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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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UPDATE:

  • Lots of ideas worth considering here. In the end, I just didn't wear the shirt. It turned it to be hugely overthought on my part because

a) 4 other people had no orange shirt, and 5 more had shirts of strategically (cowardly!) ambiguous orangeneity.

b) A kid GRIEVOUSLY injured himself in the shop class, which made everyone forget about Orange Shirt Day entirely. Apparently he's fine.

As an aside, I have come to doubt the sincerity of the people who are the public face of this stuff in schools. Twice now I have seen people go all in on this stuff, then 2 years later apply to become principals, fail to become principals, and then set it all aside. I believe I am seeing a third case now. For a day of grim solemnity, the video they used to Educate students was some instragram girl's "Top 5 questions about truth and reconciliation" [it's really called that here] but it was an actually an ad for her online feather-and-bead store. The bathos boggles the mind.

I need advice on what amounts to conduct in the Canadian culture war.

  1. For a little over a hundred years, indigenous (native/Indian/aboriginal) children in Canada attended boarding schools designed to drag them into the modern age. For about 40 of those years (a bit longer, depending on the area), attendance was compulsory, and at all times physical and sexual abuse were at least common, though not universal. A little less than half of all indigenous children who lived during that period attended these schools. 4100 deaths are known to have occurred at these schools, most of them from tuberculosis. While the death rate of the schools was not way higher than the death rate generally, it was higher and most of the children who died in the schools would not have died if they had not attended the schools.

  2. Indigenous people in Canada today are not well integrated into society. Many live on reserves (reservations, if you're American) and these reserves are isolated, sometimes accessible only by air. Almost no economic activity occurs on these reserves, so unemployment is widespread. The reserves are plagued by extreme substance abuse problems, sexual violence, parental neglect, lack of education/credentials and the shame that results from knowing that these problems are much less severe everywhere else. Even people who move away from the reserves are affected by these problems, or from having grown up surrounded by them.

  3. For the past 20 years or so, but especially following the George Floyd affair, there has been a major push by the people who set the cultural tone in Canada to establish that (2) is a direct result of (1), just as in the US there is a great yearning to prove that the problems faced by black Americans are the direct result of slavery. In Canada, this has led to strident narrative-crafting. It is commonly (but mistakenly) accepted that residential schools were a big secret, that children were murdered routinely in them, that attendance was always compulsory and, most recently, that there are hundreds of tiny graves hidden all around Canada concealing the remains of the victims of what all bien-pensants agree was a cultural genocide (Side note: While the culture is definitely damaged, there is much evidence to suggest that it was damaged before the imposition of the residential school policy, but this is a matter of historical debate, and no such debate is currently permitted in Canadian society). These graves are in some cases the confirmed rediscovery of previously marked graves in community cemeteries, but the most cited example is of 215 ground-penetrating radar hits near a former residential school in Kamloops, BC. 2 minutes on Google will explain that GPR cannot find human remains, it can only find disturbances, and that those disturbances must be investigated by excavation. No excavation is happening in Canada because it would be disrespectful to the spirits of the children.

  4. One former residential school student once received a special orange shirt for her first day of school, but this shirt was confiscated by the nuns when she arrived at the school and was made to wear a uniform. Therefore, orange shirts have become/been made a symbol of public regret (in a bizarre inversion of the American culture war they bear the slogan "every child matters"). Regret over what? Formerly, it was regret over the abduction of children by the state, though this was always the policy, but more and more they have become a symbol of regret that the Canadian government literally murdered children and hid their bodies and used residential schools as a way of making this possible.

  5. Ironically, schools are the main institutions pushing the new narrative, in many cases explicitly as a means of correcting the backward thoughts of the students, since they cannot correct the backward thoughts of their parents. This was precisely the rationale for residential schools.

  6. Advice time: I am a teacher. Tomorrow is my school's Orange Shirt Day. I have lived in the fly-in communities I described above. I have seen the mind-boggling material and moral squalor of reserves. I have lived in it. I do not see how anyone wearing an orange shirt will bring about one iota of improvement in the lives of the people I knew Thus, if I were to wear an orange shirt, it would only be to avoid the consequences of being literally the only member of a 60-person staff without one, but these consequences would be entirely social. Canadian teachers are virtually impossible to either reward or punish. I would be something like Havel's Schoolteacher, only worse, because of the much smaller threat.

-I could wear the shirt but inwardly resist acquiescence to the narrative. This is what Havel argues quite convincingly against.

-I could wear the shirt so my friends on the staff are not marred by their association with me, although the consequences would be entirely social.

-I could wear the shirt because, having argued against pretty much every hyper-compassionate wine-mom idea my fellow teachers have, I am now regarded as a mere contrarian, so if I don't have a shirt they'll just roll their eyes and whatever statement I think I'm making will fail.

However, if I were to wear an orange shirt, in addition to just feeling like I took an L, it would also greatly undermine every argument I have made to my students regarding the value and possibility of resisting conformism. I am not so naive as to think that any of this will be remembered a year after they graduate, but day-to-day we all have to look each other in the eye.

Not wearing the shirt incurs only social consequences, but I have been incurring them for years now, and it's getting tiring.

I don't want to wear the shirt, but I also don't want to make a scene, but I also want to be credible to the people I ask to believe me.

Someone talk me into the right course of action here.

The main problem I have with it is the motto for it: "Every Child Maters". That's the attitude that created this mess in the first place! The motto should be something like "Mind your own damn business". But I mean...how do you express that?

Not that I'm not sympathetic to the plight of far-rural communities, right? I think there's a real problem there. But I don't think there's any sort of good solution for it, unfortunately. The best I can do is suggest help for people who want to exit those circumstances...but this is seen as essentially genocide.

(The reason I say far-rural is my understanding that near-rural reservations are doing much better in these regards)

That's a great idea, a blm slogan for the grillpilled. How about "Your life matters" - with the motte being the concept of focusing on fixing personal issues and the bailey being that it is about positivity and opposing the feeling of futility which many people grapple with every day.