Time & Perspective Quote by Alex Campbell

There’s a politician’s tightrope act baked into Campbell’s syntax: he positions himself as both insider and dissenter, someone shaped by the very “background” that might normally obligate him to cheerlead modernization. The parenthetical “or perhaps, because of” is doing the real work. It’s a self-authorizing pivot that signals humility (“I come from this place”) while granting permission to criticize the dominant story (“and that’s exactly why I’m skeptical”). In one clause, he claims credibility and inoculates himself against the predictable charge of being anti-progress.

The key tell is “so-called modernization.” That phrase isn’t just skepticism; it’s a gentle indictment. “Modernization” is cast as branding - a sales pitch with costs that don’t fit neatly on a campaign leaflet. Campbell is registering a cultural mood swing: not rejection of change, but exhaustion with change framed as inevitable, virtuous, and externally defined. “On-going rush” suggests speed, pressure, and a loss of deliberation, implying Islanders are being hurried into a future designed elsewhere.

Context matters: Prince Edward Island’s politics has long been shadowed by the push-pull between economic development and the preservation of local identity, landscape, and community rhythm. Campbell’s intent is to legitimize a growing ambivalence among Islanders - to make room, rhetorically, for resistance that can still sound reasonable, pragmatic, even forward-looking. He’s not romanticizing the past; he’s warning that “progress” becomes a kind of coercion when it stops being a choice.