Monday, July 1, 2013

Happy Canada Day and Born a White Male Day!

The idea came to me last year that celebrating Canada Day would be as meaningful to me as celebrating having been born a white male. It would be racist and sexist of me to celebrate having been born a white male. Sure, there have been some great achievements from white males; Michelangelo, Isaac Newton, Arthur Schopenhauer. But we've also done a lot of damage too.

The thing is though, for me, it's just something lucky. I'm lucky to have been born a white male. Even though things haven't entirely panned-out for me so far as a steady income goes, I've been very fortunate in a lot of other things and I had a greater chance than most people who have ever been born.

The same with having been born a Canadian. I'm grateful for that. This is one of the best countries in  the world when it comes to material benefits, no two ways about it. Being born a white male Canadian is therefore, a doubly fortunate occurrence.

But what about Canada?

We're built upon and still rely upon the abuse and exploitation of the First Nations. The majority of us are either hostile or indifferent to the idea of justice for the First Nations.

Democracy? What a sick joke! Canada is a sham democracy with an ignorant and apathetic majority, framed on either side by deluded right-wingers and left-wingers. The idea that the Conservatives resorted to election fraud should have produced visible outrage. (Not that the left-opposition would have known what to do with that though.) The bulk of us are okay with living under a government that steals elections; that refuses to be accountable to its own Parliament, that expects Parliament to agree to policies without knowing their costs.

Human rights? Canadians, as a people, have stumbled through for over a decade as we oppress and torture the people of Haiti and Afghanistan. It is we who, together with our fellow imperialist allies, prop-up kleptocratic torture states. When we're directly involved in war crimes, the harpercon government simply prorogues Parliament, destroys evidence, and then concocts some sham exercise to release a triple-filtered dump of shit.

And the majority of us don't care.

The environment? We're among the worst polluters on the planet.

Our mining firms continue to despoil and murder with taxpayer subsidies.

The majority of Canadians IT SEEMS, are content to enjoy the material benefits of being a Canadian, while at the same time remaining blissfully unaware of the sources of these material benefits or in the functioning of their own democracy.

I don't know why they celebrate Canada Day either. For all the thought they put into the responsibilities of being a Canadian, they might as well just assume that our wealth rains down from the heavens or grows out of the peculiarities of our soil.

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