Article by Jean Kavanagh
Jean Kavanagh is the Senior Media Specialist for BC Policy Solutions.
My summer reading is often mysteries and thrillers. But a subtitle recently caught my eye as I passed a library book display.
“Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed”. Was it the decade when I came of age and in rebellion took to the streets to protest for women’s rights, against free trade and side by side with friends who were refugees from Central America, denouncing US imperialism in the region?
Yes. And in Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed, longtime member of parliament and social activist Charlie Angus not only chronicled the 1980s, but exposed how political decisions of the 1980s continue to haunt us today.
In fact, he called the 2020s a “redux” of the 1980s.
Some remember the 1980s with nostalgia: a harmless decade of big hair, colourful clothes and catchy pop songs. It was anything but for many. This becomes obvious skimming the table of contents: Operation Break the Working Class, Operation Race to the Bottom and The Nightmare in Guatemala are just three of the 26 chapters in a book I rapidly read.
Angus rethinks the cultural and political shifts of an era that unleashed unprecedented looting of the economy and the environment, resulting in social problems that laid the groundwork for our current situation of widening inequality and economic insecurity. It is also a personal story in which he weaves the larger narrative of the times, illustrating key events like the Chernobyl disaster, the AIDS epidemic, the fight against South African apartheid, the rise of neoliberalism, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the digital revolution.
“He reserves some of his hardest hits for Milton Friedman.”
He even reminded me of protests I’d forgotten about: against cruise missile testing in Canada and in favour of the Montreal Protocol when countries agreed to phase out new production of several ozone-destroying chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.
He remembers race-to-the-bottom actions by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Brian Mulroney, but reserves some of his hardest hits for Milton Friedman.
“In 1980, the economic shock was planned at the highest level, and it had the fingerprints of Milton Friedman all over it.”
And while during the 1980s the world stood on the brink of global nuclear annihilation, millions of people stepped up to save the planet and fight for human rights. As a punk rocker and adherent of the Catholic Workers Movement (to a degree that surprised me), Angus also showed the decade as a time of resistance, creativity, and hope.
He writes: “I want the young generation to know that an alternative future was envisioned in the 1980s. Seeds were planted that could still sprout today. What was made can be unmade…. This book is not a lament. It’s a call to arms.”
He calls on us to confront the false memories of the 1980s, explaining that dangerous memories come from the false history of the decade and says we need to remember what happened in the 1980s to resist what’s happening now.
He doesn’t claim to have the answers for our circumstances, but offers a blueprint for resistance through how it worked before.
Angus ends the book admitting to feeling dread and hope for the future.
And he returns to words from Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Workers Movement, “No one has the right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.”
Reading this book could be part of your summer work and it won’t feel like work at all.
Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed is published by House Of Anansi Press.
