From now on, BE PATIENT. Police have a job to do, LET THEM do it.
STOP getting your news off Twitter. STOP. I know that’s hard, given the possible forced deportations which no one can find out anything about. BUT, this happened in CANADA. For right now, we do still have some reliable media outlets. Here they are.
Vote with your money: Start PAYING for news again. We have to. News has gone downhill, and Part of the reason is likely because ad revenue has cratered, so they feel compelled to take “native advertising” and pander to customers instead of sticking to journalistic integrity. PAY FOR reliable news so they can pay reporters and researchers to do the work.
But it’s not remotely over yet. Next: the “hard” part.
Immediately after the inauguration, The Village Voice published a series of mini-interviews done with attendees. The very first interviewee said that the new president’s words were being parsed by the media, and he didn’t believe that all of things the president said were in fact going to happen, that it was his, very good, way of saying he was simply putting the US’s interests first. When asked if he had in fact voted for Trump, this man answered:
“No, I’m a Canadian citizen.”
I’m not linking to that article, because I don’t want to contribute to that person being tracked down and bile thrown at him over the internet — if you want to read it yourself, you’ll have no trouble finding it.
The fact that Canada has not one but two proponents of the new president’s ideology running for the PC leadership (you know who I mean — I’m not furthering the indignity they’ve heaped on other people), and that this ideology has support in Canada, might make clear-headed Canadians panic and say “no, we DON’T have time! It’s inevitable.”
Trump wannabe.
Tweedledum.
It’s NOT inevitable. If you believe that, you’ve said you’re going to do nothing. Which is what happened before and during WWII. THAT’S were we are now. That is NOT inevitable in Canada, we CAN stop it.
And it’s, again, very simple, BUT. Turnout for the 2015 federal election was the highest in ages, yet over 30% of voters still didn’t show up. The only way to prove to the right-wing that the majority does not agree with them IS to utterly prove the majority is against them…that is, to VOTE AGAINST THEM.
The only way to not let either of those potential PCs have power, is to NOT let them have that power. If the majority of Canadians don’t vote for a party, they don’t get the power to enact what they want to do.
See? Simple.
Yes, we have first-past-the-post, we’ve had minority governments in recent history, blah blah. We somehow allowed Harper in power for 10 years, and finally, enough Canadians got sick of him to hand him a resounding Defeat. We can, and we must, keep fascism out of the Canadian parliament. And we can. By voting.
Said to me, in 2004, by a friend I hadn’t seen in ages. It was a few days before I flew to London, England, United Kingdom. I answered him, “That’s why I have to go see it now.” I got to see Big Ben, and Southbank, and the Inns of Chancery. The next year, London was bombed.
As I write this, I am in Ataturk Airport, Istanbul, Turkey. Forty-five people were killed here two weeks ago, by terrorists who apparently believed the same things as those who attacked New York City, London, Madrid, Paris, Brussels, Baghdad, THREE cities in Saudi Arabia, and as of TODAY, Nice, in the south of France.
I am in Istanbul waiting to catch a plane. To Nice.
I have been teaching English for the last ten months in Southern China. Almost without exception, all of my students are from very wealthy families (and, obviously, because I’m teaching them, they’re learning a foreign language). Yet almost NONE of them has ever been outside of China, for a vacation, or to hear English. For Chinese citizens, visiting other countries is extremely difficult. My students are in awe when I’ve told them I have visited NINE places: Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Iceland, and China.
I’m not going to see Istanbul beyond the airport today, but I WILL. And I am scheduled to be in France for a month. I’m not changing that.
I speak English and Spanish. I’m learning Mandarin. One of my favourite books growing up, Mischief in Fez, was about Morocco. I adapted it into a play because I wanted kids to know more about Islam, because I think Islam, and Muslim people, and the places where they live, are cool.
And YOU will not change that. You don’t get to tell ME or ANYONE else what they are allowed to be.
