra­tions of vio­lence and hatred prob­a­bly even they did not know they har­boured, until the inva­sive species of eth­nic hatred and resent­ment were introduced.
Near­ly three decades lat­er, the ten­drils are still there, as dif­fi­cult to root out as the fronds of EWM that unchecked will clog boat launch­es, make plea­sures like swim­ming dan­ger­ous to the point of impos­si­ble, and even­tu­al­ly ruin life for all the species that cur­rent­ly thrive here; human, fish and plant alike.

Destroy­ing the myth­i­cal Ler­naean Hydra was one of the Twelve Labours of Her­cules. He man­aged it with the help of his nephew Iolaus.
My neigh­bours and I know our Hydra won’t meet the same fate, but with per­se­ver­ance, we may keep it under control.

Who, one has to won­der, will do he same in the bat­tle against the inva­sive species that is tak­ing over the only lake the kayak­er of rea­soned polit­i­cal dis­course has to pad­dle on?

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