Guilt and Toronto

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got annoyance at Toronto snobs?

Preface 

Audre Lorde, down in the U.S.A., taught a college English class:

“…I wish I had recorded some of it. Like the young white cop in the class saying, “Yeah, but everybody needs someone to look down on, don’t they?””

Your Silence Will Not Protect You, page 75.

… I am writing this in Toronto, under the spell of Audre Lorde, a member of several minority groups: Black, and a woman too, “but a traitor” with a nonBlack partner, raising children, but “without a  family values marriage,” lesbian, and speaker of truth to hands-on-ears fellow feminists… 

Grrr, those elitist Toronto people—who do they think they are? I mean, they go around feeling like “guilty white liberal middle class” types.  

Not me. I’m a westerner, I own two cowboy hats, and I don’t do guilt. For one thing, my middle class “membership” is rather honorary, the result of getting a university degree. I’m still poor, not  rich. My big family (Dad had eight siblings) is solidly blue collar working class. (I have five siblings) I still retain our old-world fear of impulse buying, let alone going into debt.

Today, as a regular guy, I refuse to criticize minorities for things they can’t help… It logically follows I feel no guilt when I can’t help being born white and male. As for my various privileges, including being born into the biggest country in the free world, well, what the heck can I do about it, to avoid guilt? Besides, that is, virtuously saying, “Women and children and oppressed people first!” Hard to say with a straight face, I know, easier to look serious if I am yelling it.

Guilt, to my eyes, is useless. It adds no energy for the good fight, no political empowerment, no spring to my step. What it does do, out east in Toronto, is something yucky: I keep reading that guilty white liberal females are disempowering their white Arab sisters by wearing islamic hijabs “in solidarity,” forgetting that not all Arabs are religious-and-conservative. 

In fact, some Arabs are atheists, just like some Israelis, while others are religious-and-liberal. Some of my white Muslim sisters are born right here, smack dab in the First World, where just as I do they disagree with those parts of religion that supposedly call for Iran to murder protesters in the streets, and maintain a big infamous torture prison. Let’s speak truth to middle-class power: Our Muslim sisters are against war, holy or otherwise, against oppression of women, and against domestic abuse. Me too. This as guilty Christian liberals would “help” their sisters by wearing the tools of the oppressor.

Regular people, back west where I live, can only know about liberal guilt in Toronto if we read the newspapers, reading about poor and non-guilty women desperately pleading, begging, trying to reason with the rich middle class liberal women that no, the burka (big tent with eye holes) and hijab (hides the hair) are not in the Islamic scriptures. I am sure Lorde would agree with me on this: Throughout time and space, every patriarchal culture, no matter how “religious,” manages to physically hobble its women in ways the culture just doesn’t use to hobble its men. (And has invisible hobbles too) Because that’s what “patriarchy” does, of course, feeling entitled to do so.

Naturally, I could be wrong about Toronto, since it’s so far away. At my Toastmasters club two different people who came here from out east told us of having misconceptions about the west, and one of them was especially embarrassed: She was a retired schoolteacher, and had been teaching western history wrong for years. To be charitable, maybe distance does that—or maybe Toronto people are just racist, geographically and culturally racist.

I am still chuckling from the time I left Alberta, and crossed several mountain ranges to go further west into another time zone, visiting my sister up in cattle country in central British Columbia. In the kitchen my niece asked, “Uncle Sean, are you a red neck?” Her father answered for me. “He’s an intellectual red neck.” 

Meanwhile, in Toronto—the only city in Canada which can, bizarrely, hold the Grey Cup game with only sports fans caring, without any citywide buzz of excitement—the rich liberal racists probably don’t grasp that you can have a degree, be artistic, and also have dear friends and relations who are blue collar. I think Toronto racists won’t grasp that you can live back west and still be a world class artist.

Am I angry? How can you tell? Here’s what burns my neck red: A fellow writer endured a negative and utterly rude book review by a Toronto elitist, a rudeness my friend is convinced she would not have endured had she lived within the city of Toronto, or even in the greater Toronto area. As for Audre Lorde, she had her own mighty frustrations with white feminist racists, just as I surely would in Toronto. Reading  Lorde, I scrutinize her word “entitled,” and her definition of “racism”: It is nourished by, motivated by, and produces… a sense of entitlement.

If the artsy elite, entitled to be snobs, who avoid the Grey Cup, are racist against westerners and their Muslim sisters, then maybe their entitlement produces… a passive sense of guilt. A guilt where a “liberal” member of parliament (Justin) disagreed with anyone who would call genital mutilation, here in Canada, “barbaric.” Really Justin? Please STOP your misplaced guilt—If it’s not barbaric, here in the 21st century, then tell me: What exactly is it?…  “Grotesque?” 

(Not a good word for immigrants with English as a second language)

Like playing rock paper scissors, the action of “giving up entitlement” beats guilt. Simple. But out east in Ontario it’s very hard for a liberal rich man to do so, standing there beside his camel and needle.

Too bad I can’t ask anyone here what’s going on between Toronto ears, since nobody I know back west—and hey, some of my best friends are liberals—feels guilty. Here on the prairies I haven’t seen the wind, but I have seen my friends and I taking action against injustice and oppression. 

As for Toronto folks, for the sake of my artist friends back west, I sure wish they would stop feeling entitled to snobbery. More importantly: I wish the middle class ladies out there would drop their guilty support for domestic violence and inequality.

Sean Crawford

In the Toronto airport, 

and 

In the fuselage of a 

Westjet,

March

2020

Footnotes:

~Joke: The graphic Mad Magazine once proved how it is possible to get a camel through the eye of a needle. You tie a rope around the camel’s belly, lift it up with a helicopter, and fly through a giant needle. “Nobody said how big the needle had to be.”

~ In Canada, soon after Star Trek ended its run, we de-cloaked our invisible hobbles by using consciousness raising circles. …But in our new century those pesky Romulans have cloaked again.

~A self-defensive note: (In a tired voice, after mentioning white Arabs) Yes, my politically correct friends, I do know there are Black Muslims, and Pacific Muslims, with millions in the city of Jakarta alone; yes, I know one can do holy terror without being Arab, with the worst country for “global reach” into Europe being Pakistan…. But many of my readers, as in that country song, “don’t know Iraq from Iran,” and so I concentrated on Arabs. …Besides, experts on the vanished Indo-European language say Arabs are part of the Aryan nations, from Eire (Ireland) to Iran, so that makes them white to me, and why can’t racists see that?

Sidebar 

Audre Lorde’s World

Long before 9/11 raised our consciousness  about the existence of Islamic family violence, Audre Lorde visited the Second World and quoted a woman feeling triumphant against hijabs and honour killings. I quoted them both in As Epilogue a Feminist Regards Muslim Uzbekistan archived October 2017.

As for Audre, it’s a small world: The last time I was in London, at the Tate Modern Art Museum, 

(the most visited London attraction, according to a recent BBC News article)

I bought a green book of her essays. This time around, in a Bloomsbury store, I bought a pink book that has her essays and poems. Many of her poems are referenced in her essays,
 (including A Conversation with Adrienne Riche) 
which is delightful because Lorde thinks by using poetry first, not by using words. 

(Other ways of thinking are in my essay How You Learn, archived February 2020)

The Tate exhibit was of U.S. Black political art, and it was so very sad for me to see some old black and white TV sets, outside in the lobby, each showing a person speaking, all of whom were dead except for Angela Davis. I think she survived because she was in prison during the police killings. When they took her away, Black writer James Baldwin said (I forget) something like, “Dear Angela, if they come for you in the morning, they will come for me in the evening.” 

I had already known about police shooting up a Black Panther headquarters in a surprise attack, but the exhibit included a door of someone’s home with many police bullet holes: Shot while soundly sleeping. I do believe I once read about a third such door too.

For any readers who still wonder why U.S. Blacks, including sweet gentle sisters, gave their brother, O.J. Simpson, the benefit of the doubt after his arrest, a memory has popped in: 

Back in the 20th century, perhaps from submarines mysteriously going missing in remote waters, we had a saying: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

Innocence is Gone, and It's Not OK

essaysbysean.blogspot.com   

Reminder: Back when the communists and nazis were friends they divided Poland between them, down the middle.

Hello Reader

Got knowledge of fragility?

Sources:

Anna and the Swallow Man by Gavriel Savit,

Ember, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, 2017

Poppies of Iraq, by Brigitte Fndakly and Lewis Trondheim, Drawn and Quarterly, originally published in French, with help from the Canada Council, 2017

A writer once pointed out that most people move through the world gingerly. That sounds right, based on the ordinary folks I have known, including writers. Then again, my writer peers would never be blazing oblivious extroverts. How could they be? And still do the art they do? 

This week I was with a small circle of writers to discuss our latest book club selection: Anna and the Swallow Man by. Gavriel Savit. Highly recommended. In wartime Poland, the two title characters, innocent girl and mysterious wise man, are trying to survive the holocaust by keeping on the move through forests and towns, using their wits to get past Russians and Germans. Call the bad guys bears and wolves, as the Swallow Man does, in this book of magical realism and flowing literary sentences. It’s marketed as YA, young adult.

My peers thought the novel could be for any age group. This despite dead bodies delicately described. As for readers too young, we thought they wouldn’t “get” the sexual assault scene, and thus wouldn’t be harmed. My peers were mothers and school teachers: They would know children, and they hastened to assure a sensitive lady who had not read the book yet, that the assault scene would be OK. Here’s the aftermath, on page 212-213:

“She cried, of course…Though she would not have been able to tell you so at the time, Anna had broken a part of herself like a piggy bank to pay the (person’s) price, and it felt to her as if she had already failed to…”

The book’s cover, by Laura Carlin, is inspired: A far off view: Under the shadow of a passing swallow, a girl is walking all alone in the snow. The problem with your losing innocence, or even worse, gaining unspeakable knowledge, is you then walk through life always a little cold, a little alone. I can relate. A writer once told me that I was looking out of a mask, through little eye holes, at people. Maybe she was quite mistaken, and only “perceived” so because we knew of each other’s past. It was all so long ago… This year, if I rail against teachers being documented as allowing school bullying, then it’s because I am certain assaults and bullying are a form of losing innocence, and it’s not OK. (as archived February 2019, Bullies and Teachers)

An actual example of an entire society changing its innocence would be here in Canada. We still believe in our sacred freedom of speech, of course, but now we also have laws censoring hate speech, as we are conscious of living in a post-holocaust world. We realize at last that “human rights”are the canary in the coal mine; and we know now that evil unchecked anywhere threatens the world. 

One of my favorite writers knew about the existence of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) long before Veterans Affairs did. In fact, HG Wells knew back in the 19th century. His hero in War of the Worlds, years after the passing of the Martians, is still having flashbacks. Wells knew that, just like individuals, a whole society can be affected. (Like today how folks of continental Europe sees the EU as way to prevent having enemy boots on the ground, while folks of the British Isles, having never been invaded since 1066, sees the EU as merely a trade organization) In Well’s novel, once the Martians had left, people no longer saw a friendly night sky. 

In my opinion it’s OK to face reality, and also to say that reality does not feel OK.

Breaking News regarding assaults and bullying
Being returned to a sixth form bullying environment can (link) cause PTSD-like trauma for a wife and mother (God bless society for slow-w-w-ly becoming ready to begin to face the effects of child bullying)

SIDEBAR

Documented loss of mental health on a national level, in the graphic memoir Poppies of Iraq:

Besides people under oppressive censorship gradually losing their freedom of conversation, until all they had left was trivial gossip, I was struck by this:

Quote

It’s 2016. For a long time my cousins hoped things would get better. They stayed until their parents died, and then, to give their children a normal future, almost all of them left, emigrating to the four corners of the earth. Australia, NewZealand, Canada, the U.S., Sweden, France…… And all have become Islamophobic. 

I won’t try to argue. I’ll continue to love them as they are, as people I care about.

Unquote.

As for Arabians becoming Islamophobic, to paraphrase what a “good German” said after Europe was reduced to rubble: 

“All that is needed for Islam to cause phobia is for “good Arabs” to do nothing.”

Here are two old poems, by Lutheran Pastor and former U-boat commander, Martin Neimoller which I would wager have never been translated into Arabic (as Arabs do surprisingly little translating)

"Thus, whenever I chance to meet a Jew known to me before, then, as a Christian, I cannot but tell him: 'Dear Friend, I stand in front of you, but we can not get together, for there is guilt between us. I have sinned and my people has sinned against thy people and against thyself.'" 

And this poem,
which, after being recited live with different versions, (like Bob Dylan's live presentations of All Along the Watchtower) is now classic:

First they came for the Jews

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out

because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me

and there was no one left

to speak out for me. 

Link

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/martin-niemoeller-first-they-came-for-the-socialists

As for my knowledge of horror: My perspective, in this world of woe, means I don’t get paralysed. Not me. I feel it’s perfectly OK to do like the missionaries, 

working in starving nations, when back here on vacation, 

who would “eat, drink and be merry,” without guilt, 

who would gladly embrace our “merely first world problems,’ 

…and maybe embrace a nice Mars poem too:

Poem

The Martians are Gone, and It’s Not OK

Martians gone, six years past.

Rubble cold, red weed dust.

Mother is gone, and it’s not OK.

If I look up at the starry night,

it’s not friendly.

If I contemplate the cosmos,

there’s no God.

The planets revolve unheeding;

they’re not for us.

I never taught my mother

to honor me

or know my friends were not bad,

not stupid.

Mother is gone,

and it will never be OK.

Sean Crawford

August

2019

Calgary

Schools within Society within Citizenship

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

...He (Ayama) believed a mistake of historical proportions may have been made as Japan prepared to deal with its future. The nation, he suggested, was producing workers rather than full citizens, and he once told me in passing, almost as a throwaway, that it was a great deal easier to produce a good car than it was to produce a good human being.

The Next Century, 126 hardcover pages, by David Halberstam, referenced in my essay archived June 2015

Hello Reader,

Notice how things are embedded in society?

Utah passed a law recently stating that children are allowed to play outside alone as well as walk or bike to school without parental supervision. It is the first law in the US of its kind. And the fact that it’s even needed in the first place kind of freaks me out.

From Mark Manson in his only 2018 April blog essay for non-subscribers. (link)

How grim. Manson goes on to explain that baby boomers, as part of their bizarre entitlement, see their kids as trophies to be shown off. Part of this means having their children well rounded and sent to enriching activities, even if this happens too much, even if natural “child’s play” must be “scheduled.” As must “play dates,” too. 

My formative years were of the 1950’s. A time when an “only child” was unusual. Our vocabulary did not include “play dates” or “helicopter parents.”

Back in my day children all attended their neighborhood school together. Maybe a city would have one vocationally oriented school, a school that would then usually turn out to surprise the teachers by garnering a bad reputation for having troubled youth. That was then. 

Now, in my own city, we have evolved a spaghetti snarl of bus routes as so many kids are crisscrossing the city going to special classes. This in perhaps the biggest city, by square miles, in the whole country. (And the fourth largest by population) The school bus costs are proving to be unsustainable for the taxpayers. The experts have no solutions.

…Easy for me to say it’s hopeless to give schools any thought; hard for me to think around the subject from an angle of ancient history. But I feel I have to try…

Meanwhile, over in sunny Greece, everybody knew that well rounded schools were the way to go. The children would be outside dancing and tumbling, reciting poetry, running relay races, singing, learning to strum the lyre, tackling geometry and rhetoric. The ancient Greeks had no problem doing all of this and the three R’s too: Reading, “Riting” and “‘Rithmatic”. Of course, our knowledge of Greek society comes from idealistic writing. 

Maybe, off the page, Greeks shared with each other ignoble, petty reasons for having their well rounded schools, like the reasons Mark Manson notes of our baby boomers; just as Americans, without saying the word hubris, had verbal reasons for keeping troops in the Republic of South Vietnam that didn’t get into history books. (Americans wrote of reasons such as honoring their word, saving the world from the spread of evil Godless communism and believing in South Vietnamese self determination)

I said “maybe.” In the end, if we want to be inspired by our Greco-Roman heritage (as well as our other two heritages, Christian and Hebrew) then we would do well to take the Greeks at their word. Greek parents would have been influenced by what adults told each other: “Not life, but a good life, is expected of every citizen.” As for that alien idea of having schools do nothing but specialize all day, every day, in the three Rs, Greek slogans included “moderation in all things” and “nothing in excess.”

As I see it, the Greeks understood in their very bones that the best way to maintain their freedom was with democracy, and the best way to maintain democracy was with good schools producing good human capital. The mighty Persian Empire, so close by, would have been instructive. Mighty, with a huge armed forces, but also with a vast unschooled public unused to freedom, unused to thinking for themselves. If once conquered, the downtrodden Persians would never rise up again. As Alexander the Great easily proved. Persians were like a giant chessboard where, if the king became resigned to his fate, all the pawns would surrender. Not like checkers. Not like in Greece, where every “citizen,” by definition, felt himself a king. For every new Greek generation the land would have to be re-conquered, or at least “occupied”—a word NOT in the (non-democratic) ancient world’s vocabulary.

Today Persia (Iran) and the adjoining Arab nations are rich in oil but very poor in people. Partly because their society has only a timid connection between merit and success—because of corruption and entitlement. A Canadian in the British army reports, in his recent memoirs, of being on manoeuvres with Arab soldiers. He looked over at an Arab mortar crew: The arabs didn’t even know how to aim their weapon properly… This makes sense: How could it possibly be otherwise? Armed forces are always embedded in the surrounding civil society.

I grew up poor and working class. Many years ago, back when I still thought university students knew a lot, and dreamed of being one myself, I stood outside the door of a classroom in the physical education building. I lost my innocence about white collar students when I heard a professor asking her class, like a mother talking to her simple children, “Why do you think the Spartan girls were encouraged to run to school?” Sparta, of course, fielded the best warriors of all the Greek city-states, being organized as the only "warrior-state" in Greece. She asked again. As I recall, with no answers forthcoming, at last she had to spell it out for her students: The women were to be strong, to raise strong warriors… Again the concept of the army reflecting the surrounding society.

So why, today, do certain Arabs and Muslims believe a girl should not even attend school? To me, one of the reasons is obvious: Surely so she won’t learn to think, and therefore won’t set an example in thinking for her children. So she won’t raise boys and girls who will question the king or dictator or ayatollah. 

From 1983, during the first decade of suicide bombers, is Memoir From the Women’s Prison (translated by Marilyn Booth) by Nawal El Saadawi, an Egyptian Muslim medical doctor and writer. She was politically imprisoned. On page 124, a guard is talking with a prisoner:

“I don’t know anything,” she said in a loud voice. “Not even how to read and write.”

“Why do you cover your face with a veil?” he asked.

“Because God commanded me to do so in his Noble Book.”

“How did you find that out? Have you read God’s book?”

She was silent for a moment. “I don’t read, but I heard it on the radio over at the neighbours….and I heard the Shaykh say that God has commanded all women to cover their faces.” 

On the cover of her book, old white haired Saadawi poses with an uncovered head.

To an Arab or Pakistani Muslim extremist it makes sense: Better to shoot an uppity fifteen year old schoolgirl in the head, like they did poor Malala, than to risk someday having a Greek-style entire generation of housewives who could think over new ideas and, say, ponder head coverings. The lands of Islam are fine already, say the gunmen, especially if we can return to older, purer Islam, so there’s no need to for Islamic people to take any chances of maybe, eventually, getting the separation of church and state, let alone (spits on the ground) democracy!

As I type this, dear reader, I feel a tad foolish, pointing out the obvious. But it’s not obvious to our Muslim teenagers who claim that Islam is under attack worldwide, or who would run off to join the Arab bombers and be-headers in their dark caliphate. And I won’t forget those university students needing to be mothered: Things aren’t obvious to them, either.

Our pioneer ancestors would take a day off from farming to raise a neigbor’s barn, or erect a community school. As our ancestors in Africa might say: It takes a village to raise a child, a society to raise a school. 

Schools: Not off in a bubble, not magically hopeless. We built them. We staff them. Surely we can open their windows to the light. 

Needless to say, no matter how many schools we have in our sad sorry world, there will always, for every time and space, be extremists. When my dad was much younger than I am now, he fought an army in which were embedded Hitler Youth. Because his army was “first in, first out,” Dad didn’t have to stick around for the occupation of Germany. But if he had, he could have told the Germans: “Whatever schools you choose to have, will mean the citizens you deserve.”

Sean Crawford

Calgary,

North of Utah

June

2018

Postscript: 

“I am starting to think. Thank you.” A student

Considering my opening quote from Ayama, on producing good human beings, and then seeking for proof that schooling could be effective, I found a standing-ovation Ted Talk by a man from Microsoft. 

Without using the word citizen, he represents the ideal of responsibility beyond oneself. He cofounded a postsecondary school that effectively trains the leaders (that is, the nation’s educated) to look beyond themselves, to feel less entitled and more responsible. (Link)

Footnote: For schools today, for a criticism of the newest new math, espoused by people who don't know why there was an older "new math," see my essay archived March 2014.

Literary Musings: I have been thinking of the young adult science fiction novels from the 1950’s of Robert Heinlein. 

In one, a beggar suddenly surprises his son by showing that he can juggle. The son, who as a member of the beggar class will never need algebra, gets tutored in math by his father, and discovers that algebra is worthwhile for it’s own sake.

In another, a mid-west high school boy takes extra classes to get into engineering school, including taking Latin. (Which comes in handy when he meets a time traveling legionary) In another, an old asteroid belt prospector complains to two brothers about uneducated kids these days: “Quote a bit of Latin at them, and they look at you like you’re funny in the head.”

I think Heinlein and his generation must have been raised to be aware of the ancient Greeks believing in well-rounded schools, and well rounded citizens.

Assimilation For Success

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

“In the Cold War, the West celebrated dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Vaclav Havel, who had the courage to challenge the Soviet system from within. Today, there are many dissidents who challenge Islam—former Muslims, and reformers—but the West either ignores them or dismisses them as “not representative.” This is a grave mistake…”

Heretic, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, page 221.

Hello Reader, 

Got Assimilation?

Americans make me smile fondly—you too? Only Americans, via Hollywood, could have come up with a villain like the Borg on Star Trek who say “You will be assimilated” —Americans treasure their individuality: In fact, they compliment each other on being different. (A distressing thing to hear in Japan) 

The Borg say the scary words “Resistance is futile.” —Americans hate feeling futile; they treasure having hope and optimism… Perhaps their trust and hope, in people and the future, is why they believe in democracy, although so many others believe democracy leads to national disorder.

I share optimistic American tastes in culture, especially in their music and science fiction, especially for their written fiction. While a European story about a dark totalitarian society might end on a gloomy note, a U.S. story would have a precious few striving for the light, and changing their society, maybe by managing to blow up a death star. 

When it comes assimilation, a certain U.S. book series, The Cross-time Engineer, by Leo Frankowski, is instructive. Although Frankowski is a regular American, his series hero, Conrad, is from a communist Poland. Conrad accidentally time-travels back to Polish feudal times—and is stuck there. Well. The urgent plot: Remembering history, Conrad knows that in ten more years the Mongol hordes are due to come raging through Poland to pillage, burn and kill all his new friends.

Luckily, Conrad is an engineer. Think of Jules Vern’s novel The Mysterious Island where the castaways arrive without even their pocket knives, yet they end up building windmills and irrigating crops planted in rows. The cross-time engineer resolves to improve the economy, enough to support what the classical republics of Greece and Rome enjoyed: a volunteer unpaid citizen-army. The first thing he does? Invent the crochet hook. 

Later Conrad feels guilty. His problem: Smelting ore into steel is a craft the engineer just doesn’t have. But he needs to mass produce armour and weapons for the new army. After all, the feudal tradition of innocent peasants bringing their farm implements into battle just won’t cut it, not against worldly Mongol warriors. So Conrad brings in some refugee southerners and their families. I forget who, probably Arabs to make Damascus steel. He offers them sanctuary in return for their work. Having majored in engineering, he can’t quite remember the sociological equations, but, suspecting the truth, he feels guilty from knowing: With this much critical mass, the southern families might not assimilate. They might remain separate within Poland for a few generations… or even a few centuries. Of course he feels guilty. 

Would a Pole of today, in this situation, feeling any guilt? No. Evidently not, because Europeans have told Arabs and other Muslims that they can have their own culture, their own voluntary enclaves and even their own schools. (Note: an enclave is chosen, a Jewish ghetto is imposed) They say this guilt-free. In contrast, Americans will bus schoolchildren—both their own and others—right across town if that’s what it takes to get them out of their enclave and assimilated. Americans know in their bones that assimilation starts with society having an intention to do so, and that common schools are a big help.

I don’t know why the Europeans weren’t instructed by the example of America, and warned by the example of Yugoslavia. A Muslim I met in London didn’t know either. In Yugoslavia, as you recall, after generations of failure to set an intention to “melt in” or assimilate, the factions resorted to mass “ethnic cleansing.” I wish I could say, “At least there was a silver lining to all that killing, at least the rest of Europe took heed, and then resolved to assimilate.” But I can’t.

I guess we North Americans, living in some of the oldest continuous democracies on the planet, have an unusual culture. In Canada, specifically, a royal commission reported that Canadians don’t mind someone having a different language, provided he or she also has one of the official languages. Nothing wrong with being bi-lingual, yes indeed, it’s good to be bi-cultural. 

Here in North America, I can imagine a bi-cultural Muslim girl bussing to church and school: On Sunday at church writing, “According to religion…” a woman’s word in court should be legally only half that of a man, and she should be stoned to death for certain offences. On Monday at public school writing, “According to science…” the earth is millions of years old. And then “According to the Constitution…” no one should be denied human rights.

An American “bleeding heart” might cry out in alarm, saying surely my London Muslim friend and I are mistaken about the situation over there. Not so. It was a Dutch member of parliament, a Muslim herself, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who described Europeans as encouraging “enclaves.” It was an Australian, John Birmingham, who described Germany on page 411 of the trade paperback novel After America (Titan Books 2010)

QUOTE …”But I see nothing good coming of this, Caitlin. Back in 2001, well before the Disappearance, the Islamic Federation of Berlin, after twenty years of trying, finally succeeded in getting the city to allow purely Islamic schools to take in Muslim children. The city no longer controls those lessons, which are more often in Arabic than German and usually are held behind closed doors, especially for girls. Not long after that, the hijab became much more common. Girls began leaving school as early as possible. Groups of male students formed associations that now lobby for their schools to become fully fledged madrassas. It is a disaster for these children, and for Germany…” UNQUOTE

A disaster. Well. Call me an optimistic “can-do” North American, but I am convinced Europeans could still set their intention to change. 

After all, cultures change. Didn’t my grandparents see America change from extended families to nuclear families? My parents watched Japan and West Germany transform from devoutly believing in fascism to intently embracing democracy. I myself, born when Dwight Eisenhower was president, my favourite decade, saw my world change into the exciting, new improved culture we have today. As well, we in Canada went from believing Eskimos and Indians should and could assimilate, despite the critical mass of people on the isolated Indian reservations, to saying they should remain separate from the space-age culture of the non-aboriginal population, a dynamic population where today Chinese have replaced Ukrainians as the third largest ethnic group (after British and French). And believe me, that is a 180 degree turn around. Cultures change. 

When Ali troubled herself to warn Europeans about their enclaves, it was because she thought they could change. In her latest book, an international bestseller, she describes five ways in which Muslim culture should change, not only in Holland and Europe, but overseas, and in America too. It’s called Heretic subtitled Why Islam needs a reformation now. Well researched, full of examples. With 22 pages of references.

While the engineer, Conrad, is a loyal communist, I have to wonder: If a modern Pole traveled across time to the feudal age, or back to communist times, then what could he say to describe democracy?

He might say democracy requires an optimistic view of the people, a faith that the public doesn’t need to shrug off their burden of freedom and responsibility, certainly not through bowing down in admiration and submission to a king or a Central Committee. Democracy is the belief the public is the safest, although maybe not always the wisest, holder of power. Democracy means faith that most of the people, most of the time, will do the right thing, provided they have the information. 

Information must be thought about, processed, not blindly taken in. Democracy, then, means people must have permission to think. Nothing should ever be a “thought crime,” there should be no Nineteen Eighty-Four style Thought Police — And to support the required freedom of thought, to make sure they “have the information,” people must be legally free to speak, publish and distribute information… It’s no wonder, then, that no Arab public anywhere in the world, from the sparkling Atlantic to the wine red Arabian sea, has ever managed to stay free: Their religion doesn’t allow political free speech. 

It would be nice if Muslims could decide to separate the legal powers of church and state, but I see no sign of them doing so at present… while the optimistic North American in me remains ever hopeful.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

December 2017

Footnotes:

~I quoted how Muslim culture had changed within an Asian Soviet republic in my essay As Epilogue a Feminist Regards Muslim Uzbekistan archived October 2017, from a book I found at the London Tate Museum gift shop.

~My essay I Met a Muslim in London is archived September 2017.

~To document how Australians believe in North American-style  assimilation, not European enclaves, here is a blog by typical Australian Muslim who, needless to say, has no use for Arab-extremist. His second post is by a Muslim who ran for parliament.

~I still think of reading The Cross-Time Engineer whenever I take the electric trolley bus down Broadway past a certain pancake restaurant, where I read it on vacation years ago. 

~Will idealistic “can-do” American Muslims lead the rest of the Muslim world? Teach Muslims about reform? Like how the New York bishop taught the visiting Italian pope that in the “Big Apple” it’s OK for homosexuals to be catholic? Maybe. 

Or maybe not. From what little I can see, U.S. Muslims seem to have let all the air out of their tires. It’s as if they are in victim mode, but I don’t know enough to say for sure. Does anyone else know?

~I wrote of Ali being dis-invited to speak at a university graduation in my essay Acid Blog, Stupid Yankee University archived May 2014, where I quoted CBC’s Rex Murphy saying, “Is this a university or a day care?”