Acknowledgments, or Learning to Learn

I wrote something of an unconventional acknowledgments section for my PhD dissertation. Here it is in full.

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I wasn’t a great student.

My old report cards depict “a quiet child” who, nevertheless, could be “quite chatty instead of starting the work he is to do.” I was “quite a slow printer” who somehow also “tends to work rather quickly” at the expense of quality. In general, my work was incomplete or poorly done. Terms like “disorganized,” “satisfactory” and “unfocused” followed me from kindergarten through high school in the official documents, much to my parents’ frustration.

My teachers tried. Some tried harder than others. One (grade 4) tried stuffing me in the corner until my mom complained. Another (grade 10) told me to give up on learning French—désolé Madame! A lot of them could see that I was bright. They described me as creative and insightful, but never studious. The trouble was I was boundlessly interested in things that weren’t school. School, as I saw it, was taking up time I could have spent learning about the things I really wanted to learn about. My teachers could never figure out how to meet me at this natural curiosity. At least one teacher got part way there. In grade 5, Mademoiselle Benson (who changed my name from Matthew to Matt) made me think I could be a writer. But the next year I was back to: “needs to make better use of time.”

***

A kid growing up in Ontario in the 1980s and 1990s first learns about history—about the breadth and variety of human experience through time and space—from pop culture. Seventy-eight days before I was born, Back to the Future arrived in cinemas, and stories about time travel were staples of my media diet. Period films, too. I’m talking Indiana Jones and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. These movies played a fundamental role in the early development of my historical consciousness. This dissertation probably wouldn’t exist if not for a bunch of (mainly Jewish) guys in Los Angeles like Stephen Spielberg, Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin. Other notable early authorities on the far-flung corners of humanity were Looney Tunes, Monty Python, They Might Be Giants, the NES, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Douglas Adams and an assortment of long-forgotten relics acquired at Jumbo Video, HMV and the local library.

Slowly, alongside pop culture, came so-called “high” culture. For me, that meant the culture of my grandparents. They took me and my siblings to see plays in Stratford. They brought us to museums and to the Iroquoian village at Crawford Lake. They encouraged me to listen to classical music and read “literature.” They even signed me up for golf lessons, but I was hopeless. My gramma Norma was the ringleader. I hold her personally responsible for the height of my brow.

My dad’s parents, Mary and Owen Robertshaw, emigrated to Ontario from Manchester, UK, a decade before I was born. For me, they were a living link to history. When I got old and bold enough, I plied them with questions about living through the war. They told me all about sleeping in bomb shelters while the Luftwaffe tried to level the industrial town where they lived.

My late grampa Gord (to whom this dissertation is dedicated) gave me my only connection to academia. He spent decades as a fixture of the Ontario Agricultural College at the University Guelph and made sure we all went to the annual open house weekend each March to see the cow with window in its side and the various other wonders of this secret universe.

When, at the “mature” age of twenty-six, I had the opportunity to start university, it had to be Guelph. In History, though; no see-through cows for me, thanks.

Crucially, the month before I started my undergrad, I found myself in Haiti. I had been working as a videographer and attending a church that had a denominational connection to Haiti. In 2011, while Port-au-Prince was still rebuilding from the earthquake, I started asking around about ways I could get involved. “Sister” Joan Sider let me tag along as a photographer and French translator with a delegation sent to attend a conference in Delmas 33. I met many Haitian friends and travelled around the capital and up to Gonaïves in the northwest. I asked endless questions, and our hosts—Oliam Richard, Elsa Hilaire, Michel Fortunat and Ludlène Baptistin—graciously indulged my curiosity and taught me the basics of their language (apparently quite different from French). I was hooked.

I returned to Haiti three times over the subsequent years. A friend, Mark Wallace, who works for an NGO, brought me along as a videographer and gave me some time to poke around in the national library, bookstores and a couple of museums. My time in Haiti and the friends I made there were essential to the processes that led to this dissertation. They helped me find Haitian books and also taught me things about their country that couldn’t come from books. In one of my fondest memories, I helped Elsa’s nine-year-old daughter Jhessicka prepare for a test on Haitian history. We quizzed each other. She won.

Days after returning from my first trip to Haiti, I started at Guelph, and, for the first time, I started to succeed in school. I’d like to suggest that my teachers learned how to teach me, but, in classes of 300, the onus was clearly on me to learn how to learn. Fortunately, by this point, I had come around to seeing school as a gateway to knowledge, rather than an obstacle. My natural curiosity found a home, and I started to thrive.

Not to say I didn’t have some great teachers. Karen Racine, who ended up my Master’s advisor, stands out the most. She was my compass and my constant encourager. Victor Fernandez, who was a grad student on loan from the French Riviera, was the first French teacher who made me feel like I could réussir. I had the unmatched privilege of having Dawn Cornelio—in person, no less!—before she flew away to Scotland to be with her one true love. William Cormack, Peter Goddard, Christine Ekholst and Alan MacDougall also deserve honourable mention.

As I progressed at Guelph, I looked for opportunities to learn about Haiti. Drs. Racine and Cornelio both signed off on independent study courses about the country, since there were none offered. Soon, my passion for Haiti led me to Joubert Satyre (to whom this dissertation is also dedicated), a literature professor from Haiti who happened to be at Guelph. Joubert was a mentor and a friend, patiently correcting many of my ideas about his country, directing my reading of Haitian literature, all the while struggling with health issues. He ended up on my committee for my Master’s thesis. Sadly, when I returned to Guelph to teach in 2023, I learned that Joubert had passed away, far too young, from pancreatic cancer. He will be missed by many.

During my Master’s, I had the opportunity to travel to Boston for an intense, three-week Haitian Creole class. My instructors—Marc Prou, Patrick Sylvain, Lesly René—gave me the gift of speech. If not for them, I wouldn’t have been able to talk to Haitians in their language or access the growing body of writing in Creole. I would, in a sense, be sak vid pa kanpe—the empty bag that can’t stand up. I’m forever grateful for this gift.

***

I arrived at York in September 2017 with the notion of becoming a doctor.

It was a slog.

My second son arrived that November.

We went on strike (in fact, the longest post-secondary strike in Canadian history). 

We had family health struggles and a global health catastrophe (I was supposed to be at the Schomburg Center in Harlem in late March 2020—I wonder if they’re still waiting for me to show up?).

Haiti, meanwhile, slid into a sustained period of instability.

Through it all, my classmates at York made the process twice as pleasant and half as demoralizing. Karen Dancey, the administrator’s administrator, kept me and everyone else in the department from getting lost at sea, bureaucratically speaking. And my distinguished professors made sure I kept sailing forward, doling out guidance and insights with apparently no end. Paul Lovejoy was first and foremost, but no less helpful and supportive were Marty Klein, Deb Neill, David Trotman and Margaret Schotte. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall (whom I consider an informal advisor from afar) provided critical perspectives by way of Twitter—sinking ship though it was.

Finally, the exceptional work of lots of people I’ve never met has been fundamental to this project. There are too many to mention; their names appear in the footnotes and bibliography. But I would like to note a few: Marlene Daut, Laurent Dubois, Regine O. Jackson, Chris Bongie, Chelsea Stieber, Brandon R. Byrd, as well as the late Léon-François Hoffmann and Tyler Stovall. And, above all, Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

***

As any historian will tell you, no narrative exists in a vacuum. Multiple, intertwining stories always run side-by-side. I’ve sketched out my life story as a clumsy pursuit of knowledge, but a second, no less important plotline was going on all the while in the background. Or, more precisely, the foreground. Family is, in some sense, what this has all been about. Without my parents and grandparents, my siblings, my in-laws, my two sons, and most of all, my wife Kiersten, I might have gone in another direction at any point along this trajectory and you would be reading someone else’s dissertation. They kept me grounded and made my life exponentially more chaotic in the best ways. And while, at times, some of them may have slowed down the process (like when I was home with two rowdy boys during a pandemic) they saw it through to the end.

Although I’ve already dedicated this work to grampa Gord and to Joubert, it really belonged to Kiersten from the start. The whole time I was sitting at home reading and writing, she was across town at an elementary school teaching kids how to read and write. And you can bet she was meeting them at their natural curiosity.

30 September 2024

There's something about Haiti

In the summer of 2015, I had the opportunity to attend the Haitian Creole Summer Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. For three weeks in July, I attended daily classes at the university where, under the guidance of eminent Haitian scholars like Marc Prou and Patrick Sylvain, I greatly improved my speaking, reading and writing abilities in the Haitian language. There were around thirty students total, divided into two groups: Beginner and Intermediate/Advanced. Nine of us were placed in the Intermediate/Advanced group. We were all there to learn Creole, but apart from that we didn’t have much else in common. The group consisted of four Bostonians and five academics who had travelled to Boston for the Institute. Among the Bostonians were a high school French teacher who had numerous Haitian students in his classes, a social worker and housing activist, a young university undergraduate student of Haitian descent, and a retired poet. The five academics were a Canadian gender studies professor at Concordia in Montreal, an American PhD student in ethnomusicology at the University of Pennsylvania, a Polish PhD student of literature at Leeds in the United Kingdom, a Puerto Rican PhD student in anthropology at Cornell, and myself, at the time a master’s student in History at the University of Guelph.

Despite our diverse backgrounds, we built a fine little community in that class. We had a lovely time learning about Haiti’s language and culture and getting to know one another. In the final week we had a little party—a banbòch—and during the preparations we made an interesting discovery about our little group: out of the nine students, eight were vegetarians (in my case, admittedly, a lapsed vegetarian). This struck me as too odd to be coincidental. Here were eight strangers from different countries and different walks of life, united only by a desire to learn Haitian Creole, and all happened not to eat meat. What was the connection between a strong interest in Haiti and the decision to be a vegetarian?

People refrain from eating meat for all kinds of reasons: health, religious custom, concerns about the climate, or a respect for all sentient life. In many cases vegetarianism is based on an ethical conviction. Factory farming—the mass production and slaughter of creatures who feel pain—is seen as unjust and inexcusable. A decision to refrain from eating meat can be based on a consequentialist (hoping to elicit change in the system) or non-consequentialist (personally abstaining from activities considered morally wrong) standpoint, but in either case the individual has a keen interest in pursuing some form of moral justice.

An interest in Haiti, likewise, can stem from an active commitment to moral justice. Much of the country’s history is characterized by injustice and marginalization. In the colonial era, nine-tenths of the population was enslaved and endured every manner of inhumane treatment. In 1791, this enslaved population challenged the injustice of slavery by rising up in insurrection, ultimately ending slavery and colonialism on the island. This was an event of tremendous historical importance in the progression toward universal human rights and national self-determination. And what was their reward for this significant contribution to human progress? Centuries of abuse and neglect.

The great powers employed alternating policies of exploitation and isolation against this young nation that had dared to challenge notions of white dominance. France forced an exuberant indemnity on their former subjects, trapping them in a cycle of debt and dependency and permanently crippling their ability to develop industries and infrastructure. In the twentieth century, the United States meddled endlessly in Haiti’s internal affairs. The U.S. occupied the country from 1915 to 1934. Despite the stated intention of bringing order, prosperity and democracy to Haiti, the Occupation exacerbated divisions and reinforced non-democratic politics, all the while enriching American corporations. The United States sustained some of the country’s worst dictators (most notably the Duvaliers), and generally subordinated the Haitian peoples’ interests to their own economic and geo-political concerns. All this has contributed to the situation of extreme instability and poverty in Haiti. Meanwhile, the United States has continually treated refugees from the very situation they helped create as pariahs at home. Haitian immigrants to the United States (and elsewhere) have been turned away at the borders and marginalized in the cities. As I’m writing this, the Biden administration is sending thousands of Haitian migrants back to a country where gang violence and kidnappings have become a fact of daily life.

The nine of us in that Intermediate/Advanced Haitian Creole class were aware of this historical injustice—it was part of what had drawn us to Haiti. Most of us were learning the language specifically to work with Haitians in our communities who were clearly the victims of centuries-old injustices. Some were also engaged with these injustices on a more abstract level. If Haiti has been the victim of history, it has also been a victim of historiography. Despite the paramount importance of the Haitian revolutionaries’ attack on the foundations of slavery and colonialism, Haiti has been tragically underacknowledged in history books and history classes. (For a thorough analysis of the “silencing” of the Haitian Revolution, see Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History). Accounts of the mass slave uprising (and the self-governing Black Republic it ultimately created) threatened dominant views of European superiority and the economic basis of the lucrative transatlantic trade. So white historians hushed up the Haitian Revolution.

Today, with 200 years of hindsight, history has justified the Haitian Revolution. On this side of the (apparent) global abolition of slavery, the colonization and decolonization of Africa, the Civil Rights movement and Black Lives Matter, it seems that Toussaint Louverture was onto something. We owe so much to the revolutionaries for taking a stand against racism. And yet Haiti continues to suffer the consequences of being right at the wrong time.

So how can we possibly atone for two centuries of abuse and neglect? With an estimated 10,000 NGOs operating in the country, clearly people are trying. But with so many trying to “save Haiti” it seems like everything has been tried and nothing will work. The place is too far gone. But, in view of the historical and historiographical injustices outlined about, we have no right to stop trying. Fortunately, we have gone about it the wrong way so many times that at least we know what not to do. Don’t, like the occupiers of 1915-1934, step in and start bossing people around. Don’t assume that you, the all-knowing foreigner, are best placed to know what needs to change. Don’t, like USAID and leagues of other international donors in the Duvalier period, simply keep your distance, throw money at the situation and expect unelected officials to use it judiciously. In both situations we forgot about one thing: the Haitian people. Change needs to begin with them. They were right in 1791 when they challenged slavery. They were right in 1804 when they challenged imperialism. There’s a good chance they know what needs to be done today.

Ask them.

In order to ask them, you need to speak their language. Which brings us back to that classroom in 2015. I haven’t stayed in touch with all nine of my classmates. I’m not sure if, like me, they’ve let their vegetarianism lapse. But I am sure they’re still speaking Creole and still trying to learn about Haiti from Haitians so that, in some small way, they can contribute to undoing centuries-old injustices.

We made an album for our childhood selves

I’ve told it to hundreds of undergrads: The titles of short works (songs and articles) go in quotation marks, while the titles of longer works (books, films and albums) are written in italics. I’ve written lots of articles and songs, but I haven’t produced many things with titles in italics—an indie-rock album (2007), a master’s thesis (2016) and a few translated novels (2014, 2017 and 2019), and that’s about it. But next week there will be a new one. No, I haven’t finished my doctoral dissertation. Next week my rock band for children, The Relative Minors, is releasing our debut album Play Music (hey, italics!). It seems ridiculous to say it because it’s a rock n’ roll album for children, but I think this is the thing I’m most proud of. It is my most authentic artistic expression to date. It was a collaborative work, to be sure. My wife was the primary or secondary writer on most of the songs, and the band, guest musicians and recording engineer made critical contributions. But much of this album is derived from my taste in music, my sense of humour and my interests.

They say you only have a year or two to write your second album, but you have your whole life to write your first. That is definitely the case with Play Music. As noted, I made a record back in 2007, but I was the drummer and not much involved in the song writing. I’m still extremely proud of that album (which, by the way, you can still hear wherever you stream music: it’s called Hold Hope, Oh Withered Tree! by Battle Creek). But Play Music is different. My wife and I have been writing it over the course of our lives. The newest song, “Play Music” was written from scratch this past spring, but the other 10 tracks have been germinating since, by my best estimate, 2002.

In 2002 I was in eleventh grade. I was also in a pop-punk band called Impolitics. I couldn’t play an instrument, but I was good friends with a great bass player called Chad (who, incidentally, plays the bass on Play Music), and I weaseled my way into his band as the frontman. How hard could it be to sing in a punk band, right? I’d always been drawn to music, and in particular to the idea of playing in a band (thank you Marty McFly, Bill S. Preston Esquire and Ted “Theodore” Logan), but I never had the discipline to sit down and learn to play an instrument. Too busy watching movies (thank you Marty McFly et al.). But in 2002, now in an actual band and surrounded by musicians and instruments, I finally sat down and learned my way around the fretboard. I started bringing a ratty old acoustic guitar to school and Chad and I would jam under the stairs. Under those stairs I wrote one of my first chord progressions that stuck. A decade later my wife and I had started The Relative Minors. We turned the ten-year-old progression it into a song called “F-U-N (Spells Fun)” and recorded a demo. Seven years after that, in late 2019, we recorded it professionally and released it as a single. It is Track 9 on Play Music. The oldest song on the album.

The pop-punk band didn’t last long, but it stoked my taste for the jam space, the recording studio and the stage. Over the next few years I learned to play the drums, and played in about a dozen short-lived punk, rock and experimental bands with Chad and various friends from school and church. In 2003, my last year of high school, we started a ska band called Pretty Big Plunger. This was where I really started writing music and lyrics. It probably wasn’t very good, but it was the start of something. We had a trumpet and a trombone player, and the format helped me start thinking about composition and orchestration. Summer of 2004 I went to a cottage with some of the band members, and I remember sitting in my car with a guitar and writing a ska song with a harmonized lead guitar riff intro. I wrote a verse progression, a pre-chorus and a chorus progression. The band never played it. It sat unplayed for about eight years, until 2012 when we reworked it, added a bridge and wrote some lyrics about a dinosaur rock band. We recorded it professionally in the summer of 2020. It is called “Stone Age Rock Star” and it’s Track 5 on Play Music.

Pretty Big Plunger broke up and then Chad and I formed a “progressive ska” band called Lincoln’s Revenge. We had a brass section, a piano and synth, heavy guitar parts and songs in wild key signatures. I was the main songwriter for Lincoln’s Revenge. By this point I was twenty and starting to consider myself a better songwriter than I probably was, and I tended to try to micromanage the rest of the group. I was trying to do too much with too little experience. It was unsustainable. It didn’t last. Lincoln’s Revenge broke up after about a year. The guitar player, Seth, then formed his own group called Battle Creek. It was essentially the same band, but Seth was the main songwriter and he operated on a more collaborative model. It was also a completely different genre; we started off as a folk-rock band but quickly turned to guitar-driven indie rock. Seth was (and still is) a far superior songwriter, and I benefitted greatly from collaborating with him. In this more laid-back atmosphere, I found the time to experiment and improve my chops on various instruments. I mocked up some guitar parts that the band didn’t use, but they ended up on Play Music: the main riff in “Why Spy?” (Track 5) and the “Withou U” acoustic guitar progression (Track 11). Also in Lincoln’s Revenge and Battle Creek were Chad—who, as noted, played the bass on Play Music—and Andy who now sings and plays trumpet in The Relative Minors. Seth, for his part, wrote and rapped a verse on “Stone Age Rock Star.”

When we recorded our ambitious album Hold Hope in 2007 Seth had his sister Kiersten lay down backing vocals on a few of the songs. She was a great singer and a great woman. I fell in love. Kier and I started dating in spring of 2007. While I was playing in Battle Creek, I was also working on a solo album inspired by Sufjan Stevens’s “50 states project.” I was going to write a song about every day of the year, exploring and connecting important events that happened on that particular date. The song about 1 September, for example, tied the outbreak of World War II (1 September 1939) to the death of the last passenger pigeon (1 September 1914) and the abrupt end of Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope (1 September 1980). I wanted to write a song about 4 August that would deal with Mozart’s marriage to Constanze Weber (4 August 1782) among other things. Kier was over, and we started working on it together. It was the first thing we cowrote. It was the beginning of a collaboration that greatly improved my own abilities as a songwriter. Like her brother, Kier is a way better songwriter than me. She can bang out six hits in an afternoon. The “Days of the Year” project fizzled out, but our relationship lasted. Ultimately, the chord progression and piano riff from the Mozart song made their way into our song “Walrus”— Track 6 on Play Music. You can actually still hear a very brief musical reference to Mozart’s Serenade No. 13 on the guitars about 18 seconds into “Walrus.”

Battle Creek recorded its magnum opus in 2007, toured the East Coast the following spring and then broke up in fall of 2008 when I gave up the dream and went to college for broadcasting. That fall also marked the birth of my first niece, Eden (take note: this will be important later). Kier and I got married in spring of 2009. I finished college and started a video production company with Andy. Kier went to Teacher’s College and became a teacher. In 2011, I started studying History at the University of Guelph. I had a lot going on, but, musically, I was in limbo. I continued collaborating occasionally with Seth, Andy and Kiersten, playing the odd acoustic show and now and then recording some of Seth’s brilliant folk tracks. The four of us also started writing a stage musical in this period, but it never materialized.

But it wasn’t until summer 2011 that Kier and I had the idea for The Relative Minors. Our niece was now almost three (I told you it was important) and we thought she would get a kick out of a bunch of funny songs written by her cool aunt and uncle. We recorded a demo CD for her for her birthday. The CD had 9 tracks including a song called “Animal Orchestra” (sung by Andy and accompanied by a bunch of syncopated animal sounds), a weird cover of “Who Stole the Cookies?” and three original songs that ended up on Play Music (“Sandwich,” “Pet” and “Grown Up”).

The Relative Minors met a surprisingly positive response in our hometown of Hespeler (Cambridge). We were asked to play at music festivals, birthday parties, Halloween parties, Christmas parties, libraries, churches, summer camps and even a pre-school graduation. This was a new demographic we’d never encountered as “regular” musicians. They were clamouring for children’s music, and apparently we knew how to make it. We immediately started working on a second demo CD, which we finished six months later. This one had eleven tracks including the aforementioned “Walrus,” “Stone Age Rock Star,” “Without U” and “Why Spy?” which were all made partly out of recycled parts. We also wrote a few songs from scratch, one of which was “Kings of Swing,” (now Track 9 on Play Music). We continued paying children’s concerts and having a great time, often backed up by Andy on bass and Seth on drums. In 2013 we wrote a few more songs, including “Library,” (Track 10 on Play Music).

So, there you have it. Apart from the title track, we wrote basically this entire album between 2002 and 2013—between seven and eighteen years ago. It has evolved and improved much, but a lot of the bones have been kicking around for a decade and longer. 

In 2015 I started my Master’s degree and our son JJ was born. His brother Wes followed in 2017 shortly after I started my PhD. Having young children and being a grad students is not particularly conducive to artistic creativity. The Relative Minors took an extended hiatus. But by the end of 2018, when our own kids were getting to be old enough to appreciate it, we decided it was time to reboot. JJ supported the idea. He’s a huge fan of the old demos, and sometimes still prefers them to the professionally recorded versions. We assembled a band from among our immensely talented friends and relatives and started rehearsing. We made our first professional recording of “Sandwich” in the spring of 2019 with the brilliant Zach Gerber at Skytrack Studios here in Cambridge (Seth and Chad had previously recorded a heavy post-punk album with Zach—which, I believe, included a song or two recycled from Battle Creek). We followed “Sandwich” with a music video. You remember I said that Andy and I started a video production company? Well, now he’s a full-time videographer and the brains behind our videos. We recorded six other singles in 2019-2020 and then laid down four additional tracks in summer 2020.

Eleven tracks. Eighteen years in the making. Play Music.

As I said, I’m extremely proud of this album. It’s been following me around for half my life, asking to be let loose. Seventeen-year-old Matt in the punk band would think it’s weird to be so fond of an album made for children, but 35-year-old Matt knows better. Seven-year-old Matt, for his part, would have loved it. I think seven-year-old Kiersten would have liked it too. We made this album for our childhood selves. We didn’t skimp on the production or the composition because it was “just for kids anyway.” Musically, we would have worked no less hard on a “regular” album. Lyrically, it is clearly intended for children—with songs about dinosaurs and sandwiches—but we didn’t underestimate the intelligence or the sense of humour of our young audience. Or their taste. There are no overriding moral messages on this album and there are no educational songs. There’s nothing wrong with songs with a message or educational songs; our friends in other kindie bands have great songs with important messages (Ginalina’s “Save the Mighty River” is a personal favourite). JJ learned the alphabet from Parry Gripp’s awesome songs from StoryBots. It’s good stuff. It’s just that, seven-year-old Matt didn’t listen to music for its moral messages or educational value. He listened to Weird Al and They Might Be Giants. Funny. Clever. Musically interesting. That’s Play Music.

As I think I’ve made clear, this album wouldn’t have happened without all the people that have made me into the musician I am today. And so, for my part, I want to dedicate Play Music to my parents, who saw my interest in music and encouraged it, to Chad, who took a chance on me, and to Seth, Andy and Kiersten. Also to Eden, because it wouldn’t have happened without her. And it wouldn’t have happened without JJ and Wes. I hope five-year-old JJ and three-year-old Wes like it as much as I do.

Polarizing a pandemic, and the problem with memes

A global pandemic shouldn't be political. But somehow it is. If mitigating a biological catastrophe can turn into a partisan issue, we're doomed. The trouble in the United States is that every issue, every event, every idea automatically fractures into two distinct camps. Neither side can think clearly about anything because they're so fixated on what the other side thinks. If they can't find common ground in the midst of a deadly pandemic, there is literally no possibility of productive debate.

The two-party system is partly to blame. Canadian politicians can certainly be as bull-headed as their American counterparts, but our multi-party system means that we are better equipped to avoid thinking about issues in strict binaries. Our politicians have no choice but to think of things from multiple perspectives. The ruling Liberal minority needs to find common ground with at least one of the other four parties in Parliament in order to accomplish anything. As a result, our political discourses are necessarily dynamic. Legislators can't get away with being unwaveringly dogmatic. They can't just sit around and wait for the next election when they might possibly have a few more seats.

Not so in the States. But the U.S. political system is not the only reason for the polarization in American society. Social media plays a big part. News and information are, of course, subject to the same fracturing into two camps that characterizes life and thought in general. When news and information came through TV, newspapers and radio, impartiality may have been an option. But now that we get most of our news and information through algorithmically predetermined online sources, it becomes more and more difficult for any source to take a balanced view. Everybody has to work harder and harder to counter the bad information you're getting from the other guys. Both sides end up prioritizing spin over truth.

But it's not even biased news that I think is the biggest problem. I think one of the biggest culprits is the general tone of online culture and, in particular, memes. 

Now, don't get me wrong, I love a good meme as much as the next guy. But think about it. What is the purpose and effect of sharing a political meme? They are literally designed to exaggerate a point of view by mercilessly mocking the other side. Hardly conducive to productive debate—just look at the comments.

These are the first two memes that came up when I Googled "political memes." Think about what goes on in your head when you look at each of these images. Do you feel like one is right and one is wrong? Does one make you chuckle and one make you angry? Does either make you feel enlightened, or like you've better understood some point of view?

Chances are one of these memes made you mad and seemed false and the other made you chuckle and seemed true. Most people will find this to be true, but they will disagree on which is false/cruel and which is true/hilarious. This, I think, is problematic.

This is the process: I find or create a meme that cleverly ridicules some politician or point of view. I share it on social media. My friends, most of whom roughly share my political sensibilities, like and share it. With almost no effort, I've proven how witty and brilliant I am. Everybody slaps me on the back and says "great job." We all have a good laugh. 

That's usually as far as it goes. I have made absolutely no impact on the discourse, except to entrench the views of my own side. 

If, however, the meme breaks out of my own little echo chamber and actually makes it to the people whose point of view I'm mocking, it certainly doesn't convince them that I'm right. It actually does the opposite. If anything, it makes them defensive and ultimately more committed to their own point of view. They don't think "Maybe I'm wrong." They think "You're wrong." Worse still, they think "You're wrong, and you clearly hate me, so I hate you too." In short, malicious memes do the exact opposite of what they pretend to do.

Most people are shackled to the notion that they can't possibly be wrong. When a person is committed to an idea, no evidence will make them change their mind. This isn't new to our polarized online world. As old Ben Franklin said way back in 1787, "Most Men indeed as well as most Sects in Religion, think themselves in Possession of all Truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far Error." One would think and hope that our unprecedented access to virtually all of human knowledge would make us better able to weigh information and find the truth, but the exact opposite is true.

If we simply want to prove how witty and enlightened we are, then by all means we should keep hurling angry memes and sarcastic tweets into the void. But if we actually want to fix the world, we need to stop casually scandalizing one another and relearn out how to find common ground. We need leaders who can unite the people, a herculean task in a society that is so reflexively and maliciously partisan. We  have a head-start with our multi-party system, and we should all work to protect and preserve it as essential to a dynamic political culture. But as long as we keep mainly expressing our politics through online sarcasm, we're going to be stuck in the kind of world where people attend mass political rallies in the middle of a global pandemic to prove a bad point.