Companions in the Dark

As a Canadian living in the U.S., my sons automatically inherited Canadian citizenship. But when George W Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 under false pretenses, I became afraid that if my sons were ever drafted and I was a U.S. citizen, my sons might lose their second, Canadian citizenship. So here I remain on a green card, even though I have no thought of ever living in Canada again.

The U.S. is no longer invading other nations, but it is supporting genocide in Palestine through an unlimited supply of bombs, without which that would not be happening.

Now, the U.S. has chosen to be led by a man who claims he has a mandate to annihilate the rule of law and destroy the safety net. Thinking about his threat to undo government departments, a memory of my own potential for destruction comes to mind. At that time, I was a teenager living on the west end of Montreal Island.

Instead of simply feeling helpless and blaming it on others, I’d like to explore this memory as an example of how I too was willing to harm unknown people, simply because I didn’t think of them as included in my personal world.

Several of us were out roaming the neighborhood under cover of darkness, and we entered a property across “Lakeshore Road” from the residential subdivision where our families lived. Our subdivision was built on land that had recently been a working farm, and in fact we regularly found cow skulls and farm implements in our yard.

On the lake side of “Lakeshore Road” there were several original properties, some of them occupying many acres of land.

Acting on a questionable group impulse, we picked apples off the ground in the orchard and started throwing them at a nearby building. Eventually we heard a window smash and—being amateur vandals–we immediately fled back into the shadows.

I don’t think of that incident often. It’s just one of a number of times that I was caught up in behavior that harmed others. On this occasion, I can only hope that we just caused damage to property and didn’t cause people living there to feel afraid of a world that was bringing unwanted changes into their lives.

We must have thought of those unknown neighbors as being rich landowners belonging in a class to which we didn’t belong. That feeling probably made us feel that damaging their property was a different kind of act than if we had been roaming in our own suburban neighborhood.

This memory is so inconsequential that it doesn’t seem related to the danger now faced by America. But perhaps it can shed some light on how easy it is to consider people we don’t know as not being included in our personal circle of care.

That in turn seems related to how easy it is to blame our discontents in life on the powers that have created the rules and regulations, which organize modern society. Then, if someone comes along who promises to unravel those regulations, it must be tempting for some to feel they would be better off being free of all that complexity and regulation.

Freedom from the integral complexities of modern life is about to find unbridled expression. Many of us are afraid of what will happen next. And perhaps some who are not presently afraid, will be. When they realize that they, or their aging parent in a subsidized facility, are actually dependent on a safety net supported by government funding, respect for a spirit of shared responsibility for one another may slowly ebb back.

I don’t feel personally threatened by the clearly announced intention to begin expelling non-Americans this coming January. As a resident alien, when images of newly-empowered gangs roving neighborhoods such as the one in which I live come to mind, I treat them as my shadow side expressing premature fear. However, there are many people living in this country for whom that fear must now be terrifyingly real.

One of my sons is already dead, the other two have US citizenship and don’t have children of their own, so none of my family are likely to be immediately affected by the coming agenda that treats weather disasters as a hoax, considers the departments of education, health and justice that preserve the safety nets on which so many rely, as fair game in a playpen for billionaires. But eventually we are all bound to feel the loss of fairness and caring in our daily lives.

For anyone who has read “Wind in the Willows”, it’s hard to believe that Mole, Rat and Badger will be able to take Toad Hall back from the Weasels. In that wonderful and hopeful book, the weasels were merely gangs of opportunists who gleefully took over the biggest mansion in town. Those weasels seemed more like me and my teenage pals throwing apples under the cover of darkness than today’s agents of dissolution who intend to rid society of its responsibility to keep caring, honesty and truth alive. The people who are so gleefully preparing to take over the mansions of government intend to demolish the public instruments on which almost all of us depend in one way or another. Many presently alive will feel the impact in the months ahead. And on behalf of those who will come after us, Mother Earth must be sobbing in her deepest being.