During the traditional singing of the
national anthems of Canada and the United States at the opening of baseball’s
All-Star game, while singing the Canadian anthem, the singer is heard to giggle
slightly.
The Twittersphere went nuts with harshness
about disrespect and some even suggesting banning anthems at games.
Really?
Who among us has not giggled nervously when
under stress at the worst possible moment?
I’ll let well-funded sociology and
psychology departments at universities figure when we became a culture of
blaming and seemingly have forgone any capacity for compassionate
understanding.
Since the so-called ‘Age of Enlightenment’
began in the 18th century, for all our progress in terms of free
speech, democratic development, religious tolerance, etc., as a human community
we have been on a trajectory to the proverbial ‘vanishing point’.
No wonder the other day a young adult said
to me they have no hope and see nothing but the end of all things approaching
at a frightening speed.
Bloody as they were, especially the French
revolution in which hundreds of non-combatants were summarily executed, and the
American revolution, which had its own various acts against so-called
Loyalists, many of whom fled to Canada, nonetheless it did appear for a time
that democratic forms of government would prevail. However, we must keep in
mind that universal franchise of the vote did not happen for almost two
centuries, during which time France went through a series of upheavals,
including the Bonaparte era, the Americans had a civil war, those deep wounds
not totally healed in either country.
Slavery and the so-called “Indian Wars’,
actual wars against the Indigenous people by the American government, one
post-confederation brief rebellion in Western Canada, another not yet healed
wound, by the dawning of the 20th century primarily France, Canada,
Great Britain and the USA were moving towards actual democratic systems and,
though not until after WWI, supported by universal franchise.
However the profound bloodletting of two
world wars, the Great Depression in between, has resulted in several paradoxes:
international forms to govern world affairs, such as the UN, but it is largely
ineffective because, and will remain so, five nations alone have veto power in
the security council, the price for which is paid in blood by people subjected
to genocide, such as in Rwanda; while Canada has very strict laws regarding
boundaries for seats, known as ridings, in parliament, decided by independent
commissions in each province based on population numbers after each decennial
census, spending on elections is tightly controlled and financed in the main by
tax payers, while individuals may contribute to a party or candidate, the
amount is strictly limited: for example in the last federal election less than
2,000$, while corporations and trade unions are forbidden by law to contribute
to parties or candidates.
I mention the above against the background
of the, as yet, unfinished project of maturing democratic systems.
With extension of the vote first to
non-landowning men, but well into the beginning of the 20th century
before the franchise was granted to women, and even longer before women as
government leaders or ministers became the norm, democracy began spreading
across the globe, after WWII, until recently.
In our day once more the powerful and
elites, of both the right and the left, an ever smaller, more powerful number
of people, have seized control and push their own agenda.
No surprise then since after the US Supreme
Court decision in ‘Citizens United’ money, not the voice, the votes, nor the
concerns and needs of the common people, i.e. all the rest of us, has a wit to
do with power, governance, elections, for when ballots are cast the outcome is
virtually pre-determined because of the influence of hard, cold, cash.
On this point, I highly recommend Jane
Mayer’s seminal work DARK MONEY.
Neither major party in the last US election
listened to nor heard the people.
One man did, himself hardly the forgotten,
common man, but shrewd enough to listen to and become the voice of ordinary
Americans.
Brexit happened in Britain because of the
same arrogant deafness and the country remains in a blaming lather with still
nothing resolved.
France has deep divisions and anger, Canada
likewise, while so-called, or formerly, democratic countries, Venezuela and
Turkey being just two examples, have more and more oppressive regimes and a
very angry and divided populace.
The Canadian Prime Minister, frequently an
immature flip-flopper, prevents passage of a bill which would have protected
police officers from being slaughtered by criminals granted bail because their
violent past cannot be revealed at bail hearings, participates in the
relentless blaming by Indigenous people of the rest of us for all their past
trauma, some of it truly horrific and needing to be addressed, but the way his
government handles things is beyond rational comprehension.
Things on most reserves are ‘third world’,
but no one in his government seems willing to follow the money!
With millions upon millions poured annually
into reserves over decades where has it gone? Not into adequate housing, for
example and neither are governments willing to clean up the secretive way in
which chiefs and councils, often with every one of the same family, are chosen.
The removal in the US of Confederate
monuments, of objectionable building names or monuments in Canada because of
what the colonial powers did is, frankly, revisionist history at its most
grotesque and heals no one, reconciles no one.
Why?
Unless groups such as ‘Black lives matter’
or the Assembly of First Nations in Canada, and their counterparts around the
world, are willing to look in the mirror, government placations are akin to the
famous story of St. Augustine strolling along the shore trying to comprehend
the mystery of the Trinity. Seeing a boy running between the sea and a hole dug
in the sand with a shell in which he carried water, St. Augustine asked the boy
what he was trying to do and the boy replied: “Put the ocean in the hole.”
Augustine explained the impossibility of the task, to which the boy asserted:
“I will put this ocean in this hole before you understand the mystery of the
Trinity!”
Yes, black lives, but all lives, do matter,
and yes injustice must be re-dressed, reconciliation worked towards, but with
objective truth.
Yes, some police officers do kill minorities,
but there are more, black on black murders per weekend in Chicago than police
shootings, and yes Indigenous women and children should not be murdered, but
excusing violence against them by their own, or ignoring it, because of past
history, is disingenuous.
A prominent Indigenous recently stated how
welcoming his people were when the British and French first came. Really? How
traditionally Indigenous people have always been peaceful. Really?
So much for brushing out the wars between
the tribes through millennia in North, Central, South America – much like the
Jesuits did years ago at the shrine of the Canadian Martyrs, painting over
beneath the clouds on which the martyrs stand, the depiction of their
martyrdom.
Guess the Jesuits figure the martyrs were
assumed into heaven!
A brother priest told me of his experience
as parish priest of a large reserve when the feast of the martyrs was at hand
and how nervous he was about preaching on the feast. So he went and asked one
of the Elders what advice she had. The wise woman took his hand, looked him
straight the eye and said: “Why worry, we did them a favour!”
Indeed.
This is truth speaking.
We know the molten core of the earth
triggers earthquakes and volcanoes, neither of which we can accurately predict,
both occurring with frequent destructiveness.
Both governments and elites of the left and
the right, live on top of a seething, ever more hot and angry core of forgotten
men and women.
Who knows when this core will erupt or what
the consequences will be.
Erupt it will.
Blaming those who never had, nor have, any
responsibility for the actions of previous generations, as terrible and
destructive as those actions were, has become itself a form of discrimination
and oppression and contributes more and more to angry resistance as minorities,
finding every newer ways to blame and re-write history and making ever more
extreme demands, trigger reactions which have both sides using ever more
intemperate language.
This cycle will eventually stop
reconciliation dead in its tracks.
We cannot rationally apply to previous eras
of history, and human behaviour therein, our modern understanding of our common
humanity, of intrinsic human dignity and rights.
That is a fool’s errand.
More and more it appears minorities’ understanding
of reconciliation is: gimmee, gimmee, and there is no amount of money, no
number of building name changes, nor monument destructions, which will ever
satisfy.
Reconciliation must be mutual, or nothing
is reconciled, nor will it ever be.
Reconciliation is impossible without mutual
understanding, mutual forgiveness, mutual love.
Currently there is within societies, both
national and international, such a dearth of understanding, forgiveness and
love that the volcano of violent chaos is bubbling ever closer to the surface
and the whole human family is at risk.
Thus, the first disputed question is: Are
we willing to embrace objective truth and move away from blaming so that both
just re-dress of wrongs and reconciliation can become forward moving within the
context of authentic government of, by and for the people? Are we willing to
become a people of attentive listening, reconciliation without vitriolic
blaming, using instead love’s maturity?
Or is the chasm between the blamers and the
blamed, the blamed who did NOT enact the evils of the past, so immense that for
all the shouting back and forth no sound can carry that far and so each side
becomes ever more distanced from and incomprehensible to the other?
We need to dispassionately,
compassionately, find a way to bridge the chasm, find a meeting place, see each
other as one like myself and begin to love one another.
Little time remains before the volcano
erupts and the whole earth becomes a new Pompeii.
