~ If you actually care about a country, you don't just wave the flag ~

Working around younger people in music shops changed the way I think about generational differences.

You’re around people in their twenties, thirties, forties. You hear conversations when nobody is performing for an audience. You hear what people actually think when they’re standing around the counter, loading gear into a van, having a coffee, talking after hours.

And something struck me.

A lot of younger people seem to have developed an instinct that my generation was never really taught: don't automatically believe the story you're being given.

They don't necessarily agree with each other. They don't necessarily have some grand alternative theory of the world. But there is often an underlying suspicion of authority.

They'll question politicians.

They'll question the media.

They'll question corporations.

They'll question whatever official explanation is being handed to them.

You can bring up 9/11 and, rather than immediately accepting the conventional narrative as something beyond discussion, you'll hear: "I don't know. Something about that doesn't add up."

That's not necessarily proof that an alternative explanation is correct.

But the willingness to ask the question is important.

There's a kind of intellectual reflex there:

Who told me this?
Why are they telling me this?
What do they want me to believe?
What isn't being shown to me?

And then I look at people my age and older, and sometimes I see something very different. It's as if they have a cartoon version of the world in their heads.

"That Putin!"

"He's leading the country in the right direction."

"Orange conman"

And it isn't that I disagree in some cases... yes, "Orange conman bad"... it's that they don't seem to realize they sound like parrots, just repeating whatever propaganda tagline that's been drilled into them via whatever media so they can blend into their surroundings and not make waves.

We grew up with a much more centralized information system.

There were newspapers.

There were three or four television networks.

There were a handful of major broadcasters.

There were trusted anchors, trusted newspapers, trusted institutions.

If something appeared on television, there was an assumption that somebody had already checked it.

The gatekeepers were invisible.

And because they were invisible, they were trusted.

That doesn't make people stupid.

It means they were trained by their environment to understand information differently.

The younger generations grew up watching institutions collapse in real time.

They watched politicians lie.

They watched corporations get caught manipulating people.

They watched wars sold to the public with narratives that later turned out to be profoundly incomplete.

They watched social media expose contradictions between what governments, corporations and mainstream media were saying and what people were seeing for themselves.

So skepticism became almost a survival skill.

And then you get something like politics today.

Someone like Mark Carney can appear on television with the vocabulary, credentials, confidence and institutional legitimacy that makes an older generation think:

"Well, this guy must know what he's doing."

But that's exactly when I want to slow down.

Who is this person?

Who supported him?

Who benefits from his political rise?

What exactly happened during the election?

What assumptions are we being asked to accept without examining them?

What did the media emphasize?

What did they ignore?

And why?

I'm not saying the answer is automatically some giant conspiracy.

I'm saying "look."

Actually look.

That's the thing I find increasingly strange.

People will spend three hours researching which fucking guitar pedal to buy, checking prices, watching YouTube demos...

and then they'll accept a political narrative after watching a thirty-second news clip.

That's backwards.

The older I get, the less interested I am in being told what the truth is.

I want to see the machinery.

I want to see the incentives.

I want to see who owns what.

I want to see the documents.

I want to see the money.

I want to hear the argument from both sides.

And if somebody tells me, "Don't question that," that's probably the moment I want to question it most.

Maybe that's one of the unexpected things I learned working around younger people in music shops.

Not that they're smarter.

Not that they're automatically right.

But many of them seem to have already absorbed a lesson that my generation was encouraged to forget:

Nobody is coming to tell you the truth.

You have to go looking for it yourself.

But here's where I think we also have to be careful.

Questioning propaganda doesn't mean hating your country.

Quite the opposite.

We can love Canada and still tell the truth about Canada.

And yes, for a moment, let's even buy into nationalism.

Canada is a good country.

There are things about this place worth defending. There are people here worth loving. There is a social fabric, a history, a culture and an idea of Canada that is worth preserving.

But Canada also has a past.

And being an adult means being able to hold both things in your head at the same time.

Canada allowed people with Nazi ties and collaborators to enter the country after the Second World War.

Canada participated in the NATO intervention and bombing campaign in Libya in 2011.

Canada has supported or participated in military actions connected to wars and interventions in the Middle East.

And then there's MKULTRA - a CIA program involving horrific human experimentation that also had a Canadian chapter through the Allan Memorial Institute in Montréal.

These aren't things we have to turn into mythology.

They're historical records.

And that's the point.

A country doesn't become less worthy of love because you examine its history.

It becomes more worthy of respect when it is willing to examine it honestly.

I don't want a Canada that teaches its citizens that we're always the good guys.

I don't want a Canada that teaches its citizens that we're always the bad guys either.

I want grown-ups.

People capable of looking at their own country and saying:

"Yes, I love this place."

And yes, some terrible things happened here.

Now let's find out what actually happened.

Because patriotism without memory is just advertising.

And nationalism without self-examination is incredibly easy to manipulate.

Maybe that's ultimately what bothers me when I watch people my age sitting in front of the television and absorbing another perfectly packaged political narrative.

It's not that they love Canada too much.

It's that sometimes they don't seem to love it enough to look underneath the surface.

Because if you actually care about a country, you don't just wave the flag.

You learn its history.

You learn its failures.

You learn who benefited.

You learn who was lied to.

You learn what was hidden.

And you learn what happened when people stopped asking questions.

One of my favourite quotes gets to the heart of it:

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

That's usually attributed to George Santayana.

And maybe that's the grown-up version of patriotism.

Not "My country, right or wrong."

Not "Everything the government tells me must be true."

Not "The news wouldn't lie to me."

Not "Our institutions would never do that."

Just:

"I love my country enough to look at it honestly."

Because history isn't something that happened to somebody else.

It's the machinery underneath the floorboards.

And if you never bother to look down there, you might not notice when it's starting to move again.