We Suck at Connect-the-Dots

When I sat down to write this blog post, I intended to focus on the concentration camps in China and the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uyghurs and other minorities. It is important to know about these human rights abuses, especially given our role as consumers in a market where everything from masks, to takeout food containers, to phones, are made in China. I fully encourage you to take 20 minutes to watch John Oliver’s often comedic, occasionally crass, and always informative episode on this topic. For a Canadian perspective on this issue, you can also read this news release from the House of Commons Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development.

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I decided that this particular blog post needed a different focus and have instead turned it into a brief personal rant, in part because the above sources already provide a good break-down of the available information on the government of China’s actions. However, I also had two other reasons for changing the direction of this post: First, I didn’t want to take a holier-than-thou approach and talk about China without addressing at least some of the comparable problems in Canada’s past and present. Second, I saw a broader theme that I thought I could more productively speak to. You see, the more I think about current and evolving human rights violations, the more I see a huge, gaping hole in society’s willingness to connect the dots between past and present.

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We think that we’re good at connecting the dots. Every year, we teach new cohorts of students about the horrors of the Holocaust, in hopes of ensuring that it never happens again. Every generation, we learn about wrongs perpetrated by the generations that came before us, in hopes of doing better ourselves. In every society, we are told about the wonders we have achieved, in hopes of inspiring more wonders to come.

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All of these connections, by themselves, are nothing but superficial self-assurances that we care.

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Students learn about the Holocaust every year, yes, but do we really connect what we learn back to anything of value? Do we really use the past to evaluate the present? Study of the Holocaust certainly hasn’t stopped genocide or eugenics from occurring in Canada. Neither has it stopped our apathy and lack of awareness towards genocides occurring abroad, of which the Government of China’s actions are only one of several modern examples.

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We learn about the wrongs of past generations, yes, but is that enough? We probably learned about the Japanese Internment Camps, and the Residential Schools, and maybe even some of the other wrongs our country has committed. But do we truly think about how those injustices continue to affect people today?

 

We learn about the bright moments in our history, yes, but whose history do we learn? We whitewash our history and idolize its figures as paragons of virtue, until history’s depiction becomes a modern-day oppression.

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Now, why did I feel the need to turn the perfectly pleasant topic of connect-the-dot games into a rant about history’s misapplications?

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I did it because this matters.

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If you don’t know about Canada’s  history of slavery, you might falsely believe people when they say Canada doesn’t have deep, systemic roots of racism.

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If you don’t know about the centuries of oppression Indigenous peoples have faced and met with acts of resistance and resilience, you might agree when leaders say land defenders need to ‘check their privilege’.

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If you don’t know about longstanding, unimplemented recommendations and calls for action, needed to save lives and earnestly start on the path of reconciliation, you might think powerful people taking a knee is all that change needs to look like.

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If you don’t know, you might not care.

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Now, I could just let this be the melodramatic ending, but I feel like we have enough melodrama in the world at the moment. So, instead, I’ll end my mini-rant on a reasonably optimistic note.

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For better or for worse, everything is connected, from the environment, to socioeconomic inequality, to human rights. Unless somebody reading this has Thanos-like powers (to use in a non-genocidal way), nobody can tackle all of that at once – but we don’t have to. Even if you aren’t an expert on every historic and modern wrong in this world, you can be an expert in something and you can do something. Even if that something doesn’t seem like a lot, it’s connected to more than you can see. And if you learn one thing, advocate for one important change, raise a single dollar for a worthwhile charity, you have made a start.

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Humanity is intrinsically flawed and we’ll never achieve perfection in our lifetime, but we can all make a start. 

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So, I’ll sign off with an optimistic question: How can you make a start?