Values
Hello dear friends, today we have a special guest. Anne Leahy has served as Canadian Ambassador to Cameroon, Poland, Russia, and the Vatican, and she is here to discuss Values and the role that they play in our daily lives.
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The podcast is at the end of the article.
Values
The citizens of a state must share common values to survive.
Ideally, those values should also be humanistic and positive if the society is to thrive.
As a positive force, societies bound by common values achieve development of a culture and a national identity that can provide model governance for its citizens.
These create a foundation for a patriotism that is neither chauvinistic nor expansionist. It simply generates a loyalty to ths state that embodies these values while respecting other societies as we expect them to respect ours.
One’s cultural background need not be the sole parameter from which to build a national identity. National identity does need to be exclusive in nature. Identity is not the same as differences in cultural background.
I am a Canadian, born and raised in Quebec, and enjoy both the anglophone and francophone elements of my society. Quebec has a strong identity that the rest of Canada lacks, but most Quebecers I know share the values that define Canada.
Throughout my career I have been exposed to many friends and colleagues originally from other countries or members of the First Nations, and they have been excellent colleagues in my diplomatic service. Each has brought linguistic and cultural wealth to my own experience. But this is not identity, since each cultural background has a different base.
Despite our different origins, we shared the same fundamental values that make us Canadian and allowed us to represent Canada abroad successfully.
That has changed recently. A good number of Muslims and their allied non-Muslims have started promoting a different vision of Canada – an Islamic state bound by Sharia.
Our student population today – the fountainhead of those who will govern us in the private and public sector in future – have banded together to occupy universities, block streets and buildings, and attacked Jewish Canadian individuals, businesses, and temples, threatening them with jihad and intifada, and calling for support for Hamas, Iran, and Yemen – all repressive, criminal dictatorships and fonts of global Islamic terrorism.
Most of these are Canadian students and faculty members who were not originally Muslim nor “Palestinians”, but who have been seduced by a global movement that supports Islamism.
Their values are the distinctly opposite of Canadian values of respect for democracy and human rights, respect for the individual, respect for the freedom of women, members of minorities, and for political plurality and respect for our institutions.
Their values do not reflect my Canada, nor the Canada I represented abroad for forty years.
Nor do they represent the values of the majority of Canadians.
Our different levels of government are cowering either in fear of the violence of radical Islamism or fear of losing large blocks of Muslim votes in key electoral regions.
They are permitting civil unrest, threats of violence and disruption, while preventing police from arresting those responsible and legal authorities from prosecuting them.
The values that bind Canadians and contribute to the Canadian identity do not make hatred for or fear of the other come easily. But it is what we are witnessing now across Canada and in many other countries, where foreign funded Islamism is gradually taking root.
Another cause for the dilution of values is the great political divide that separates the different political parties across Europe and in North America.
Time was when politicians would debate in parliament and then get together to hammer out deals based on consensus and common sense.
Now consensus is a dirty word, sowing deep divisions in our societies.
There are no political opponents, only enemies. And political debate is perceived to be a zero sum game rather than a dialogue of the willing whose objective is the common good.
Values are dropping by the wayside as we take sides against each other rather than define the values that unite us and fight for them.
We cannot forget the lives lost defending the freedoms that our forefathers/mothers fought so hard to defend and for which countless immigrants, such as my parents, hold dear as the main reason they fled the same oppression that today is being sought by the ignorant and the ill-informed.
It is our responsibility to defend these values that have made western democracies the envy of the world.
Podcast:
I believe that the "pro-Palestinian/Hamas" demonstrators see themselves as not only demonstrating against Israel/Jews, but also against the "establishment/government". Ironic, isn't it, that their beef (the same one against countless generations of college/university students have demonstrated) is in favour of an establishment whose control over the people has been unlike anything they've ever experienced. This is but the latest manifestation of bigotry, which is rampant in all societies, but kept under wraps in a "politically correct" society. The non politically-correct commonly talked about forms of bigotry are racism, religious intolerance, sexism, intolerance of gender expression, but we all know about fat-shaming, disdain of the physically infirm, developmentally challenged, snobbery against the poor and uneducated...all this to say, no, I don't see a society needing shared values, just the wisdom to tolerate the "other" because they too are God's creations, and none of us are wise enough to judge God's plan.