Wouldn’t you know it. Just when the voices of Indigenous people, Black people and women were beginning to make some headway and be heard over the loud voices of male supremacy and the persistent messages of the pale, pervasive patriarchy then a new rebellion snuck up on us.
Fast talk from the likes of Jordan Peterson rallied the boys. COVID rallied other would-be victims. Everyone wanted in on victimhood. Everyone wanted to complain about their oppression as if they had missed out on something. It was as if they thought the historically oppressed were getting something they deserved.
At first I was interested. I’m a western educated, vaccinated, privileged woman—I wanted to know who and what was behind this incredibly effective silencer of the voices that had been working so hard, for so long to be heard. But then how could I know. As I was told more than a few times, “You have been conditioned, programmed, moulded (just short of brainwashed…no one has actually used the word brainwashed) by the western education system.” Apparently, I am not privy to the knowledge and wisdom of the un-western-educated, common folks (and I still wonder who those folks are).
Then I began to get less interested and more worried. Internet junkies, all of them consuming the same “information” from undisclosed sources had formed the band of new victims. Daily on-line diets of racist, sexist and homophobic material mixed with anti-vax, anti-government, anti-social cohesion, anti-peaceful “information” coagulated into a common theme…angry, self-pitying individualism.
Now I’m less worried and less patient and more appalled. When Danielle Smith, Alberta’s premier, said something like, no one had ever been so discriminated against as the anti vaxxers in her province, it was clear to me that it had all gone way too far. Extreme Christians, white supremists, anti Semites and a new breed of misogynists were fully in on the act, mixing their poison to the brew—under the surface sometimes but getting more emboldened daily.
Who is fighting back? Who is demanding that this new “knowledge” is held accountable? There are voices but who’s listening? As always the thoughtful left are ineffective when trying to offset self-facing conservative thinking.
And another thing that’s concerning me for the sake of my eight grandchildren…what are we doing about the young, angry, male movement that is striking out against women? My granddaughters say it’s here. It’s now. Their peers are faced with controlling and even violent attitudes towards women I haven’t heard so openly and proudly expressed in my lifetime.
Okay, maybe I need to be more understanding. I know it’s hard for young men in the shifting economy. Jobs we could once depend on in the resource sector are drying up and it’s the boys who are struggling the most. The good ol’ life is getting harder to come by. Women are on an equal footing in tec and management jobs, they are overtaking university classes—even engineering—and they are competing and winning many positions that, in the past, belonged to men.
But whether we understand or not isn’t the issue. The thing I’m struggling with is the rise in what we have typically or perhaps stereotypically called masculine energy…angry, aggressive, competitive, demanding, chest-beating, unempathetic energy. It is bubbling up everywhere we look. There was no such immediate reflex movement when it was women, or Indigenous people, or Black people who were discriminated against. It took decades for women, Indigenous people and Black people to made any headway at all against the western headwinds.
While it is, again, getting really ugly out there and I don’t look forward to the next few years, I am not without hope. The changes the historically-oppressed have made are deeply rooted. The cell in which they were once confined has been exposed—the bars have been broken (fractured at least). The denizens of those cells have earned and experienced their freedom and their power. I don’t believe they can be reinterned.
One last and very strange thought about this new movement is how mute their voices are about climate change. They all but ignore the real existential threat to humans. While they busy themselves with their arguments about their own personal freedom and while sea level laps around their feet they hold no space for ideas around individual sacrifice in exchange for communal survival.
I don’t want to argue or fight. There is already plenty of belligerence in the world. Pushing and shoving seems like a response that it so, so yesterday.
I like the old Aesop fable of the man, the sun and the wind. The sun and the wind were arguing about who was the most powerful when they saw a man on the road. He was wearing an overcoat. They put down a challenge—who could get the man to remove his overcoat? The wind blew and blew and we know what the man did with his overcoat…he buttoned it up, held it closer and tighter and firmer. When it was the sun’s turn it simply shared its heat on the road up ahead of the man. As he experienced the change in weather he loosened his grip on his coat, he unbuttoned it and finally took it off.
The trouble with this great story is that those of us who see themselves as the thoughtful left know it has never worked. Not on a grand scale. But then maybe we have never really tried.
Perhaps if we could all, in unison, quietly get off our high horses and sit in the field for a while. Perhaps if, once again, we sang John Lennon’s anthem All you need is love. This time finding a way to do it all together. Maybe if we tried to act out the plea from his other anthem Give peace a chance, then maybe just maybe we’d have a chance. Because isn’t it really, really, really strange that we haven’t yet, not collectively, ever given love and peace a chance?
