Life, Writing, Weirdness

I don’t know how I feel about Canada Day anymore.

If we roll my life back a decade, I could probably still call myself a proud Canadian but it was getting harder. At that point I was wrapping my head around the idea of being proud of something that was an accident of birth. I didn’t have any part in deciding to live here and I certainly didn’t have to do anything to earn the privilege, so why was it something to be proud of?

This was probably about the same period where so many of us fell into thinking that it wasn’t a perfect country, but at least we did things better than the loud-mouth Americans to the south of us. I’ve grown out of that. Being better than some other country or group of people doesn’t necessarily mean we’re good. Sometimes, that just means we suck less.

But don’t we have an obligation to not suck? Maybe we have an obligation to get better than we are?

Because whether we want to admit it or not, there’s a lot of dark and ugly stuff in Canadian history. I’m old enough that I didn’t learn about any of it growing up. The school curriculums were so whitewashed and sanitized that what we learned was so far from actual history I had no idea until deep into adulthood.

Now I have some idea, but only enough to understand what a huge disservice has been done to generations of children in not teaching us the real thing so that we can properly come to grips with the history of the country we live in and push the powers that run things to be better.

There’s an uneasy in-between space that a lot of us live in at this point, where we can be grateful for the freedom we have to do and be what we want but have started to develop the understanding of the human costs it took, and continues to take, for us to have that. I think being better starts with a lot of self reflection and understanding what it means that not everyone has that freedom.

I’m a cisgendered heterosexual white male. Every one of those words comes with things I don’t have to deal with and things that don’t make my life harder than it needs to be.

There are questions I should probably be asking myself at this point. When will I have enough understanding to be capable of taking coherent, intelligent action than isn’t just a matter of being good to the people around me and calling it out when I see someone who isn’t? Am I already past that point? Have I started to become an ally yet?

I’d like to think the answer to that last question is yes, but it’s far tougher to judge your own actions than objectively than most folks think. In the meantime, I keep working at being a better human.

I’m not in a mental place where I can celebrate Canada with flags and fireworks (and I’m generally against fireworks, anyway). But I can mark the day in remembrance and spend some time thinking about what better looks like and how in that direction.

Be well, everyone.