This week we all watched the Ukrainian people school the world in what valour and courage means.
Analysts expected the country to fall to overwhelming Russian numbers before the weekend was out, but as of writing Ukraine still remains an independent state.
With their grit, they have shamed western governments into sending as much assistance as legally possible. In cyberspace, Anonymous has declared open season on Russia’s networks, showing internet trolls how it’s done.
This global grassroots response to the invasion should be a wake-up call for all of us, because we’ve spent the last half-century undermining ourselves.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, western capitalist nations suddenly found a huge void where their nemesis had been. This void was not empty for very long, however. In Canada, the United States and elsewhere, our focus very quickly shifted to the real enemy - each other.
You don’t have to look very hard in Canadian media to see what I’m talking about. There are many columnists who have made entire careers telling us everything that’s wrong with the other side, be that conservative, liberal, socialist, easterner, immigrant, rich, environmentalist, baby-boomer, or millennial. With the onset of the internet and social media, these ideas have found strong niche markets, full of readers able to separate themselves from information that may contradict their preferred opinions, to the point where we now appear to have two entirely different versions of reality. The results speak for themselves.
If there was one common, coherent message from the convoy-blockade protests of the past few weeks, it was that they absolutely despised Justin Trudeau and compared him to Adolf Hitler. While it’s certainly debatable if Trudeau is as ‘woke’ as he markets himself politically, he’s got as much in common with Hitler as a rock has to a seagull. It is a level of overheated rhetoric that would have been shot down immediately during the Cold War. But we’ve become so used to calling each other enemies of the state, these nonsensical comparisons aren’t even shocking anymore.
Now, in the face of an actual enemy, there is hardly an ounce of trust between the left and right, sadly for good reasons — in the U.S. 2016 election the Republicans even benefited from Russian interference. Many on the right still question the legitimacy of the 2020 election, even though it’s been proven well beyond doubt. None of this helps the west organize a coherent and effective response to the challenge it now faces.
On the left, rhetoric is similarly overcharged past any level of usefulness. Far too many people have lost their jobs in online lynchings over relatively minor missteps, with the court of public opinion branding them sexist, racist or worse. This only pushes people to the defensive, preventing any meaningful dialogue that could actually move these issues towards resolution. We collectively love arguing and hate solutions.
Right now, our politics are so overheated we can’t even have a functional debate on key issues like climate change, let alone stand up to a determined attacker who has clearly had us in his crosshairs for some time.
“Divide and conquer” is the foundation of all military victories — we’re about as divided as we can get. We need to find a way to be friends again — and fast.