And we seem to have a lot of “others” these days. I just read a stunning article about something hideous that has surfaced on the right wing side of our political rat’s nest. Our government is promising, if re-elected, to put an end to “cultural barbarism”. This is pernicious code for targeting “others” in our society since the cultural barbarism is not so clearly defined. One can be damn sure that it won’t be targeting the government’s own barbarous treatment of Aboriginals on and off reserves. And one would like to think that the wealthy folks who import live-in nannies and keep them virtually prisoners, abuse them and underpay them would be solid suspects. Nope…I think if they do anything about Aboriginals it will be to call them “barbaric” and put more police on the job.
Never-mind…in these divisive days there are plenty of others to go after. Foreigners mostly…but we’re careful not to alienate anyone specific during election campaigns…but later? Well let’s just say that Canada is not planning to help much with the refugee crisis and we have already put in place some laws that will strip the citizenship of “bad people” . Yes, Yes, I know that some of these people might indeed be bad…but the due process is pretty shaky here. A person born in Canada is a Canadian citizen…you can’t just take their passport and deport them to another country…unless that country agrees to take them…can you? Well maybe.
So here’s the thing. Say a young Canadian girl goes to a certain war-torn country with the intent of nursing the afflicted. While she’s there…”somebody” tells “somebody else” that she’s working for ISIS. She eventually comes home and is promptly arrested. Our “terrorism laws” say that she can be tried and convicted on the word of “somebody” in that other country without having that somebody revealed and even without the courts or the public and especially not the defendant knowing what “somebody” said. But if it’s good enough for our intelligence guys…hey…what’s the problem? Maybe she wasn’t working for ISIS at all but we’ll never know and furthermore…it’s against the law to talk about it.
Poor people are “others”. They always have been. I’ve heard social workers tell me that these people sit on the porch of their rented houses, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes while collecting welfare and not looking for a job! We should deport their asses for sure! I wrote a few years ago that being unemployed made one a second class citizen. In fact it’s worse than that. Being unemployed is like losing citizenship…and the longer one remains unemployed the harder it is to get that citizenship back. Homeless or not…these people live in a shadow world surrounded by our prejudice and conceits. We conspire to “not see” them on the street. Means they’re not there of course.
So this drawing is for the others we don’t see. These people collect bottles and cans and trade them for cash…presumably so they can sit on their porch and drink beer and smoke cigarettes.
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