Sunday September 4, 2022
By now, everyone must have seen the video of Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland being accosted in the lobby of a hotel in Grand Prairie, Alberta, on a visit to her home province; she was born in Peace River, north of Grand Prairie.
Freeland is quite short, even in high heels. One of her own Tweets gives her height as “5 feet 2 inches, on a good day.”
The man – identified by his own Internet postings as Elliott McDavid – towers over her. He’s almost a stereotype of an Alberta redneck -- burly, heavily bearded, dressed in a tattered undershirt.
As Freeland moves towards an elevator, he unleashes a torrent of abuse, which I will take the risk of quoting verbatim: "What the f—k are you doing in Alberta? You f—kin' traitor! You f—in' b—ch! Get the f—k out of this province!"
Media coverage described him as a "right-wing extremist" and an "active organizer of convoy protests.”
Interviewed, he said he was proud of his actions.
That part, at least, strikes me as true. I’m sure he believes he has history on his side. As do all right-wing reactionaries.
The real danger
I have argued, for years, that the primary threat to our society comes not from the left – despite American paranoia about anything remotely related to communism – but from the right.
Various friends challenge that bias. And I have sometimes wondered where it came from.
I think it came from 13 years of working directly for the church, and another 15 of working with it.
The United Church of Canada, to be specific, elects a new chief executive officer, called a Moderator, every two or three years.
Once upon a time, that position was reserved for ordained male clergy. I was there when the first lay person – medical missionary Dr. Robert McClure – was elected in 1968.
Since then, the church has continued to break new ground, electing a Black man, an ordained woman, a lay woman, an Indigenous man, an Indigenous woman, an Asian man, a gay man…
I haven’t known all of them personally, but I have considered myself a friend and confidante of at least half a dozen.
And all of those, without exception, have commented about the hate mail they received after their election. Letters filled with obscenities. Words scrawled with heavy felt pen. Letters charred over a flame. Envelopes filled with dog poo. Death threats. Assurances that the Moderator was going to hell, was taking the church to hell, or was the devil incarnate.
McDavid’s rant sounds moderate, by comparison.
One moderator – I can’t recall which one – described his secretary bringing in an envelope, holding it at arm’s length, with a tissue between her fingertips.
Always the hate mail came from conservatives.
Always from the right
My wife Joan supervised the office operations for the General Council held in Fredericton, NB, in 1992. Four years earlier, the United Church had decided that all members were eligible to become ministers, regardless of their sexual orientation.
Outrage still seethed.
Office staff – who had no hand in that 1988 decision – found the deluge of angry, spluttering, venomous phone calls so distressing that my wife had to get extra phone lines installed. She, and only she, answered the public number.
Some nights, she came home still shaking from the tirades hurled at her.
None of this abuse came from the left. It was entirely from conservative factions reacting against anything new that the church might be doing. Or thinking of doing.
For good reason, the far right is often called “reactionary.”
I heard from other colleagues of the similar venom they had lived through after the United Church launched its “New Curriculum” in the 1960s. The curriculum contained nothing that had not been taught in theological seminaries for decades. But it upset people’s preconceptions of what their church believed.
Even if it never had.
They did not want their preconceptions challenged.
You can debate, all you want, the definition of labels of right and left, liberal and conservative.
To me, the reactionary right is any group that refuses to accept a chink in the battlements they have built to preserve their perception of how things have always been – if only in their imagination.
Because they’re not open to reason, they can only react with verbal or physical violence.
There is no doubt in their own minds that they’re right. And therefore anyone who thinks differently must be wrong. And must be denounced. Ridiculed. And humiliated.
And like McDavid, they’re proud of doing it.
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Copyright © 2022 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
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Your turn
Apparently I’m not alone in encountering difficulties with the big banks (last week’s column).
“Your timing on this column couldn’t have been any better,” Wrote Heather Richard. “As I read it, my 86-year-old mother has her cell phone on speaker and we listen to the lovely guitar riffs of the hold music of her credit card company, another large bank that will remain nameless. She has been on hold for over 2 hours, for the third of several days in the past week, trying to get in touch with someone (anyone) to get a small matter resolved. As her frustration level has increased, she has decided to pay off the balance and cancel the card. Customer service is definitely becoming a lost art form!”
Jean McCord asked, “May I share this column with my bank? Which today passed me through four different people before sending me back to the number I had originally called, then putting me on hold with horrible music. All of which took more than an hour and a half on the phone and did not solve my problem.”
And this from Casey Koster: “You have echoed our exact experience!! I have been with an internationally known Canadian bank for over 42 years. Not anymore.”
Tom Watson asked,”Is it because the bank has trouble hiring capable people, or is it that the bank is so big they just don't give a damn?”`
JT: I lean towards the latter. Money matters more than people.
Isabel Gibson commented. “I've only had occasion to call a bank once to correct their mistake (I got a loan statement for someone with a name close to mine - someone had linked the accounts in error). I was able to get through to a human with one call and she was able to correct the error. Of course, that was 20 years ago . . .”
Kerry Mewhort had a different beef with the banks: “I'm only partly sorry you had such a hard time with your bank as it gave you the chance to share it with us. Your column gives me the opportunity to let you and your readers know that the Big 5 banks in Canada are up to their ears in financing climate-wrecking fossil fuel projects including the Trans Mountain and Coastal GasLink pipelines. RBC has pumped over $208 billion into these projects since the Paris Accord of 2014. These pipelines are being driven through Indigenous communities, including sacred locations, without the free, prior and informed consent of those nations, a right enshrined in Canada's adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. I urge everyone to consider moving their funds into a credit union. They are much less heavily invested in fossil fuels.
“Thanks for the opportunity to comment. As you might have guessed, this is an issue near and dear to my heart.”
Stephanie McClellan: “It isn’t just big banks that are out of touch with customers. My dad came to visit me this summer in Newfoundland. After purchasing the ticket on-line, there were a couple of issues he needed to contact customer service about, but he was not able to get through the levels to a human being. The airline said that everything should happen through their app. If someone wanted a human to answer the phone, they would need to pay $15 just for them to pick up the line at their end. The agent we spoke to wasn’t able to solve the problem. He hung up to supposedly speak to the supervisor. When he called back, it cost another $15. Worse even than that, was that dad got sick while here and we needed to change his return itinerary. After 3 days of lost holidays sitting on the phone with a dozen go-arounds on the ‘how can’t we help you’ loop, we ended up buying him another ticket home from another airline. The airline we booked with answered the phone the first time I called and had me a new ticket, with dad’s disability accommodations covered and all my questions answered in about ten minutes. One customer service representative through the whole process and done! That’s service!”
Wim Kreeft: “Everything in our society seems to be about wealth and corporate power. We peons matter less and less. And the line, ‘your call is very important to us’ is totally meaningless.”
My column two Sundays ago, about the abuse and misuse of the Bible, is still generating some responses.
David Gilchrist: I have visited many right-wing Churches over the years for different reasons; and what struck me most is how rarely I heard reading from the Gospels. So I don’t think a few choice quotations from Jesus would be nearly as acceptable as quotes from Paul -- on whom so much of what we call ‘the Christian Church’ seems to be built (most of the creeds and doctrines).”
Jane Wallbrown: It's incredible to me that many people I have encountered in the USA over the years think that the USA is a ‘Christian’ country; that it says so in the Constitution. Since I happen to like reading about the presidents, depending on the person, I tell them what some of our founding fathers believed. They would NOT pass a bible literacy test!”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns