terdShat
terd
Men
The hidden half of domestic violence
Date: Friday, 19 October 2001, at 6:54 p.m.
Christie Blatchford National Post
October 6, 2001
Who, exactly, does NAC represent?
I went out one lunch hour the other day, with a couple of girlfriends, on an impromptu shoe buying blitz; within about 15 minutes, we laid waste to the store and purchased, among us, seven pairs of shoes and/or boots and one glorious soft black bag.
Well, it was our duty as patriots.
I mention this for a couple of reasons, first, how tragic it is that the Canadian "war" effort is to consist of shopping, and second, because I wonder if Sunera Thobani ever does anything remotely like this. My sense is, when the University of British Columbia professor in women's studies, who last week won notoriety for a hateful speech she gave at a women's conference, gets together with her female friends, it is to sit around and whinge about the patriarchal hierarchy, the oppressors and the pain of having been colonized.
What did you do in the war, mummy?
I bought shoes, honey.
But why?
Well, the prime minister said we were to spend as a demonstration of our courage and willingness to resume our normal lives after the 9-11 attacks.
But mummy, you always buy shoes.
Shut up, you little (deleted) , and eat your breakfast.
Honestly, I don't know which is greater, the distance between Ms. Thobani's life and mine, or the chasm between what the government is asking of me and what I might like to give. All I know for sure is that because of them both, and they fit as hand in glove, I feel a stranger in my own land.
Ms. Thobani made her reputation, such as it is, as a former president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.
This is an organization which came into being when I was a young woman, two years away from starting out in newspapers. I didn't understand its raison d'être then, and I don't now. Canadian women of my generation were never oppressed, subjugated or victimized. We wanted for little, least of all equality of opportunity, which is the only reasonable expectation; if anything, the young men of our time suffered in this regard. NAC's querulous voices were never mine.
Yet somehow, NAC proceeded to wage in my name a battle that goes on still.
It laid claim, and still does, to being the pre-eminent feminist organization in the country; it purports to speak for more women than any other single group. It never has. It never will. It was a joke when I was in college, and so it remains. The organization is now dominated by gender and racial politics; it reserves spots on its executive for women of colour and lesbians, as though such women might not not be capable of cleanly winning election by their lonesome.
It invents new foes, new causes, new languages. Once, its budget was wholly underwritten by the federal government; even now, its special projects receive federal funding. Without taxpayers' money, it would have died a natural death long ago. It should never receive another sou of public funds.
But it will.
This federal Liberal government, like those before it, asks nothing of the citizenry but that when they enter the polling booth, they remember who doled out the bucks for Arab Heritage Day or the Take Back the Night marches.
Women are deemed in need of protection, Charter and otherwise, and usually from men. Immigrants, whose blood and sweat and over-riding capacity for work built the nation, are effectively pronounced, by dint of official multiculturalism and its thousand points of grant-giving darkness, as timorous and frail. I don't know which vision is more preposterous, woman as cripple, or immigrant.
Not so long ago, while getting my visa for Pakistan, I was treated to tea-and-a-lecture from the Pakistani vice-consul in Toronto.
The tea was lovely. The lecture centred around the great difference that in the vice-consul's view makes Canada superior to the United States -- that is, multiculturalism versus assimilation -- and to make the point, he told me how he could visit Pakistan-born Canadians, living in the Toronto suburbs, and not even be able to tell he was in Canada. It hardly sounded like victory to me.
Decades of such treatment have bred in the bone a sort of national prissiness and the collective soft-headedness which sees Ms. Thobani, paying the barest of lip service to the 6,000 dead of the World Trade Center before launching into her hate-mongering last week, be hailed as a pacifist, and Jean Chrétien, who took 18 days to visit the ruined site, be called a considerate fellow who just didn't want to interfere with the rescue work.
(To make it small and personal, which appears to be the only way many people can look at an issue anymore, imagine your neighbour's house burned down, killing the whole family but one: Would you dispense with paying your respects for almost three weeks because you didn't want to get in the way of the cleanup crew?)
This month marks 15 years since my father died. Though I miss him every day and delight in the physical reminders I have of him -- for one, the book of Edna St. Vincent Millay poems he gave me and which, in his dreadful and nearly illegible writing, he inscribed, poor optimistic parent, "To emulate this lady's literary accomplishments is most laudable; any imitation of her lifestyle, however, would be less commendable" -- a small part of me is glad he is not here to see what has become of his country, and more of his countrymen that he ever would have believed possible.
If that great lady were writing her most famous four lines about Canada, they would have read, "Our candle burns at neither end; it will so last the night; but ah, my foes, and oh, my friends, it barely cast a light."
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