This piece has a number of influences. The first and most important dates all the way back to 1995/96, when I wrote two companion pieces: Lost in the Process and Lost in the Progress, both of which were rather dark, and bitter lamentations. In the case of Lost in the Progress, that bitterness came out in the form of dark humour, and in the case of Lost in the Process, it skewed towards a straightforward lamentation without the humour.

I still have the original flip-pad, where I jotted down the ideas for those pieces, way back when; although I didn’t use everything I had written on it. There was a little bit of further material for at least two more follow-on pieces using variations of the similar title/theme, although, until recently, I was never able to do anything with them. Two of the variation titles that I had also listed (but never used), were Lost in the Procession and Lost in the Progression.

As sometimes happens, somewhere much further down the road, a few more fragments might come my way, and some of those old, dusty, unused pieces will suddenly fall into place. In this case, two recent news stories provided that needed spark. The first is a recent gaffe by Canada’s ‘dreamy’ Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (whose election to that particular position was such a foregone conclusion for such a long time, that it could pretty much have been called a coronation), where Valiant Prince Justin corrected someone, who had uttered the term ‘mankind’, and urged them to use ‘personkind’ instead. He later on tried to save face, saying it was a ‘joke’… Likewise, like any good Canadian politician worth his or her salt, Prince Justin always makes sure that any speeches he makes are in both official languages, so it is only natural that I should likewise at least make the attempt to refer to a few things such as the French words to the national anthem, and also to a couple of pieces of wordplay that Anglophone students are taught when first starting to learn French.

The second was another story, where the Canadian House of Commons voted to change the lyrics to the National Anthem, so that it was ‘gender neutral’: replacing ‘all thy sons command’ with ‘in all our hearts command’. Personally, I found this equally absurd to a previous change that was put in place in 1967, (although suggested as early as 1908), to insert the line ‘God, keep our land’ into the anthem. Well, political correctness being what it is, that, of course, is likely to soon be on the chopping block as well, because (obviously), that line is ‘offensive’ as well. </sarc>

Likewise, I’ve also made a much wider lamentation about the fact that for almost the entirety of my adult life, I’ve been one of that large population of folks, who have never had any sort of political representation of any kind. Indeed, there are plenty of other folks, especially of the Social Justice Warrior (SJW) persuasion, who quite freely state that people like myself (i.e. traditionally centrist, but with a grab bag of both liberal and conservative viewpoints on a number of issues) don’t deserve any sort of representation, precisely because we either refuse to jump on the trendy bandwagons of the moment, or if we do try, promptly fail the ‘purity tests’, (the most important of which being complete, unquestioning agreement), and get unceremoniously hurled right back off.

Well, getting lost in the procession, or worse yet, missing it altogether, tends to run the risk of, as I stated in my previous piece, ‘More Sloganeering’:

’Cause if you refuse to jump on the bandwagon,
you’ll get pissed on in the gutter.

I have also mentioned the infamous Canadian ‘sorry’, and how most people now realise that it’s almost never sincere, but in actuality is generally quite passive-aggressive in nature.