Old News
One of the interesting (or not, depending) aspects of Internet reporting is the reaction to new news and old by various and sundry. This story is currently making the rounds on a few Canadian blogs (I posted about it on my forum) and yes, it is horrific:
The comments, though, are wary and, you'll notice, tend more to question the source of the story and the terminology used in it, than the fairly accepted knowledge that Indian children weren't always treated well in residential schools. In any case, here is the horse's mouth:
HiddenFromHistory-ByRev.KevinArnott
Personally, I don't doubt, ever, the possibilities of institutional inhumanity. It strikes me, too, that Indian children were at a special disadvantage in residential schools because society at large - if it thought of them at all - held a fervent belief that they were better off in the care of religious institutions than they were on Indian reservations.
Or what some people might call being caught between a rock and a hard place - both of which (the rock and the hard place) were by government design, so we're guilty as a society at the very least of not doing well by a population - but which has no bearing on the here and now. Except that it does. Afterall, we are our history and if we have a reluctance to dig, literally, into the past to uncover the parts that reveal us to be not who we believe ourselves to be, then we're no better than all of those countries we set out from our shores to make over in our image, are we? Or am I a crackpot. Too.
Maybe. Certainly, the longer Canada goes on, the less enamoured of it I am. My patriotism fades with each passing government, to be honest. I no longer feel that stirring of national pride when I hear the anthem played at the Olympics anymore - if you can believe it.
I dunno. Maybe because it still has Gawd in it and I'm sick of Gawd. Gawd, Gawd, Gawd. Because it seems to me that, in the name of Gawd, there's a lot of denial and power in the same old hands and no real movement away from religion and into the light of rational thought.
Even all this hate speech nonsense that has permeated the Canadian internet for the past few months has come about because we are so fervent in our protection of religion that we are willing to sacrifice individual freedom of expression and, more importantly, the truth.
Why?
