The American tyrant and racism in Canada

Jun 26, 2018 | 5:00 AM

“HEY LADY, did your white husband meet you online?” A random and unprovoked question directed towards a family member of mine living in Alberta. She’s Canadian, has been living here for more than two decades and that was one of several verbal assaults she and her young daughters faced one afternoon last week.

We may have thought we are ‘Canada The Good,’ but racism flourishes. Bigoted, ignorant and intolerant as ever, racists are now feeling emboldened, thanks in large part to the xenophobic president of the United States of America.

Perhaps driven by the same tiny hand insecurities of Trump and other alt-right nationalists, these racists are certain their path to respect, stature, and manhood — womanhood ,too — can only come through scapegoating. They need to blame someone else for their own deficiencies. Blame others for their inability to get or hold onto a good job. Blame others for their relationship failures. In fact, blame others for all their failures because otherwise, one would need to face up to and accept responsibility. And accepting responsibility is only for those strong and capable enough to handle it.

In my family member’s case, her abuser was female and, judging from the recap of the incident, this woman fit the typical profile of an insecure coward for whom intolerance is used as a cover for her own inadequacies. Need to feel better about yourself? Why bother with the hard and difficult work of self-examination and improvement when it is so much easier to pick on a mother enjoying some special time in the park with her two daughters?

When the urge to vilify is directed toward a mother with her two young girls nearby, then you have entered into a special world of depravity. Such vile actions demonstrate a degree of character ugliness that is a twisted perversion of normal behaviour; an abnormality that will fester and consume them with their own hatred.

Racism has always been with us. For the most part it lay beneath the surface, kept mostly to private chat rooms and conversations with fellow losers. But Trump has changed all that and given what these deviants feel is a licence and father-like approval to openly commit acts of intolerance. They feel emboldened and, in the rush to prove they really don’t have tiny hands, will now stop people in the park and try to build their own self-esteem by verbally degrading others.

You don’t have to go far to understand where it is coming from. You have the First Lady of the USA visiting Texas immigrant detention facilities for children while wearing a jacket emblazoned with the words, “I really don’t care. Do you?”

These are the same camps where her husband Donald, has forcefully separated and incarcerated non-white infants in what he euphemistically calls, “Tender Age Shelters”. In the meantime his former chief political advisor Corey Lewandowski responds to a story about an immigrant child with Down syndrome with the sickening and tasteless, “womp womp” reply.

The West Wing has become a refuge for old white men who are self-entitled, intolerant and afraid. Of course, they don’t talk about the Klan anymore. Instead, they use words like “Alt-Right” because using Klan (The KKK) reminds everyone what they truly stand for, including the horrific lynchings carried out in the name of white supremacy.

In light of these greater horrors, some might say that what was experienced in the park last week is tame but it is far from it. The type of woman who did this is the same kind of coward who once attacked Jews and encouraged their deportation to death camps. She is the same woman who laughed and cheered beatings and lynchings in the Deep South of America. She is the same person who did nothing to stop the Cambodian atrocities of what we now call, The Killing Fields. She is the enabler, the weak personality that sociopathic dictators count on when planning their inhumane savagery. Gullible to the point where she can be manipulated with ease, her weaknesses exploited and her insecurities and impotence mobilized to benefit the tyrant. Without her barbarism becomes impossible, but with her it can flourish and grow.

So no, verbally assaulting someone in front of their children is not tame and should be seen for what it is… Racism at its worst.