Tag Archives: politics

Our big ‘neighbor’

I remember driving through Indiana and meeting a couple older teenagers at a motel pool where we stopped for the night. It was the early ’90’s and these kids knew very little about Canada. They asked if I knew of Larry Bird and the NBA? They asked if we used the same currency? And they asked what the big mall was like? After a couple questions, I realized they meant West Edmonton Mall, and living in Toronto at the time I said, “You tell me, you live closer to it.”

That wasn’t a fair response, but I was growing weary of questions like this. As a Canadian on my travels through the States, I’ve been asked about hunting moose, dog sleds, igloos, and one of my favourites, if Canada was an American State?

I don’t pretend to know a lot about America, especially their history, but Canadians have an unfair advantage over Americans when it comes to knowing about each other’s countries. We see their news, they don’t see ours. We watch their television and movies. We follow their social media and business icons. We eat a lot of food produced in the US, and eat at restaurant chains that are American owned.

Canadians know we are significantly different than Americans. I’m not sure (beyond cliches) that the same can be said in reverse. It matters more to us when we rely so much on the US. And, if you look at a population map, the vast majority of Canadians live relatively close to our border, and that is not true for Americans.

Americans can live their lives not knowing anything about Canada. We don’t have the reverse option. Our election will be a ‘blip’ of news ‘down south’, theirs have and will continue to flood our media sources. Tariffs disputes affect individual companies in the US while they affect entire communities and Provinces in Canada. We will watch their blockbuster movies, and while some of them are filmed in Canada, they will be American films that Canadians might know were filmed here, but most Americans won’t.

We have a very large and powerful neighbour to our south, and we can’t ignore the influence they have on us. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next 5-10 years. The closed border, the discrepancy between our two countries in Covid-19 cases, their leadership, and the impression the US has on the world stage, has all changed the way the US is viewed in Canada.

The little brother or sister eventually stops looking at his bigger brother or sister with admiration and awe. I think we are seeing a similar relationship transition between Canada and the US. I just hope these two siblings remember that we are all part of a North American family and keep trying to play nicely together.

In the history books

We are only half way through 2020 and already we know that this year will be prominent in history books like no year in the 2000’s before it. It is the beginning of a new era, one that will keep us socially distancing from one another for a while; One that will make the wearing of masks and hiding our faces ‘normal’; One where handshakes and hugs are greeted with hesitation rather than warmth.

But it will also be a year remembered for bringing about social change. It will be remembered not just for changing our social interactions as they relate to salutations, but also for bringing about equity and making the world a more just place for those that have been disenfranchised and unfairly treated. Perhaps this year will be remembered as year a pandemic brought us together exactly when it was trying to pull us apart.

There is still half a year left, and many hints that economies and therefore people will struggle. The second half of 2020 will hold inequalities, political strife, and a death toll that will include those fighting against a virus, and those fighting against injustice. While the pandemic will surely be the lead story in the history book chapter on 2020, I hope that social change, and the battle against injustice is the focus of the chapter.

That is my hope, but if there is one thing the first half of this year has taught me, it is that this is not a time when it is easy to predict the future. If you don’t believe me, go back in your memory to the end of December 2019 and tell me that you could have predicted anything about the world we are living in today.

The year is only half over and it is already one for the history books.

Down the rabbit hole

The afternoon I went down a very dark rabbit hole. First I read a tweet from an influential twitter profile that grossly miss-communicated some data comparing the flu to COVID-19, making it look like this coronavirus was only a threat to those over the age of 60. This tweet went to her 2.2 million followers. Then I went to another public figure’s tweet that was very controversial and did something I almost never do, I went to the tweet and read the conversation/reply thread that followed. Wow. I remember now why I don’t usually do this.

It was dark. It showed the bipolar divide that I spoke about in my post, Ideas on a Spectrum. It was nasty, it was mean, it was ignorant, it was a complete waste of my time. It achieved nothing. Not for me, not for anyone that commented. The lines were drawn and both sides could only preach to their side.

I’m glad that this isn’t my typical experience on Twitter. I’m sorry for those that spend a lot of time in this sad, angry space on both Twitter and Facebook. I’ll happily go back to my world of educators geeking out, sharing, and learning on Twitter… and I’ll stay there for a while. A word of advice as we spend more time at home, more connected than usual to news and our social streams: Keep away from the rabbit holes and check your sources for news and for click-bait headlines.

A while back I wrote about a new tragedy of the commons. In this post I said,

Indeed we have a new, social-emotional, tragedy of the commons. Despite our understanding that perpetuating the onslaught of negative news is, ‘contrary to [our] long-term best interests’, we still do it. And social media isn’t making things any better. We used to be able to blame the media monopolies and moguls, but now we are the news-makers: We publish freely, and quickly and without thought as to how we are part of the problem.

We don’t need to feed this negative loop, and we don’t need to feed on it either.

Resilience #OneWord2020

If I were to pick 2 words for 2020, I might pick “Growth Mindset”, but if I’m only choosing a single word, it would be:

Resilience

The world needs this word right now. Here are some specific places I see a need to pay attention to this #OneWord in 2020.

In Schools:

Student anxiety seems to be on the rise, and anxiety lowers resilience and the willingness to try new things. Words seem to ‘injure’ students in ways that victimize them rather than make them stronger. This is not to say that students should tolerate bullying or inappropriate language or slander, rather they should speak up, defend themselves, and report poor behaviour. Instead it seems that they feel wounded and do not act. This is a sensitive topic, but one where I’ve seen a greater awareness of adults who want to support students and at the same time I see students allowing words to hurt them deeply, giving too much power to the transgressor.

In Politics:

I said this in Ideas on a Spectrum, “In a civil society, dialogue is the one problem-solving strategy that should be sacred. To do this, free speech is essential. But right now there is a culture of ‘attack the opposition’ that is very scary.“ – We need to be resilient when hearing opposing views, and understand that, “…we must be tolerant and accepting of opposing views, unaccepting of hateful and hurtful acts, and smart enough to understand the difference.” When we can’t have conversations with people that have different political views, we don’t grow as a culture or as a society.

In Online Spaces:

People will make mistakes online. They will say things that are unintentionally hurtful, or blindly offensive. This is different than someone being intentionally biased and rude. If the slander is intentional, it should be reported. If it is unintentional, even to the point of ignorance, we need to be more resilient about what our responses are. When every transgression is treated with an attack, the most severe/bigoted/rude/biased transgressions are not given the heightened alarm that they deserve. With lesser errors and mistakes, we need to let people have a venue to recognize their errors and invite conversation rather than damnation.

Growing up, I heard the playground retort to taunts, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never harm me.” We are past the era of letting nasty people say whatever nasty things they want, and just turning the other cheek to pretend we are not hurt. This is a good thing. We want to live in a world where that behaviour is not acceptable. But it does not serve us well to treat the attacker like they can not repent or be sorry. It does not serve us to let the words said hurt us too deeply. By being resilient we can speak up, clarify our perspective, and engage in conversations that help us feel empowered rather than victimized.

Resilience allows us to be strong, flexible, and engaged in a society that is the kind of society we want to live and thrive in.

The great divide

I make a commitment as an educator to promote people doing their civic duty and voting, and so I choose not to publicly share who I vote for. I want people to exercise their right, and participate in the democracy that they live in, and I’d rather promote that than promote any one party.

That said, I must say that I’m saddened by the story told by voters in yesterday’s election:

  1. The news leading up to the election focused on dirty tactics and the ‘ugliness’ of the attacks by parties on other parties.
  2. The Bloc Québécois had a resurgence, suggesting the return of separatist attitudes in Quebec.
  3.  While the Liberals won, the Conservatives had the popular vote.
  4. #Wexit was trending during the election, with Albertans wanting to start their own separatist movement for Western Canada.

The story being told is one of a divided nation. Head south of the border and the story, while quite different, also speaks of divisiveness in their upcoming election as well. Head ‘across the pond’ and Brexit tells yet another story of a country divided.

How does our media promote this? News headlines need to be catchy to gain clicks and advertising, or to keep people glued to their television. Social media sites are slow to respond to hateful comments and trolling. Hate and divisiveness spreads quickly. False information is easily shared. Memes that attack and ridicule get more likes and shares compared to newsworthy items on issues that really matter.

Why are democracies becoming so polarized, separatist, and adversarial? Why do we identify on the extremes rather than recognize that our ideas and opinions sit on a spectrum? Why do these extremes define our politics?

I don’t have answers to these questions. I have concerns about how great a divide we are seeing, and I wonder what can be done to promote a democracy that can be defined by unity rather than polarization?

Ideas on a Spectrum

The world seems so bipolar right now! Topics that used to be on an ideological or political spectrum have become dichotomies.

di·chot·o·my. /dīˈkädəmē/

noun ~ a division or contrast between two things that are or are represented as being opposed or entirely different.

It can be dangerous to take a spectrum of ideas and polarize them. We do not live in a Yin or Yang, black or white, world. Where the greatest danger lies in this polarization is in the importance of having a right to free speech. As I said in My one ‘ism’:

“We want to live, thrive, and love in a pluralistic society. We just need to recognize that in such a society we must be tolerant and accepting of opposing views, unaccepting of hateful and hurtful acts, and smart enough to understand the difference.”

It is getting harder and harder to do this because people find opposing views, equally as hurtful as hateful acts. This is delicate, and very problematic. This is where we need some bipartisan cooperation. 

bi·par·ti·san. /bīˈpärdəzən/

adjective ~ of or involving the agreement or cooperation of two political parties that usually oppose each other’s policies.

Right now there are untouchable (un-discussable) topics that make dialogue impossible. 

di·a·logue. /ˈdīəˌläɡ,ˈdīəˌlôɡ/

verb ~take part in a conversation or discussion to resolve a problem.

In a civil society, dialogue is the one problem-solving strategy that should be sacred. To do this, free speech is essential. But right now there is a culture of ‘attack the opposition’ that is very scary. This seems to play out at its worst on Twitter:

~ A prominent person tweets something insensitive or careless and they are attacked as if every fibre of their being is evil.

~ A little-followed user tweets something ‘inappropriate’ and suddenly they are famous in the most infamous of ways. 

~ A person with an unpopular opinion tweets that opinion and they become ‘memed’ as the poster child for ridicule on the topic. 

We can’t live in a civil society where dialogue is shut down, because at that point hate and violence are too easy to be responses, where dialogue should suffice. We are seeing this happen on different ends of the political spectrums, such as: 

~ undemocratic societies shutting down/arresting/killing opposition to those in power.

~ extreme right wing groups being unabashedly hurtful. 

~ extreme left wing groups physically attacking journalists and public figures with opposing views.

None of this moves us towards a freer, more open and accepting world. None of this fosters conversations and dialogues that can help us grow as a society. None of this creates an environment where middle ground can be found, to allow the vast majority of us to coexist in a civil society. 

We are living in a time when the extremes seem to be the voice of everyone. That’s scary! If someone has a centrist view they are identified by the extremes to share the opposing extremist view. Or, they are considered collaborators, co-conspirators, or unacceptably sympathetic to the other extremist view, (sometimes by both sides simultaneously). And so the vast majority of people that do not hold extremist views are either pushed out of the conversation, (forced to be silent for fear of some form of retribution for holding a ‘wrong’ view), or they are attacked in unfair and hurtful ways. 

I don’t pretend to have answers, but I’m pretty sure that two things can move us in the right direction:

  1. We need to recognize the difference between opposing views shared in discussions and hurtful acts, and treat them differently. When someone does or says something harmful to a person or group of people, legal responses and a judicial process should prevail. When someone says something hurtful (as opposed to hateful/harmful/prejudiced), the response should be dialogue. That dialogue might not bring about any kind of consensus or agreement, but it is what we need to do in a civil society that allows freedom of opinion and speech.
  2. We need to move away from public attacks and shaming as recourse for every wrong-doing. Treating every mis-step and error a person makes as unforgivable is harmful to our society in two ways: First, it does not provide the space for apology, forgiveness, and learning; Secondly, it actually waters down the response when someone does something truly unacceptable and deplorable… if they are treated no worse than someone who mis-spoke and is apologetic. 

We can not let the extremists and the misguided be the voices for the masses. Most people in a civil society have opinions that lie on a spectrum, and not at the polar opposites of each other. To focus on the extremes is to move us towards a society that is less free.

“We want to live, thrive, and love in a pluralistic society. We just need to recognize that in such a society we must be tolerant and accepting of opposing views, unaccepting of hateful and hurtful acts, and smart enough to understand the difference.”

More on this idea here: Having hard conversations