Okay, I’m sure everybody on both sides is tired of the blockade situation. Except for the deluded souls who think they have a winning solution and keep saying it over and over as if that makes it more right.
Facebook Solutions are Fantasies
What I’m really tired of is the plethora of easy answers. As a fantasy writer, I know exactly how it’s done. First you define an enemy that is exactly the person your readers hate and fear. Then create a solution based on precepts that your readers hold dear, and presto! You have a hit. In the case of Facebook, thousands of hits.
Now Let’s Get Back to Reality
Real life doesn’t work like that. It’s much more complicated, and we need to be very suspicious of anyone with a solution that can be stated in a Facebook post.
Political Solutions
Politicians like Andrew Scheer are firmly on the fantasy side of the story when they shoot off those simple solutions that their voter base is likely to buy. That’s an advantage of being in Opposition. Nobody expects you to come through on anything you spout off, so you can promise your voters anything. I gather the Conservatives are getting a lot of donations these days. Selling the right kind of fantasy makes money.
Absolutes
Facebook ought to hold a moratorium on certain words once they start getting overused. How about, “illegal blockades” and “colonialism”? If comment writers would stop battering their opponents with these, perhaps there would be less fighting and more talking.
“Illegal”
“Against the law” is not as simple as some would like. There is a sliding scale of illegality, from really illegal, like shooting people, through actions against someone else’s property, to disagreements with equal rights on both sides. Police take a different role in different situations. In a property dispute, the owner has to go to court for an injunction. But getting an injunction does not make the other person automatically guilty. An injunction is a timeout for naughty people, giving them breathing space to negotiate, rethink, and perhaps take more court action.
Policemen in the field do not want to be put in the position of being judge and jury. They are expected to treat everybody, and I want to underline that, everybody, as if they were innocent. An injunction does not prove anyone guilty.
So don’t expect the police to take an aggressive role without a whole lot of thought and discussion by all the governments involved. Unless a protester actually breaks a major law, the police will not move.
How Far Is Too Far?
As I said in last week’s post, the whole idea of strikes and protests and civil disobedience of all sorts is to gain public relations. There comes a point — and it’s a broad and tricky dividing line — when a protest stops being a publicity stunt designed to gain democracy for a minority group and starts being a small group autocratically demanding that everyone does what they want. When the public stops seeing you as an adult standing up for your rights and starts seeing you as a two-year-old kicking tantrums on the floor, you’ve overdone it.
Just Fix It
“Illegal” is misused by protesters as well. When somebody did something wrong two hundred years ago, you can’t just say, “They broke the law, let’s go back to when it happened and start over.” It isn’t just the rights of the two original parties that matter. That’s why many laws have a statute of limitations. Once life has gone on for years under the situation as it stands, there are a whole lot of innocent people with perfectly legal intentions who have based their lives on the status quo. Somehow their rights have to be taken into account as well. This is where compromise comes in.
“Colonialism”
Which brings us to the next overused term. It’s the best “wrap up their arguments in one small bundle and dismiss them all” non-argument there is. In the modern context, the word is meaningless. We can’t “solve” colonialism. Nothing can ever put the map of the country back to where it was in 1867. Nothing we do now can change what happened to victims of residential schools, especially to those who are already dead. Calling an action “colonialist” pretty well shuts down conversation. Instead, talk about a modern minority whose rights are being ignored. That, we can and should deal with.
A lot of jokes have been made about right-wing types who say to immigrants, “Go back where you came from,” while an Indigenous person stands there saying, “What about you?” These are jokes. The clock cannot be turned back. We are all Canadians, now. Deal with that.
So, What to Do?
Start with the here-and-now. Governments, get back to the negotiating table and hammer out agreements with all the First Nations. First Nations, sit down with each other and hammer out a way of making decisions on a national scope. When you tout your centuries-old decision-making system, remember that those hereditary leaders almost never all got together and made decisions affecting the whole nation. Their usual function was to discuss issues between neighbors. A different form of democracy is necessary.
The Bottom Line
Let’s quit with the, “Give us all the land back,” and the, “Throw them all in jail,” rhetoric. All it does is persuade fools that they have more support than they really have.
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