A fitting start to a long weekend, dedicated to celebrating all that is great about Canada, is the audacious disruption of road and rail by bands of usurping brigands. Not satisfied with being exempt from paying taxes, having health care and education provided by those of us who do pay taxes, as well as having a generous and endless stipend to provide for a wide-ranging list of demands, natives who seem to have scads of time for social disruption and none at all for employment or societal contribution, launch a "Day of Action" to crank up the pressure for more entitlement.
Chief instigator Shawn Brant puts the escalation of native extortion in this light...
"We simply want to have a relationship with the rest of Canada that is balanced and fair."
Do you always characterize the prison-style rape of hard working, responsible Canadians as balanced and fair? I had a husband like this, once. He wanted a shared relationship of love and respect with me, and was willing to punch me in the mouth as many times as it took, to get it. At least I had the choice to leave him. But my Canada, with it's elected representatives who choose capitulation over action, and it's emasculated police force which prefers to act as a personal bodyguard service to arsonists and provocateurs, gives me no choice to leave this abuse. It gives none of us the choice. We are all forced to accede to the most hubristic demands, suffer through the most outrageous violent behavior and console ourselves with the fact that our acquiescence may buy us a brief respite before the demands get heightened.
It is long past time the inhabitants of reservations came to the realization that they have created the squalor in which they live. They have acceded all of their rights to chiefs who leave them to live in dilapidated shacks, while they jet set off to the Caribbean. They have accepted the condition of relying on social welfare, in lieu of making the hard choices that the rest of us are forced to make, in order to improve our standard of living. They have chosen a life that does not burden them with responsibilities to either themselves or to others, but also does not bless them with prosperity because they refuse to accept that those two conditions are intertwined. One can not exist without the other.
In short, the perks of native status (and there are many) are the millstone which hangs around the neck of every native person, dragging their face in the dirt and restricting their means for a fulfilling existence. But they are happy to don it, and mask it as a shroud of victim hood -- a hair shirt woven from the white mans lies and the rampant oppression natives suffer from soccer moms and McDonald's franchises.
But the reservations are not internment camps or gulags. They do not have the walls and bars of a prison. They are not guarded from escape by armed sentries and rabid dogs. They are in effect, prisons of one's own making. Those who have chosen to leave the reservation and discard their special status have managed to find that life has rewards, if you're willing to work for them. But so many are not. And so to all the natives out there who raise one hand to shake their fist at me and shove the other hand in my pocket, I ask...if you don't care enough about your own life and the lives of your children, to work for what you want and improve the conditions in which you live, why should I be forced to care for you?







