BEING HUMAN

“Why does everyone talk about the Arab-Israeli conflict as being difficult?”

“Probably because it’s, I dunno, difficult?”

“Is it, though?” 

“Isn’t it?”

“Well, like, compared to what?” 

“I think it’s safe to say the whole Palestine thing is sufficiently complex and fraught.”

”But just consider the parties. These people are nearly indistinguishable. Their populations melding DNA for millenia. And they have loads of linguistic and cultural and religious cross-over, and a common ancestral geography to boot. It’s all relatedness and connection and similarity all the way down.”

“Sure. You can’t, as the eugenicists might try, look at a line-up of a thousand people from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Israel and ever hope to sort them into their nationalities or religions, say.”

“Okay, now compare that with the parties who came to form Canada. That’s a truly complex situation and one that had no good reason to work given the long history of friction between everyone concerned. Even just the French and the English."

"And yet they came up with a fifty-state-solution, blended into an awkward five-state-solution."

"With large and essential Asian and South Asian diasporas who arrived centuries ago and very much formed that nation."

"Right."

"And all of this mess comprising a modern state so multicultural, so unlike the American melting pot, as to be quite nearly a no-state- or all-state-solution that identifies more with being not-British or not-American than being Canadian."

"Whatever that is.”

"What?"

"Canadian."

"Exactly."

“It’s a good point.”

“Now just go ahead and take yourself back to the 15th, 16th, or 17th century. It's something pretty hard to do.”

“Sure.”

“There, bipedalism is the common denominator between the French and the Algonquin.”

“Just about.”

“The French arriving in Canada may as well have landed on the moon.” 

“Ha.”

“Well, everything from what to eat to how to get around to just how to survive the winter had to be learned from the locals, upon whom their continued survival totally depended for centuries.”

“That’s probably fair.”

“You can be certain the best move you could make as a Frenchman arriving in the Americas was to get in with the locals, to show yourself to be reliable and useful, and to marry one. That wouldn’t just be a huge upgrade in social status but also the surest way to survive, even just immediately.”

“Sure. They were totally unaccustomed and ill-prepared.”

“The climate and biology and cultures were as perfectly alien as could be while still being on Earth.”

“Right. Pretty limited in their shared experience and associations and worldview.”

“Yeah, think about all the requisite certainty that comes with Catholicism, around cosmology and meaning and purpose, beginnings and ends. And now smash that, like a meteorite, into the Gaspé Peninsula and the marvellous Mi’kmaq milieu.”

“For sure. Messy.”

“And you think, ‘How different could northern France be from southern Canada?’ But we know many of the first concerted attempts at settlements, 20, 50, and even 100 years out from first contact, typically failed within a year or two and often with significant swathes of the population not making it through their first winter.”

“Right. And you’re saying that, by contrast, the entire Jewish tradition makes reference to the desert, the flora and fauna and the people and places therein.”

“And also a return to Zion. That’s the whole religion.”

“Sure.”

“And then consider that the whole state of Israel and much of the precursory events that led up to it exist, certainly most of what folks care about, alongside and making use of the typewriter and the photograph.” 

“And anyone can peruse the records and correspondences and newspaper articles. Sure.” 

“But we have comparatively nothing from the first, what, three or four centuries of European activity in North America, from any side?”

“I don’t really know anything about it. But it must be true that there’s little from the time of the framing of many of the early political boundaries, for example.”

“Almost nothing other than official documents from some authority.”

“And even most of that would be laws or decrees—”

“And maps.”

“And maps or official agreements.”

“But the bulk of that would come not from folks on the ground or even pertinent individuals on various sides of an agreement but from a distant land and a single official or authority.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying I don’t think people mean ‘complicated’ or ‘difficult’. That can’t be what they mean.”

“But there is this history of violence and this fixation around bits of real estate.”

“That’s true of effectively everywhere else. Except with far more violence and misery and over a far longer period in almost every other case.”

“And you don’t have the added complexity of things like alien illnesses wiping out 98% of the population prior to direct contact.”

“The messiness and complexity is orders of magnitude greater and in more directions in what is now Canada than 20th century Palestine-Israel.”

“I get all that. And I guess I agree. But what are you getting at, exactly?”

“I think what people mean with 'it's complicated' is that they don't want to talk about it. Or even think about it. That the risk of attracting labels they don’t want, especially ones they haven't actually earned, or making permanent enemies with people is far too high."

"Well, you can't blame them; especially when you have so many people, half their neighbours or family members, refusing to acknowledge the meaning of words or the difference in peoples' intent while also declaring their endorsement of both scapegoating and spectacular violence.”

“But, who can actually afford to abstain from thinking about this, sorting it out as best they can, and even taking sides?”

“No one. But, being human, they’ll put it off until they no longer can.”

“Surely. At which point it's too late.”