Sunny Days - A Political Melodrama Drama in Three Acts

Act 1 - A lovely fall day, a walk down a long driveway with a large crowd following behind a newly crowned young prince and his cortege .....fade to a group portrait of the prince's advisors - half of them are female because it is 2018. Over half of those who voted, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, believe that things can and will be done differently this time.

Act 2 - Two years later after that walk. No crowds are following the prince, or at least the crowds are no longer adoring. In fact, numerous groups are condemning him for not living up to his promises and certainly not doing nearly enough. Groups on diametrically opposite sides of any debate are saying that they are speaking on behalf of the majority of their constituents. The loyal opposition finds fault with every decision; regardless of when or how decisions are made - the prince is to blame.

Act 3 - The prince -now accused of participating in a scandal looks like a deer caught in a headlight. Not only is there no one following him - people are running in the other direction. Opponents are cheering in ecstatic visions of the upcoming elections.

Epilogue - the voting public is seen scratching their heads outside of the polling booth, trying to decide which lies are the most palatable or the least insulting. The election has been run on promises that can not be delivered on but will demonstrate within 24 months how incompetent the government is - again.

If we lived in a dictatorship, we would never know of the myriad of times that senior civil servants and politicians make less than ideal decisions. In a democracy, we get to see at least some of the bumps and warts on our politicians and political bureaucracy. It should not surprise us that sometimes life is complicated; there are times when some people end up in places where any decision they make will affect/hurt/offend someone.

If we are to have any hope of writing a new story, of creating a place where all people can thrive as individuals and as a collective, then we need stop expecting perfection from everyone else except for ourselves. We need to stop engaging in political dialogue filled with innuendos and inappropriate and inflammatory labels; we need to find solutions that support people in their efforts to figure out what is right and wrong - not condemn them for their errors.

We know that children learn best and develop into competent adults when they are assisted in learning how to make good decisions. We know that constantly criticizing a child for their errors ensures that they will continue to struggle with making good decisions. Maybe we should apply the same teaching logic to our politicians.

Who Has It Worse?

I have just finished reading The last heathen : encounters with ghosts and ancestors in Melanesia by Charles Montgomery. It was an interesting read in a vague anthological way - containing facts and stories about a people that I know absolutely nothing about and a land that I will never visit. But what attracted my interest the most was the description/discussion of how various imperialistic countries, mainly Britain, consistently interchanged religious beliefs and capitalism. That is- the need to get labourers (slaves) to work elsewhere, the need to sell products to the indigenous people were combined with the need to convert those people to whatever particular brand of Christianity was acceptable at a particular point in history. These changes are well documented partially because European influence happened a bit later in the 19th century so there is more writing available. As well the area is both more geographically isolated and a smaller than North America a. The attempts to eradicate traditional beliefs were more obvious. The attempts also appear to have in some ways been less successful.

It struck me as I was reading the book of how similar were the tools of both Christianity and capitalism in their drive to create a world that served only one master, of how ruthless was the drive to destroy other cultures that were beyond their understanding or at least beyond their desire to try to understand. At some point, I started to compare the experiences the Indigenous people of Canada with the experiences of the various Indigenous groups within Melanesia. This is a dangerous thing to do. Comparing the life experiences and suffering of various peoples and groups allow those people to separate their experiences from others, to feel as if they are better (or worse) than other groups who have been colonialized. It is this process of segregating groups from each other that weakens any movement to create change. If one group's pain and suffering have been greater than another's' - then that in some weird perverted way - it gives us permission to ignore all of the other issues, the other groups.

A number of years ago when I was teaching at Fleming college, one of the videos that I used was The Story Telling Class (1). The documentary is about a high school in Winnipeg that uses A Long Way Gone - an autobiography by Ishmael Beah who was a child soldier in the Sudan, as a platform for students from countries destroyed by war to share their experiences with their Canadian born peers. At some point, the Canadian born students start to question why they are not allowed to tell their stories. When Ishmael Beah visits the class he talks about how we should not compare our emotional pain or stress. That it is not useful to dismiss someone's experiences because on the surface - it was not a terrible as another's. That regardless of the experience, the level of pain may be the same. By dismissing an individual's experience, we isolate that person or that group and ensure that they will never be allies. Such divisions only facilitate the growth of the elite.

It would seem to me that what we must learn to do is to accept all other people's life experiences and perceptions of those experiences while not diminishing our own and without attempting to rank who has had a worse life.


(1) http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/story.html