Today was going to be Dream Diaries with Martin Donovan but that will have to wait. This is more important.

Please take the time to watch this. It is SO important.

As we go back to the ‘new normal’ let’s actually make it new.

Let’s have a renaissance. The one niner has given the world an opportunity that I feel is already being squandered.

The ‘old normal’ was immoral, sadistic and sick.

All of this is why I am finding it difficult to reengage with it all.

What is it I am reengaging with?

I challenge you to challenge yourself and anyone around you this July 1st and really think about what is being celebrated. The Indigenous to this land have expressed how painful that day is for them. I choose to respect someone else’s pain. My new preferred name for the date is Canada’s Genocidal Celebration. Not something I will take any part in.

I used to. I used to take part in it all. I used to love ‘Canada Day’. A big party with fireworks and food and friends and everything. I understand all of that, I chose it for most of my life. Defiant in not educating myself. I was a good, spiritual, nice person so what if I like to party on Canada day. Oh but how in that one stand I was so ignorant of my own ignorance. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t even know to look, or how to look or what to look for. I didn’t have anyone telling me that perhaps I should look. So regrettably it wasn’t that long ago I sat in the space of “I was born here, I didn’t personally do all these things, but I love fireworks and a good party, I’m not a colonizer, I grew up here, I’m a good person, I’m not racist.” I was willfully sitting in my ignorance and whiteness by choosing not to listen, choosing to dismiss or not to see another perspective.

There wasn’t any clear defining moment that began to shift things. Perhaps I became older and softer and more willing. Going inward and beginning the work of dismantling my racism and white supremacy was not easy. Is not easy. It has been so systemically ingrained in me that I didn’t know where to begin or that I needed to and ultimately wanted to begin. (If you are white and reading this and not thinking you need to look if you haven’t looked then you are actually exactly who needs to look. Sometimes its under stuff and you may have to move a few things to find it.)

When I finally began to look I realized how in the dark I had been. I allowed myself to grieve at how wrong and blind and uneducated I had been. I raged towards a system that knowingly raised me and kept me that way. I may not have actively created the situation but I also was not actively against it. Remaining neutral is choosing the side of the oppressor. Always. Period. I know that now. My neutrality was an ignorant denial. I enjoyed how easy it was for me and I didn’t want to take on the empathetic emotional labour of someone else because that would ruin my fun. Especially when it really wasn’t my fault…Oh dear. Sigh. How does one get others to see the light when they feel so happy and safe in their darkness? Great question. I am choosing to look and listen even if it is hard and heavy and uncomfortable. I am choosing to not be neutral. I am choosing to do my own personal work of dismantling my racism, educating myself and finding empathy for others stories. My whiteness has given me privilege and I choose to recognize that.

Change begins with many small personal choices.

Let’s make them shall we?

#reconciliation #whatiscanada #letsrenaisaancethisscheisse

Danke for being here, I appreciate it.

Lisel

Oh, also just cuz I need to get it off my chest..

Fuck You Trudy you Seriously Fucking Suck.

It does help to say it out loud. Danke.