The other day I was complaining about being stuck in traffic. Today I’m complaining about our neighbours to the south electing a leader who wants to destroy my country and bring about a world war.
I’ve been struggling internally with my feelings. The first response to seeing Putin’s secret agent and his lap dog sitting in the American white house picking on a smaller country at the behest of Vladimir Putin was rage. Looking for the reasons behind the rage, my focus fell upon my American extended family members, some of whom I know were Trump supporters. Because how did Trump become president, except by the actions of Americans?
Uncle Bob, before he died a few years ago, was your typical big, fat, racist red-neck Texan. Son in the Marine Corp, red white and blue flag worshipper.
(And by the way, have you ever been in the USA and in the middle of a public meeting like a concert when they start worshipping their flag? It’s creepy. But then so is their obsession with guns, religion and politics, which I have seen mingled together down there. They ask their God to bless their government. Then they go out and purchase weapons and shoot people and other creatures.)
But uncle Bob was a friendly man. He married my aunt back in the 70s. He was a music instrument repairman and she was a music teacher in the public school system. Their kids (from his first marriage) were quiet and pleasant when I met them in their home in 1975.
How is it that people, who are pleasant and easy to get along with when you meet them one on one, sharing a meal, going to a music concert or a movie, or just hanging out, somehow are complicit in political systems that put dictators in office; dictators who cause suffering and misery across the planet?
I’ve glimpsed paradise while working in my back yard, making my garden a nicer place. Or while looking after my cat. Or doing something nice for my wife. My mind, like any mind, sometimes drifts into a reverie and I imagine that, out there, in outer space, there are beings more advanced than us, where paradise is not just something glimpsed now and then, but a state of being experienced continually.
If there were such higher creatures, why would they not make themselves known, and help us become better creatures than we are?
Could it be that we’re just too barbaric? Would any sensible gatekeeper of paradise want to admit a Make America Great Again zombie? Might not we be stuck here in a place from which we can only glimpse paradise until we collectively manage to overcome the idiocy and violence that pollutes our world? The idiocy and violence that we, collectively, create?
Fascism is ugliness and cruelty. The fascist state of Russia has been attacking the peace-loving people of Ukraine for three years now. The United States is culpable because the United States has fostered… I might even say created the enmity between Russia and its western neighbours; the United States invents weapons, then sells them to other countries and uses its secret agencies to foment hatred between nations.
Brings me back to my friends and family members south of the border. What do they do to prevent this? Nothing, as far as I can see. Some of them actively participate in these oppressive systems, either directly, by serving in the military, or indirectly, by twirling wooden rifles in ballet formations and marching around in lock step formations designed to enforce the ideals of totalitarian control.
Why pick on people who serve in the US Military? Why raise an eyebrow at lock-step gun-twirling?
The only other thing Americans worship besides their flag is their president. The American president is a god-king. Take the idea of a capital G God and mingle it with the idea of a totalitarian king and you’ve got the American Presidency. Soldiers vow allegiance to their supreme leader, their God King president. Speaking somewhat hyperbolically of course: they don’t actually say the words “God King”. But they voluntarily sacrifice their personal identity and become tools for a vicious killing machine. A machine that is, sometimes, controlled by people with malicious intent.
But on the other hand, what can Americans do to stop this?
Americans have been friends, neighbours, business partners and family members for generations. The parallels between the Ukraine/Russia relationship and America/Canada relationship are striking, except for the fact that America has generally been on our side: the side of freedom and justice and truth. Now America is on the other side: the side of oppression and injustice and falsehood. So the Ukraine/Russia relationship becomes more germane.
Canadians are also complicit. For generations we’ve been selling our resources to the Americans for less than those resources are worth, enabling them to manufacture weapons. Maybe it’s time to cut ties to the US. I’ll always love my friends and extended family members, but I won’t continue enabling them to enable the systems that destroy any chance of peace and harmony. I’ll be avoiding American products, and won’t cross the border until the situation down there improves.
Like the superior outer space creatures of my imagination, I’ll let America sort itself out, and when it is worthy of being admitted to paradise, I’ll open the gates.
Meanwhile, I’m stuck in a cosmic traffic jam, fuming and telling myself to calm down; that the only thing I have control over is my own emotional state. Back to the garden.