My Dilemma

What is divided must unite; what is united, must divide

Chinese proverb
(I think)

My homeland is slouching towards fascism, and there's nothing I can do about it except write these words on a blog nobody reads.

Oh sure, you can quibble that I'm a Canadian if you want, and everyone knows it's really America that's getting buggered by history. But while Canada might be America's kinder, gentler and slightly dull kid brother, the sad fact is that we also follow the American lead in more or less all things. Legislation that gets tried out in the states is introduced in Canada within a decade. The sad fact is that the only reason Canada's been a free country throughout the 20th century, is that America has too. If America loses it's freedom, Canada will too. You can take that to the bank.

I'm not going to belabor the North American descent into tyranny. Naomi Wolfe does it much better here, in Fascist America in 10 Easy Steps, and Carolyn Baker does an excellent job as well in her article Speaking Truth to Power. Go there, read those articles, and if they - and the events of the last several years, which sadly I'm only just now really waking up to - don't scare your bowels empty you're not paying attention. Or you're working for the fascists, and the various incidents they detail make you all warm and tight down in your unmentionable areas (if you are, and you're reading this post, I'll just say this to you: you and the cockroaches you work with might just succeed in hollowing out the greatest nation on the planet. Good for you! But you know, eventually, we'll hang you from a lamp-post.)

I'm seriously conflicted. You see, right now I live in Japan, making my humble living teaching the fine people here how to speak my language. It's undemanding and reasonably well-compensated, one of the better compensations being that I get to live in Tokyo. But it's been a few years, and I'm getting the itch to return home, to rejoin my kith and kin, and start something approaching a real career.

But is that so wise? North America's on the brink of a precipice, and the only thing keeping the entire continent from a rapid fall into tyranny is just one more big terrorist attack ... and if 9/11 really was a false flag operation (I'm not %100 certain on that, but the doubt is there, and the doubt is enough), that terrorist attack could come at whatever time is convenient to the state. Like, say, shortly before a presidential election.

Going back right before that would be a really bad move. I'm a very loud person, with a tendency to sound off if someone's annoying me. At the very least, any career I started would be very short-lived; at the worst, I might be 'detained', or simply executed.

At the same time, this is my homeland these execrable fucks are ruining. Not fighting the bastards smacks of cowardice, but fighting them is basically suicide.

So that's the question I'm looking at. Stay in Japan - or at any rate Asia - and continue plying a trade I fell into more or less accidentally. Or return home, very likely jumping down the rabbit hole with the rest of my country, deep into Orwell's darkest nightmares, and hope to God it all blows over quickly.

Although I know it won't. If America loses itself, it'll be a century before it's people wake up and remember who they used to be. If I go back, I'm not just fucking myself ... I'm risking any kids I might have, too.

History's a bitch, isn't it?

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Preserving Secular Dominance

My buddy Jay posts his answer to an ethics test he just took: Multiculturalism vs the Will of the Community. The basic issue is a North African muslim immigrant family living in a small, otherwise homogeneous town. Their kid is constantly getting picked on in school: she stands out as different due to her religious dress (a modified school uniform every other student has to wear), and because of her religious practices, like running off to pray five times every day. Of course she's basically a good kid: the teacher gets along with her, as does the class' star pupil.

My take (admittedly after far less thought and time than Jay put into his) is that the kid should be put into the school uniform, at the very least. Uniforms are very symbolic things. If everyone has to wear one, but if one person is exempted due to religious reasons, that person - especially if they're already behaving oddly - stands out even more. Non-standard dress likely serves to intensify the scrutiny, criticism, and bullying.

Religion is a bullshit excuse here. "Hey, my religion - which was revealed to me last night after a heart-to-heart with God - says I have to wear a ten inch dildo around my neck to ward off evil spirits, and if you don't let me I'm taking you to a human rights tribunal!"

People using religion as a reason for flaunting rules everyone else has to keep has irked me for a long time, whether it's Sikhs who join the mounties or the army, and insist they be allowed to wear a turban with the uniform (the army's solution was to have military issue turbans on the official kit list, but never actually have it in inventory), or muslims forcing their daughters into hijabs while their sons are allowed to wear anything they please. We live, after all, in a secular society, one in which people are allowed absolute freedom of religion in exchange for the subordination of divine law to law made by committee. It's less exciting, but millennia of history seem to show it to be better than theocracy.

Allowing in immigrants is fine, indeed it's necessary and desirable. Allowing them to flout written and established law due to their religions is not, because that principle followed a little further out has ugly consequences. All memes are not created equal, after all: some are nice (new recipes are always good); some are useful or at least harmless (say, acupuncture or vegetarianism); and a few are barbarous relics with no place in a modern society. Multiculturalism should mean allowing the best in from all over the world, while rejecting the worst. Muslims themselves are attempting - in a shambolic sort of way - to harness the benefits of globalization (capital flows and technology) while screening out what they see as dangerous foreign influences (particularly lascivious Western fashions and lifestyles.) There's no reason Western countries shouldn't react the same way: we want your food, but you can leave the burqas and the honor killings back in the dark ages where they came from.

(I'll make an exception for this. Gotta be a google-bomb on 'burqa'.)

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