The flag was heavy, but not as heavy as the burden of having to participate in the blood flag ceremony as a member of Hitler’s youth corp. It was raining, and instead of water on the cobblestones, my mother saw blood running in the streets – a premonition of things to come. She had to find a way out of this. But she knew it was dangerous to her and her family if she was seen to rebel.
My parents had a swastika on their wedding license. My brother had one on his birth certificate. Many American friends lived under a president who invaded Iraq on false pretenses. As a teenager, I narrowly escaped being drafted to go to Vietnam. And more recently, as a Canadian who believes in personal freedom and justice, I found myself under the rule of a government that legislated tyrannical controls through a bill called C-51. The Canadian privacy commissioner said it “opens the door to collecting, analyzing and potentially keeping forever the personal information of all Canadians.”
So much of what passes as patriotism is just anger and hatred toward others. It is convenient to paint THEM as the cause of our troubles. Often this simplistic view masks the complexity of the underlying tension, the historic injustices perpetrated by the few against the many, the fear that drives good people to do bad things.
In a current example, Ivan Philippov writes a personal account of his struggles as a Russian citizen during the invasion of Ukraine.
Governments almost never speak for all the people they claim to represent. And when they act inappropriately it is usually too late to stop them. As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But in a time of rapidly increasing complexity, exploding polarization and fake news, it is becoming increasingly difficult to responsibly hold governments to account.
To do so doesn’t just require good news reporting but also the ability by the electorate to comprehend the issues underpinning the news. And that is a tall glass of water. Especially since most people are too busy living their lives to explore the backstory and discern what’s fact and what’s spin. So we rely on others to do that for us – to lead our thinking.
That is why trust is so important. And why the erosion of trust, in whatever form, is feeding the fire of our civilization’s collapse. The thing is, that even in an increasingly polarized world, we trust our own tribe. Doctors tend to trust doctors. Truckers tend to trust truckers. Members of a service club, or denomination tend to trust each other, not necessarily because the individuals have earned that trust, but simply because they have made a commitment to belonging to the same tribe.
What if instead of laying blame, we all agreed that we are interconnected, that we are all in this together? What if instead of dividing ourselves in ever smaller and more insular tribes we all agreed that the only tribal boundary that has any real meaning is the upper limit of this planet’s precious atmosphere? How would that change the trajectory of human civilization?
