In our family we have several birthday traditions. A family dinner. The birthday person gets to choose their favourite food. Birthday cake. Birthday presents are not essential but some of us always remember to bring something. After the eating is over, we sit in a circle, or around the table, and say something to or about the birthday person.
March 13th was my birthday and although I can confidently say these are our family birthday traditions I don’t remember ever being the subject of the after-dinner circle. Until this week. I was the recipient of a round table of affirmations. I heard about the quirky but positive aspects of my motherhood. My life affirming ways of grandmothering. My non-judgemental relationships with my friends and neighbours. My loving way of being a wife. Although Tex did say that he’s happy we hooked up late in life. He wasn’t sure he would have been up for an entire life with me.
I sat. I listened. At first a bit uncomfortable. A bit apologetic. Too awkwardly humble to hear compliments. Too cool. But I let myself embrace the love. Me, the receiver. What a strange experience. And now, here I am repeating good things about myself. It feels even stranger still. Surely I must be too cool for that. But I’m not.
What else could I ask for, for my birthday than to know I am truly loved? That I am forgiven for my parenting blunders. That I have helped my family and friends grow and get through their lives.
What a wonderful gift.
And then there are the dozens of Facebook friends who sent Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday friend. Happy Birthday Auntie. Some sent short memories of time we have spent together.
What else could I ask for? Than for the people in my life to take one brief moment in their lives to think of me.
And while I bemoan the world. And all of you who are reading this have read your share of my bemoaning. On my birthday weekend, I am celebrating goodness and love.
Remember not long ago when we were inundated with “alternative” news adherents spreading warnings that there was a cabal, a backroom bunch, who were planning to take over the world? They said there were devious planners who were using covert strategies like COVID and vaccinations to manipulate the population. They were forming their own military. They were corralling power—judicial, military, government—ready for a wholesale take-down. They were buying up the media and controlling the messaging. They had organizations that stole young people and molested kids. They were infiltrating the west with foreigners and foreign ideas. They controlled world finance and were funneling all the riches to themselves. They were messing with elections. They were planning to take away individual freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom to protest, freedom to have guns, etc. They were using the education system to brainwash young people.
You are being duped, was the message. If you want to be in the know, look under your bed and over your shoulder, there is a plan to get you. There is a monster lurking. Soon it will all be revealed. In Canada the monster was Trudeau. He was in on the plan to take over the world. Their proof: he shut down the protest in Ottawa. He squelched freedom of speech. He didn’t let those good people in their trucks occupy the parliament buildings. The same news feeds and media influencers targeted Biden in the States. And his son. They targeted woke people. The liberal world order, meaning people who believed in equality, climate action and that white people did not have a divine right to rule brown people—the radical left.
The messaging said that Trump was the answer. He was going to drain the swamp of the elites…those nasty people who are in charge of everything. He was going to be the guy for common folks. He was going to put Americans first and be the first president not to invade another country. I can’t even remember his promises. I think something about the price of eggs was big.
So here we are. I am not going to talk about what Trump is doing. Writers who are much better than me have written a gazillion words about him. It’s enough for me to say that everything the “alternative press” warned me was lurking under my bed is here. They were right. It doesn’t matter which news you watch, what is happening in the States is obvious to everyone. Oh, we are arguing about whether or not the ICEMAN was so scared for his life that he had to shoot that woman three times in her face and call her Bitch in self defence. We seem to think there is some nuance that should be part of that conversation that many of us are missing. Like, did he walk himself to the hospital because he was so badly injured? There’s that. And now we are arguing about whether the fact that the young male nurse had a gun, is reason enough to be shot. (I can’t get my head around that. Isn’t that what they are fighting for…to be able to carry a gun?)
There’s no mistaking Trump’s threats to Canada, Venezuela, Greenland, Iceland, Denmark, NATO, the European Union. Everyone knows his plans to take over the world. Both sides. Everyone.
We don’t even have to look under our beds or over our shoulders. The monster came out and is so unhinged that he forgot it was all supposed to be a subversive take over. He can’t help himself. There is so much attention to be had.
I’m tired of Trump. But what I am interested in right now is where are all the people who were warning us about a conspiracy to take over the world. Where are these people? How are they accounting for the swift manifestation of their warnings? Because the rest of us are now believers. There really was a conspiracy to take over the world. And now we are living the take-down.
But didn’t the alternative news say that Trump and his boys and girls were the answer? Not the problem?
I am not being facetious. I am actually confused. Are the alternative media adherents celebrating? Is this the solution they were looking for? Are we better now?
One of my friends who is an obsessive adherent to what she calls alternative messaging told me a few weeks ago, “I don’t always like Trump. He’s kind of crass. But he is doing what needs to be done.”
Really? I haven’t seen her since. But. Really? Is this what needs to be done? And to what end?
And why do I sit here, at 4 in the morning, writing this useless blog? Why don’t I phone her up and challenge her? Why aren’t we all challenging the “alternative news” crowd with the same enthusiasm we use to challenge mainstream media?
Why are we not calling it what it is? A scam. The American people got duped by a giant scam. The scammers had everyone looking under their beds and over their shoulders for foreign threats and the horrors of the radical left. And. In the end. It was them. They got sold a fix and the fix was the problem.
My head is spinning. Is your’s?
p.s.
The trouble with this post is that it makes it appear that I think the “radical left” has all the answers. I don’t. It makes it appear that I think the system as it was, was good. I don’t. But I think that I think that what we’ve got now is the outcome of a total scam. I think when historians like me look back from the future they may call this the Era of the Great Muddle. Or the Era of the Great Deception.
Sending my hope to all my Facebook friends that you have a pleasant and loving Christmas. I had a great time with you in 2025. You made me laugh and cry and question and wonder. You made me think and think and think again. And sometimes you made me ask myself why I ever thought my thoughts in the first place.
You made me frustrated and surprised, infuriated and disappointed. You introduced me to ideas that wouldn’t have found their way into my mind if it weren’t for you. I met people I would never have known. This year I got to know the poetry of the brilliant and inspiring, Andrea Gibson. Unfortunately, it was in her dying that she came to my attention. But I thank my Facebook friends for introducing her to me. If you don’t know the work of this wonderful woman, look her up…Will the afterlife be harder if I remember the people I love, or forget them?Either way, please let me remember.
You, my Facebook friends, are relatives I would never hear from otherwise. You are friends from school, from Sunday School, from work, from the community, from politics, from knitting interests, from my travels, from my children’s lives, from the writing world.
You are friends of friends. Most of you I will never meet. Or, at least, never meet again.
I join some of your political conversations. I say what I think either in support or disagreement. Often in those conversations I refine my thinking or amend my ideas or confirm my opinions, depending on what others are saying. Thank you for that. In no other world could I have those conversations with such a diverse group of people.
It is not completely true what they say about social media confidence…that it’s easy to be your worst self and to say things you’d never say face-to-face. Perhaps it’s is true for people who don’t use their name and hide behind their Facebook mask. I know it takes courage to publicly state what you believe to be true. I have met people for the first time who say “I know who you are. I read what you said about…on Facebook.” That is accountability with wheels.
Almost always I refrain from exclaiming, “You have got to be kidding. You can’t possibly think that!!!” Although on a rare occasion I express a muted sense of despair.
Most of the time I am ignored, sometimes I’m tolerated and, once in a while, I am appreciated. I can count on one hand how many times I have been disrespected. On one spectacular occasion I responded to an old friend who now lives in Alberta. She was cheering for Trump’s 2024 election win. It was her site and her right to celebrate. But I had one of those “You have got to be kidding,” moments. I squeaked out a muted contrary response. I was pounced on by her Trump-loving friends with very unmuted name calling. I apologized to her for triggering such nasty comments. She apologized to me for her friends. She took the thread down and we both learned a few things.
Only once have I defriended someone. I didn’t know the woman. She posted several times a day. Her comments ranged from full-out anti First Nations racism to seemingly benign comments about First Nations but ones that were pierced through with racist innuendo and snide jokes. At first, I engaged with her. Then it became clear there was no point. But somehow the algorithm would not let go. She took up way too much space, so I deleted her.
There is so much to bemoan about Facebook: the algorithms, the advertisements, the billionaire ownership, the trolls, the nasties, the nonsense.
But. For me. For now. Have a pleasant Christmas, my Facebook friends. My world is more interesting because of you. Thank you for that.
And. Now. Do I wish you a Happy New Year? It seems out of place these days. To me it sounds a bit vacuous given the deep anxieties most of us are experiencing. I do hope you find happiness in the coming year. But more than that. My wish is that 2026 brings a new sense of ‘us’ and that our insatiable desire to pursue out individual happiness and defend our individual ‘rights’ becomes boring and so, so yesterday.
My wish for 2026 is that we reimagine being human. Being people. Not in a fist punching “We the people” sort of way. But in a ‘let’s be good to each other’ sort of way. In a ‘here I’ll go first’ sort of way.
Sending my hope to all my Facebook friends that you have a pleasant and loving Christmas. I had a great time with you in 2025. You made me laugh and cry and question and wonder. You made me think and think and think again. And sometimes you made me ask myself why I ever thought my thoughts in the first place.
You made me frustrated and surprised, infuriated and disappointed. You introduced me to ideas that wouldn’t have found their way into my mind if it weren’t for you. I met people I would never have known. This year I got to know the poetry of the brilliant and inspiring, Andrea Gibson. Unfortunately, it was in her dying that she came to my attention. But I thank my Facebook friends for introducing her to me. If you don’t know the work of this wonderful woman, look her up…Will the afterlife be harder if I remember the people I love, or forget them? Either way, please let me remember.
You, my Facebook friends, are relatives I would never hear from otherwise. You are friends from school, from Sunday School, from work, from the community, from politics, from knitting interests, from my travels, from my children’s lives, from the writing world.
You are friends of friends. Most of you I will never meet. Or, at least, never meet again.
I join some of your political conversations. I say what I think either in support or disagreement. Often in those conversations I refine my thinking or amend my ideas or confirm my opinions, depending on what others are saying. Thank you for that. In no other world could I have those conversations with such a diverse group of people.
It is not completely true what they say about social media confidence…that it’s easy to be your worst self and to say things you’d never say face-to-face. Perhaps it’s true for people who don’t use their name and who hide behind their Facebook mask. I know it takes courage to publicly state what you believe to be true. I have met people for the first time who say “I know who you are. I read what you said about…on Facebook.” That is accountability with wheels.
Almost always I refrain from exclaiming, “You have got to be kidding. You can’t possibly think that!!!” Although on a rare occasion I express a muted sense of despair.
Most of the time I am ignored, sometimes I’m tolerated and, once in a while, I am appreciated. I can count on one hand how many times I have been disrespected. On one spectacular occasion I responded to an old friend who now lives in Alberta. She was cheering for Trump’s 2024 election win. It was her site and her right to celebrate. But I had one of those “You have got to be kidding,” moments. I squeaked out a muted contrary response. I was pounced on by her Trump-loving friends with very unmuted name calling. I apologized to her for triggering such nasty comments. She apologized to me for her friends. She took the thread down and we both learned a few things.
Only once have I defriended someone. I didn’t know the woman. She posted several times a day. Her comments ranged from full-out anti First Nations racism to seemingly benign comments about First Nations but ones that were pierced through with racist innuendo and snide jokes. At first, I engaged with her. Then it became clear there was no point. But somehow the algorithm would not let go. She took up way too much space, so I deleted her.
There is so much to bemoan about Facebook: the algorithms, the advertisements, the billionaire ownership, the trolls, the nasties, the nonsense.
But. For me. For now. Have a pleasant Christmas, my Facebook friends. My world is more interesting because of you. Thank you for that.
And. Now. Do I wish you a Happy New Year? It seems out of place these days. To me it sounds a bit vacuous given the deep anxieties most of us are experiencing. I do hope you find happiness in the coming year. But more than that. My wish is that 2026 brings a new sense of ‘us’ and that our insatiable desire to pursue out individual happiness and defend our individual ‘rights’ becomes boring and so, so 2025.
My wish for 2026 is that we reimagine being human. Being people. Not in a fist punching “We the people” sort of way. But in a “let’s be good to each other” sort of way. In a “here I’ll go first” sort of way.
Us humans have been ruled by oligarchs, kings, dictators, what have you, for eons. We tolerate these rulers until they have killed, stolen, destroyed more than we can endure. Then we kick them out or murder them and replace them with another overlord. Over and over again. For a tiny sliver of history, we tried ‘rule by the people’. We called it democracy. We called the ruler, ‘the government’.
In the west, ‘the government’ has had a long run. Ideas of government by the people brought with it ideas of individualism. The importance of the person not just the people. Ideas that made modern western people less tolerant of rulers than their predecessors…more demanding. Now many western people are itching to kick out ‘the government’. It’s not surprising. ‘The government’ in many respects acts like the other sorts of rulers and has inherited human’s historical aversion to being ruled. The thing that shocks me is that we can see what we are replacing it with. Yet we are doing it anyways. The replacement is not even pretending to solve our grievances. He despises the individual. He believes humans are best used as fodder. And he is not trying to hide his intentions. That’s the part that shocks me.
As Heather Cox Richardson says, “The Trump administration is replacing American democracy with a kleptocracy, a system of corruption in which a network of ruling elites use the institutions of government to steal public assets for their own private gain.” We got sold the idea that smaller government was better…that the bureaucracy was bloated and elected lawmakers were corrupt. Most of us believed that was, in many ways, true. Then we got sold on the idea of privatization…that government should not own the mechanisms of survival. Many people believed that was true, as well, although most people didn’t understand what privatization meant (HCR’s definition pretty much sums it up). We already believed that the ‘elites’ were bad. It’s in our DNA. Although most of us are still confused about who the elites are—government folks? private corporation owners and profiteers?
We got confused because many of the same folks who believed in smaller government also believed corporations were the evil ones. Here’s a part that I don’t get. Republicans, libertarians and others call for less government…it’s the enemy. Republicans are looking to overthrow the government elites, drain the swamp, install a new regime…you know the story. It all sounds so radical. Maybe even with a hint of necessity. Yet right before our eyes. With no sense of propriety Trump and his buddies are putting the power, the money, the military, the future, the planet…in the hands of the folks who are clearly manipulating the world economy through the very corporations Republicans, libertarians and others profess to hate. Is your head spinning? Mine is.
What am I missing here? What makes this make sense?
So far, the folks who are into replacing government with the new face of oligarchy, monarchy, dictatorship, what have you, are winning. And even some of the smart ones of us are saying “Trump might be a slob, but he’s doing what needs to be done.”
Some of us are dizzy. It’s like we have a collective case of vertigo. We have been spinning in an unfathomable vortex of history repeating itself. I am a historian. And for my historian fellows, I know we don’t believe history repeats itself. But I believe it does go around and around using the same basic ingredients, elements, factors, energy, human constituent parts. Around and around. Believing there is something new. Something different. Around and around. Yet recycling the same old, same old. Around and around and around. Some of us praying. All of us hoping. Most of us skeptical. dizzyingly skeptical.
Maybe AI will spin us out of our human whirlwind. Into something completely different. I hope not. But I am tired of more of the same. We need something outside of ourselves to save us from ourselves. No matter how clever we get we still aren’t quite clever enough to fix our messes. I’ve been thinking that all our cleverness is just creating more clever problems not more clever solutions.
Spirits? Saints? Aliens? The ancestors? Jesus? Super heroes? It’s no wonder people believe in these sorts of otherworldly solutions. It is one of those moments in human history where humans appear to be hopeless and perhaps, collectively, we need to look elsewhere for hope. In my tiny, insignificant life, I have never been so completely out of suggestions. So completely without answers. And so fascinated by the otherworldly.
Yet, in a way, I am relaxed. It’s not that the future of the world is out of my hands. It’s always been out of my hands. But now the future is also out of my realm of understanding. And not only that. It’s out of my realm of imagination. Now, what else is there for me to do but relax. And watch and wait.
Oh, I won’t stop advocating for better housing conditions for poor people. I won’t stop creating safe spaces for people to live. I won’t stop encouraging my grandchildren to pursue their creativity and their passions. I won’t stop fighting racism and trying to soften the discord between peoples. That’s enough to keep me busy.
The world. The planet. The eternal purpose. The cosmic plan. Even oligarchs, kings, despots and ‘the government’. I’m just letting that stuff go for a while.
“Quiet, quiet, piggy,” said the President of the United States of America to a female reporter.
In what sort of story would this take place? Perhaps in an animated children’s cartoon when the President needs to protect the woman to keep her safe? But I can’t imagine what would come next or how a writer would build out the characters and fill in the story with surrounding events.
Oh, it’s not a story. It’s real life. As they say. You can’t make this stuff up. You wouldn’t make this stuff up. When you read it, it leaves you flat. Just flat. It isn’t even dystopia. It’s banal, trite, the worst kind of juvenile.
Yet I continue to hear friends and family say, “I don’t like Trump, but he’s doing what needs to be done.” Some of these people likely hold a sort of far-right Christian belief that great mayhem must come to herald the second coming of Jesus. Or they might be the plug-your-nose-it’s-going-to-hurt-but-it’s-necessary sort of believers, that for secular reasons think the fall of the American empire is a good thing.
While the first group have a firm grasp of the “what’s next” the second group haven’t yet explained what they are looking forward to, what will come of this revolution they are so ardently supporting.
I have, for a long time, thought there needed to be a giant redo of the American system. I frivolously used words like destroy and revolution. I wanted a massive disruption that would put an end to the domination of corporate control, colonialization and capitalism. I wanted the current, corrupt system replaced by a government that I could describe with words like benevolent, even-handed, grown-up, emotionally mature, smart…really smart in a ‘they understand complexity’ sort of a way.
After watching the January 6, 2021, Washington Capitol attack I quit using the word destroy. And after watching the first 3 episodes of Ken Burn’s series on the American Revolution I will never again wish for a revolution.
The government I wish for doesn’t come about that way. I have moments when I return to the Christian right teaching of my youth. The one about Jesus coming back and setting up a kingdom where the lion sits down with the lamb. What a comforting idea to believe in! But while the belief itself is magical how Jesus will pull off the new world is not magical at all. It’s chaos, destruction, bloodshed and agony…for everyone who isn’t one of the ‘elect’. And there won’t be very many of those. Think about the mere eight survivors of Noah’s flood, the two survivors of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the one survivor of the fall of the walls of Jericho.
This is where the magical idea loses its appeal. This is where I am back where I started. I don’t’ want a revolution whether it is Jesus’s revolution or otherwise. And this is where I have to admit to myself that while I know what I want I can’t imagine one possible way for it to occur.
I am certain about one thing. Good will not come by way of a President who calls a woman ‘piggy’. I also know that it is past time for people to stop saying “I don’t like Trump but he’s doing what needs to be done.” The man and the actions are the same. He is a mindless, heartless, careless, incredibly unthoughtful man and he is making mindless, heartless, careless, incredibly unthoughtful change.
And then I remember I am a hopeful person and a little light eeks in to my mind. We are all seeing resistance to the madness. People are saying enough. I am now hoping that I live long enough to witness enough people saying enough.
My beautiful lacrosse playing grandsons. Jack with a silver medal and Felix with a gold.
Old people say it. They’ve always said it. It’s the sort of thing you hear along with “What’s this world coming to?” And. “When I was a kid…”
I was talking about our children’s parenting approaches with a friend last night. About her daughter’s patient instructions, inquiries, guidance of her 2-year-old. About the little fellow’s incredible ability to identify his feelings and, as he grows, his ideas and opinions.
And about my daughter’s let’s-get-things done, did-you-brush-your-teeth, sometimes not-so-patient, approach to her two adolescent, high-energy, talented, physical boys.
Our daughters have one thing in common. The same thing they have in common with us. Their children are their lives.
Despite the cultural shift that convinced women that their primary identity was not motherhood. That they needed a career. That they needed to put themselves first. That they needed to find their own sense of self, separate from their children. Despite all those incredibly important considerations. Here we are. Talking about our two daughters. Both with high-end career jobs. Both with different ways of mothering. Both dedicating an enormous part of their lives (it might be fair to say their whole lives) to their children.
Because that’s what we do. That’s what mothers do. For better. Some of us have wonderful lives with our children. For worse. Some of us have a constant struggle. But whichever is our path we all share a common truth. Once our bodies make another body. That’s it. We are in it for life. It’s us and them. These days. Our days. Our parents’ days.
If anything, our days were easier. If anything, we didn’t make such a conscious effort to parent correctly. If anything, parents these days are required to try harder, think deeper and give up more than us.
I can’t see what’s ahead for my grandchildren. I thought I knew what was best in the past. I am sure I don’t know what will be best in the future. But I know what’s ahead will be their’s to create. I also know that pretty much every grandmother I know has pretty wonderful grandchildren and that while, at this moment, the future looks bleak there is a hoard of young people with skills and understandings we haven’t thought of yet.
I am also getting the sense that many of us baby-boomers, who tried to create some separation between being woman and being mother, are learning that the best approach is not limiting, compartmentalizing and separating our ‘parts’ but by embracing our whole. By giving it all we’ve got.
I’ve been thinking back to my experience of delivering my first baby. It was a nasty birth. All births are nasty. Incredibly nasty. There is nothing beautiful about natural childbirth in our country-garden, ocean-view, highfashion western sense of beauty. I was 20 years old. My mother hadn’t taught me about childbirth. I had done no prenatal prep classes. I knew instinctively that the giant mound in my belly had to come out through what I knew to be a very small hole. The doctor had given me the medical explanations. So, I knew that. He also told me that he thought my baby was going to be at least 9 pounds. I also knew that was a lot.
During labour I knew one other thing. I did not have the option to lose it. I could scream. I could cry. I could have sworn, although I didn’t swear at the time. But I couldn’t lose it. That was not an option. This motherhood thing meant I had no choice but to pull it together. For the baby. But also. For me. There was no conceivable way that I could jump off that bed and run away from what was happening. Some of our babies die. One of mine did. Some of us, for many reasons, give our babies away. But the one thing we all have in common is that those babies are ours, in one way or another for life. There is no way out.
Those of us with natural childbirth experiences remember being told to bear down. Okay, Sylvia, bear down. I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant but my body told me to hold my breath and give ‘er.
It starts there. And it doesn’t end. We bear down.
My beautiful lacrosse-playing grandsons. Jack with a silver medal and Felix with a gold.
Parents these days. Kids these days. Old people say it. They’ve always said it. It’s the sort of thing you hear along with “What’s this world coming to?” And. “When I was a kid…”
I was talking about our children’s parenting approaches with a friend last night. About her daughter’s patient instructions, inquiries, guidance of her 2-year-old. About the little fellow’s incredible ability to identify his feelings and, as he grows, his ideas and opinions.
And about my daughter’s let’s-get-things done, did-you-brush-your-teeth, sometimes not-so-patient, approach to her two adolescent, high-energy, talented, physical boys.
Our daughters have one thing in common. The same thing they have in common with us. Their children are their lives.
Despite the cultural shift that convinced women that their primary identity was not motherhood. That they needed a career. That they needed to put themselves first. That they needed to find their own sense of self, separate from their children. Despite all these incredibly important considerations. Here we are. Talking about our two daughters. Both with high-end career jobs. Both with different ways of mothering. Both dedicating an enormous part of their lives (it might be fair to say their whole lives) to their children.
Because that’s what we do. That’s what mothers do. For better. Some of us have wonderful lives with our children. For worse. Some of us have a constant struggle. But whichever is our path we all share a common truth. Once our bodies make another body. That’s it. We are in it for life. It’s us and them. These days. Our days. Our parents’ days.
If anything, our days were easier. If anything, we didn’t make such a conscious effort to parent correctly. If anything, parents these days are required to try harder, think deeper and give up more than us.
I can’t see what’s ahead for my grandchildren. I thought I knew what was best in the past. I am sure I don’t know what will be best in the future. But I know what’s ahead will be their’s to create. I also know that pretty much every grandmother I know has pretty wonderful grandchildren and that while, at this moment, the future looks bleak there is a hoard of young people with skills and understandings we haven’t thought of yet.
I am also getting the sense that many of us baby-boomers, who tried to create some separation between being woman and being mother, are learning that the best approach is not limiting, compartmentalizing and separating our ‘parts’ but it’s embracing our whole. By giving it all we’ve got. Whatever that is.
I’ve been thinking back to my experience of delivering my first baby. It was a nasty birth. All births are nasty. Incredibly nasty. There is nothing beautiful about natural childbirth in our country-garden, ocean-view, high-fashion western sense of beauty. I was 20 years old. My mother hadn’t taught me about childbirth. I had done no prenatal prep classes. I knew instinctively that the giant mound in my belly had to come out through what I knew to be a very small hole. The doctor had given me the medical explanations and instructions. So, I knew that. He also told me that he thought my baby was going to be at least 9 pounds. I also knew that was a lot.
During labour I understood one other thing. I did not have the option to lose it. I could scream. I could cry. I could swear, although I didn’t know how to swear at the time. But I couldn’t lose it. That was not an option. This motherhood thing meant I had no choice but to pull it together. For the baby. But also. For me. There was no conceivable way that I could jump off that bed and run away from what was happening. Some of our babies die. One of mine did. Some of us, for many reasons, give our babies away. But the one thing we all have in common is that those babies are ours, in one way or another. For life. There is no way around it.
Those of us with natural childbirth experiences remember being told to bear down. Okay, Sylvia, bear down. I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant but my body told me to hold my breath and give ‘er.
It starts there. And it doesn’t end. We bear down. And give ‘er.
I was raised in a bubble. A conscious, deliberate, religious bubble. There was a definable and impermeable line between inside and outside. Between us and them. Between their teachings (wrong) and our teachings (right). Between good (us) and bad (them).
I lived the bubble thing until I was almost forty. Now I am shocked and frightened by how new technologies have cast the entire population into bubbles, how algorithms hold us in their grips and how individuals like Charlie Kirk, and others, create realities and reinforce walls around their constructions that make total sense to the insiders and sound like complete fabrications to outsiders.
I broke out of my religious bubble when I finally was able to see the bubble for what it was and for how it worked. It was a life-changing, a world-shattering experience. It took me years to be a comfortable outsider.
In my religious bubble we were taught as young people how to argue. We did role playing exercises. I liked being them. I loved to challenge our side with their arguments. I could debate with the best of them. It was my sporting event. I would have taken on Charlie with glee. Sparring with him to prove my points. It was all about making points. I would have been unphased by his put downs and bullying. I would have seen them for what they were—strategies for making points.
There was only one rule in our religious debates. The arguments had to stay inside the bubble. We couldn’t bring in outsider information. That was easy because, at the time, none of us knew much information from the outside. We were not encouraged to read outsider books or visit outsiders’ homes. Education was not encouraged. Many of us didn’t have television. My father believed it would poison our minds. We went to outsider schools, but we weren’t allowed to take part in outsider activities. No dress-up at Hallowe’en. No standing for the national anthem or God Save the Queen, something that happened at every assembly. I remember in grade three there were two of us who were not allowed to colour Christmas pictures of Santa Claus and decorated trees. A Jewish girl and me. We were given old, mimeographed colouring pages of fall leaves and pumpkins.
Our arguments. Our proofs. Our debate fodder had to come from inside our religion’s very narrow understanding of the Bible. The Bible was the only source material. For instance, if a discussion was about creation, Genesis was the source. Seven days from start to finish. Man had dominion over other created things. Woman was created from man and was to be subservient to him. No questions. It was meant to be. God-decreed. We were mere humans. It was not the created’s place to question the creator. Or to question the men who had decided what the creator meant by the things that were written in the Bible.
Thinking back, I can’t imagine how our arguments went on for so long given how little source material we were dealing with. Yet I saw myself as a radical. I questioned everything. From inside the bubble. I could only devise questions from inside. I had no other information. I was inside a locked drum, an eco chamber.
Then I started having dreams, awake and asleep dreams, of brick walls falling around me. Images of Coventry, England, which I visited in 1970. It looked like the war had taken place the day before. I was haunted by scenes of decay.
At the same time, as if someone had stuck a pin in my bubble, I began to hear voices from the outside. At first, I began to think about injustices to indigenous peoples differently than before. “What sort of God would set up a system like colonization? What sort of God would let it go on for centuries?”
Then God himself began to shake. And Jesus. Then Abraham, Issac and Jacob. The second coming. The judgement. They all became stories, metaphors, along with all the other spiritual stories and metaphors from outside of the bubble. I became physically sick as I grieved the loss of the world I once knew and that I once believed to be true.
I’m thinking about that bubble more and more as I see bubbles being constructed seemingly out of reinforced steel, not shimmering dish soap. Pins are going to have a hard time poking holes in our modern bubbles. It appears people are willing to fight for the right to live in their bubble.
While I once thought that I had escaped the bubble world altogether I realize I have moved into, or, more appropriately put, have been cast into, another bubble. The radical left, woke, Antifa, socialist bubble…apparently.
The other day a young man excused what he thought was my ignorance because as he said, “You have been indoctrinated by extreme left-wing media and you don’t even know it.” I have been told that it’s no wonder I think like I do because I have been brainwashed by the western education system. As someone, who used to be a close friend, said, “I read the stuff you post in your blog and I think, oh my, you need the right information.” Information from inside her bubble, I’m assuming.
So here I am again. This time pigeon-holed in a bubble not of my choosing. Frustrated because I thought I had moved on to a more enlightened world. Deflated because I had naively believed such a world existed. But still passionately imagining a way to live in a peaceful, non-dogmatic world where we respect and appreciate each other, where we find our differences interesting rather than threatening and where we interrogate our own sources with the same doggedness as we apply to others.
On Reconciliation Day I’m thinking about the reason we need it. Perhaps, simply put, it’s because Canada was built on the principles of white supremacy and as a country we are at risk of forgetting.
If you Google “white supremacy” you will likely find the following definition:
White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races. The belief favours the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine of scientific racism and was a key justification for European colonialism.
Or you may, as I did this morning, find this definition front and centre:
The term white supremacy is used in some academic studies of racial power to denote a system of structural or societal racism which privileges white people over others, regardless of the presence or the absence of racial hatred.
It’s easy to see the difference in these two definitions. The first states that white supremacy is a belief. The second states that white supremacy is a term used by certain group of scholars. The first says that it is rooted in the doctrine of scientific racism. The second says it is imposed on a system that could have no racial hatred whatsoever. The first defines white supremacy as a fact of history. The second defines it as a construction of academics.
I don’t know about you, but I find this not only significant, but concerning.
Why the slide?
My sense is that the deliberate dilution of white supremacy is part of the larger narrative designed to both target “woke” academics, who are being actively discredited by many conservative leaders and influencers, as the source of a falsehood and a fabrication and to silence the voices of the historically oppressed…brown people, women and Indigenous people. This is part of creating a new population of oppressed…white men, anti vaxxers (as Premier Danielle Smith said “unvaccinated people have received the worst discrimination of any group in more than 50 years”) and white people in general.
I don’t find this slide surprising. I find it appalling.
A large part of my white life has been spent inside the First Nations world. My career has been spent pushing and pulling government to try and improve First Nations housing. My academic life has been spent writing (not rewriting) the history of the relationship between First Nations and Canada.
It is from my academic perspective that I find the muddling of white supremacy to be particularly galling. For decades (centuries?) white supremacy co-existed alongside and informed academics who wrote racist histories of black and Indigenous people. These are the histories most of us old folks were taught in school. The histories that said Indigenous people have all but vanished. That colonialization was a triumph. That white people had a right to North American. That “Indians” should be thankful for everything they are “given.” You know the history. Academics were complicit with and were effective disseminators of white supremacist ideology.
Until they weren’t.
When academics stopped working for the cause of white supremacy, white supremacists began targeting them. Belittling them. Attacking their institutions. And let’s not get mixed up here. This is not just a problem in the States. My history of First Nations housing on reserves in Canada has been criticized for being negative. “At a time,” I am told, “when we need to hear good things about our country why would you be so critical of Canada?” One of the reasons these comments don’t work for me is that I was not raised by a mother who said, “If you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all.” My mother said, “If you can’t say what’s true don’t say anything at all.” And I tell my children and grandchildren, “Just because they don’t want to hear it doesn’t mean you don’t say it.”
Let’s be clear. White supremacy is not a term used by some academics. It is a movement that dates back to the 18th century. It’s a movement that was designed to oppress certain people (and continues to oppress certain people) in ways that the rest of us have never experienced.
On Reconciliation Day let’s not get mixed up. Reconciliation, in spite of its shortcomings, is meant to help us remember our history of white supremacy as demonstrated by the existence of nearly 100 years of residential schools.
