sylviaolsen

How is it so far?

Twenty-one percent of Canadians said they would support Trump in the last election. We all know some of those people. They were our friends and family. Many didn’t outwardly say they supported Trump. He was too crass, too dumb, too full of himself. But they supported a myriad of ideas that fell into the Trumpish camp. At first my sense was that they had a constellation of beliefs and values that, while I did not agree and could not totally understand them, were legitimate responses to the crazy world.

These friends and family seemed angry at everything COVID (anti vaxxing seemed to lead…to trigger the rest of the ideas), they seemed sure there was an underground force manipulating everything from the economy to international relations to our sleep patterns and the weather/climate, and on… They seemed to believe mainstream media was making stuff up and that their “alternative media” was telling corrective truths. They seemed annoyed that white people were getting discriminated against. They seemed suspicious of university educations, the police, the justice, healthcare and education systems, and more, and more. Once a conversation turned to one of these topics, the others were not far behind. Before you were finished there was a hint of them all.

It reminded me of when I was a fundamentalist Christian. We called our constellation of beliefs “First Principles.” You couldn’t believe one without the other. Our beliefs were like a network of veins, blood flowed through them all.

In conversation with these friends and family I often ended up defending the current system, as if I believed that capitalism, globalization and junk food were good for us. As if I believed everything I read in the newspaper, heard at university and saw on the news (at least the news I was watching). As if I believed our western, privileged justice system was fair, honest and good. As if I hadn’t spent most of my adult life (post church, that is) in some sort of protest against our western system and wishing for a revolution.

But theirs was such a completely different world view than mine, I felt like I had to constantly defend myself and in so doing I ended up defending things I had never defended before. I knew the revolution they had in mind would not bring about the systemic changes I thought were so, so, so necessary. I ended up using all my mental energy researching and debating each one of the ideas. I could not keep up so I started to quit the conversations before they got going.

I had been in a similar situation as them. In the church. I had an answer for everything. I had to. If one of my beliefs fell apart, the rest of them got shaky. So, I kept it up. I was right. “The world” was wrong. Although being right was tiring it was also life affirming. Being right never did a thing to improve the world but it made the world easier to bear. It was us against the world and there is a certain appeal to that.

But our tiny church would never have its crazy beliefs put to the test. The church would never have the power or position to see if its ideas worked or to see what would happen if wheels were put on what we believed.

Now here we are.

Their revolution is here. The whole constellation of ideas that made the Trump movement (or the anti-democratic movement) is being transformed into action. Not cautiously, slowly, one-thing-at-a-time, but slam-dunk, in-your-face, as fast as possible to throw everyone off their feet, scramble their brains, upset their stomachs, so everyone and everything is so off kilter that there is no effective respond. And if there is, they have that covered, responders will be arrested.

I think we are all a bit shocked when we shouldn’t be. Everything we see happening was promised. But even those of us who believed it would be bad didn’t really believe it. Not this bad.

The western system that made us all so complacent, so comfortable, so emboldened, so self-focused, is no longer there for us to depend on.

Now the revolution is here.

At the helm is a middle school yard bully who finally gets to be in charge and has one thing in mind—revenge. He hates that he’s chubby, weird looking, and not-that-bright. Now he’s going to take out everyone he blames for making him feel that way. He’s going to put us all in our place—beneath him—where he thinks we belong. Women, people of colour, people who are disabled, educated, gender diverse… Perhaps only very rich white men will be immune from his raids and ravages, because of his delusion that those are his people.

Nothing I have said here is new, helpful or even very interesting. We’ve heard it all before a dozen times. It’s just my morning meanderings. And, I suppose, my way of asking—is there still 21% of Canadians who support Trump? Now that his crazy talk has gotten real does it still sound good? Does the revolution look like what you thought. Is it going in the right direction?

Are Canadians going to embolden our own very weak strongman who can’t seem to grow up past his schoolyard-level Trudeau jealousy? In the name of what? The economy? Christian values?

sylviaolsen

Education?

I graduated with a Phd in 2016. It’s not something I advertise. I am seldom Dr. Sylvia Olsen. I find as many people are suspicious of that level of education as find it interesting. Apparently having a Phd makes you one of the educated elite. Brainwashed by leftist university doctrine. It’s a stretch for me to think of myself as any sort of elite. I dropped out of school when I was 17, at the end of grade 11, and got married. I moved into a single wide trailer on an Indian reserve. I worked for minimum wage. My husband did a bit better than me but it was years before his wages even reached middle class. Once you are a high school dropout you are always a high school dropout. And when you’ve lived in a trailer on a reserve it sticks with you.

That being said, thinking has been my favourite activity since I was a little girl. Figuring stuff out. Asking why. About everything. I went back to school when I was 37 because I couldn’t find the answers to the questions I had—about things like why single-wide trailers were some of the best houses on Indian reserves and about why Canada didn’t seem to care. I needed time and space to think. I needed a place where thinking was what people did. A place where you could put your questions on the table and where you could find other people who were genuinely interested in pursuing the answers.

I found out that I was a historian. The historical lens was the one that gave me the sort of insight I was looking for. Canadian history in the early 1990s was undergoing a dramatic transformation. The old historians, mostly men, had told stories of railroads, politicians, industry and World Wars. Their histories were missing the people.

It was an exciting time to be in the history department. Far, far, far from feeling like I was being brainwashed. I thought I was a radical. Challenging the status quo. Thinking of new ways to interpret old information. Putting women, children, Indigenous people and everyday life into the stories.

While university was never a destination for me, I loved the process. I was able to think with no apologies. At times I had to defend my choice. Some family and friends would say, “You need to get out of your head and into your heart. That’s the trouble with the western world. They don’t get out of their heads.”

I couldn’t see it. In general, it was my sense that there weren’t a lot of people who were thinking too much. Perhaps there were some people in the university, like the ones who seemed to pointlessly bury their heads in things like ancient Greek literature, but nowhere else. Secretly I believed that for most people more thinking might be a good thing. Even then I knew saying such a thing would sound elitist although I didn’t use that word.

I am just completing a post-doctoral degree. Thirty-five years after I started my back-to-school journey with only a few years off here and there. Yet it is my recent experience that spending decades training my brain to think critically is of little value in this current populist world that equates hours on the Internet with hours of research.

I’m going to be 70 on my next birthday and I think the shift from valuing higher education to disdaining it has taken place over the last half of my life—since I started university. I don’t like the shift. We all know the examples of where disdain for education turned to witch hunts, purges and annihilation—Germany, Italy, China and Cambodia. Stalin was so jealous and intimidated by anyone he thought was smarter than him that he either murdered them or sent them to the gulags.

It’s said that the Republican party has always had an aversion to the highly educated, and perhaps so, but I don’t think any of us have ever witnessed such a celebration of the uneducated as we are seeing in the US. Have we ever heard a presidential candidate, soon to be president, so crassly calling people dumb and stupid. So intimidated by intelligence? So boldly demonstrating his foolishness? Have we ever seen so many people enjoying such antics?

I am tired of all the analysis of the current state of our world and especially of American politics. It seems like the last thing we need is another angle, another argument. I apologize if you, like me, are weary. But just one more thing. I’ve never thought that thinking it through was the wrong approach to serious problems. Until now. There has appeared to be no point.

I am emerging, however, out of the bleak. The historian in me reminds me of the thread of bold, undeterred, clear-headed resisters who survived or didn’t, but who forged a path through the dark waves of ignorance over the years.

For the past few weeks I’ve given myself the space to descend and to stay for a while in my dark feelings. Out of my head and in my vulnerable place. I am not alone. Many of us are here. Together. Perhaps just with candles. But there is light. And we will keep forging that path. Together.