I removed yesterday’s links post after learning that the Canadian gaming site led to terrorist links.
People do need to get on with living their lives, and cannot do so when paralyzed by mortal terror. I get this. However, the extent to which people in this country avoid taking any personal responsibility for their communities is truly a sin of omission.
Are we so invested in our civilized culture, that we would sooner turn a blind eye to any activity that threatens to stain our polite veneer than safeguard what is ours? One doesn’t have to look hard, or do much more than open the eyes, to find information on the reality of terrorist activity here. Start with articles such as this one on the Mackenzie Institute site. If you’re looking for yourself, then please don’t stop there, but continue seeking information independently. I am not an expert or a journalist and my writings here are my personal opinions based on my own experiences and readings.
I years ago lost track of the number of Americans who, upon learning that I was from Toronto, responded with some form of, “Toronto is a beautiful city …it’s so clean.”. More and more the word clean, in this context, is coming to mean sanitized and antiseptic to me, but only, dangerously, on the surface. We sweep all ugliness and unpleasantness under the rug in order to maintain our pristine self image, and in doing so put our children’s future at peril.
The thing we’ve always touted with pride in this city, our tolerance and multiculturism, is becoming a fragile and uncertain thing as the world changes. I’m shocked to hear educated intelligent fellow citizens tell me that each ethnic community within our culture is responsible for cleansing its own.
Certainly no private individual can take responsibility for and action in segments of our society outside of their personal sphere. We each can, and should, though, take full responsibility within it, and communal responsibility throughout.
If this marvelous ‘melting pot’, as Torontonians proudly term this city, truly exists, then our spheres of personal influence overlap across demarcations of ethnic origins. Personal spheres of influence include ones family, friends, and co-workers, as well as community business and property owners. Who among us cannot count multiple ethnic origins among the denizens of those personal spheres?
Yes, it’s a heck of a lot harder to pay attention and comprehend the presence of dangerous influences in the lives of our children and everyone else we care about than it used to be. The sheer volume of contact enabled by this new world of technology we live in can be mind numbing on a personal level, and we’re often focused on learning to tune most of it out so we can get something done. Doing the exact opposite, opening our reception to the entire cacophony bombarding everyone around us, is simply impossible. Retreating ever further on a personal level, though, is an abdication of responsibility which equates directly with the rights and freedoms we’ve come to take for granted.
For too many people the only coping strategy for this is to turn increasingly to the comforting illusion that our law enforcement, our governments, our Big Brother, will take care of things. Those people we pay and elect to ‘take care’ of everything for us, though, are usually underpaid, sometimes corrupt, and often fallible human beings just like we are. We share responsibility for their actions no less than we do for our own or those of our families, employees, etc.
So how do we cope with the cacophony? The same way that we cope with the new media bombardment on a personal level. By creating and constantly fine tuning custom filters. The faster the world changes, the more flexible and adaptable we have to become. The single most frustrating aspect of exploding new technology and the changes in our world on a personal level is the fact that there’s no such thing as learning something new once and for all. Who hasn’t proudly mastered, at long last, a new idea or tool only to be rudely greeted with the fact that it’s outdated, requiring us to update our skills against encroaching obsolescence? That’s a pretty rough treadmill for most people. Who personally has the time and ability to fully observe and analyze even a fraction of the entire cacophony?
The result of this is that just as we’re all being drawn into the overwhelming global pool of humanity through technological connections and advances, many normal, well meaning people are instinctively retreating to safety. The ‘pooling’ of humanity, the breaking down of the barriers that separate us, is, perversely, also highlighting our differences and conflicts.
I believe this is actually a good thing. The time of change we’re living through isn’t easy, but change never is. Growing up has always been hard. Every challenge, though, every painful transition, is exaggerated by denial and eased by willed acceptance.
The world will continue to get smaller. We and our children will continue to become more and more vulnerable …until we decide to face that reality. The same new elements of our existence that expose us to danger offer the means to safety and survival when we embrace cognizance and take up the responsibility for our rights and freedoms.
Focusing our political attention on red herrings such as overloud protest about racial profiling is no more productive than election time mud slinging, tactics which are used to cry wolf until they lose meaning. If you’re just a business person, or just a worker, who, like most of us, concentrates most of your energy on paying the bills, getting ahead, and remembering to celebrate your humanity at the same time, you still retain the choice of whether to be a witless pawn or a responsible citizen. In choosing the latter, you accept, as I do, that we all have a personal stake in creating the world we want to live in.
Sane human beings have a built in moral compass. Personal freedom, both an ancient and a modern concept, is a bounty of taking ownership of and being guided by that compass. When you choose to follow a leader whose words make you feel good and appeal to you personally without examining the underlying premises determining your course, you are handing over your freedom rather than joining it to a group or cause.
Would doing that make you a bad person? Evil? Well meaning but misguided? An innocent dupe? Are any of those descriptions a sufficient self-goad to take the time to learn, analyze, and make conscious choices rather than taking the path of least resistance? I believe that those of us who choose freedom and responsibility can act and strengthen our cause from within the parameters of our daily lives.
Canada today is not always an easy place in which to state such opinions, but there have not been many societies or many moments in human history where it was easy. Human freedom has typically been won through revolution, not argument. Forming, holding, and stating a strong opinion garners attention. It also has a wonderful way of identifying solid relationships and cementing them, when it is based on a foundation of honesty and respect.
We are a clean and polite society here. Simple politeness is as powerful a means of showing respect as it is a tool of hypocrisy. It is the latter use which is dangerous. The fact that those who decide to send our troops, our family members, to Iraq can only make doing so politically palatable by calling it peace keeping and making loud statements of policy decrying barbarous methods and practices, is totally representative of our sanitized self-image.
We’ve learned to be horrified by sexual predators (although we still let them out), and are no longer surprised to hear a neighbor telling a reporter how nice and normal the perp seemed. Why is it acceptable to note, for example, that crime rates are higher in poor neighborhoods, but not to identify which societies spawn higher or lesser numbers of predators? Can not such identification focus as equally and constructively on identifying desirable societal attributes? Where does our treasured multiculturalism, in which each ethnic group contributes and is proud of its best, disappear to? Most importantly now, are we prepared to reason clearly enough to address real threats of terrorism that make us more vulnerable in this shrinking world without being handicapped by our racial and other insecurities?
