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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2017-08-17, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, AUGUST 17, 2017. PAGE 5. Other Views Why can't we see the individuals? One of the mysteries of the time we live in is why, when we are more individualistic than ever before, we insist on lumping other people together. If a neighbour's kid or a member of our extended family rebels and breaks the law, even kills someone, we will shake our heads and say how sad it is that this individual has messed up his potential. If, on the other hand, a Muslim kid rebels and becomes radicalized, we often see it as part if a world-wide Muslim conspiracy. If someone we know becomes an alcoholic or a drug addict and ends up living on the street, we see that person as one broken individual. If an Indigenous person follows the same route, he or she often becomes "another drunken Indian". Donald Trump made great hay in last year's U.S. Presidential election by suggesting illegal Mexican immigrants were rapists and smuggled drugs. Probably there have been Mexican migrants who have smuggled drugs or raped someone — after all there have been more than a few Americans who have committed the same crimes. Trump would never suggest that all Americans were drug dealers and rapists but somehow thought it was acceptable to libel the millions of honest, hardworking Mexican Americans who are helping make American great, by associating them with a minority, real or imagined, who have committed crimes. This guilt by association comes from people who would think of themselves as enlightened, too. When some police officer or officers go rogue and beat someone or even kill an innocent person, suddenly it's not individual officers at fault but "police violence". Lots of conscientious cops get tarred with the same brush of violence. Some Keith Roulston From the cluttered desk innocent police in the U.S. have been murdered in revenge for the crimes of their fellow officers. Similarly, all white people apparently must carry the guilt of their forefathers who settled Canada or who may or may not have been part of the residential school system that so cruelly treated Indigenous children for decades. All men are regarded as potential assailants because of the minority of men who assault women physically or sexually. Why can't we see people, good or bad, as individuals? Certainly people seem more aware of themselves as individuals today than at any time in history. We used to need to be part of groups, whether working together to accomplish tasks we couldn't do ourselves, or coming together find fellowship, worshipping in churches or joining clubs from the Women's Institute to various lodges. Modern prosperity and our advanced technology has allowed us to be self-sufficient in providing for our families. Few people even grow a garden these days, they just buy food at the store. We have off- loaded many of the community -building tasks we used to share to various levels of government. Both church attendance and participation in social groups has been in a steady decline. People spend more time involved in their own individual worlds. Often you see people in the same room — even sharing a table — yet ignoring each other, absorbed with their smart - phones. In the social media world, people want everything tailored to the individual desires. Many resist the shared experience of watching network news or reading the newspaper because they only want to spend their time doing what they want to see or read, not what someone else selects for them. And yet, as individuals themselves, people like to group people together: "all" Muslims are somehow alike, "all" blacks, "all" Indigenous people, "all" white men. Why? Some psychologists suggest this is a remnant of our ancient instinct for self- protection: any stranger was seen as a possible threat. Certainly, even in a country that has accepted people from as many parts of the world as Canada, most people, particularly in rural areas, seldom have the opportunity to develop a personal relationship with people who look different, dress differently and speak a language we don't understand. Even if we become friendly with one Muslim or one Somali, we still don't have bridges built to all the other ethnic communities that make up modern Canada. But at the same time I have to wonder if it's not our desire to make things easier, the same urge that makes people want to live a controlled life through social media, that attracts us to simplify judgements by grouping people together. It's not as much work as seeing the individuals who make up the group. We must break the habit. We must begin to judge people as individuals, whether for their good traits and their bad. If we want to live in peace and harmony, everyone needs to stop seeing a group that can be blamed for what goes wrong and instead see the actual perpetrator. Finding the recognition balance 0 ver the weekend Ashleigh and I, alongside valued friends and family members, marked a special occasion: My daughter Mary Jane's first birthday. It was a bit of a premature celebration as her actual birthday isn't until next week, but, with both of our schedules being so hectic, it was the best day we could find where both of us could dedicate the time to celebrate her birthday properly. Wait, did I say her birthday? Because apparently that was only part of what we were celebrating. Earlier, during the planning practices of the shindig, Ashleigh had explained to me that the day is a celebration of Mary Jane's first birthday but also a celebration of the fact that, between the two of us, we had kept this little person alive for an entire year and gotten her to the point that she was strolling around the house like she owns the place. In essence, we were celebrating that, as parents, we did exactly what was expected of us. I could get into the ridiculousness of recognizing people for the things they are supposed to do, but, it dawned on me, during the party, that maybe the problem isn't with people, but rather with me. More than one person pointed out that the celebration was part birthday party, part marking Ashleigh and I keeping Mary Jane far enough away from harm that she lived. It was then that I realized that maybe I've been looking at this recognition thing the wrong way. We are always thinking that someone might fail at the things that, by all rights, they should succeed at and, because of that, we celebrate when they don't fail. It got me thinking about the fact that, often times, when I discuss these issues, I point at the upcoming generations as being the source of the problem. While it's true, the lower -end of the millennial scale (which I still protest being on) and the generation that is following us do seem to be getting participation ribbons for everything from graduating Kindergarten to getting out of bed in the morning, I can't help but feel, after the number of jokes about Mary Jane surviving the year under my care, that we're all getting recognition for things that we should be doing anyway. It's a defensive mechanism, I guess, so we don't have to face the reality that we might have failed. By joking about these potential failures, by making light of the fact that people are doing what is expected, we are distancing ourselves from the idea that we might fail. I don't expect recognition and, for the most part, it makes me uncomfortable. Ask my wife — she thanks me for doing things around the house and that's just her way of showing that she appreciates me recognizing something needs to be done. I appreciate her appreciation, but I've always felt that things like cleaning the kitchen, doing the dishes, cutting the lawn and picking up Mary Jane's toys are something that we should just do. Receiving recognition for them usually causes me to respond with, "Don't thank me for doing what I should be doing anyway." I'm working on not responding that way because Ashleigh says she isn't thanking me because she expected me not to notice the things needed doing. She says she is thanking me because it means she doesn't have to do it and it's just her way of being supportive. Between that weekly experience at home and the recent realization that a lot of people I admire and respect were congratulating me on keeping my daughter alive, it got me to thinking that I may be looking at this whole recognition thing the wrong way. Maybe, and be sure to tell me if I'm going soft here, we should be recognizing people for doing things not because their actions are particularly deserving of outside recognition, but because they may not realize they've done something that deserves recognition. I'm not about to miss my daughter's birthday any day soon, but surviving that first year, in hindsight, hasn't always been easy. I know I tell everyone who will listen how well- behaved Mary Jane is, but even the best baby goes through teething pains, gets bad diaper rashes and can't be calmed down some days. Getting through all that and not despising the person you share the responsibility with may be deserving of a brief pat on the back and a bit of a celebration. I guess my fault in this entire realization is that I haven't said that to Ashleigh and I likely wouldn't even think of it if it weren't for the fact that we threw this party for Mary Jane who, aside from the copious amount of attention she received, didn't know the difference between her birthday party and any other day of her life. Maybe that recognition is there to remind us to recognize the growth we all go through, even if we don't want to recognize it ourselves. I have a few friends getting to the finish line of their first year as parents and, with this newly discovered knowledge, I'm ready to celebrate with them as well and bring their child a gift along with one for them as well. The stories we tell For the last decade, I have been paid to tell people's stories. None of these stories, with the exception of the few times I get personal in this column space, are mine. They are always somebody else's. That is the nature of journalism and being a reporter. News has been called "the first rough draft of history", first by Alan Barth, a long- time reporter and then in a speech by Phil Graham, both of The Washington Post. It is against this backdrop that I wanted to talk about storytelling. People have been doing it for many years and I feel like I have been doing it every day for the last 10 years. Cultural appropriation has been a hot topic in the news as of late. At the heart of the debate is the question of who can tell the stories of others and when it is appropriate to do so. In Canada the discussion around cultural appropriate exploded around the telling of First Nations stories and a suggestion that an "appropriation prize" should be created for writers who cross cultural lines to tell a story that isn't theirs to tell. Great care has gone into this season of the Blyth Festival in which two First Nations - centric stories have been told. First it was Drew Hayden Taylor with The Berlin Blues, which tackles cultural appropriation head-on, and now with Jessica Carmichael and Falen Johnston with Ipperwash. Taylor threw his hat into the ring of debate earlier this year when he wrote a special piece for The Globe and Mail on the dangers of cultural appropriation and Carmichael and Johnston have spent months with the people of the Kettle and Stony Point First Nations communities. Both playwrights are members of First Nations communities and they have worked diligently to ensure the story being told is the one the community wants to tell. On top of that, Ipperwash will feature an cast entirely comprised of First Nations actors. The cultural appropriation debate rages on in the United States as well, as the white screenwriter/director team of Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow produced Detroit — a film about the Detroit riots of 1967 and the infamous Algiers Hotel incident — which absolutely bombed at the box office amidst controversy about cultural appropriation. Of course, with racial strife in the air since the election of Donald Trump earlier this year and the recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, perhaps Americans simply don't want to watch this movie, but it does seem like there's something bigger at play here. As a writer of other people's stories my whole life, I have always struggled to find a point of view when I have been forced (and I do mean forced) to write fiction. I wrote a short story in college for a course once. It was a semester -long project and I wrote it in first -person and I wrote it from my own perspective. It was about a man driving his car during increasingly long periods of closing his eyes, just to see if he could do it — and what would happen if he couldn't. At the time, I remember talking to my teacher about it, telling him that I didn't know how to write as anyone but myself. To even reach to the simplest of alternative perspectives — say, a woman or an older man, neither of which I've ever been — seemed impossible to me at the time. From my perspective, writing from within someone else's skin seems impossible, but people do it all the time. Anyone who's ever written anything, unless it's only about themselves, has done it. But along with it comes definitive rights and wrongs.