Dystopia Proofing the Tweenage Twins

Each year, I try and introduce a new culture of Christmas celebration to the Twins. This year it was Ukraine — art and history and cookbooks.

Additionally, I introduced some books that were not typical tween reading;

A graphic novel rendering of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaiden’s Tale” (exquisitely drawn) and Tim Snyder’s “On Freedom”. In short, a portrait of dystopia, and a guide to regaining freedom.

My son had picked up for himself “We are not Free” the tale of the Nisei who were interred during World War II.

And I have been re listening on Audible to George Takei’s , “My Lost Freedom”, using the sound of his quiet and calm voice as a guide to help me tell tell the parallel story of Japanese Canadians similarly interred on the West Coast to the twins. As a teenager I had worked at a gas station for a Japanese Canadian family who had been interred, and one day the younger brother told me of his experiences during that time, and the bitterness it left in him. I was stunned as the tale he told me was so against my 15 year old understanding of everything I believed Canada to stand for.

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/internment-of-japanese-canadians#:~:text=The%20forcible%20expulsion%20and%20confinement,any%20charge%20or%20due%20process.

Those memories from when I was a teenager cross my mind as I listen to today’s news S of the border and know any trend in the USA is refracted back into Canada. I remember as a kid my parents listened daily to reportage on Watergate — cutting into my and my sister’s cartoon time. I recall the stories of my mom not allowing my dad to take a research position in the US for fear I would grow up to be drafted. And of course there are the fragments of stories of my mom’s time as a refugee during the partition of India. The full story there, I will never know as my mother does not speak of it.

My parents conveyed to me a sense the world is hopeful; but can be a very hard place. My dad tended to emphasize Hope. My mom tended to emphasize Hard.

The world today is still hopeful, and about to become very hard. My generation (I am a tail end baby boomer) growing up in North America have few visceral memories of war; almost no memory of internment camps; certainly memories of racism, but none of mass deportation. No memories — until now — of rights systematically removed for all females from birth to adulthood.

I remember in November 2016 right after the USA election being at a C-Train in Calgary with the usual multi aged and ethnic mix of fellow public transit travellers, and suddenly a man in a good business suit started screaming — “OK you guys, you foreigners you <racist expletives> are going to find out now — what it’s really like. You are all going to have to go back to where you came from . “

No one confronted the man, we all just slowly backed away and ignored him in a kind of silent dread of embarrassment. I recall thinking; a week earlier this well dressed business suited man may have thought this, but would never have spoken it out loud . Now he felt permitted to spew his hate, emboldened to foam at the mouth loudly and publicly. In Calgary, Canada.

That was 8 years ago. A lot has gone south since then in the US with inevitable echoes in Canada. As parents we want our kids to be safe; and fear that is getting harder. We want them strong enough to confront hatred, yet choose kindness.

We seem to all be living in the Upside Down of Stranger Things. I was watching the scene at the top of this post with my daughter this evening. The scene reminds me of her battles with full tonic clinic seizures; where control of her body is taken against her conscious will; and I have watched her fight to take it back; sometimes crawling out of a seizure; sometimes halting a seizure in mid collapse and cranking her body upright inch by painful inch like a reverse marionette. It is like she is Eleven and the seizure is Vecna

My daughter gets very excited during this particular scene, happily yelling:

“What’s my Name!

What’s my Name.

Magic.

Fight!”

As parents, we want to protect our kids. Often we can not. We are not here forever. We are limited in our wisdom, our influence, our own mental strength. Eventually, our kids will have to go on without us. Hard times are coming. Harder times than many of us have faced over the last 60 years. We need to prepare our children; give them the strength to hope; and the grit to face hard hard things and defiantly call out:

“What’s My Name!”