June 30, 2021, written by Barry Gray
I want to speak my truth as I seek ways to work towards reconciliation. I need to speak my truth and it will include words that are offensive, but if I do not use them it will detract from the reason I am writing this essay. I hesitated to call this essay TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION because I did not want it to be construed as a co-opting of the work, efforts and goals of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission or its report and calls to action, the latter of which I have read. I use the title because I want to identify my personal truth around my role in contributing to inequities in how societal groups are treated, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Then I want to continue the work of reconciliation that has been a life’s work since I began to break free from the biases, prejudices and stereotypes that were a very large part of my childhood, teen years and young adulthood.
German has lent a word to our language that has become popularized over the decades to describe the spirit of the times, the zeitgeist of any given era. It is sometimes used to apologize for, excuse and even minimize the effects of society’s racism, sexism and homophobia. But there is no real excuse for these acts even if we see them throughout all of human history. They hurt deeply and they are inexcusable.
My era began in 1953 so the 1950s and 1960s were the period in which I grew up. All of my grandparents immigrated to Canada from two different European countries. I grew up in a large family in a small town in the interior of British Columbia, the eighth of nine children. Most of my siblings were born during and shortly after World War Two.
In this look at the zeitgeist of my youngest years I want to comment on the society around me in a personal way, through the lens of my role in high school. I am not bragging but I do believe that I was probably one of the best joke tellers in town. I was the class clown and the school fool. From telling jokes for hours on a street corner after school, to constant, in my mind funny comments in class about lesson material or one-upping teachers who thought they were funny, I lived to make people laugh. It got me in a lot of trouble and kept me safe from the toughest kids in town because they saw I was a harmless joker who was no threat to their status and egos.
In joke telling, no societal group was exempt from ridicule. As long as no representatives of those groups were present, I was safe. Famous individuals, even Her Majesty and His Holiness, were fair game. The more offensive the language, usually the louder the laughs. The more sexual the content, usually the stronger the impact of the punch line.
Nationalities came and went as the fashionable targets of jokes. The Polacks were the brunt one week, the Yookeranians were the next. All Germans were Nazis, all Jews were stingy. The Latino house cleaners were named Spic and Span. Cold weather was like a Japanese trapeze artist: a little Nip in the air. “There are only two types of people I don’t like: bigots and Chinks.” Or Niggers or Wops or Indians or Frogs or Faggots.
I must have learned the jokes from young adults and older kids. They were woven into the fabric of my small BC town society as I suspect they also were in any other part of Canada and the United States. Television was CBC and three American stations out of Spokane. The zeitgeist was alive and well and permeated with cultural stereotypes belittling many groups openly on the trans-continental airwaves. We played Cowboys and Indians. The worst atrocities were the stuff of humour. There was nothing funnier than genitals and excrement.
And then I joined the Air Cadets. The “military light” atmosphere was probably a reflection of what went on (and still goes on) in the Canadian Armed Forces. Our leaders were local Reserve officers whom we looked up to. We marched to rhythmic songs to keep the cadence with lyrics like: “Aboard the good ship Venus, by Christ you should have seen us, the figurehead was a whore in bed and the mast an upright penis.” Or imagine a hundred teenage boys marching on the tarmac at summer camp singing: “In days of old when knights were bold and women weren’t particular. They’d line them up against the wall and fuck them perpendicular.” Or can you imagine those same boys (this of course was back when Cadets were only boys) singing: “The Eskimo women they are the shits, they have no cunts they have no tits, they wack you off with fur-lined mitts, in the North Atlantic Squadron.” I can imagine it because I was at that camp at a Canadian Air Force base sleeping with six-hundred other boys in rows of bunk beds in an airplane hangar, and I thought it was normal. And funny.
So that was my zeitgeist. And then we grow up. The civil rights movement in the States, the Vietnam War, (or as I much later read the Vietnamese called the American War) the American Indian Movement, the FLQ crisis, and many other consciousness jolting, paradigm shifting events start to creep into my comfortable, bias-ridden view of the world. Sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually, I failed to see the humour in many things I had always taken for granted were funny. What I always saw as obviously banal and stupid and somewhat unreal jokes became offensive and racist and homophobic and sexist. Even if I (mostly) stopped telling the worst of the worst, they were still being told into the 70s and the 80s and the 90s and beyond. You hear them in bars and that sort-of innocent teen laughter that I vaguely recall got replaced by an ugly, vile, alcohol tainted guffawing that sounds anything but fun or funny. Did I call out the drunks who were telling my old jokes to educate them about a changing zeitgeist they seemed to have missed? Of course not. I could no longer hide behind the safety of my telling skill and assuage the beast that was smouldering in their breasts. So I was still complicit, if not actively then by association.
Throughout my thirties and forties and fifties and sixties I have tried to shed biases. I use the word ‘shed’ deliberately because it sometimes feels like a snake growing out of its skin until the snake sloughs off that which it no longer needs or can use. Education is a life-long process. We grow. Old biases are no longer needed, some of which we didn’t even know that we had. We often hear that all people realize at some point in life that they are in charge of themselves. They can no longer blame their parents or the church or their schooling for their own shortcomings or for their prejudices and biases. Perhaps I spoke too soon in not blaming schooling for many of the ills plaguing us today. In my formal 1 to 12 education in my little BC town, I never heard of the Japanese internment camps (a somewhat sanitized form of the word concentration camp) or the internment of Doukhobors or the mistreatment of prisoners of war on North American soil or of the Indian Residential Schools that often had very little to do with schooling or of laws banning Chinese immigration or a long list of other human rights abuses perpetrated by the governments and institutions of the day.
We can blame the zeitgeist if we want but we all know that those decisions were made consciously by intelligent people. Some steps have been made to redress the wrongs of the past but governments and institutions are still full of intelligent people making decisions. How will today’s leaders respond to the consciousness rocking and the paradigm shifting that is taking place today as the shocking but not surprising revelations about Indigenous children’s graves come to light? Will the zeitgeist control us or will we control it?
I am writing this the day before the Canada Day holiday. It is my small action. I will spend the next year ruminating about how I will celebrate July 1, 2022. I will spend the rest of today and tomorrow contemplating deeply, mourning the deaths of the hundreds of children we are hearing about, knowing that it is likely well into the thousands. I grew up Catholic and will contact the leaders, as well as the leaders of local, provincial and federal governments, and ask for them to do the right thing. I will support Indigenous efforts to find solace. I will make the best effort I can to see where the spirit of our times is leading us and hopefully find a way to help lead it by my efforts.
We are all being challenged to define what it is to be Canadian. I have grown up a very privileged Canadian, although not with the privilege of affluence, but rather the privilege of being a male member of the dominating race. This is a big part of my truth and my reality. I felt entitled in my youth to make the jokes about the topics I mentioned and have long since also shed the shame of realizing what I had done because it was the water I swam in, the air I breathed.
This has been as true an account of my truth as I can express. Painful truths about the history of Canada will continue to emerge and we will grow and we will shed more skins and hopefully those skins will compost and feed the growth of the nation as a whole, bathed in the light and warmth of reconciliation.
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