Covenant Zone: taking action for Canada

Ambleside Park, one of the most beautiful spots in West Vancouver, is poised to become the most polluted area in the entire Greater Vancouver Regional District.

I invited a colleague to join us for both tonight's Blue Revolution meeting, as well as our move to counter-protest the cretinous MAWO [Mobilization Against War & Occupation] rally inexplicably held in the waspish upper class stronghold of West Vancouver (millionaire parents, do you know where your spoiled teenagers are...?).
My colleague raised his eyebrows and muttered the same lament that's become all too common in our cynical times: "What's the point? What can you accomplish?"

Something. We can accomplish something. One thing, each time, every time. We can hope to accomplish so much more by actually doing things, than by just sitting back and expecting problems to go away on their own.

Fighting for what is right and true is like taking care of your teeth. Our teeth are one part of our bodies that do not fix themselves, they do not get better over time if left unattended. They rot. They can even poison us if we do not take action to fix them.

We cannot ask oppressed muslim women in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, to shed their burkas and voice their rights to dignified treatment, if we in the comfort of the west take no stand for them, against the same enemies when they manifest themselves on our shores.
We cannot ask any reform-minded muslim reader of the koran, genuinely prepared to abandon the bloody road of his religion's past, if we are not prepared to meet him halfway on our road, facing up to the same enemies trying to run us over as we hike towards each other.
We cannot ask for problems to fix themselves. The rot will not stop of its own accord... that's why it's rot. It can only grow.

Imagine the morals of a human being who would parade with a sign demanding that Canada withdraw her armed forces from Afghanistan. What do they expect would happen to the women of that country, were we to just leave? Will the women get to suffer even more hobbling shackles than those they are already forced to endure? Can there be a living human being who might sincerely dream that the abominable conditions for women in that nation would Improve in the hands of an even more islamic-leaning mode of government? What else could one imagine would be their fate, should we pack up and leave them to their unreformed sharia law?
Make no mistake about it: the people rallying in West Vancouver are taking action to bring physical harm against the women of Afghanistan; whether that is the goal they set for themselves when they wake up in the morning does not reduce the cause-and-effect that will result from their actions. What actions shall we take in turn, to counter theirs?

Imagine the disconnect from reality that would drive a human being to parade with a sign demanding we unleash the 17 failed terrorists so recently apprehended in Toronto. After London, after Madrid, after Mumbai, after all the death and destruction caused by other readers of the koran, is there any moral reason to leave ourselves defenseless to similar horrors in Canada? MAWO wants these failed terrorists freed. Freed to do what, exactly..?
Why not come down to West Vancouver and ask them to continue the logic of their thoughts, why not ask them to defend the indefensible?

How dare we to expect others to fight our battles, take care of our problems, when it is within our obligations as well as our opportunities to take action for what we all know is right?
Let's take action for Canada, for the Canada we vaguely remember from a childhood dream, for the Canada we would wish our nation to become, for the Canada that we need to be.