Tribes

A lot of the trouble with the world is all of the tribes.

Take any bunch of people, and in no time at all they will have figured out what group they belong to, and who the other groups are.

It doesn’t matter if the groupings make sense, they’ll find them anyway.

I happen to be Canadian, as are a lot of other folks. It we are travelling the world, that is pretty much how we define ourselves. When we are at home, that isn’t good enough.

In that circumstance, the province that we reside in seems to be the big thing. Newfoundland, Ontario, Quebec? That seems to matter a lot.

But why?

Friends of mine live in the Okanagan area of British Columbia. A lot of tourists visit there. A lot of the residents seem to resent these people, especially the many who come from Alberta. Why is this? I guess because they come from the wrong side of an imaginary line.

In my own little community, many people were furious with folks coming over on the ferry from Vancouver on a long weekend when Covid restrictions were still in effect. The most common complaint was that if the visitors brought infection, they would overflow, “our,” little hospital.

“Our,” hospital? It is paid for with tax dollars. The visitors support it just as much as the locals do. If somebody around here gets Covid and needs a hospital, that’s where they would go. If it is a serious case, they get promptly sent off to one of the big-city hospitals. Why wouldn’t they? We pay for those just as much as the city folks do. None of the hospitals belongs to any particular community. We are not separate tribes.

Then there’s all this nonsense about race. During Covid times, idiots are pissed off at anybody that looks Asian. Many American cops have two sets of behaviors; one for White citizens, while being very different towards those who are Black. I guess being Black puts them into the wrong tribe.

The American President has the support of almost 40% of American citizens, simply because at some point they identified him as part of their tribe. They can’t let that go.

Religion, race, nationality, region, career, political bent, social class, school, team; it’s all a bunch of crap.