Hope on Canada Day

     It's become a habit of mine to write a sort of state of the union composition on our country's birthday. I
may not always post them on this blog, but July 1 has become a day for me to assess and look outward across our country and culture.
     That sounds grand, but it's not intended to be. Really, this is just a blog about wanting to be hopeful.
     Last year I was still haunted by visions of rushing water, of streets turned to brown sludge riverways, of military trucks screaming down the QE2, embarking on the most un-winnable of battles, of that now infamous shot of a mud-splattered red Canada hat. Last year in Southern Alberta, Canada Day was about clean up. That evening, as we always do--and will again tonight--my band took the stage before the local fireworks. I introduced a Big Sugar tune and thought the words "All Hell for a Basement" had a bit different meaning that day in this song Gordie Johnson wrote about Alberta.
     Today, I'm thinking about hope. And its loss, or at least its weakening in Canada today.
     For some reason, after a drink or two the other night I got thumbing through YouTube music videos from my youth. Deeply down the rabbit hole, I let fly the Scorpions' "Wind of Change," that hair-rock power ballad from the tail end of the hair-rock era, that whistle-solo piece of schlock that was one of the go-to closers of high school dances (along with Extreme's "More Than Words," of course).
     I was moved with the cheeseiness of the song, its over-dramatic nature juxtaposed against eighties rockers in their greasy finery, with far away eyes and slowly swaying hips. But it'd been twenty years at least since I'd seen the video, and I'd forgotten the images of the fall of the Wall, of the toppling of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. For those of us alive then, there was this overwhelming sense that we were going somewhere right, that the world may actually be getting some peace. Growing up as a kid in the tail-end of the Cold War, some of its most volatile years thanks to the idiocy of the Western Powers and their Cowboy Actors and Bassy Irishmen and Iron Ladies, I and most kids my age had lived in an unannounced fear most of our childhood. Nuclear war seemed an unreal specter, but it was a specter that was there. It could happen, we believed that we believed.
     Then, at the turn of the 90s there was a feeling that we'd finally lifted the weight that started back in 1914, that a century of war and strife and human depravity had finally been shaken off. That finally, we were moving towards peace.
     You'll forgive my optimism. I was twelve when the Wall fell in Berlin, and my own innocence parallels nicely with the dawning of what the nostalgist in me wants to see as the best ten years because they were a pretty good ten years for me. I would be ignorant to ignore the strife in Bosnia, Kosovo, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Rwandan genocide, Oka, Oklahoma City. I have not forgotten.
     And yet, there was still hope. This summer, as I watch the sun rise over this Dinosaur Valley I call home every July, I'm thinking about what's on our minds as a nation and as a world. There are flood clean-ups in Southern Alberta again; granted, on a much smaller scale, but tell that to anyone who has lost their house. My home province of Saskatchewan has a dozen communities under severe flood threat. Ontario's been suffering tornadoes.
     This summer marks one hundred years since the great celebrations and mass enlistments as Canadians prepared to proudly and patriotically--as Britons--embark on the greatest stupidity the world had yet seen in the trenches of France and Belgium. One hundred years. One hundred years of those battles over the next few years, of Ypres, the Somme, of course Vimy, of a nation we were told was forged in those trenches--war doesn't make nations, not ever--and then of victory. Of the folly, the idiocy of 1919, and how it acted as a guarantor of the coming strife that has not shown a single year of pause since the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.
     The news has been thick with fear of Putin's Russia, and twenty years of convincing ourselves that so much has changed from the fall of the Soviet Union has proved mostly a lie. Our own boob prime minister postures and puffs against the Russian bear, while raising his fists out our cultural and legal institutions, and pushing for pipelines across Treaty Land. 2014 is the year that Harper finally and truly rang the death knell of the CBC, a Canadian institution I value like no other for its public interests, and for its import as OURS. When the dust settles, when the damage of this past decade of Conservative depravity has been assessed, that is one victim I hope we morn the loudest, for it was one of the most significant things that made us what we are.
     The past fifteen years have been hard. We've grown cynical. We see a world full of the next awful thing and the hope we felt at the end of the last century--even as ignorant a hope t it was--has long washed away. We find it easier to stomp quickly and heavily on the thoughts and opinions of others, as the speed we can respond to each other and the digital safety--a brand new Wall--allow us to sometimes be truly awful to each other.
     I'm never one to be given over to "the world is getting worse" thinking--tell that to anyone in a trench nintey-nine years ago--but I do wonder where are hope has gone.
     I'm not sure what Canada Day stands for, really. After the pancakes and fireworks and flags, what are we celebrating? Our history? Our culture? How we are feeling right now? Above I've listed how all of those can be dubious sources of pride.
     But--and this is the father in me talking--I think it's an important day for hope. In a province and a country and a world where sober cynicism is often touted as a mature reality, I think there's more than a little room for some hair straight back hope. From hope, we can stand and look at the awful in the world and work better against it, because we can see another side where the problems are solved. I would much rather count myself there, than amongst those who shrug their shoulders and tell the rest of us that that's how it is and we're immature not to accept it.
    Happy and hopeful Canada Day.

What Do You Celebrate on Canada Day After the Flood?

I stole this from a Dave Rutherford tweet, but am pretty sure it's going viral, so that should be okay. 

On 11 September 2001, we were told by those who could remember days of similar impact—Hiroshima, Kennedy’s assassination—that there are days we remember every detail of. Forever after, we tell people where we were when, what we were doing when, how we heard that. We define our life by before that day and after it.

                Forever our days are the pre and the post.

                For many in Canmore and High River, those days will be the days before and the days after Thursday, 20 June 2013. A day later for the people of Calgary and Siksika Nation. Over the course of the weekend, breath was held and then released in Red Deer, Drumheller, Medicine Hat. After the devastation upriver, their fear was understandable.

                June 20 and 21, and the days which followed. The longest days of the year twice over in 2013.

                This is my tenth year in my adopted province. Twice in that ten years Southern Alberta has been ravaged by floods, though 2005 is only a memory now. The Flood of the Century forgotten in less than a decade. I have come to love Alberta, and am proud and delighted to live where I do.

                On this day where we celebrate the nation we live in, if you’re like me you’re feeling, perhaps, a little guilty to be celebrating anything while others toil in in homes that, unlike your own, are not dry or safe or perhaps even standing. How can we celebrate anything, especially something as vague as our national identity when people are shovelling sewage out of their basements rather than looking aloft at fireworks?

                I won’t remind you of the savagery of Mother Nature. I won’t add my voice to the chorus of “This too shall pass.” Instead I will encourage you to celebrate things that are very worthy of it, as an Albertan, as a Canadian, as a human being. I will remind you of the good.

                Of the grinning firefighter carrying the little old lady through knee-deep water.

                Of the volunteers who keep coming, long past the expectation, to work in their neighbors’ devastated homes.

                Of Edmonton military, police, firefighters, rushing down the QE2 to come to the aid of their beleaguered sister city.

                Of the people who opened their homes to complete strangers needing a place to stay.

                Of students and teachers from Strathmore who, a day away from summer break, went to Siksika to help the stricken.

                Of the people who donated clothing, food, or time to those who lost a little or lost it all.

                Of the people who said, over and over, “At least we’re alive. Stuff can be replaced.”

                On this Canada Day I’m proud of us. As we march further into the days that came after, we need to remember this unity, this good. The clean-up and rebuilding will be long and difficult, and possibly more demanding than the initial shock of tragedy.

                We have two lives now, the one before and the one after. What we need to remember is the unity we saw at the point where our days became divided. Where we stood as one and we held a mud-streaked hand out to a brother or a sister.

                I love you today, Southern Alberta, for I have seen us all stand as one.