We should expose our shame, not hide it

SOCIAL STUDIES - Published Monday February 23rd, 2009

The battle for the Plains of Abraham has been called off.

Well, okay, the re-enactment of that battle has been scrubbed.

It makes me think about guilt; about our ability to face the things in our past that have caused us pain.

We all have them as individuals. We come from abusive families, we have a history of abuse, we pulled the fire alarm for kicks one February night . . . . Whatever the skeletons in our closet, we are fairly reluctant to pull them out and exorcise them. Which any psychologist would tell you is unhealthy.

Part of it, of course, is that we are comfortable with the illusion. Other people have problems but we do not. As long as everything remains calm, and beneath the surface, it will be all right. There is the whole Scottish stoicism, British stiff upper lip type of behaviour which I am sure most cultures have in spades, which does not help either.

All of this explains why we take so many pharmaceuticals for so many psychological reasons. Schizophrenia and depression, social anxiety disorder and addiction, fatigue and insomnia are all the growth industries for all industrialized nation's medical profession.

I would like to argue that it is because we do not re-enact the battle between the French and English which overturned the first majority government of our fair colony.

Look at it this way: in the United States almost no one has any idea that any soldiers have died in the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Okay, that might be a bit of an overstatement -- but it is certainly not publicized, and the death toll is not in the papers. Instead, we have ludicrous statements about winning unwinnable wars.

Every single foreigner who has ever sent troops into Afghanistan will tell you -- they will wear you down. Every single battle fought over Middle Eastern nations by forces from outside has been a complete disaster from the Crusades on. I think the last person who could legitimately claim to have conquered anyone over there was Alexander.

And yet; even though it is pretty easy to think back to the Russians pulling out en masse; or how the United States has not actually completed a ground incursion since the Second World War; leaving divided and broken countries like Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Panama in their wake; we still think everything is fine.

Bread and Circuses. That was what they called it back in Nero's day. Keep the Romans from remembering that they had been at war for generations, often with each other, by distracting them with free food and violent entertainment. It served the same purpose, it glossed over any semblance of memory.

We now watch more reality television than anything else. How does Dancing with the Stars make you a better person? It does make you forget, for at least one hour, pretty much everything. And that is the point. You can even get through a whole day of drudgery by keeping the single thought that Survivor is on tonight in your mind to compensate for all your pain.

And because of it, we are not whole, we are not healthy, and we are not living life fully.

What can be said of the individual can be applied to the country.

Imagine for a second that you are an American. Did you know that more Americans were killed during the civil war between the North and South than any other of their wars? Did you know that it pitted father against son, brother against brother and sister against sister? Do you know how many people lived after having their legs torn off by cannon fire?

But almost every weekend some group of hundreds of people is re-enacting some famous battle between the north and the south for all to see. It is actually a fairly healthy way for them to deal with the most violent episode of their past.

But don't give them too much credit, they bury almost every other part of their nefarious history just like the rest of us.

The French and English in Canada have been having this Hatfield and McCoy sort of feud ever since that famous Plains battle. I imagine part of the reason is that we have never really dealt with the fact of how terrible we have been to each other over the ensuing years.

With some just cause, of course, our country is actually founded on the backs of two warring nations. But we never acknowledge it. We never actually sit down and say, yes -- there is a history of violence between us; now, what do we have to do to exorcise those demons?

Shame leads to depression. It is as simple as that. Part of the problem for us as a country is that we are depressed. Think about it -- we are always negative about ourselves; we find it hard to get motivated to do anything, including electing someone to run our country; we are riddled with self doubt about every major decision from gay marriage to economics; we snap at each other for no good reason. All hallmarks of a depressive episode.

Sigmund Freud once said that those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat it. We can all buy into that, and have probably said something similar about our families, or ourselves, but what if it applies to the nation as well?

Karl Marx put it another way, "the reformation of consciousness lies solely in the awakening of the world . . . from its dreams about itself."

I wonder, if we turned off the television and went and stood outside of Quebec City, if we read the story, heard the speeches, and watched the battle, would we not somehow reclaim a part of who we are? Would we not then be able to actually reach across the divide we have created and start to heal? I wonder?