Small Betrayals, Compounded Over Time

One of the reasons I have been antiwar is that the habit was cultivated in me by my parents from a young age, when they brought me to antiwar protests. It evolved into a feeling that I wasn’t able to articulate until now.

Most people came, and come, to North America from somewhere. People living here have cultural roots around the world, ranging from foods to spiritual practices to conversation habits and beyond. A country built on such numerous roots should not instigate wars in other countries. That risks alienating part of one’s own population, a population quilted from numerous roots, because it puts people from those roots in the difficult position of having to choose between their citizenship identity and their cultural identity. A country like that should focus on humanitarian and antiauthoritarian global engagements when necessity forces to engage in these things at all. Above all, it should focus on making a better life for the people who are tapestried or mosaiced into it and delivering on the social contract.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been having some stress-related symptoms due to the news. It wasn’t what is happening in Minneapolis that did it for me. Would-be authoritarian systems kill citizens of all demographics, this is how we always knew things would go (why I’ve been anxious for a while), and my heart goes out to all of the observers supporting their neighbors in this time of constitutional crisis. The stressor that prompted me to finally articulate what I’ve often lacked the words to describe was the Greenland situation.

For several years, I have had a bit of trouble praying at my ancestor shrine. Before that, ever since my parents’ divorce, I had trouble praying to my paternal ancestors. My grandfather (with whom as a child I’d had positive experiences; I learned what I now know much later) struggled with alcoholism. Between that and the undiagnosed autism that I suspect is pretty common in my paternal family, there were issues within my recently-deceased family that made it very difficult to honor those ancestors. That’s part of why I’ve sometimes tended to emphasize my maternal Scandinavian ancestry, in addition to the French Canadian side without many specifics.

My autism diagnosis has helped a lot with thinking about my paternal family. It gave me a framework for thinking about certain things and feeling more closure about why said things unfolded the way they did.

It also got me thinking, to generalize beyond my own family, about the small betrayals involved in upholding America — those little things like language loss, the pressure to assimilate to Anglo-American culture (which I’m defining here, quite loosely, as the British colonial descendants’ culture), and how these things end up rendering those of us who are not Anglo-American displaced from our own roots. America is hyper-assimilationist. There are costs to resisting it.

My father’s side of the family is French Canadian. Most of these ancestors moved to the United States after the US Civil War, where they lived and worked in the Little Canadas that set up their own French-language everything. My surnamed paternal ancestor immigrant was a polyglot doctor who wrote op-eds defending women’s education. He sometimes gave abortions.

French Canadians were big targets of the Northern States’ KKK in the 1920s: Our ancestors at that time were Catholic, but unlike the Irish, they didn’t speak English, nor were most all that interested in doing so. The KKK organized against them — with arson, sometimes, but more often by running for office and passing anti-French Canadian legislation. This situation pressured a lot of people to assimilate, and the French-language churches and newspapers were collapsing by the 1960s. Meanwhile, Anglo-Americans, particularly the wealthy ones, decided that they needed a moat of “acceptably white” people to buffer themselves against working-class people of all ethnicities, races, and religions agitating for better treatment, by turning them against one another, and people from my ethnic background were eventually folded in. Even so, my more recent ancestors still communicate information about our heritage, and when I was a kid, my father was very into genealogy. I knew from a young age that my family had French ancestry and that we’d been in the Americas for almost 400 years. I kept up with some news about Québec. I’d sometimes Google to see what my relatives were doing. The Internet, of course, enabled a lot of this.

From college acquaintances, I’d also come to learn that this heritage awareness is sometimes different in Québec itself. I think of it as a cool thing to be descended from some of the earliest colonists and to have an ethnicity that’s studied by geneticists due to some of the population dynamics in the early colony, but some people in Canada do use that deep-rooted background to put down people who arrived more recently. Coming back to tapestries, where (almost) everyone comes from somewhere else, just because two people have two different stories doesn’t make one of the stories more important than the other. (Perhaps my belief in nobody being better than anyone else comes from my mom’s Scandinavian side, where it’s a cultural norm. Learning about that as an adult made quite a few things from my childhood make sense.)

It’s important to me to stand with Canada and the Nordic countries on Greenland. While ruminating about this, I started thinking about my (few) MAGA relatives — most are on my father’s side of the family — and about how their actions and their beliefs are a certain betrayal of what happened to our ancestors in the early 20th century. They never suddenly decided to flip from conservative to MAGA, but I’m sure that a series of small severings, of small betrayals and submissions over the past few generations, landed them there, where they’re happy to take advantage of conditional inclusion and put on the tacky red hat and shout out the slogans and make their divisive mark on the social media toilet discourse. Once Canada made its statement about defending Greenland, I was very worked up — members of our extended family are on both sides of the border. Members of my extended family have also served in the military on both sides of the border. However … in about five generations, the French Canadian American community went from resilience to this situation.

America, again, is hyper-assimilationist. A certain amount of assimilation is expected — it is important to adopt certain values that are essential to a democratic society — but beyond that, there seems to be this assumption that to be something, you have to be all of it. You have to kill a part of yourself to even half-join what is being marketed to you.

That total assimilation is something that I haven’t believed in ever since my father showed me my great-grandfather’s French-language schoolbooks, long before I knew about the KKK’s role in why English eventually took over. Then, in high school, my classmates said threatening things about having me stripped of my US citizenship and deported because I have a French last name and didn’t have the “rightly patriotic” views on the war in Iraq. That’s when I started learning the French that my family had lost, even though I had to learn the Parisian dialect and not the Canadian one. I think we can see hyper-assimiliationist issues in partisan politics and political cults today, and we can also see them in certain problems that have arisen in polytheism online in contexts where the majority are American, with a sense of all-or-nothingness about it. (As one example of that hyper-assimilationist way of thinking: You can’t just worship the Hellenic Gods and love them as your own complicated self with your own complicated and messy identity and circumstances; you have to be a Hellene.) Why can’t we get ourselves out of this intractable situation?

And I don’t think that I’m alone here in noticing these wicked issues: Small betrayals of self, compounded over time, transform individuals from persons with interesting family histories and unique perspectives into self-alienated persons who are willing to ideologically contort themselves to support terrible regimes, or cults, or extremist groups. People need to have self-awareness that this problem exists before they would ever opt into a “Before We Were White”-style ancestral healing seminar (btw, it looks amazing), so it’s really tricky to help pull people out of that stuff.

Thinking about these issues has made me feel much more connected to my own past and much more able to build a positive identity. The more we can connect to our past, and the more we can come to have mutual respect for others’ different stories, the more we will have capacity to build the kinds of communities that we want to have and the kind of polis environment that we want to have, social media algorithms willing.

So. I’ve been thinking about my ancestor shrine quite a bit more over the past few weeks, with all of this weighing heavily on my shoulders. The Anthesteria is on the horizon soon, in just over a month, and I realized that I’m looking forward to printing off some more photos and giving water and incense.

Hermias, while talking about what we inherit from them and how souls pick the families that will give them the tests that they most need in their next lives, wrote that families have presiding daimons. We are the waters merging from many lines, deltaing into the ocean of generation, and we each ourselves are such wonderful mosaics. We bring forth the light of our current lives through the contexts in which we incarnate, and we owe it to ourselves and to one another to make the best of it that we can.