It's All Performance Art 15

lt communicating to hidebound conservatives about the importance of social activism. When any of those people ask you the rhetorical question, "Are you expecting to make a perfect world?", or similar, then that is a red flag, and you had might as well either walk away or at least change the subject, because you are not going to get anywhere fast with that kind of non-thinking, and certainly with the kind of people who really don't know how to think. I had a friend, now an ex-friend, from a country in Latin America, from Lima, Peru, who used to spout that kind of nonsense. To cut him perhaps a little bit of slack, he was trying to help me improve my Spanish, in exchange for support in English. On the other hand, he was a business administration student from a reasonably well-off family with one singular goal in mind: to become a Canadian citizen and leave behind his birth-country forever. When I suggested to him, on a few occasions, that his country might actually need him, and that his leaving would be just accelerating the kind of brain drain for which Canada is hugely responsible, but always denies responsibility, he responded with the usual lame excuses, every single one of them completely self-centred and absolutely self-serving. This of course is largely due to Canada's very ass-backward policy on immigration, welcoming moneyed and well-educated immigrants who will of course help feed and fatten the economy, without caring much about the brain drain in poorer countries that we will be benefiting from as we gladly welcome them from their countries of origin, places that will be needing those people's skills, education and expertise way more than we do, while giving short shrift to refugees and other poorer folk who might not have a lot to contribute, right away anyway, but have been proven to make the most loyal and the most productive of new Canadians. But here I digress, and in one disgracefully run-on sentence, but such is blog-writing, eh? We were talking about making a perfect world, and that of course isn't about to happen, at least not during my lifetime. This world, the human part of it anyway, has never been perfect even if some of us appear to be better off now than we were before, but not without plunging many others into lives of poverty, want and despair. Or perhaps one could just simply ask, what is wrong with us? It isn't that social and political activists, people who really want things to improve, especially for the most vulnerable, expect to create heaven on earth. If there is anyone who already knows that is not going to happen, then it's going to be us. So, this brings us to the problem of Remembrance Day, when almost everyone gets all damp and smarmy about the dead soldiers and how their sacrifices have made it possible for us to live in freedom and peace. Well, that's one narrative, and it is also the very came claptrap that they are feeding to their children. But no one ever talks about the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just the Japanese war atrocities in Nanjing and Hong Kong, nor does anyone mention the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands scorched to death in the allied fire bombings on Tokyo, or Dresden or other cities. We do go on at length about Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and so we should. But why exclude the innocent murdered in other countries, just because they lived in enemy countries, and why not acknowledge that the very soldiers that we are expected to honour and commemorate also committed war crimes, crimes against humanity every bit as cruel and dastardly? Tell me, Gentle Reader, your excuse de jour. I am waiting. This will never be a perfect world, but this does not leave us off the hook for not doing our due diligence to keep it from getting worse. And dropping bombs on others is not going to do it.