Protest.

I am so tired of it all.

And outrage.

Enough already.

And cancelling.

Stop with all the cancelling.

Stop cancelling people you disagree with. Or let’s call this for what it is. Undemocratic. The life blood of any successful democracy, the one non- negotiable is free speech, the free and open access to saying what you think, free from censure.

Don’t get me wrong. As with everything, there are rules. There have to be rules. Humans are wonderful in so many ways and so terrifying in others. Where we can build we can destroy, where there is good there is evil. Our capacity for anger and hate, our ability to destroy what is good in the name of what is right knows no limits. So we must have rules.

I’m a progressive socially and politically and I despise so much of the vile rhetoric spewed from the poisoned mouths of our social and political leaders. I despise the anti Semitic bile we are exposed to, I don’t agree with much of what is taught at university. I can go on and on. Hey, I’m a progressive, it’s what we do. In my perfect world I would censure, cancel and punish all of those who spew such hate, the people I disagree with. But that is my perfect world. There is of course someone else’s perfect world which would mute all progressive, left leaning arbiters of right and wrong. People just like me.

There is of course no perfect world. We are left to live among one another, within a set of rules which make it work. We have seen someone’s version of a perfect world before, not so many decades ago, in Europe and more recently in Russia and China. And now, here it is, where we live, in our own country. In the name of freedom of speech we are outraged, we protest and we cancel and we shout down anyone with whom we disagree. Freedom of speech has been weaponized. And it raises a question. What lays ahead?

There are no absolute freedoms in a free society, an ironic statement on its face. But I am Canadian. I live in a country which has enshrined freedom of speech in its Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which has created hate laws, specifically targeting hateful speech. We have jailed citizens who have broken our hate laws, we have deported others. We have imposed limits on free speech. For there are rules. There has to be.

We are free to say whatever we want in Canada but we are not free to espouse hate. I hear the contradiction but it is the only way. We are free to box but we are not free to punch someone in the face without reason. We are free to say what we think but we are not free to harm people with words. We are free to travel across our land but we are not free to drive at whatever speed we want. We are free to fish but we are not free to catch as many fish as we want, in fact we are not even free to catch whatever species we want. You may hunt at specific times of the year but you can only hunt for specific game. We impose limits on it all. There are no absolute freedoms, not in a safe respectful lawful society there aren’t. Try not paying taxes and see what happens, try stealing; we will even put you in jail for many of those things, stripping you of your most basic of freedoms. Them’s the rules, as they say. None of us are free to break them because there are no absolute freedoms. That is how a free society governed by the rule of law, maintains a peaceful, safe and stable society in which all can thrive. Let protest, outrage and cancel roam the land unchecked and watch your country begin to break, cracks appearing first, then tears in our social fabric, then irreparable damage. Want proof of my proposition. Look south.

In a time long, long ago there was something known as ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’. It was a manual of parliamentary procedure and debate written in 1915 by Henry Martyn Robert, a US Army officer and they’ve been adopted by governments, including our own in Canada and school boards, trade unions, strata councils, homeowners associations and city councils around the world. In other words, wherever we gather to quietly and respectfully consider questions of the day we use Robert’s Rules of Order to keep order. To impose order. And that’s on account of we humans have proven time and again, in fact since the beginning of time, that we are incapable of respectful conversation. At least, not without a strict set of rules which can be used to effectively stifle us when we stop being respectful with one another, as we inevitably do. Oh, I know many of you are about to close this blog before you have to read any more of this drivel, but please give me a minute longer to press my case.

We are in trouble. Our country is tearing apart, our communities, our families, lifelong friendships reduced to memories of a time gone by, a time when we may well have disagreed but we knew how to talk it through. It wasn’t easy then and it won’t be easy now but we have to start somewhere. If we are to ever find our way back, we must start talking again. It’s called social intercourse, a playful descriptor for such a serious topic.

There is an art to social intercourse, the art of conversation. You need to be inquisitive, genuinely inquisitive; wanting to understand what the ‘other side’ thinks and why. You need to trust, really trust, that a full even vigorous exchange of ideas is a good thing. But that only works if you really do listen to whoever is speaking, something which is all the more important when you don’t agree with what is being said. Not easy. Your brain may listen but your ego has both fingers in your ears and you’re drowning out the dialogue with some version of ‘la la la la la la la!’. You ain’t about to listen to no fool! And don’t be having no airs about this not applying to you. Those legislators in Peru you laugh at on CNN, breaking out into a fist fight on the floor of their senate. That’s us. Just humans with different accents. And it’s getting worse. Fistfights are breaking out all over our country simply because we disagree with one another. For God’s Sake what are we thinking!? And why don’t we speak up. The stakes could not be higher.

Somehow we now go from disagreeing to protest in nanoseconds. We skip the ‘let’s talk and try and work this out’ part. Protest has become the go-to solution. It’s not a left or right thing, although everyday both sides of the political spectrum give us new examples of how much it has all broken down. And here’s what I really worry about. The worst is yet to come.

Now I really believe that all of our social behaviours change on a trackable trajectory. I was a student in the 70’s at the University of Victoria, a more middle class university campus you could not find in those rebellious times. Jerry Rubin, a 70’s radical activist came to campus and riled up the entire student population so well that we marched on the legislature in downtown Victoria., all five thousand of us. The Vietnam War was still raging, racial tensions in the US had broken into the open throughout the ’60’s, young National Guard soldiers had shot four students dead at Kent State, the ’68 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK; the times felt dangerous and violent, and they were. It was a decade of protest the likes of which I never expected to witness again. Yet here we are.

Political assassinations have given way to police shootings of black men, violent ideological political division has replaced the riots at the DNC in Chicago, 50,000 truckers descended upon Ottawa demanding that vaccine mandates be dropped, hundreds of other truckers blockaded the Alberta-Montana border. Protesters demand that government policy be changed and cause massive civil disruption to press their case. And that’s just today’s headlines, who knows what headlines are coming our way. All we know is that it is getting worse and relentlessly, harm is being caused to our country, to us.

And what will come of it all? Nothing good. Although more protest, is certainly one answer. More strident, more violent, more undemocratic, more idealogical and more unbending protest. It is becoming the go-to tactic. A national deafness and an unwillingness to talk to one another are descending upon our land. If we continue down this path it will cripple our ability to govern ourselves democratically, a proven process, flaws acknowledged, which gives voice to all and authority to the majority. Our social rules which have served us so well for centuries, allowing us to disagree but move forward, are being dismissed as irrelevant. And beware, it matters not whether you are left or right, progressive or conservative, protest knows no loyalty. It just tears at the foundations of what we have built, without regard to your politics or opinion. And the worst is yet to come.

Unless we put the brakes on. This can’t be legislated. We can’t be ordered to be more civil. All we can do individually, one by one, is stop ourselves. It’s a choice we have to make, either way. We make that choice each and every time we get mad, or blast our horn, or huck a middle finger at the driver in front of us or to be outraged at something. It is exhausting and there is a better way to live but we have to choose it. If this fractious, angry, violent Canada is the one you envision for yourself and your children, keep doing what it is you’re doing. But if this is not the Canada you envision, then stand up and be heard for goodness sake. Stand up at home, stand up at school, stand up at school board meetings, at council, at protests, stand up and be heard. Stand up for your country. Stand up for yourself.

Now part of that is to remember the lubricants of social intercourse. You were taught them when you were younger, it’s just that you’ve forgotten them or you’ve decided they’re unimportant anyway. So here they are:

Please.

Thank you.

Excuse me.

I‘m sorry.

What! I can hear you now. Listen, it is naive, I’ll give you that. This is social triage at best, for there is much more at play than a lack of common courtesies. But what do you have to lose. Our peaceful, respectful, law abiding society is under threat. We are going in the wrong direction and it’s not going to get any better unless each of us makes a choice. Whether you agree or disagree with the issue being protested, is missing the point. The next one you won’t. This is self harming. We have built a safe society, governed by the rule of law, capable of introspection, accountability and change. There is little point looking to our leaders for the answer. From whichever political background they arrived in the pursuit of power, once obtained it corrupts them. The leadership we seek is in us. The choice is left to us and that choice begins with how we speak to one another, and that of course begins at home. So give it a try, it’s a start and it’s better than what we’re doing now, being ever so polite and respecting everyone’s right to protest, to be outraged and to cancel. How Canadian is that as we lookup and collectively wonder what that light is coming down the track?

And what the hell, if it doesn’t work for you, even if to make you calm down for a moment, then feel free to send me a comment on my blog and tell me to

‘F*@k O*#’.

What have you got to lose? Either way you’ll feel better.

http://www.tonywithacapitalt.ca