Recently I was sitting in a nearby mall’s food court and what seems pretty typical of today’s seniors they started to criticize the jacket that I was wearing. I’m assuming that they did their criticizing so brazenly because I was wearing headphones and they never thought that I would have the music on pause.
After this they continued their narrow-minded line of complaining to pick up the local Edmonton SUN tabloid rag and agree with the paper’s common complaint that Alberta’s woes are all because of the current NDP government. They then went a step further to piss and moan that Canada’s problems are all because of the “immigrant problem” that the current Liberal government is responsible for. I felt like pulling out and playing the world’s smallest violin and calling bullshit on their old, dinosaur bigoted ways. I still have yet to get used to being called a “faggot” for wearing my punk clothing and sporting several tattoos. We shall get back to the Liberal party in a moment, but for now let’s focus on how a new immigrant might feel being called out for supposedly being responsible for every problem facing Canada today.
Like Andray Domise spoke so eloquently in a Maclean’s opinion piece the Canadian media should be calling out racism. Instead there was a recent Conservative promotional article in that very same rag, Maclean’s, promoted the idea that Canadian Conservative party leaders were the new resistance. I call bullshit again. They are NOT the resistance, they are the same white, bigoted, status quo dinosaurs that have been plaguing Canadian politics ever since one Stephen Harper was first elected.
These sort of conservative promotional pieces should be replaced by writing that condemns racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism etc instead of congratulatory high fives when the next group of minorities is targeted. Occasionally condolences are put out when some white asshole shoots up a black church, or a synagogue or a mosque. But more often than not, these same grumpy, old white men piss and moan that their precious 1950’s society is under attack. Under attack by immigrants like Ahmed the neurologist who works at a Circle K or Vishna the electrical engineer who drives a cab at night. I am really getting tired of hearing this same old broken record over and over again.
So we have the white male seniors pissing and moaning about 2019 not harkening back to the good old days of the 1950s where men were men and women were barefoot, pregnant and shackled to their respective ovens in their respective kitchens. Then we have the white male 20 to 30 year olds who are sick and tired of the immigrants stealing their jobs for less pay. These same boys, I mean men, are sick and tired of getting their wages reduced and/or laid off that they blame immigrants or any other minorities for their woes.
Never mind the fact that it’s the corporations screwing them over by exploiting the system and hiring someone who will work for less than these boys, I mean, men. The fact of the matter is that these young white males should look in the mirror first because what is staring back at them is the real problem. Instead of blaming immigrants, or current provincial NDP government or the current federal Liberal government they should be railing against the corporations for exploiting the workers. Ah yes, but it is far easier to blame some minority scapegoat for your problems instead of, uh, manning up and admitting that you were the one who bent over for the corporations in the first place. And now that the corporations are done with you, all you can do is put on a yellow vest and march and rant and yell your misguided vitriol at anyone who’ll listen. I for one am getting tired of my ears constantly being filled up with these people’s shit.
Now we have an upcoming provincial election and in the autumn we have a federal election too. And of course some yahoo or yahoos, are going around vandalizing NDP campaign signs with profanity and even swastikas. You’d think that the people responsible for this crap would know about the fascist playbook that they are promoting. If the people vandalizing the signs are younger than 40 that horrific past may be too distant. But if the people vandalizing the signs have parents or grandparents that fought fascism in World War 2 you’d think that they’d know that the Hitler manual would not end well for them or anyone else for that matter.
Let’s hope not, but if this new brand of ultra-conservatives all get elected they will most likely end up going down the same ultra-right-wing path that our autocratic neighbours to the south have. To me this looks a lot like dictatorial fascism, and the first people to be baffled by this new fascism-lite are the people who voted these bigots in. From not wanting to address someone with the right pronoun to outright taking away the rights of minorities they are still wearing a bigots line of clothing.
The only remedy for the current divisive, political diatribes are for the people of Alberta, and later this year Canada, is to diplomatically call out the politicians, their supporters and the media. Diplomatically calling them out wherever one may hear their rhetoric, whether that is in a food court in a mall or a campaign stop. Diplomatically call all of these bigots out. The politicians should not have even been elected in the first place let alone given a platform to spew their hatred. But the politicians were elected. So in this next Alberta provincial election, and federal election too, let cooler heads prevail, ignore the right wing banter and vote with your hearts and conscience instead of your testicles.