Watching the peculiar, scary neighbours

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/07/2023 (812 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If I were a religious person, I’d be thanking God every morning, afternoon and night for an extra long grocery list of items.

Item No. 1: my Canadian citizenship. I was born in a foreign land. There was trouble there. I was an infant. And my family took me out of a country that had become a snake pit of every kind of authoritarian left and right.

My parents had no way of knowing where we were going, but they were certain we were leaving. They weren’t positive that we wouldn’t be detained or worse. We were fleeing a dictatorship. But months later in an Austrian refugee camp, my parents got what they prayed for — a green light from Canada. Not a day goes by where I am not thankful to Canadians for creating a democracy that is pro-immigration and pro-refugee, which is what I was.

All who read me, and have ever listened to my voice know that I will always identify with being a refugee.

If I were religious, I’d be thanking God. I am respectful of people who are believers. How could I not be? My hero, Mike Adler, was raised an Orthodox Jew. I never have a moment of doubt as to what his parents were thinking as they were drawing their final breaths in an Auschwitz gas chamber. I know they were asking God for help.

And whether or not I comfortable admitting it, I know that one reason why I refuse to be religious is because if there is a God in Heaven, he knows of the hideous chip on my shoulder. I strongly object to his decision not to help the inmates at Auschwitz.

But, of course, that isn’t even remotely rational.

Blaming God for the Holocaust is emotionalism — not realism. The Nazis are responsible. God didn’t murder my grandparents. Hitler did.

God didn’t open the gates of Canada to my parents and me. Canadians did, democratically electing a government that chose to admit more than 37,000 Hungarian refugees. We were three of them. If I were religious, I would thank God several times a day. I don’t happen to be.

So I thank Canadians.

I thank them with every column and podcast.

Today I need to thank them because I am having trouble removing the thought from my head that the country next door to us has a culture that has gone bonkers.

I am not talking about many millions of Americans wanting to elect a person to the presidency who has been impeached twice and is facing multiple criminal counts in what could be three separate criminal trials. Beyond that, in a recent civil trial, a jury said he did indeed sexually attack a woman in a department store decades ago.

The judge declared that Donald Trump is a rapist and yes, he used that word, because he said Trump forcibly penetrated a woman.

But that is now relatively old news.

The U.S. story driving me bonkers right now is the ridiculous debate going on about whether Blacks benefited from slavery.

No, I am not kidding.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is defending the idea that children of Florida need to learn that Black people acquired skills while being enslaved. He and his minions argue that many Black men learned how to be blacksmiths while being enslaved.

This discussion was made even sicker when a Fox News personality, who happens to be Jewish, said Nazi concentration camp inmates, primarily Jews, developed a strong work ethic in the camps.

For all the stuff we hear about cancel culture, Greg Gutfeld still has a job at Fox. He is lucky that the president of that company isn’t named Charles Adler.

The grandson of a very hard-working Josef Adler would tell Gutfeld that Josef did not need the Nazis to teach him the work ethic, before the Zyklon-B gas was forced into his lungs, asphyxiating him along with his wife and kids and uncles and aunts and cousins.

The comedian-turned-Fox-personality has been condemned by the White House and human beings everywhere in the U.S., Jew and non-Jew alike.

But he said this days ago, and he still has a job.

Perhaps this is the company’s way of demonstrating they are more dedicated to some tortured definition of the work ethic, than they are to decency.

Just one more reason to thank you, Canada, for allowing me to be Canadian.

» Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster. This column was previously published in the Winnipeg Free Press.