I’m knocking off two birds with one stone here because this meme contains two completely separate messages that have no connection to each other and should never be placed together.
Refugees:
Let’s get one thing straight; Canada is an inclusive democracy. That means everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY, gets the same opportunities, and the same help when they need it. No matter how you got to be where you are now sit, allotment of resources is based on need, not background. Anyone who says otherwise is either racist, sexist, or the most prevalent in Canada, elitist. This part of the message is absolutely wrong. There is no getting in line because of who you are: handicapped, veteran, refugee, immigrant, born here or anywhere else.
However, in a standard trick employed by propagandists, a clever bigot has paired this nasty message up with a very different problem: the plight of veterans.
A Historic Problem: Mistreatment of Vets
This has been going on for as long as there have been armies. How many stories stretching back into antiquity involve a crippled old soldier? That stereotype didn’t just show up by mistake. The Powers that Be have been starting wars and spending the lives and bodies of our young men for as long as history has been recording them. It is probably the most cynical misuse of other humans in our society. (Except perhaps the treatment of women past child-bearing age, but let’s not get into that.)
We Owe Soldiers More:
The treatment of soldiers is not a parallel moral choice to the treatment of other Canadians. Besides their rights as citizens like everybody else, there’s a quid pro quo going on. As in, payment for services rendered. A factory worker or miner who gets lung disease from a polluted atmosphere gets compensation. Soldiers put their lives and health on the line to protect their country. Those that get wounded receive treatment and compensation to the level that a rather shoddy bureaucracy can dole it out, given the fiscal restraints politicians place on the military. But that’s only the surface problem.
Psychological Damage
There is something else soldiers put on the line: their humanity. Humans have two strong instincts that often come into conflict: the urge to self-preservation and the urge to protect the weak. Soldiers are trained — sometimes by very harsh methods — to repress these natural feelings. It is demanded that they ignore their self-preservation urge at all costs in order to protect…well, supposedly their country and loved ones. They are also brainwashed to go completely against everything our society teaches them and kill other humans.
So when they come back from the war, they are damaged in ways that no one can see, and they have been trained to kill. People are quite rightfully wary of them. If the damage is great enough and does not get proper treatment, the priorities get mixed in their heads, and sometimes great tragedies occur, such as the one discussed in the news this week. Unfortunately, it is politically convenient to use the bad press and public fear to minimize fiscal responsibility and save the taxpayer money.
Politics as Usual
It seems to be a competition between both sides of the political spectrum to see who can be the cruelest and most cynically self-serving. The Right lauds soldiers and the law and order they provide, and then cuts social services to present their usual facade of fiscal responsibility. The Left puts on a big show of cutting back on the military but doesn’t make the effort to ensure that the cutbacks don’t affect veterans’ services. Which they always do. The only group that is more cynical is social media propagandists who use the plight of veterans to forward their bigoted and elitist views.
The Bottom Line
Please support any political action that will actually get our veterans the services they both deserve and have a right to. And think twice before you give knee-jerk support to memes like the one pictured above that take advantage of veterans for antisocial purposes.