Life of Steve - The Epilogue

                                         The Epilogue


      Steve belongs to a generation that's dying out.
      Every year, and sometimes more,  one of his communist comrades drops dead.Each death shrinks his world, and confirms him in his growing isolation and oncoming death.  
     For Steve never married. Whether gay or heterosexual, he has lived alone.
     He belongs to a shrinking group of men and women who were inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. "Bliss it that dawn to be alive," wrote William Wordsworth about the French revolution of l789. "But to be young was very heaven." Many people around the world felt the same about the 1917 communist revolution in Russia.
     Steve wasn't alive when Lenin led the 1917 revolution. But he does remember the Soviet victories over the Nazis in the second world war, and the Chinese Revolution in 1949.
    Like millions of people before and after him, he joined the communist party and tried to organize a revolution that would sweep away capitalism, and bring in socialism. The revolution never came.
But along the way, communists like Steve, helped fight for pensions, unions, supposrt for farmers, the minimum wage and so on.
     In Canada, communists helped create the welfare state that's now shrinking year by year. They were a driving force for social equality, which too is history.
    But Steve has no regrets. "I did what I had to do," he says. "I just wish we would have won more victories."