The Olympics

So back during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics, the media thought it was a wonderful idea to bash China on its human rights issues.

Now what I want to know is why we aren’t doing the same to Canada. Is the way we treat First Nations peoples any credit to our so-called human rights record?

This is written more out of frustration than because I think there’s any real literary merit in it. There isn’t. But I’m so angry it has to be expressed somewhere.

—

I hated the news running up to
the oh-eight Olympics—that need to search
in the crevasses of another language,
or the stretch across an ocean
for the English papers back in the old
home, for the simple acknowledgement
of the pro-China protests happening
next to the anti-ones. What happened to
reporting both sides of the coin? A feature
never seen in the media of this country
that I so want to proudly call mine.

This was supposed to be about sports,
not politics. So I believed until my
Canadian friends persuaded me
otherwise. Here was a forum for speech,
a chance to hang the dirty laundry
and maybe make some change!

Except now it’s oh-ten, and everything is again
lopsided, now in the other direction.

No one points a finger at the plight of our
First Nations, the one that we put them in.
No one questions the state of the homeless
in the host city of the most beautiful place on earth.
No one calls us out on our hypocrisy of being
a peacekeeping nation refusing to stop pumping
the greenhouse gasses destroying our world.

CTV anchors keep asking me, with smiles
on their faces and merchandise on show, do I believe.

What can be said but that I tend
not to commit myself to unstated blanks?

I’ll believe when we hang the dirty laundry.