A 30, 000 foot view
The helicopters whirr as I put toothpaste on my daughter’s brush. And I think about the view from up there. The 30 000 foot view.
Tiny ants gathered around rectangles. Splotches of colour: flags, fires, lights, tents. The blur of blue and white as police cars move in and out of the chaos.
Just outside the perimeter, yellow busses carry children to and from school. City cars, start and stop, moving along streets at the regular rhythm of a Monday morning while other cars sit idle in driveways.
From above, you can see it all: In the red zone, a fire is lit to prepare food for a family camping out in a truck; a block away, another is set as an act of arson. Swastikas fly alongside Canadian flags, and Ottawa citizens are harassed, some beaten, for choosing to wear masks. White supremacist interpretations of “freedom” have ignited into a violent occupation.
Police dip in and out of the red zone. Some sharing a beer with protestors, others handing out tickets. How do you reconcile a restrained approach to policing an occupation with the all-to-swift reactions to Black, Brown and Indigenous protests. With the ruthlessness with which BIPOC lives are taken?
Outside the city centre, those who can work from home sit at dining room tables, slippers on, hot coffees in hand, tapping on keyboards, waiting for virtual meetings to begin, while others choose between showing up for work sick or missing out on a paycheck.
An entanglement of inequity & entitlement.
How much of this can I convey to my 7-year-old who is wondering why a truck with a Canadian flag is parked outside his school?
How can I help him to untangle the threads and to think critically about what he sees? To understand the big picture and the white settler ideology that underlies it.
If I could, I would pick him up and place him in the helicopter seat beside me. Hear the sound of the whipping blades and feel the shaking seat. The precariousness of the hover-to-rise and that feeling of being ungrounded. We would watch as the school, street, neighbourhood shrink into abstract colours and dots, our perspective broadening.
From the 30, 000 foot view, we see clusters of (mostly white) people, flags, fires, chaos and follow the threads to map connections of entitlement. One runs from the downtown core to an ice cream shop on Wellington Street. Another moves between the blur of blue and white police cars and the red zone. One draws a line between an inflatable hot tub in front of the parliament buildings to a bitcoin account in the US.
Other threads are more difficult to untangle because they connect seemingly contradictory experiences, such as one that runs from a shelter where a newcomer stays with their family after testing positive for COVID and not qualifying for sick leave to a protestor. Interests converge around disenfranchisement (sometimes perceived, other times real) to reinforce a racial hierarchy.
We push a button in the cockpit and watch as layer after layer of the narrative of entitlement peels away (our magical helicopter comes with some pretty ‘unsettling’ VR capabilities).
We watch as the layers of white settler stories about “belonging” are stripped away until we can see peoples, resistance, resilience, and belonging as reciprocity and responsibility, not entitlement.
How can we create opportunities for our students to untangle these same threads? To critique the notion of belonging as entitlement. To think critically about the dominant narratives on repeat? To work collaboratively to create a more just society and world?
Surely not by avoiding challenging topics and issues.
Teaching in the time of COVID, in the time of the freedom convey (and social media) is not status quo. We must teach our students to unravel the threads of a complex and contradictory national narrative by focusing on the colonial here and now.
If we neglect to discuss what is happening around us, if we neglect to teach students about social media and its role in reinforcing individual perspectives, we are setting the stage for increased political polarization. Now more than ever, we must focus on cultivating critical thinkers, social justice activists, active and patient listeners, empathizers, collaborators and reflectors, decolonizers. If not, we are abandoning our children on a warming planet to dance in the echo chamber in which they are captive.
In Not Light, But Fire, Matt R Kay presents a framework for creating safe ecosystems in which we can engage in difficult discussions, emphasizing active and patient listening, self-regulation, and the exploration of the complexity and type of conflict we are addressing. While written for teachers, Kay’s work provides a roadmap for navigating a difficult conversations through a dialogical curriculum. So if you can’t get your hand on a a futuristic helicopter with ‘unsettling’ VR capabilities, but want to show your students the 30,000 foot view, pick up a copy of his book.
