Can Canada honour reason over passion?

Canadians like reason over passion. That is hardly the tenor of modern times. My feelings are mixed, as are my opinions. I try to be reasonable.

This is in reaction to Donald Trump whose feelings are monoliths, impermeable, and unmoving, and whose opinions are like his Mexican border fence, faulty, spendthrift, and silly. The man Trump most hates, Barack Obama, once said he couldn’t support “a dumb war, a rash war, a war based not on reason but on passion.” No wonder they don’t get along.

To Trump, you are a friend or an enemy, black or white. People are Republican or Democrat. His world is made up of friendly nations and “sh — hole nations.” Misogynists accuse women of having too many feelings. Trump has nothing but.

I began this column by distinguishing between feelings and opinions. I often see news stories about how people are feeling, an easy question. But unless they’ve suffered a personal catastrophe, it’s more useful to ask what they think.

For instance, I feel angry about the refusal of men to wear masks consistently or even correctly, i.e. a man in a Danforth cheese shop telling us loudly that he wouldn’t wear a mask because he has asthma, not grasping that asthma makes him more likely to die of COVID-19.

But I think Ontario should make masks mandatory. I cannot walk along Bloor St. W. because the blocked sidewalks make distancing impossible. Wear masks outdoors too. This is a good opinion, a reasonable one. My feeling about the cheese shop bro was merely briefly entertaining, an anecdote to bolster a useful thought.

When Trump was elected, childlike American reporters headed into previously overlooked Rust Belt states to uncover Trump voters’ feelings. The answer: hard-done-by and boiling with resentment towards liberals, Blacks and city “folk.”

But if they had been asked their thoughts, they would have talked more about money and how it is made. This would have helped their cause. Can industrialism return? Could they better market local goods? Could schools change to train rural students for new jobs? Why not raise taxes?

Equally, Canadian women have been the hardest-hit in the pandemic, with jobs generally done by women at their lowest level for decades. Child-rearing duties were still left largely to them, daycares and schools closed, and precarious jobs left them easily discarded without compensation.

How do they feel? Enraged, blasted out of existence, panicked by sudden poverty, one imagines.

But what do they think? That schools and daycares are essential services, that job security rather than precarious work is the basis of a working economy, that the minimum wage must rise, and that the whole economic system should shift to accommodate emergencies like COVID-19.

There will be more emergencies, you see.

What do I feel about the WE charity scandal? It is a worthwhile but minor story.

What do I think about its prominence? It takes time away from reporters covering financial news about government debt, the failure to provide PPE for all Canadians by now, how schools can be rejigged to accommodate every single student, the fact that women may never recover from this economic blow, that violence against women is soaring, that police are at a crisis level of incompetence.

Ottawa faces almost insurmountable problems right now; so do we. Work on that first.

I always read Star race and gender columnist Shree Paradkar, especially her slice-of-life stories, a variant of Reddit’s plaintive AITA subreddit. She recently wrote about a young teacher who had done a number of things that upset the principal at a Scarborough school.

What did I feel? Sad that the teacher had received so little guidance in college and then in a first job. What did I think though? Look, teachers can’t photograph young students at naptime and post it on Twitter. It’s dangerous and births parent lawsuits. The “N-word” should never be used in school without permission because students may be shocked and hurt.

School is intended to be rational. Young teachers and students are human; they make mistakes. But rules provide structure for learning.

Can schools find a balance between reason and passion? Can governments, corporations, workplaces, and families? Can we try?