Much has been said about the ideals of democracy.
Its goals are lofty, its ideals are the stuff of the best of man's aspirations, practices, and beliefs, and its precepts - presumably, and by definition - are supposedly reflective of what its most precious values keep sacred, in the daily infrastructures of a free and just society.
And yet.....not until 1947 did Quebec officially recognize the equality of women, and allow them to vote. Think about that. Slaves were emancipated from the Deep South of the United States and FLED to this country ....and women could not participate, legally, in the official declaration of the idea of freedom, within the very democracy that supposedly rescued other human beings from institutional bondage.
For all of our discussions of language, inclusion, cultural representation, religious, sexual, and minority-driven equalities......the Second World War did not include women who could officially vote in Quebec. Little is said by a smug Nation about the reality of its history - and its treatment - of women.
Herded onto official plots of land deemed not threatening enough to deter "progress", blood percentage quotas were also "officially" imposed upon the main aboriginal inhabitants of the country by its "officials" in order to determine and institutionalize governmental subsistence, intertribal racism, caste mentality, and "dependences" which were encouraged and instituted as "equal", while instantly creating a "removed citizen" system which isolated, "zooed" and reduced its First Nations generationally. They created pogroms of the popular, with punishment-popular systems of accountability and shaming with little or no ways and means for governmental and operational foundation-building training....and then, having reduced recipients to recalcitrant child status, moaned about waste and accountability, when the imposed system began to implode. The well-crafted "problem child Frankenstein" failed to perform like the much-hoped-for sainted dancing bear.
Only recently have some of these systemic norms been acknowledged, recognized, and exposed for the ways in which they have "retarded" normal societal growth and inculcated gross misunderstandings, terrible degradations, and complete ignorance about who, what and why the idea of "status" came to be in the first place.
Recent footage revealed the horrific poverty and alarming suicide rates of people in the Far North. More alarming, amidst supposed increases in connectivity and "available wealth" was, simply, a sense of hopelessness in the young....and the elderly. Removed from a knowledge of their own tradition, the void between the two, and the lack of understanding, had become vast, and disturbing.
Having been used up, wrung out, and exploited, the "discomfort" that is "the difficult Aunt" of representational democracy, having been patted on the hand and quietly shut up in the attic to pay off everyone's bills, would not go away, amidst the hypocrisy, the glamour, the new beauty, and the remembered hours of double overtime shifts worked, like most people, with the idea of it resulting in a life made better by work and effort. Alas....1947, a propensity for enjoying the practice of patronizing hope, and the convenience of "putting them uppity niggers to good use" saw the dignity, honour, and belief in the idea of service, denigrated and debased with a viciousness and focus usually reserved for a truly threatening enemy. Education, hope, and equality, responding in bewilderment, looked around in horror, and recognized how easily enslavement of "one for all the rest who found it convenient" - oblivious to the shadows of the six million gassed to death in a fever pitch of focused and furious group envy - was allowed to continue, unchecked.
The artist, aghast at the distortion of freedom and law, retreated, wounded.......
...and then, defiant at the outrage, demanded reparations; unrepentant, determined.....unrelenting.
