Vancouver Courier
for August 2, 1998

I'm astonished at what I see going on around me in my native province. What the hell's happened?

My generation, youngsters during World War II, lapped up contemporary propaganda about what our boys were fighting for, and decided that we would indeed end discrimination and develop a tolerant society. And it meant getting rid of deep-seated prejudices we'd been taught that "Japs" and "Krauts" were irredeemably evil people. We had, as sung in the superb musicale of the time, South Pacific "been carefully taught". But we unlearned the propaganda of the Saturday movie and our parents dinner table and went to work.

As late as the late 40s Orientals and Indians couldn't vote or enter many professions. In the late 50s the insurance company I worked for flagged record with a "C" if the policyholder was non-white. Until very recently, women couldn't join the prestigious Vancouver Club. We didn't end that intolerance - indeed it was our younger siblings of the 60s that fought the war - but we started the process.

But we all moved on. The 70s brought more legislation and more social pressure for fairness to all minorities - even to the majority which happen to be women.

One would expect that this major upheaval would produce distortions and inequities and it did. An American white prospective medical student went to court because he was rejected by Stanford Medical School because the "quota" of white students had been exhausted. That sort of story became common - men who used to be favoured for jobs were thrust aside for women. And it sometimes became faintly comical as women, wanting to become he-men, took over all the flag man jobs on construction sites of the world becoming flag people in the bargain.

Most people not only tolerated all this but accepted it as being the temporary price, albeit unequally borne, paid by society as a just penalty for centuries of evil behaviour.

Others saw trouble ahead. George Orwell in 1949 wrote 1984 where he portrayed a future society which employed "New Speak" which turned every value on its ear. Love became hate, good became evil and so on. To some this was a tocsin, warning of a future which would materialize. Some saw it as an exaggeration - to others it was nonsense. To me only the date was wrong - by 14 years.

As every schoolchild knows, every action has a reaction. All revolutions have counter revolutions in their wake. A Tom Paine creates an Edmund Burke and vice versa. This is because revolutions tend to be unstoppable in the short term and excesses often become as bad as the evil which the revolution was supposed to cure.

In our human relations revolution, many people's lives were upset. People who had come to believe in a right to their status saw themselves elbowed aside to make way for someone they had been taught wasn't capable of the job. Often the replacement was inadequate for the obvious reason that he or she had no appropriate training. There was a counter revolution.

Then came the insidious bit. Any who opposed what to the revolutionary was a necessary move, was a reactionary - or racist, bigot, whatever term is appropriate. There was no room for dissent, you were either with 'em in which case you were a decent person you were agin 'em in which case you were evil. In other times, those loyal to George III were tarred and feathered or worse by American revolutionaries; hundreds of thousands who just looked sideways at the French Revolution went to the Guillotine. These days any who point out injustices in the fight for justice are branded as racists and social outcasts. Minorities who would not now be seeing even a glimmer of tolerance were it not for free speech now condemn not only those who say bad things about them but decent tolerant people who just happen to think that free speech must be preserved. Those who have spent a lifetime battling against racism now find themselves branded as racists because the victims are not the traditional ones.

You dare not raise a voice in criticism of the latest pronouncements of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women on abortion or sexual assault without becoming a male pig. To this group, it is intolerable to criticize any tenet held to be sacred to womanhood.

Similarly, criticism of the Nisga'a Treaty which gives special rights to Nisga'a to the exclusion of all other British Columbians immediately puts you right up there in the pantheon of racists with Ernst Zundel and Jim Keegstra.

Perhaps, in the fight for social justice, we should take care that we don't deny it to people who dare question those who always think they know best - in Denny Boyd's wonderful phrase - the "higher purpose persons."

For surely you don't create a just society by ensuring - even at long last - the rights of some by taking them away from someone else.