Remembrance Day

In Canada, Rememberance Day is today. It is the day that our nation honours the veterans who have served and sometimes even gave their lives for us. Last week I was at my childrens' school, watching the Rememberance Day assembly. My daughter's grade two class was doing the presentation. They read from some scripts and sang a couple of songs. I was very proud of my little girl. My youngest though, struggled to appreciate the solemnity of the situation. Forty-five minutes is a long time to be quiet and still when you're four. He wriggled, rambled, played loudly with his toys, and generally did the things a kid his age does.

Rememberance Day hits pretty close to home for me. My grandfather and his father-in-law before him both served during wartime. (My great-grandpa had a bullet scar on his butt cheek to prove it. Not that I would have asked him to...) My friend spent almost a year in Afganistan during the most violent part of that conflict. It took him months to adjust to regular life, or as much adjustment as he'll ever be able to have. I deeply respect what they and so many others have given to the rest of us. With that in mind, you'd think I'd be freaking out on my twitchy little man. I did my best to keep him quiet and calm, but I didn't take his outbursts as show of disrespect. I actually felt the opposite. 


The fact that, at that moment, my son's biggest problem in life was that he just dropped his toy was a wonderful thing. He didn't understand why we were all quietly gathered in that school gym. He doesn't know what war is, or it's terrible costs. He's never seen anyone get shot, unless he walks in while we watch a grown up show. Everyone he can ever remember meeting lives in peace. I can't describe how I felt when I realized what a gift that truly is. 


I know the world's far from completely peaceful. And yeah, lately, even Canada hasn't escaped the threat of terror. (RIP to our two home soil casualties.) But we live in an era that knows greater peace than any time before, thanks to the sacrifices of thousands of men and women. I know it's not nearly enough, but thank you. I'll never forget.

America's Healthy Diet of Fear

 As I hear of small towns in Texas and Oklahoma that have turned away children who have visited Africa due to a fear of Ebola, which is likely as fake as the story about the 17 schoolchildren who have contracted the disease, I am reminded that Americans especially live on an exceptional high amount of fear and hysteria. Before it was Ebola, it was Obama taking our guns, ISIS, creepy clowns who are taking photographs, the immigrants crossing our borders, or almost every other article any given news media outlet puts out in a given day.

The part of this I don't get is the people who act as if this hasn't always been the way we live. I see articles like this one, who say openly that Americans haven't always lived in fear. I disagree completely. I think if you look at our past, you'll find that there was never a time since America was established that white men didn't thrive off a heavy dosage of fear-mongering and scare tactics.

Our first and most brutal enemy wasn't Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden. From approximately 1622-1924 we were at war with the American Indian. While we systematically exterminated many of their forces and drove them from their lands, propaganda spread throughout America that the real terrorist was, in many cases, the victim. We ran them out of their villages, murdered them, made treaties and broke them. Meanwhile, we spread a message that the Indians were savages who would burn down your ranch, rape your wife, kill your cattle, scalp your head, and enslave your children. We were the ones who brought the smallpox epidemic and had more guns. We were the ones to be afraid of.

I guess they couldn't find the picture where he was cuddling babies?

We created a fear of the Indians, because even then we understood that if our people were afraid of our enemies, they'd allow us to go above and beyond the law to justify our actions. The same reason The Patriot Act went through and was allowed to exist in 2001 also entitled early settlers to drive out our original arch-nemesis in 1901: those pesky redskins.

After we decimated them, we needed a new nightmare to keep our people in check. Along came the Japanese on Sunday, December 7, 1941. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States entered into World War II. By this time we were delivering our media in new and exciting ways. We had invented the radio. So much false reporting and misinformation was coming out of radio reports that CBS Radio came out with a counterpropaganda program called Our Secret Weapon, where Rex Stout would separate fact from fiction and also use the most exaggerated lies of the week to entertain the public.

Hollywood looked to draw money off the current agenda, so they replaced the normal villains in their films with Japanese and Nazis. Depicted as monsters without compassion, the films caused Hollywood to lose its foreign market. However, without the trouble of worrying about boycotts now, since those other countries weren't paying attention, they could paint other nationalities any way they liked without consequence.

As World War II came to close, America found a new fear of the Russian persuasion. The Cold War was upon us. Our country had just got out of World War II and needed a new reason to fear the Soviet Union, so word spread of the threat of nuclear attack. In elementary schools, students regularly did drills where they "prepared" for an atomic bomb. Communist rule threatened the very fabric of the American way of life in our country.

The point I'm making is that fear-mongering in America is nothing new. We've been afraid since the days when we were settlers out on the prairie. After the Cold War, segregation was the order of the day. While the Civil Rights Movement was taking place, the Vietcong were savage animals who wanted to eat our young during Vietnam.

The only thing that has changed over the years is how we ingest our media. Now it's all on Facebook. With the advent of social media, stupid people are allowed to spew nonsense at us constantly and repeatedly. This steady stream of bullshit gets regurgitated back at the public, because people are gullible idiots and the Share button is their best friend. Thus, fear-mongering is building because it isn't just the mass media trying to scare us, it's also your childhood friend who doesn't realize the satirical news site he's quoting is false. As long as none of us are doing research on what we're supporting, we have no one to blame but ourselves.


"Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live." - Dorothy Thompson