Independence Day, and a summer that will redefine “twenty-twenty hindsight”

Earlier today, I came across a PSA about wearing masks that the Alamo Drafthouse cinema chain had commissioned from Bill Pullman (who children of the nineties remember as the alien-busting, fighter jet piloting POTUS from ID4). It got me to thinking about all the many July fourths I’ve seen now…which is more than forty and yes that seems kind of crazy. It also gave me a good laugh, which I badly needed, because as many have noted we’re living in a time when weeks feel like years, and nothing about summer is “normal.”

For this family of American ex-pats living in Canada, the end of the school year is always a busy and bombastic time. Canada Day and Independence Day come in close succession, often sharing an extended weekend and marking the beginning of a season of big outdoor festivals. We’ve had three such kickoffs to our summers now, and while normally all the barbecuing and fireworks sort of blend together, this year is one of stark contrasts.

Here in Ontario, we’re still primarily interacting with even our (literally) closest friends by text messages and video chat, perhaps getting together every few weeks for a socially distanced picnic in a public park where each household brings their own food and none of the kids interact closely.

We’re contemplating trying the new drive-thru version of the Toronto Zoo, and we’ve bought kid-sized masks from a repurposed local business to go with the gloves they’ll be wearing at our slowly reopening berry-picking farms. Some small households have been able to combine into “social circles” of up to ten people, but most families are still quite isolated from each other.

For this year’s Canada Day, the government cancelled public fireworks displays and put lots of effort into online content encouraging each household to keep their celebrations contained. I decided to cautiously experiment with taking our kids to a popular beach spot, behind a much beloved lakeshore restaurant figuring if it was crowded we could just take home some fish and chips as a consolation prize. This is what it looked like, on the biggest holiday morning of the summer:

(more folks showed up by the afternoon, but respectfully kept their distance)

Meanwhile down in Virginia where I grew up, despite accelerating infections in all southwestern counties, the government decided this week to proceed with the third stage of their planned reopening including summer concerts, movie theatres, sports venues, museums, escape rooms…pretty much you name it, it’s allowed to reopen there now.

Physical distancing is described in the state’s official documentation as a “best practice” but in most situations it’s not a legal requirement. Many families are routinely hanging out with each other in person again, their kids are having play dates, and some households are even taking interstate road trips as far away as Florida, currently a worsening pandemic hotspot.

There’s very little enforcement of distancing where it is required, use of masks isn’t as normalized (and is very highly politicized) and Virginians don’t fret those upcoming birthday parties or weddings anymore because they can now have a social gathering of up to 250 people…no that’s not a typo.

Just across the Potomac river from northern Virginia, the nation’s capital went full speed ahead all day today with holiday celebrations involving thousands of people packed into downtown DC. Even the American media is starting to take notice of these radical differences between close continental neighbours during a global emergency:

The United States has a little less than ten times the population of Canada, but right now they’re seeing more than ten times more positive cases per capita than we are, which makes for a difference of a full order of magnitude (with one country’s wave declining while the other’s is increasing exponentially). It’s just been announced that strict border restrictions between Canada and the USA will be extended further into the summer, and last week the EU announced they are banning American travellers outright.

But lest we get ahead of ourselves, nobody I know in Canada is patting themselves on the back about all this. Instead, we have a national controversy boiling over regarding the long term care of our elderly and how the “tragedy that unfolded in Canada’s nursing homes trained a wider public lens on the demographic and economic challenges facing the country’s patchwork eldercare model” during our pandemic response (and that’s in the words of a business-focused think tank not some liberal blog). Canadians are furious about the death rates among our most vulnerable, and aren’t arguing whether or not to address that problem, but how and how soon.

I don’t want to get too lost in the weeds about all this, because I am neither an epidemiologist nor a politician and I have no idea what their day to day jobs are like, but since our family is so closely connected to health care and hospitals these…discrepancies let’s call them have been front of mind for us perhaps even more so than most families who have some connection to both countries. I’ve felt such a weight on my chest lately that I hope maybe all this link dumping at least informs, if not helps, some other folks who might share my frustration.

On that note, there’s one more thing I feel a need to address before getting back to fun posts about the idiosyncrasies of transplant life in the great white north…and that’s what Canada and the USA (and much of the world it seems) have had in common over the beginning of this tumultuous summer. If there’s one thing that is increasing exponentially in both countries right now, it’s outrage regarding systemic racism, and particularly the dangerous and even deadly consequences of how racism relates to leadership and law enforcement. I won’t attempt to sum up everything that’s happened on both sides of the border since the murder of George Floyd in late May, but there are two specific recent events I relate to personally that I want to compare.

Within the just the past few weeks, the leader of a progressive political party was booted out of a session of the House of Commons here in Ottawa for calling out racism during a debate about policing, and a number of Confederate civil war monuments have been removed, both by protesters and by city officials, from a prominent avenue in my former hometown of Richmond, VA…which also happens to have formerly been the capital of the “Confederate States of America”.

While it is obvious that both these situations have tangential connections to the Black Lives Matter movement and the ongoing struggle for civil rights more broadly, it is our two federal governments’ responses to these moments that have had a profound impact on me, and to which I relate very personally.

First, some context. One of the “perks” of having seen more than forty July fourths, and having spent my youth in the American south, is that there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that system racism exists, or that it permeates every level of society from kindergarten classrooms to the highest positions of leadership. I can’t believe that anyone is still having that “debate” but let’s just chalk it up next to climate change, evolution, and gravity and move on. This is a thing. It’s not something the world is going to solve in a year or a decade or even a generation, but let’s not pretend it doesn’t exist.

When I was growing up in the 1980s, the ghosts of Jim Crow laws were obvious every day I went to elementary school. First off, the school itself was just a mile or so up the road from another school that looked almost exactly the same, built at the same time, but in a different part of the neighbourhood. Can you guess why? I’ll give you a hint, it’s the same reason the original design of The Pentagon had so many bathrooms and water fountains. So yeah, while I attended elementary school with all my neighbours (the other building had been repurposed) those walls, those hallways, those classrooms, had seen a very different and more overt kind of racism than I experienced.

Secondly, and this is something younger friends of mine just do not believe but I swear it was true, for the most part we still sat segregated at lunch until I completed the fourth grade. There was no signage of course, there was no enforcement of this, and all us kids would roll around and play together at recess right after lunch but for the life of me, it’s hard to explain, it’s just something everyone did.

There were two very obvious sides to the way the tables in the cafetorium were laid out during meal period, and you just sort of copied what you saw all the other kids do. That’s the insidious way these patterns perpetuate themselves. Soon after my time there, the school was demolished due to a hazardous asbestos problem, and my younger brother and sister went to a new building that now stands on that site. They never experienced this. On some occasions, we’ve had arguments about whether it actually happened.

I’m not going to describe my entire upbringing in some attempt to preach about America’s complex issues regarding race, but because my own kids are also in elementary school right now, these particular memories have been flooding back in recent weeks. It’s not an issue that’s frustrating because society never makes progress, it’s frustrating precisely because we do make progress, but the resistance to that progress just never seems to diminish. It’s dispiriting, especially when it involves revolving political power.

My kids will never see, just as my siblings never saw, a mean old lady in the office standing next to the mimeograph machine with a magic marker robotically crossing out the “King” in “Lee-Jackson-King Day” on the paper calendars we all took home each month. Not just because that secretary is gone, but because that stupid holiday is gone. Likewise, they never saw a well-worn wooden paddle hanging over the principal’s desk…which was just a stern symbolic warning about discipline to some kids, but a commonly utilized tool of corporal punishment for others. Suffice to say, long before I ever encountered an actual police officer as an errant tween, before I even had the vocabulary to describe it, I knew that “equal under the law” had different meanings for different people when it came to the structures of power in my life.

I bring all this up because just earlier today a friend of mine here was sharing a story about how her grade-schooler recently brought up some of Canada’s own shameful history regarding racism and education at the dinner table. One of my own munchkins is a former classmate of his, and like all kids here she’s done whole units on this in public school, every year since kindergarten, and has come home full of conversation and questions about it. Just this morning, over breakfast, she asked me about the difference between the two national holidays she saw on our family wall calendar, and we ended up having a spirited conversation for several hours, through eating and playtime, about colonization, slavery, independence, confederation, and both countries’ ongoing issues with systemic racism.

I promise this all has a point, and now I’ll get to it, and that’s if you really want any of this kind of stuff to change, you have to understand why some people are so exasperated and mad about it, and I strongly believe you have to be willing to cause a little exasperation yourself.

I’ve been trying to write about this since late May when everything exploded, and I’ve been so busy home schooling and just trying to juggle pandemic living that I haven’t been able to organize my thoughts, but now I know what I want to say and it’s specific. If you want change you need to make some noise, and if you’re not making some noise about this right now, to someone, in some way, then frankly you’re being complicit.

It’s all well and good to go yell in a parade or forward some memes if you want to and if it feels cathartic, but actually that’s not what I’m talking about. This isn’t about a wokeness contest on [explicative] Facebook. You need to make some noise where it matters, and, pardon the awkward but deliberate pun, where you have some skin in the game. Home. Work. Church. Places and spaces where it could cost you something (maybe even an estranged relationship, friend, or relative).

For one thing we, and by that I mean everyone, need to have difficult conversations with our kids about this. Don’t sugarcoat anything, and whenever you find yourself doing so, realize the privilege that you must have to be able to choose to do that…and then choose not to. If we can tell our children about how a virus kills grandparents by destroying their lung function, so they’ll understand what the masks and hand washing are for, then we can sure as hell describe to our kids who George Floyd was and how he died.

One of my daughters is enthralled with Lady Gaga, and one day a couple years back she asked me what the song “Angel Down” was about. It took me at least an hour to explain who Trayvon Martin was and I was choking back some sobs the whole time while I watched her eyes widen and her brow furrow, but I did it and then I answered every one of her followup questions as completely as I possibly could. It’s not “for when you’re older” if it’s a conversation that someone else’s parent has to have with their own kid before even letting them play outside.

I feel like this applies to every aspect of our lives. We’ve all had that teacher, that customer, that boss, and gawd knows that relative at the Thanksgiving table. I’m not-too-cool-to-admit that I’ve been complicit before. Haven’t we all? I’ve bit my tongue and swallowed my anger. I’ve been polite and gone along to get along. Well screw that, let’s all just stop.

You don’t have to yell, but maybe you do need to say something. You don’t have to get your fists out, but maybe you need to raise one up. You don’t have to burn a building down, but maybe you do need to “light a fire” under the right conversation. Don’t give out free passes anymore, not for someone being in a position of power, not for someone being old and “stuck in their ways,” not for someone wearing a uniform, and definitely not for someone wearing a badge. You might lose a friendship, lose a promotion, or lose a job…but isn’t that a pretty good bargain when you consider what’s at stake for the next person in a choke hold who can’t breathe?

I have to emphasize this one more time, if you have the choice to do these kinds of things, if it’s something you can even consider, then you have some privilege in your life. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, but ask yourself…what does it mean if you realize that, if you’re aware of it, and you’re not wiling to use that privilege to help someone else? I’m so tempted to quote from Spider-Man here, but you know what I mean.

This is where I finally get to Justin Trudeau and Donald Trump, and whatever you think of either of them please just consider this…I’ll keep it to one sentence.

Promptly after the incidents in each of the videos above, each nation’s leader came out used their amplified voice to make a clear statement—Justin Trudeau said plainly that systemic discrimination exists not just in the RCMP but in all Canadian institutions, and Donald Trump established a Homeland Security task force to protect controversial monuments. Each response riled up a hell of a lot of conversation that is ongoing, and laid their administrations’ proverbial cards on the table.

Those choices spoke to me, and what speaks even louder is that nobody in either country was even particularly surprised by this. That’s where we’re collectively at right now. It’s late, and I wanna post this while it’s still at least technically Independence Day. I’ll quit this rant, and I promise my next post will be about something more upbeat, maybe an immigration update? I’ve just felt lately like if I didn’t address this in some way, I might as well take my site down.

Wherever you are, I hope you are safe, I hope you aren’t regretting bothering to read all this, and I hope tomorrow you think twice and don’t hold your tongue. To put it in American-Canadian terms during these days of national pride…by all means spend your summer in “pursuit of happiness,” but please don’t ever prioritize that above “peace, order, and good government.”