A Better Life?

I went on social media this morning with the intention of, amongst other things, posting notice of a local meeting to investigate sponsorship of a refugee family, but found that there is something that really rankles about the idea. I’m an immigrant to Canada, and my forebears were immigrants from Germany and Ireland, some political and some economic refugees, and all this shuffling around has worked out pretty well for our lot, as well as for the receiving countries. Truth be known, everything I read indicates that it has worked out a damn sight better for us than for the original inhabitants of this land, and for many who haven’t been as successful at navigating the shoals of hostile economies and social situations as we have been. Much of this, both success and failure, can be ascribed to dumb luck, with Dame Fortune smiling on some and throwing stones at many more. A good deal more can be ascribed to the mean-spirited and short-sighted policy environment that has enveloped us in the last four or five decades and has (and continues to) caused disasters and misery abroad, discrimination and disparity at home.

My own sense is that there is a great need for rewriting our social and economic playbook, and that the care of our living space needs to be at the top of the list of priorities, and that charity is a band-aid on the festering sores of environmental degradation and the economic imbalance that produces poverty and homelessness, hunger, exposure and violence. As I suspect the case might be with many others who have avoided these pitfalls, we are charitable, but have the feeling that we could donate our way into our own poverty, and that it would make little difference in the overall scheme as those who have sequestered the great wealth of society in their own pockets would only deepen their own pockets of absorb the new donations without it making a whit of difference to the indigent. I reserve a special space in hell for people who fatten on the outpourings of charitable donations as part of the Charity Industry: it might be a good gig economically, but it’s morally indefensible.  It’s also an excuse to let governments continue to funnel funds to their cronies and shirk responsibility to citizens for protecting our common living space, both physical and social.

Let’s accept refugees, welcome them with open arms and all the love and support we can muster. We have done much to create the conditions that forced them out of their former lives, so let’s try to make up part of it by ensuring that they have a better life here. At the same time, we here in Canada have a core of disenfranchised citizens, our own cadre of internally displaced persons, victims of whatever combination of toxic social circumstances and bad decisions by whomever. We can do  better at looking after “our own” as well as taking in some “outsiders”, in the spirit of Gilles Vigneault’s Mon Pays:

De ce grand pays solitaire je crie avant que de me taire
A tous les hommes de la terre ma maison c’est votre maison
Entre mes quatre murs de glace je mets mon temps et mon espace
А prйparer le feu, la place pour les humains de l’horizon
Et les humains sont de ma race

(Basically, my house is your house, and all humans are of my race.)

Fairness doesn’t always dictate that everyone get the same treatment, but it ought to mean that no one goes without the necessities of life, including participation in society in economic, intellectual and spiritual dimensions, and full opportunity to improve the living situation, as long as it isn’t at the expense of others. So let’s sponsor both refugees from abroad and our own internal refugees. And let’s work toward a better economic and social balance at home, and quit blowing stuff up elsewhere.