COLUMN: Tales from the Gravel Ridge – Our family escaped political dysfunction

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/02/2024 (301 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Living in Canada as we do, many of us have no sense of what it means to live in a war zone. Added to that, I think we also take for granted the fact that we live in a civil society.

The experiences of the home life of my family when I was a child and young person living in Rosengard were ones that continue to permeate my thinking with a sense of consideration and respect for others. In a formal context the rigour with which our teachers at the Rosengard School taught the mandatory subjects on the curriculum were in their own ways lessons on how a well-functioning society should educate its children. Along with these formal requirements, our teachers, some of them young and inexperienced, nevertheless modelled for us a way of interacting with their students in ways that demonstrated respect for each one of us as persons who were entitled to certain rights and dignities. These were not formal, structured lessons, but rather models of how to live in meaningful relationships within society.

The death of Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident who fought valiantly for what he firmly believed would benefit the people of Russia, is a sobering reminder not to take our democracy for granted. By seeking to serve, with integrity, those who rely on us, we have the opportunity to do so in a very wide range of possibilities. This should surely apply to those whom we have elected under our democratic system of government, but is also applicable to all of us in our day to day lives.

Being a member of an immigrant family, the stories from my earliest recollection are those of instability as experienced by my parents on a massive scale. My father having been born in the village of Smolyane, in Ukraine, formerly the Mennonite village of Schoeneberg, in 1895, and my mother also having been born in Ukraine in 1903, had experienced during their youth a world war, revolution, anarchy and civil war, in addition to famine and a devastating typhus epidemic. These were indeed the stories that permeated my consciousness of life in a far away country, one from which my parents and eldest siblings had been able to escape. Many of their family members and friends had similar experiences. Some of these remained in that country where it seems to this day the only way to survive is to keep your head low and your opinions muted. By all means, avoid voicing your views on what you consider needs drastic improvement in your country.

My recollections of winter evenings in our Rosengard home might be of my older brothers playing guitar and singing, or perhaps playing the harmonica. For us younger children my memories of such winter evenings focus on our father reading from a range of newspapers, and sharing items of interest with our mother. Our mother meanwhile would sit near the small silver-coloured cast-iron wood-burning stove, perhaps darning socks, and relating stories of her childhood and youth in Russia, now Ukraine, to us. Many of these accounts are mine from the lived experience of hearing our parents sharing their stories and events with us.

In recent times I have begun to realize more and more that the democratic freedoms we enjoy in Canada are by no means to be taken for granted. There are strident voices in our society selfishly challenging the Canadian tradition of peace, order and good government as stated in our Constitution, in order to reframe society to their image of what our country should look like and how we should act. Darker times are always a possibility when agitators begin to collaborate with those who provoke political dysfunction. I think it is high time that we remind ourselves that striving for the common good, where all have the opportunity to live with dignity, is essential for the good of all of us. It is incumbent on us to treat each other with respect and common decency.