And then there was Dave.
It’s not his real name, but it’ll have to do for the purposes of telling my story, a story that needs to be shared. I also don’t want to use his real name because I don’t want to embarrass him, and more to the point, his family. Because, Dave is no different than a lot of other Dave’s out there, so why single him out, right?
You see, Dave is a racist. Not even a little bit of one, but rather a racist with a paid-up-in-full membership to AOA, or Assholes of America, a subsidiary of ROA, or Racists of America, a family-oriented group complete with chat lines where you can spend time dumping on those goddamned immigrants you saw at Walmart earlier in the day, when you stopped in after church, the place you pretended to be a Christian for reasons unknown.
Dude, if there’s a God, he already knows you’re a racist, so you might just as well carve an extra hour for yourself on Sunday mornings rather than go to all the work of showing up and be a hypocrite. But then again, you don’t go to church for God, do you? For you, it’s mostly about the appearances you put in so that other folks think you’re a great guy. And after all, it’s not like you’re the only racist sitting in church on a Sunday morning, right? For heaven’s sake, the place is full of them. Go ahead. Tell me it’s not.
It’s like we’re going to need Jesus to come down and throw one of those money-lender freak-outs to reclaim his Father’s house from the imposters who take up space within it. No doubt I’ll get all caught up in the mayhem, but hey, I went to Confession just a little over a week ago, so how much sin could I have possibly accumulated?
However much sin I’m burdened with, I’m not a racist.
I ran into Dave at Walmart, and yes after church. Dave’s not a bad guy, so I shouldn’t dump entirely upon him, as it’s just his racism I’m calling out. Fix that up and Dave becomes a good guy again. The guy who remained friendly to me as I went through some troubles. A guy who would always stop and talk mostly hockey, but sometimes politics as well.
“How do you feel about a fourth term of the Radical Left?” he asked.
Umm, okay, wasn’t expecting Dave to hit me with something that fell off the Conservative Party war truck. Like, this is Red Hat stuff.
“The what?” I came back with, because I’m awesome at snappy comebacks, it’s my thing.
“The Radical Liberal Left,” he explained, and I had to kind of stop for a minute and absorb those three words, to get the proper feel for them. This was getting into Hillary Clinton and Antifa running a child-sex operation out of the basement of some pizza parlour territory.
Dave has been lunching with the crazies, and it sounds like he’s biting down hard.
It wasn’t long before Dave took aim at the French in Quebec, and how they should just sit in their corner and shut up like good French people should. After all, he explained, they had lost the Battle of the Plains of Abraham fair and square, and that should have been the end of them. “Canada is English now,” said the fellow with the Polish last name.
Then along came the immigrants, people who, as Dave said without the blink of an eye, “all look the same.”
Maybe Dave’s cheesed at the Liberals for the housing crisis, the housing shortage that developed during their watch. And he’s right to be cheesed at them, since they cranked up immigration without first ascertaining if we had the housing capacity to absorb the influx.
Sparks Notes response: we don’t.
But to throw that squarely at the feet of immigrants who came here in good faith after being recruited by the government, just like his ancestors were recruited by a previous Liberal government? To make it entirely their fault, when many of them are struggling with the situation just like white folks are? Seems a tad unfair to me, a guy just looking to pop-in to buy some hair gel, and not necessarily step into a great big puddle of whatever it was that Davey was dishing out.
“They should all go home, we don’t want them here.”
I feel Dave is speaking for himself here, and perhaps for that group of buddies who all feel the same way and are made bold by the fact that everyone in their echo-chamber is saying exactly the same thing. And I guess I was supposed to agree. Or maybe say something to validate Dave’s opinion.
But I disappointed, as I often seem to do, cleaving as I do to the better angels as much as I can.
I asked him what his last name was, even though I already knew, but it was my introduction to making a point, right there in Walmart’s pharmacy. I said “It’s **************, right?”
I then pointed out that his name was a Polish name, and that he was from an immigrant family himself.
“Ya, but my people came here over a hundred years ago,” certain that he had scored the death blow of a winning point.
“Well, geez Dave,” I responded. “The French have been here for over four-hundred years, and the Natives for over 30,000 years.”
Dave doesn’t like it when you come out of nowhere and wreck his narrative, because it’s not unusual for people to dislike it when other people point out their inconsistencies. All Dave’s buddies in the garages and coffee shops that dot the local landscape feel the same way. It’s one of the reasons why people don’t like me, I guess, because I think I was supposed to agree with him. Instead I got all uppity, the way all educated people get, at least that’s how Dave’s crowd would view it. I guess that makes me a woke radical lefty bastard, and honestly, if that’s what I am, then let’s get those business cards printed up.
“That’s different,” he said, without offering to educate me about how it was different. He knew he had stepped into his own hole, and I guess was a little embarrassed by that. I find when you cause someone to be embarrassed by something, they often double-down on their original sin, just because they figure that being an even bigger asshole is somehow a way of saving face. It’s sort of like yelling at a person who doesn’t speak your language thinking they’ll somehow understand better if you raise the volume.
I asked him about how his attitude around all this meshed with the teachings of his church. How it fit in with his faith, something he attempts to publicize by taking his place in church, surrounded by dozens of others sharing the same familial ties, last name, and Polish heritage.
He didn’t have much of an answer for me on that one, but did state that Jesus calls us to love others as we would be loved ourselves, which is kind of a weird thing to hear from a guy jamming up the immigrant population, those folks out there taking over the country, taking all our jobs, and converting us to their faith. You can’t miss them, right? I mean, they all look the same, right?
At the very least, Dave understands his faith. He just chooses to ignore it.
And Holy Mary, Mother of God, he’s not the only one.
To be fair, Dave is a good guy who’s simply lost his mind. It’s because he surrounds himself with like-minded thinkers, which is not hard to do. Go to any Tim Hortons on a weekday afternoon and just sit there and listen.
It’s an environment of conspiracy theories, racist commentary, rabbit holes, and government plots to screw us out of, well, actually just to screw us. And if you hear it often enough, if this is your peer group talking, then you better get yourself into shape if you want to sit and talk with these boys. And I shouldn’t get all shitty about the boys, because the women, the “radicalized” women, are even worse. And there’s plenty of them.
Think small, be small.
They become emboldened in their opinions, and speak freely, and offensively, just like bullies at a school where the adults don’t do anything or are clueless about what’s going on right under their noses, a situation that I’m entirely unhappy to reveal happens just about all the time.
These people will stop and talk to you one the street, a retired couple walking their dog, an absolute slice of Canadiana, and then wreck the whole painting by falling off the deep end, sure that you feel the same way. It’s almost like they crave the validation of others by bringing this stuff up, and they’ll look you right in the eye and say stuff that really shouldn’t be said, as if it were entirely normal.
And it is entirely normal, because people like this, and groups like this, have made it the new normal, as if that makes everything okay. But it doesn’t.
But still, there’s something lingering in the back of their mind. Maybe their faith, maybe their suppressed good sense, something telling them that they may well be on the wrong side of the whole thing. And so they engage you with their thoughts, and perhaps are hopeful that you’ll agree.
Because misery loves company, right? When you’re being a shit, maybe it helps to know that everyone else is a shit too. The psychology of group dynamics on full display.
I don’t know how Dave felt after I left. It’s not like he’s stupid. He must have realized that he had just experienced a failed encounter in the deodorant section of his local pharmacy, a pharmacy operated by a Black man. Unless that makes him uncomfortable too, which means I’ll be seeing a lot more of him at Aikenhead’s, the one local pharmacy not operated by immigrants.
When he goes to the hospital, or any clinic, or requires surgery for himself or his family, does he refuse service if the person helping him is a person of colour?
I doubt it.
You see, Dave is a good guy who just got his thinking hijacked by his anger towards a whole bunch of stuff that he wishes to find a scapegoat for, or a bogyman to point at. He’s no different from all the other good people who have stained themselves in this way.
But stains can come out if you treat them properly. It’s when you fail to do so, our when you don’t care, that stains can become entrenched.
I’ve lost friends over overt racism because I simply won’t tolerate it. I’ve just cut them off. But for some reason, Dave is different.
First, he’s not a friend, but rather an acquaintance, so there’s that. But secondly, turning one’s back on people like this does nothing to solve the problem. And to be honest, I don’t know what would solve the problem.
So I pray for him. It’s all I can think of. I pray for him while he’s sitting in the very same church I am.
John 13:34. “Love one another as I have loved you.”
John 8:7. “Let he is without sin cast the first stone.”
Steve 1:1. “Let he who has no immigrant heritage throw the first insult.”
Words to live by, except for when we conveniently don’t.
Failing all that, maybe just grow up and be a kinder person, like the God you profess to worship would have you be.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 