We’re silent on Ford’s greatest betrayal of our children
Let me start out by saying that I am prosex ed. When the kids were little and asked about marriage, I always told them that they can marry a man or a woman. We never used nicknames for their genitals and have always explained how bodies work with nary a blush or titter. I gave my 13-year-old son “Girls and Sex” by Peggy Orenstein. The YA books they’ve read include a healthy number of transgender and gay protagonists. These are only a few examples — rest assured, I am totally full-assing this progressive sex ed thing!
However, I’m taken aback by the decision we seem to have made, as a province, that our children’s understanding of issues related to sexuality and sex is more important than their ability to exist at all. Why is it that so much public discourse has been so energetically devoted to the importance of updated sex-ed curriculum, and so little has been devoted to the Ford government’s decision to destroy any sense of environmental responsibility?
About a year ago, I was briefly running through my Facebook feed, and I paused at a picture of the earth, turned a burnished brown colour, with an article about scientists’ new prediction that the earth would be uninhabitable within 80 years. My daughter, who was ten at the time, had walked up behind me, so her voice, shaky and uncertain, surprised me: “What is that?”
And so I was tasked with the unthinkable: explaining to my child that the best and brightest scientific minds in the world have come to the conclusion that the human race is rushing, eyes wide open, toward its own extinction.
Since then, she’s mentioned, in a heartbreakingly offhand way, that she’s not having children because the world is ending in 80 years. What can I tell her? Should I shut off the radio and stop her from reading the newspaper so she doesn’t know that in her country — her supposedly safe, clean country — the north is burning and the south is parched? So she doesn’t know that the Netherlands’ highways are melting, and England’s green and pleasant land is brown? That people are dying from the heat in places as close as Montreal and as far away as Japan? That China’s air pollution kills 4,000 of its people every day? EVERY DAY? That her own federal government has ceded to the worst polluters in our country, agreeing that it would be “too onerous” to obey the feds’ original sustainability targets? Too onerous. Too onerous. More onerous, I suppose, than hundreds fleeing their burning houses in Alberta, B.C., and now Parry Sound — only three hours away from our home. More onerous, I suppose, than relocating entire communities swamped by rising sea levels.
I wonder sometimes if our culture of apocalyptic storytelling has made our own end unrecognizable to us, conditioning us to think that the end of the world looks like “Mad Max” or the “Planet of the Apes.” Would we take things more seriously if there were aliens or giant asteroids involved, or if our kids were being rounded up for Hunger Games? But that’s not what the end of the world looks like; instead, it looks like the butterflies and bees dying off, and like forest fires the likes of which we’ve never seen. It looks like today. And yet we elect prime ministers and premiers who make environmental destruction even easier.
It was a mistake to call it climate change. “Change” has been ingrained in our culture as something we must accept, for our own good: we say that the only constant in life is change; we say that a change is as good as a rest; we say that winds of change are blowing, and that we shouldn’t fear change. The word has been granted a kind of manageability and inevitability that should never have been associated with global environmental destruction. From the very beginning, it should have been called the Extinction Process, as in: “The Extinction Process has brought record high temperatures to the Arctic.” Perhaps that would’ve inspired people to take it seriously.
Progressive sex ed is important, and to cancel it is a betrayal of children increasingly being thrown in the deep end of sexuality, without any kind of preparation or contextualization. But Ford committed a much greater betrayal of our children when he robbed them of what little environmental initiative and responsibility the provincial government had put in place. Where were the demonstrations about that? Where is the outrage about a generation of children who, simply because they read the newspaper, bear the knowledge that they will see out the end of the world? Where is our love for them?
Latham Hunter is a writer and professor of cultural studies and communications; her writing has been published in journals, anthologies, magazines and print news for 25 years. She blogs at The Kids’ Book Curator.