As a young child of the ‘80s and early ‘90s, I often worried that quicksand was a much greater threat than it actually turned out to be.
I’m not sure why I feared quicksand, but I certainly wasn’t the only person from my generation to lose sleep over it. Grown up – somewhat – I’m now fairly confident that my life isn’t in any kind of jeopardy because of quicksand.
Knowledge sometimes has a way of dampening unnecessary fears.
Today we have new quicksand called barbaric cultural practices.
So serious are these practices that last week the Tory campaign promised to establish an RCMP tip line for reporting them, a move opponents quickly criticized for its apparent targeting of the Muslims.
This pledge was intended to help enforce a law passed earlier this year, which came with the same criticisms and accusations of fear mongering.
According to proponents of the initiative, the move is simply a continued emphasis on so-called “Canadian values. “
Some of the most common “barbaric cultural practices” cited as reason for dedicating more RCMP resources include honour killing and forced child marriages. While I never realized either issue was widespread, I will for the sake of this argument submit that they may be and I could just be naïve.
Now if, for example, I’m aware of an honour killing, wouldn’t an RCMP tip line be redundant? Shouldn’t the existing 9-1-1 suffice? And where do we draw the barbaric line? My neighbours celebrate their faith by symbolically drinking the blood and eating the body of a prophet who died some 2,000 years ago.
Of course for those who understand the symbolism of the traditional Catholic practice, the description above is far too literal and unfair. You can even argue my analogy is offensive and silly.
That’s exactly my point.
When we look at unfamiliar cultures and faiths we need to challenge ourselves to understand and accept that we may be ignorant. We might actually be making offensive and even silly conclusions.
Examples of silly conclusions could be found in some of the responses to a recent opinion piece I authored. In that piece I criticized opponents of immigration for appearing to argue with xenophobia rather than facts. A few responses I received, doused in irony, argued that Muslim immigrants would try to force Sharia law onto the Canadian judicial system.
The belief that new immigrants would be in favour of and fight for Sharia law in Canada certainly is silly. The belief that they would also be successful is incredibly ignorant.
Now back to the tip line and my original question before we headed down the silly path – why isn’t 9-1-1 good enough?
Perhaps because 9-1-1 is for real emergencies, while a special RCMP tip line is what’s needed to take care of quicksand.
