Civil War in the Supermarket
Today I mourn the death of a delusion. The delusion that by putting down my verbal weapons and offering an olive branch, I could co-exist peacefully with the social justice warriors in my midst.
It was a dream hatched in 2013, when, exhausted from six years rancour and confrontation, I thought I should give peace a chance. So I tried a new approach. Rather than engage them with words, I engaged them with smiles. And then they began to smile back, however contrived those smiles may have initially been. I built up relationships one person and at a time, until their numbers reached a critical mass and suddenly the word was out: I wasn’t so bad after all. In other words, the strategy seemed to be paying off. I was making progress. Then it happened.
Without warning or expectation, I found myself in a no-holds-barred shouting match with an evangelical Leftist in the village supermarket, locally famous for his boorish intrusions and unwanted observations. On this occasion, I attempted to quickly brush by him in my urgent journey to the bathroom at the back, but I failed to dodge one of his gratuitous anti-Trump remarks. This time it was about his desire to shoot the President. That was the spark. The lighted match was my quick retort that I would rather shoot him, the pious preacher of progressive depravity. An explosion followed. I left the store shaken, contemplating the potential fall-out as I walked to the car. News of a verbal fracas can travel twice around this island community before my counter-narrative would have a chance to put its boots on. That one incident could undo three years of fence-mending. It’s back to square one folks. So ends my experiment in inter-faith dialogue.
In the days that followed, I tried to make sense of the incident, but it didn’t take me long. I came to realize that it was just one skirmish among millions across a broad front stretching from Europe to North America and Down Under. Battles that are being fought not only in parliaments and on the streets, but within families and between friends. It is a culture war that became an ‘uncivil’ civil war with ominous indications of becoming something much worse.
Welcome to the Last Stand of Western Civilization, everywhere on the brink of breakdown and chaos. Our nations are the venue for the eradication, displacement or absorption of resident Europeans and Euro-North Americans. It is hard to imagine that any vestige of our Western heritage can survive a human tsunami of the frightening proportions that some predict. Think not of millions or even tens of millions, but rather hundreds of millions of migrants and refugees who may descend upon us like locusts to strip our cupboard bare, crushing our already straining welfare state under the weight of their insatiable demands. All with the aid of the rootless cosmopolitan elites and the politicians and media hacks who do their bidding. Think “Camp of the Saints”, Jean Raspail’s nightmare. We are only seeing the first instalment of an ongoing migration of epic scale.
But the demographic shake-up is not simply a matter of mass immigration, but of migration within nations themselves, and within cities as well. What Bill Bishop called “The Big Sort”. What is interesting is that unlike former times, in America at least, more and more internal migrants are motivated to move not for economic considerations, but to seek out communities of people much like themselves. In fact, almost one in three Americans (100 million) have moved from one place to another in the last decade alone. Not only by region, or from Blue State to Red State, or from city to city, but from one neighbourhood in a city to another, all to congregate with like-minded people in homogeneous pockets that are becoming more homogeneous over time. In other words, a nation that progressive politicians proudly proclaim to be diverse is, upon closer inspection, a federation of nations which consist of ideologically inbred clusters of self-segregated believers. To paraphrase Robert Putnam, Americans, among others, prefer to “bowl” not only with people who resemble them, but people who agree with them too. Mobility is not promoting diversity, but quite the reverse. So much for the melting pot and the myth of assimilation.
Read the rest of Tim Murray’s article at the Council of European Canadians
