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I’m getting tired of the racism displayed for all the world to see right now.
I thought we were so much better as a collective society.
I was wrong. It’s not just the right-wing extremists. It’s looking to me like somewhere around half of all Canadians are completely unaware of how our country works. It’s history. It’s system of Government. The Law.
This is a huge problem that has produced a country of uneducated and easily manipulated people. Clearly, we need to radically overhaul our education curriculum to expand the history curriculum to include natural history and native history. Every Canadian is a Treaty person, and every Canadian needs to know how that works. We need to make Civics mandatory classes at the grade ten and eleven levels, were the children learn how to become good citizens. By good Citizen, I mean they will learn how our Parliamentary System works, the checks and balances in place to balance power (
cough, cough
) and develop the problem solving skills it will take to create a generation of informed and engaged citizens who can recognise and lay claim to their rights and responsibilities as Canadians.
The mainstream Media is the enemy of an informed and engaged public. The innuendo and misinformation being pedalled by these corrupt elitists is frightening. But what’s really mind boggling is how many Canadians don’t understand this simple truth. They read the skewed headlines and that’s the extent of the time they are willing or able to invest in becoming informed and engaged. We sure as hell aren’t teaching our children critical thinking or skepticism of what’s presented as fact by the Media.
Think about it for a minute. I went to my nearest municipal website to find out how much money we pay the Mayor and Council. It may have been there, buried 30 or 40 pages into a PDF. I did not perservere. I am not an Accountant or a Lawyer and I hate math and I dislike excessive scrolling. Math is subjective and it is a foreign language to me. I typed Attawapiskat into Google, clicked twice for full disclosure. It’s right there, yet there seem to be alot of people demanding disclosure of information and audits when all of those things are a google search away. Why is there a higher expectation for the disclosure on Reserves than the rest of Canada? They are buried in paperwork and bureaucracy in whatever endeavour they undertake. Corruption undoubtabley exists in a population made financially desperate and marginalised by the rest of Canada with indifference or hostility. Why do these people not scream blue murder about the many cases of proven corruption and malfeasance in most of Canada’s largest and most powerful municipalities, Provinces and the Federal Government? If you want to know about the money, go
here
.
Educate your friends and relations, engage them in dialogue. People need to wake the fuck up from this stupor, this orgy of individualism at the expense of everyone elses wellbeing. We have become very ugly in the eyes of the world.
Yes, I mean Canada. Let’s take it back. #IdleNoMore.
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hi Kim….excellent post. I agree with everything you wrote. I’ve been stunned and deeply discouraged by the amount of anti-native racism I’ve seen in the last few days.
Those ignorant people need to learn about their country, and show more respect for people who may be poor, but are a priceless asset to this country. What a miserable
colourless boring country Canada would be without them. And they have so much to teach our greedy individualistic society about how to preserve the land for future generations. Oh well. I’ll try to think about how disappointed all those racists are now that Harper has had to agree to meet the chiefs. That should cheer me up…
Kim Reply:
January 4th, 2013 at 9:46 PM
Simon,that is beautiful.
“What a miserable
colourless boring country Canada would be without them. ”
The same sentiment applies to you Simon and your witty, pithy, truthy blog!
This is a great observation Kim. Over the holidays, I was shocked to hear Attawapiskat racist comments from several people (and on the Internet). I was shocked. I learned from a family friend that, in Germany it’s not legal to make any derogatory Jewish comment. BRAVO! The Germans seem to know that racism and genocide went hand in hand in WWII.
So, it’s legal in Canada, to make false statements about First Nations use of money – to make racist comments – even though we have a genocidal history against First Nations. And even though Canada has apologized for our residential school death camps, there is no law in Canada against blatant and hurtful racist comments aimed at these First Nation survivors. Surely this whole attitude has to change.
Priscilla, sad but true. Canadian’s in general need a huge reality check. I don’t see it happening without international pressure. But that pressure is beginning to come to bear fruit with Amnesty International, the International Criminal Court and the UN all investigating genocide.
So glad there are other people concerned about this. The level of ignorance among the public is truly disgusting. Agree completely about the mainstream media aiding and abetting the right in their quest to dumb us all down so they can impose their version of Canada without dissent.
We must work harder to fight back. Never give up. Thanks so much for this wonderful post today.
Kim Reply:
January 5th, 2013 at 6:44 PM
Thanks Deb for stopping in. Feel free to share widely. That’s how we roll…
I do feel optimistic today that there is a critical shift happening with humanity right now and hopefully we ride the crest of that wave to a new beginning.