Does your left wing know what your right wing is doing, or are you not a bird? An airplane?

By now I think most of us are pretty tired of the terms lefties and righties—or versions thereof—being hurled about as pejoratives. The terms don’t define anything that actually exists and even if a given person tends to side with liberal views and policies while a neighbour tends more toward conservative values, that doesn’t justify the labeling that’s becoming so strident in the West, for instance.

Right-wing worldview has come to mean something like a preference for keeping things as they are because they’re working. Its focus is individualistic; it favours self-reliance over social benefit, strict property rights, and as a result, isn’t keen on income equality, preferential hiring for minorities, feminism and/or any program that hands tax money over to the needy who should “just get over it, get a job, get off their asses.”

Left-wing worldview sees a role for government in ensuring the well-being of all citizens and

tend to be sympathetic toward universal health care, subsidized housing & daycare, social welfare and food banks. In North America, this doesn’t equate to socialism, particularly the kind we see in Venezuela, the former Soviet Union, China or North Korea. The fringes I’ll mention later tend to attach words like communist, or fascist to augment their vacuous pronouncements.

According to Jordan Peterson and others, the “leftie” viewpoint and the “rightie” worldview are necessary as checks against a politic that can swing too far toward the total nanny state on the one hand or a dictatorship/police state on the other. It’s when people with differing viewpoints lose the ability to dialogue productively and see each other as teams that must be defeated that the balancing breaks down and reasonable policy becomes difficult to negotiate.

We have plenty of examples to guide us in assessing where we are in keeping Canada in balance. The Russian Revolution swung so heavily toward the nanny state side that it destroyed itself and millions of its citizens with the excesses that followed. Latin American countries (Nicaragua, Columbia, Venezuela, for instance) have swung so sharply from one extreme to the other that citizens have been left to duck and run or die, time and again. Their balance systems have been known to fail . . . to put it graciously.

And let’s face it: in Canada today we’ve chosen a mixed economy and multi-culturalism, both of which are negotiated and balanced stances between extremes. What this means is that we have left wing and right wing-style commerce going on side by side, smoothly and productively. Most Canadians are conservative on preserving/ “conserving” the environment, liberal (actually, socialist) on healthcare. Phone, gas and hydro service in Saskatchewan are state-owned, potash mines are free enterprise. These few examples illustrate the frustrating and unnecessary dividing into hostile camps (NDP voters are lefties, CPU voters and Saskatchewan Party voters are righties.) What exactly is this labeling supposed to achieve? Except, if one of our great desires is for peace, another thing we are itching to have is a fight (this irony I witness in myself, time and again). And for fighting, name-calling, ridiculing you need sides. And these sides need derogatory names that can fit on a placard.

One might think that a test of our “balance” could be had from the way we have dealt with, for instance, gun ownership, or Medical Assistance in Dying, or gay marriage, or drug regulation. Typically, we have felt our way over time toward a position with which the majority can live. Liberals start a gun registry, Conservatives abolish it. Liberals ban classes of weapons, Conservatives cry foul. It’s a nation of social-leaners, capitalist-leaners and a mass of voters indifferent on the subject clumsily negotiating their way to a compromise. Liberalism may bring in assisted dying legislation; Conservatives are there to ensure that it doesn’t escalate to extremes. And vise versa, of course.

For reasons wise people could probably explain to me, our politics hasn’t capitalized on cooperative legislating and decision making. Take right now in this minority parliament during a pandemic when collaboration ought to be so very obvious an approach. What we have instead is decisions made for us in cabinet, opposition parties scrambling to find messages that denigrate the Liberal’s plans and processes when it would make good sense to govern in a “committee of the whole” manner, with all the ideas and all the “safeguarding” voices in one room.

Here’s a thought. What would change if in that debating phase of governance we call parliament, legislators would draw lots for seating in the chamber? It strikes me that at present—with government and opposition members ranged like battalions across a no-man’s land as if in preparation for medieval battling—the very configuration militates against productive dialogue and the necessary give and take when important matters are being negotiated. You’re much less likely to jeer an opposition member if he/she is sitting right beside you and you’ve been chatting about your respective grandchildren while waiting for question period to start.

The upshot of “us vs. them” politics is written all over the news coming from the USA. Divisive leftie/rightie rhetoric seeded into the general population will, I think, always produce hardened fringes that don’t even need to know what the issues are, that bond with others to form an antagonistic “club” identifiable as the extreme version of whatever ideology gave them birth. A problem is that democracies know intuitively that the extremes aren’t what they want, but the Skin Heads, the Antifas, white supremacists, the Tea Party, the gun lobbies, etc., tend to suck up all the oxygen available to journalism, dominating our news and encouraging us to think that we’re headed toward one or the other hell.

Some would say that “it’s just human nature,” or that “this is as good as it gets,” neither of which give us much hope for a future in which we’re eager to participate.

Being Canadian, I’m obviously most concerned with how we as a nation will launch ourselves into the future, particularly now in the light of the pandemic, the decimated economy, the changes happening in our southern neigbour and climate change. Perhaps this column falls into the category of the old man who plants trees, knowing he’ll never live to enjoy their shade, although the temptation is to hunker down and make the best of the good things this country has allowed me . . . and to hell with politics. But I’m also a history buff and through much reading have discovered how extensively one generation sets the table for the next generation . . . and the next . . ..

We must not let the line between imagined camps grow darker and wider as is the tactic of an incompetent US president. How to erase this barrier is the challenge before us. To this end, I have two suggestions: 1) do away with the party system in provincial politics and run our provincial government the way municipalities are run. (Side note: Toronto has 2.5 times the population of all Saskatchewan), and 2) have members of parliament choose their seat in the chamber by lot, not by party.

Would that be a start? I think so. If you’d like to dialogue with me on this or any other topic, my email address is gg.epp41@gmail.com.

To reconcile what has become divided

Seems to me we need to do some serious thinking on the topic of racism, beginning with recognizing that it exists on two levels: the personal and the corporate.

A story: The Nepalese Gurkhas gained renown as mercenary fighting units for mainly the British in India. After Indian Independence in 1947, they were given the choice of serving in the Indian or British Army. A minority chose the Indian army and served on the Indian sub-continent, but were always looked down on (personal racism) as the dirty Nepalese and were paid poorly compared to Indian soldiers. When Gurkha soldiers retired from soldiering, they received no support from India, were disallowed from owning property (corporate racism) and were basically persona non grata in their neighbourhoods.

Not identical to--but showing similarities to the situation of the descendants of slaves in the Americas and Indigenous populations in the USA, Canada and elsewhere--Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss has a wonderful description of what can go on in the consciousness of a member of a visible minority when events like the killing of George Floyd happen. This is about Gyan, an underemployed, underpaid Nepalese inhabitant of India as he joins with an insurgent movement:

"For a moment all the different pretenses he had indulged in, the shames he had suffered, the future that wouldn’t accept him—all these things joined together to form a single truth.

"The men sat [in the canteen] unbedding their rage, learning, as everyone does in this country, at one time or another, that old hatreds are endlessly retrievable.

"And when they had disinterred it, they found the hate pure, purer than it could ever have been before, because the grief of the past was gone. Just the fury remained, distilled, liberating. It was theirs by birthright, it could take them so high, it was a drug. They sat feeling elevated, there on the narrow wood benches, stamping their cold feet on the earth floor."

Like Paul to Timothy, we are urged to “Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” What do we need to learn here? 

Obviously, looking at a visible minority member from the outside will differ from his/her view from the inside. Can we get a faithful perspective without hearing from the police, the indigenous people and people of colour? Not easy in a time of pandemic.

To declare that we are not individually racist (personal) may not be enough, may not even be important, but where corporate racism continues to exist, we can be sure that personal discrimination and racism may well follow. And from places like India, Columbia, USA, Canada, Nicaragua, Russia, France, Germany, Great Britain, China/Hong Kong, etc., we should have learned by now that where corporate discrimination persists, violence often follows.

These are surely times for churches to give at least some of their energy to the breaking down of corporate and personal prejudice and racism. What might that mean in your church, in mine? We dare not declare ourselves in solidarity with a side, neither that of the protesters nor the justice establishment; our calling is to make peace, to do our bit to reconcile what has become divided, to offer ideas for change that might accomplish at least some of what would make for a better world. 

Our solidarity is with all who share the planet.

Perhaps that’s what we need to “study.” Eh?

gg.epp41@gmail.com for comments. 

Defund the Police? What?

HI!

“Defund the Police,” strikes me as yet another slogan to accompany “Black Lives Matter,” “I Can’t Breathe,” and so on. A new thing to fit on a waving placard and for me, a good reason to pause and think again about the role and practice of law enforcement as we find it today.

Take our experience of the mass killing in Nova Scotia recently, the skepticism about police actions in that event, questions about whether or not it could have been prevented and the subsequent attempts by the RCMP to justify its actions. And given the way we currently deal with violence and crime, and given that the perpetrator always has a huge advantage over enforcement, the reasons and excuses for the tardy apprehension of the perpetrator may well be valid.

And I think about the role of policing in the demonstrations/riots currently going on full bore in the USA, triggered by the police murder of George Floyd and the ongoing attempts by police to find their way out of charges of endemic racist practices in their ranks. We’re familiar with the scenes of battalions of robot-like, Darth Vader-like riot police in full conflict gear descending on demonstrators as if this were a face-off between two teams, one angry and unarmed, the other equipped like a military force with lethal weapons. From the president, meanwhile, a tunnel-vision preoccupation with brute force as the solution to every conflict.

I think it’s reasonable to say that our policing is primarily engaged in apprehending and punishing breakers of the law. There is a preventative aspect to that, of course: you can’t rob a bank from a jail cell. But on the whole, we’re putting a great deal more tax money into cleaning up after deviance than we are spending on preventing it in the first place. Perhaps this is what “Defund the Police” is all about; reducing the budget to policing and diverting it instead to social services, schools and wholesome recreation for youth. Poverty, discrimination, racism and the ennui of “nothing to do” are all like petri dishes for the culture of anger and deviance. Why not reinvest scarce dollars into preventative facilities?

I’m not well versed in the training of the police, I admit. What I’ve gleaned, though, is that a similarity to military training can’t be ignored. I’ve seen prospective Mounties marching in crisp uniforms and in strict formation in Regina. There’s weapons training, self defense practice and, of course, enough law and human rights indoctrination to prevent abuse. In part, it’s reasonable. It strikes me that police being summoned, for instance, to a weapons incident would be deathly afraid for their own lives given the history of so many of their fellows dying in service. But as surely as the parameters of medical practice, for instance, are bound and governed by the social contract we’ve agreed to as citizens, so our policing has always responded to what the public demands.

Perhaps citizens are beginning to change their minds on what policing shall look like in the future, their clues coming from the news of the Nova Scotia massacre, the “lynching” of George Floyd and myriad stories of guns, gangs, shoot-outs and mayhem in the streets of our towns and cities. Too often, police involvement has made conflicts worse, even when officers and constables are decent, compassionate people. Fear for our lives changes how we react to the world around us.

So often, families of people who’ve died while being “policed” have cried out for justice. Unfortunately the justice they are calling for isn’t justice at all, it’s retribution akin to “an eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth.” The justice that the Old Testament prophets, that Jesus Christ cried out for is something else: it’s in righteous and compassionate dealings in all aspects of society, evenly and mercifully distributed to every child of creation so that all can rest in the good will of their neighbours.

The adult in us is shaped by the experiences of our childhood and adolescence. Perhaps it makes a lot of sense to put our dollars into a better school for every child; more and better-trained teachers; a universal guaranteed income plan; engaging recreation, music and arts opportunities everywhere children are growing up; fabulous, universal daycare.

And finally, determining together to pursue a real and forward-looking plan to eliminate every injustice that ends up necessitating retributive policing. A country without guns, because, “Why the hell would I need one, stupid?”

And, putting our money where our mouths are, eh?