Taking back our minds

Words do matter and it was proven on a Sunday evening in January when a radicalized individual gunned down innocent Muslims during prayer time in Quebec City’s Grand Mosque.
The alleged shooter was a Canadian born, white guy.  His computer showed that he was a follower of racist rhetoric from President Donald Trump and France’s radical right leader, Marine LePen.
Quebec had a different history from the rest of Canada. After more than a century of Catholic Church influence on Quebec’s governance, society rebelled and moved abruptly to an anti-anything religious, post-modern society.
Postmodern is defined as no universal truth, everything is relative; my truth can rightfully be different from your truth.
The culmination of secularism and Quebec nationalism led eventually to the proposed Quebec Charter of Values. This Charter promoted elements of religious intolerance, including banning the wearing of any religious symbols such as crosses and hijabs.
It would be naïve to deny that Bissonnette, the Quebec shooter, was not influenced and motivated to leave 17 children fatherless and six widows if not for submerging himself in words of hatred.
Stephen Harper and the Conservative Government bear some responsibility for hatred towards Muslims. The furor they made to stop one Muslim lady from wearing her veil when taking the oath of citizenship was, I believe, intentional to promote fear. Of course, that woman had unveiled her face to a female judge prior to the formal event and it wasn’t “just anyone” under that veil.
Then we have current contenders for the leadership of the Federal Conservative Party, Chris Alexander and Kelly Leitch, who fronted the snitch line for ‘Barbaric Cultural Practices’ during the last federal election.
Canada is far from perfect. Hatred and racism exists here as well. But as evidenced by the recent shooting in Quebec City, Canadians generally are much better at caring for others even if their ideologies, religion and race are different.
However, Canadians need to spend a lot less time listening to and processing the hatred coming across the border from our toxic southern neighbour. You become what you hear and hatred is a much more powerful emotion than reason.
In this postmodern world we must be mindful of those who seek to take over our minds. Trump has claimed and will forever claim that three million people voted illegally in the last election, that he won the popular vote, that free trade took away manufacturing jobs (automation took more), that his crowd for the inauguration was the biggest ever, and that terrorists come in through the U.S. refugee program, all which would be absolutely false pre-postmodern relativism.
But amongst his followers, this is their truth and anyone who disagrees is a liar.
It matters not if it’s the radical left (Lenin after the overthrow of the Russian Tsar) or the radical right (Adolf Hitler) or today’s Alt-Right movement led by Donald Trump, or radical Islam–extremes are absolutely frightening.
History has proven that the assumption of power by populist radicals has always ended up serving the ruling elite and crushing the lower classes that originally brought them to power.
George Orwell in his novel, ‘1984’ writes about living and surviving in a postmodern world where truth is whatever the guy at the top says it is.
If you’ve never read this book, now would be an excellent time. It’s long overdue for people to take back their minds.
We are in a very dangerous zone when we spend much of our conversation adopting and promoting rhetoric from talking heads or trash radio as our beliefs. Without doing our own independent reading and investigation, we become surrogates of propaganda and hatred.
Mark my word, the billionaires in the White House will be the true winners in Donald Trump’s revolution, not those who worked themselves into a frenzy at Trump’s rallies!