Well said Samuel.

I’ve written this before but I fear that when we elevated/deified/empowered victimhood beyond accountability since the mid-1980's, and in the process degraded the power of resiliency, we also strengthened exclusive tribalism, some of it based on the degree of suffering and the amount of social media coverage it generates.

Don’t get me wrong, we all love a story of triumph over adversity. And truth be told there are indeed forces still tearing us all apart as you so eloquently wrote.

So fight the good fight of course but one must remember that since we all have wars, how we fight them defines us.

So victimhood is not the only story let alone the only theme in town and it denigrates the very real progress many women and many POC have made in Western society.

And yet, ‘poor me and my tribe’ has become the mantra of much of social media and many platforms: millions are casually if not indifferently labelled ‘the enemy’ because they don’t suit the narrative.

One only need look to the breakup of the former Yugoslavia to find one reason to avoid tribalism, it led to genocide.

Sorry to seque too far away from your most excellent humanistic writing…but one of the cultural attributes of being Canadian is that for the most part, we are trained to laugh at ourselves. Most of our stories start with a ‘you won’t believe what happened to me today.’

We understand irony. We’ve had to, seeing that we’re perched on the fence bordering the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. We have to be able to laugh at ourselves.

To not be able to laugh at oneself is to tread the path of hubris.

Much of what is dividing us today is that so many of those who would mire themselves in political correctness and identity politics engage in absolutism.

In other words perfectionism. If one is perfect, and expect those of one’s tribe to also be perfect, and since judgment and condemnation and punishment are swift and have no sense of due process, one can’t laugh at oneself.

One must perpetually be on guard against the greatest to the slightest offence, even if it means going back decades if not centuries without historical context, and I am sure that must be exhausting: is there a safe room from such perfectionism?

It was this kind of perfectionism that kept the Puritans tightly wrapped up in an orthodoxy which ultimately led to internecine murder in the form of the Salem witch hunts: sorry to engage in historical facts, but it must be remembered that 5 out of the 14 victims hung were men, while one Giles Corey, the 15th victim, was pressed to death.

So one way to thwart the rise of such divisiveness is to recognize the humanity in us all and try to remember Walpole’s words: “Life is a comedy to those that think; and a tragedy to those that feel.”

In other words, since we’ve all got a finish line…a tragic expiry date if you will, lighten up and laugh with each other…it’s good for the soul.

Thanks for having the courage to share your writing.