A great opinion piece from last year when election campaign in Canada was all the noise (& news) in the media.
We Canadians like to think that we are all one nation & we care for each other. Non-Canadians come to visit Canada & see the urban, down-town real estate developments & enjoy the urban amenities, & consider Canada a great place to be. Canadian cities are regularly rated to be great place to live & work by international organizations.
But all that happens because nobody takes a peek behind the curtain to see how Canadian Aboriginals are faring on the forgotten reserves & even in the urban areas. Nobody, including politicians, wants to hear / see their plight. That's the same case everywhere around the world. Be it Aboriginals of US or Australia, or even poorest of the poor people, forgotten in the back country, of countries on African, Asian, & European continents.
Although, blaming the developing countries for forgetting the poorest of the poor might not be justifiable, since their urban (so-called, "middle-class") populations also struggle to make ends meet, but it is inexcusable when developed countries put millions, if not billions, in the outstretched hands of the rich suburbanites because they are a few dollars short for their new home renovations, new electronics, vacation trips, night life shenanigans etc.
The author is correct to say that although we think we are one nation; be it Canadians in Canada, Americans in America, Australians in Australia, Pakistanis in Pakistan, Indians in India, South Africans in South Africa & so on & so forth, when it comes down to our selfish interests, it is me against everyone else. We always want more. We always have less. Why?
Because we forget to look at people who are below us in our society. Perhaps, then, we can satisfy our constant hunger for more. We forget that, as a democratic nation, it is the responsibility of the general populace to reject the latest handout in the elections & annual budgets, & compel our politicians to take care of the least unfortunate & needy among us. After taking care of the humanity on the national level, all of us, as humans, are obligated to tell our politicians & international organizations to take care of the least unfortunate among us on an international level. Heck, a lot of animals (wolves & lots of grazing animals, for instance) take care of the whole herd, instead of taking care of their own little family. Are we humans worse than animals?
Michael Moore, the documentary film maker, said in one of his documentaries (if I may recall correctly, it was on the American healthcare system) that a nation is judged by how it takes care of the sick, old & needy.
Perhaps, we are eligible to call ourselves humans, only when, we take care of the whole humanity; be it in our own backyards, on our streets, in our cities, in our provinces / states, in our countries, on our continents, & in the world.
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If it’s a typical eight weeks in Canada, then 1,425 Aboriginal kids dropped out of school, a rate three times the national average. Since the campaign began, 45 Aboriginal children died in infancy; they would have lived longer if they’d been born in Sri Lanka. As Canadian politicians bickered on the evening news, 1,074 Aboriginal children & 6,265 Aboriginal women were sexually assaulted. Since the writ dropped, 33,534 Aboriginals were violently victimized. Another 182 committed suicide, roughly eight times the national rate. And, if the last two months were anything like the last decade, 11 were murdered, at a rate almost seven times higher than the national average.
...
Politicians are pushing each other out of the way as they scramble to give the hard-pressed suburban middle class the help they need. Meanwhile, other Canadians living on reserves & in the inner city are disappearing, assaulting & killing each other & themselves, at a rate typically only seen in countries that have been torn apart by war.
...
The party leaders build their campaigns on ... isolated, focused announcements. Small promises for small men & women, them & us—because this strategy only works if we respond. And we do.
We respond because we are nothing more than a collection of special interest groups. We are dairy farmers or oil workers, urban or rural, francophone or anglophone, Manitobans or Nova Scotians. But we are not a people, not a nation, not really. If we were, we would not be able to ignore each other, ignore other Canadians, the way we ignore the Aboriginal community. We would not allow our politicians to reduce us to Pavlovian demographics, salivating at the sight of a specially crafted handout. We would be unleashing a full-throated cry of anger & dismay, that so many fellow Canadians are growing up alone & lost, that so many of us are living in abject poverty & then dying miserably.
We would shout down every stump speech about the “struggling” middle class & demand more for the least fortunate among us. We would scream in frustration as yet another young Aboriginal is found hanging, unnamed & unmourned.
But we don’t. We just stand there, heads down, hands out.
I don’t know who to be more ashamed of, our politicians or us.
We Canadians like to think that we are all one nation & we care for each other. Non-Canadians come to visit Canada & see the urban, down-town real estate developments & enjoy the urban amenities, & consider Canada a great place to be. Canadian cities are regularly rated to be great place to live & work by international organizations.
But all that happens because nobody takes a peek behind the curtain to see how Canadian Aboriginals are faring on the forgotten reserves & even in the urban areas. Nobody, including politicians, wants to hear / see their plight. That's the same case everywhere around the world. Be it Aboriginals of US or Australia, or even poorest of the poor people, forgotten in the back country, of countries on African, Asian, & European continents.
Although, blaming the developing countries for forgetting the poorest of the poor might not be justifiable, since their urban (so-called, "middle-class") populations also struggle to make ends meet, but it is inexcusable when developed countries put millions, if not billions, in the outstretched hands of the rich suburbanites because they are a few dollars short for their new home renovations, new electronics, vacation trips, night life shenanigans etc.
The author is correct to say that although we think we are one nation; be it Canadians in Canada, Americans in America, Australians in Australia, Pakistanis in Pakistan, Indians in India, South Africans in South Africa & so on & so forth, when it comes down to our selfish interests, it is me against everyone else. We always want more. We always have less. Why?
Because we forget to look at people who are below us in our society. Perhaps, then, we can satisfy our constant hunger for more. We forget that, as a democratic nation, it is the responsibility of the general populace to reject the latest handout in the elections & annual budgets, & compel our politicians to take care of the least unfortunate & needy among us. After taking care of the humanity on the national level, all of us, as humans, are obligated to tell our politicians & international organizations to take care of the least unfortunate among us on an international level. Heck, a lot of animals (wolves & lots of grazing animals, for instance) take care of the whole herd, instead of taking care of their own little family. Are we humans worse than animals?
Michael Moore, the documentary film maker, said in one of his documentaries (if I may recall correctly, it was on the American healthcare system) that a nation is judged by how it takes care of the sick, old & needy.
Perhaps, we are eligible to call ourselves humans, only when, we take care of the whole humanity; be it in our own backyards, on our streets, in our cities, in our provinces / states, in our countries, on our continents, & in the world.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If it’s a typical eight weeks in Canada, then 1,425 Aboriginal kids dropped out of school, a rate three times the national average. Since the campaign began, 45 Aboriginal children died in infancy; they would have lived longer if they’d been born in Sri Lanka. As Canadian politicians bickered on the evening news, 1,074 Aboriginal children & 6,265 Aboriginal women were sexually assaulted. Since the writ dropped, 33,534 Aboriginals were violently victimized. Another 182 committed suicide, roughly eight times the national rate. And, if the last two months were anything like the last decade, 11 were murdered, at a rate almost seven times higher than the national average.
...
Politicians are pushing each other out of the way as they scramble to give the hard-pressed suburban middle class the help they need. Meanwhile, other Canadians living on reserves & in the inner city are disappearing, assaulting & killing each other & themselves, at a rate typically only seen in countries that have been torn apart by war.
...
The party leaders build their campaigns on ... isolated, focused announcements. Small promises for small men & women, them & us—because this strategy only works if we respond. And we do.
We respond because we are nothing more than a collection of special interest groups. We are dairy farmers or oil workers, urban or rural, francophone or anglophone, Manitobans or Nova Scotians. But we are not a people, not a nation, not really. If we were, we would not be able to ignore each other, ignore other Canadians, the way we ignore the Aboriginal community. We would not allow our politicians to reduce us to Pavlovian demographics, salivating at the sight of a specially crafted handout. We would be unleashing a full-throated cry of anger & dismay, that so many fellow Canadians are growing up alone & lost, that so many of us are living in abject poverty & then dying miserably.
We would shout down every stump speech about the “struggling” middle class & demand more for the least fortunate among us. We would scream in frustration as yet another young Aboriginal is found hanging, unnamed & unmourned.
But we don’t. We just stand there, heads down, hands out.
I don’t know who to be more ashamed of, our politicians or us.
