Priorities in Caring

It is no surprise that my Facebook page has been flooded with people posting items about the First Nations anti-pipeline protest at Standing Rock, North Dakota. Most of my  "friends" are of the political left and therefore they are people who have, at least on the surface, similar views as I do about the environment, human rights etc. But while I agree with their general attitude, I do wonder but how some of them choose their priorities, and in some cases how blindly they follow other peoples' lead.

For example - a day or two ago someone posted that the authorities were monitoring the Facebook accounts of the people who were protesting at Standing Rock, presumably so those same authorities could use that information to arrest those people. The request was that others around the country should post a line saying that they too were at Standing Rock under the assumption that if thousands posted such comments, the authorities would be unable to track so many people or to determine who was there or not there. A number of my friends did so. I am not sure if any of those friends wondered why and what good would it do.

It would seem to me that tracking Facebook pages is a particularly inefficient way of monitoring peoples' behaviour partially because there are so many hundreds of law enforcement personnel (both private and public) on the ground taking pictures of the participants as well as the fact that most cell phones have a built in GPS component. If the authorities want to track people, the GPS is a much more efficient way of doing it. I suspect that flooding a Facebook page would be seen by those authorities as something less than a minor annoyance. People did it because they wanted to do something to help - but they did nothing useful.

However, at the very least it probably does no harm if someone wants to say they are at Standing Rock. I am more curious as to why Canadians spend energy focusing on the outrageous acts of American corporations and politicians in terms of their actions against First Nation communities while seeming to ignore similar type of actions in Canada. Lord knows we have enough to be concerned about;

The Grassy Narrows First Nation community has for decades been protesting the clear cutting of their traditional lands. At one point this protest was the longest running such protest in North America. The same community has spent an equal amount of time demanding - with limited success - to have someone clean up the mercury spill that occurred in the mid to late 1960s.

The residents of the Shoal Lake First nation community have had to boil their drinking water for 18 years. In fact at least 80 such communities across Canada are under such orders (http://canadians.org/fn-water).

Adam Capay, an indigenous Canadian has spent four years in solitary confinement - with no trial (CBC)

There is of course the continuing issue of a police, legal and correctional system that is consistently biased with the consequence being that there are both an over representative number of Indigenous Canadians in our correctional system and a lack of justice for indigenous victims.

And the list could go on and on.

There is no doubt that for First Nations in the US, Standing Rock is an important issue. Unfortunately, it does not appear to be an election issue which would suggest that for the vast majority of Americans, the pipe line is not particularly relevant. For Canadians, while it is nice that we cheer on other groups who are defending their rights - I really wish that we would devote some of our energy to fixing our own problems first.

Or perhaps I just need a new set of friends on Facebook.