Even as we fight jihadists overseas, parts of the West are hacking away at our figurative walls from within, weakening our confidence in our system.
And many of our leaders are so blinded by their disdain for our system of government and culture that they condemn them both regardless of the facts.
Steyn has a disturbing piece about the Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff’s account of the death of two little children as a condemnation of Canada itself, which he has difficulty imagining as a country, it seems:
“To imagine it as a citizen is to imagine it as a resident of Yellow Quill reservation in Saskatchewan would have had to imagine it, this Canada where two half-naked children died in a snow-covered field in the sub-Arctic darkness because their father tried to take the sick little girls to his parents and never made it, and all you can hope is that death was as mercilessly quick as the cold can make it. What does a resident of Yellow Quill imagine, what do we Canadians imagine our country to be, the morning we learn that children have perished in this way? It is surely more than just a tragic story of one family. It is a story about us.”
Ah. The deaths of two native children is clearly a story about Canada's failings, he says. The poor father was compelled to make a desperate journey in bitter cold, seeking help for his children. How could Canada be so distant as to require that doomed dash through the night?
But as tragic as that episode is, and the image of two little children dying that way is truly horrifying, is it a story about Canadians? About us? I think not:
“Their father tried to take the sick little girls to his parents and never made it.” I wonder what it takes to formulate it that way, knowing, as Ignatieff surely does, that Christopher Pauchay was drunk, so drunk that he was oblivious (or so we must presume, for he was found guilty merely of negligence, rather than sadism) to the fact that it was well after midnight, minus 50 with the wind chill, and he had dressed three-year-old Kaydance and 16-month Santana only in T-shirts and diapers. At 5 a.m., Pauchay was found on a neighbour’s doorstep, stinking of booze, frostbitten and aggressive, so that the RCMP were obliged to accompany the paramedics. It was not until eight hours later, in the hospital, that he mentioned the children.
As to “the sick little girls,” Santana wasn’t sick until her father’s carelessness made her first ill, and then dead; and Kaydance’s body was discovered with a cut on her leg, but, given the number of Pauchay’s knives found scattered on his path through the snow, or the others his brother-in-law had seen him putting under the sofa that afternoon, there’s no way of knowing whether, amidst the other abuses he heaped fatally on her, the cut was also her father’s fault—or more benignly the consequence of a three-year-old toddling around in her diaper during her “parent’s” all-day bender.
Why couldn’t Ignatieff have used words like “drunk” and “abusive,” or even “minus 50” and “dressed only in diapers”?
Oh, come on, be reasonable. He’s a caring, progressive party leader. Can’t go around being judgmental. Stick to the passive voice—“children have perished”—and the usual sentimental evasions. The price of “imagining Canada” Ignatieff-style is that an awful lot of cold hard reality has to be discarded.
But that's how you chip away the bricks that make up our confidence in our sytem of government and our free society, based on centuries of building our institutions and customs. You condemn us all for the failures of individuals, and use that as an excuse to refuse to defend our countries or our common free society--and even to condemn them, ignoring all the good we've achieved.
When our leaders are so eager to undermine what we've built, who can we count on?
Ignatieff has views all too common in the Western world. We need better leaders.
