Arms are for Hugging, and Other Cliched Criticisms

A month and a day after my foray into freedom, I've realized that today would be an excellent day to let you know just how I am enjoying said freedom. Today I condemned a regime that has terrorized the world for over four years. Today I exercised my right to have a voice. Today I told the world that I could not and would not be an accomplice to murder and injustice around the world. Today I marched through the streets of Ottawa and told George W. Bush NO.

The most profound lesson I learned today was that even in a country that claims to be a bastion of democracy, that boasts one of the highest national literacy rates in the world, and whose people claim to be so aware of and so opposed to the unjust and illegal actions of the Bush regime, people are still severely ignorant. Canadians don't seem to be aware of our own contributions to the violence in Iraq, to the spread of the AIDS virus, and to the arbitrary detention of people who have not been formally charged with any crime both internationally and within Canadian territory.

What pains me even more is that of those who are aware, very few are actually willing to make even the smallest personal effort to hold their fellow human beings accountable. In North America we have the right to protest peacefully, yet we content ourselves to watch events unfolding on television. We have the right to free, fair, and democratic elections, and yet our leaders continue to take power from corrupt and widely unsupported elections. It seems to me that only when our own children are starving, our own police are being turned against us, and our own cities are being bombed with Canadian-made artillery shells, only then will we Canadians abandon our terminal apathy.