What's To Debate?
This is becoming a truly tedious debate. But there you have it, human beings enjoy debating issues, and that's all right. As basically alike as we are, we are yet different one from another, with our own ideas of values and priorities, our own backgrounds of culture, ethnic traditions and religious adherence. We do though universally value freedom and fairness and the ideal of equality.
Sometimes, though, we get carried away by our distinctions and our insistence upon our rights to be 'different' if only insubstantially. It's as though human beings require a certain amount of tension in their lives, to give them a reason to forge on. Otherwise, what do we do? succumb to boredom, because everything is proceeding so swimmingly?
Some children for example - and let's not forget children's impressionability, inborn romanticism and personal needs - seem to gravitate to attention-seeking behaviours while at the same time seeking acceptance. The need to belong, for example, and to feel valued despite engaging in activities that seem to deliberately push away normalcy. Accept me for what I am, whatever I seem to represent.
Sometimes those two elements alone inform children and solidify their impressions of self. They become acquainted with the idea that they 'belong' to an identifiable group, then they may become aware that outside sources hold that group in less than outright esteem. Which outrages their sense of self, their idealization of group identity, causing them conversely, to value both all the more.
How to react to outside infringements on one's dearest concepts of self and group-identity? Defiance. Flaunt, in the most visible manner, one's identity. Thus bringing attention to oneself. Thus declaring oneself, flinging down the gauntlet. Here I am, this is what I represent, do what you will, and face my defiance, my presence. This tactic succeeds only in an otherwise freedom-loving, equality-dependent society, needless to say.
So we have children from immigrant families taking on the observable trappings of ethnic or religious origin that their parents may have been glad to leave behind. Children of immigrants who become, in defiance of the little discriminations that they find and which offend them in the larger society - more visibly immigrant, though they are not in fact, more than their parents before them.
They have the courage of their convictions because they are really no different at all than all those other children with whom they've grown up in Canadian society, knowing that this is a society overall, which seeks to accept and protect differences. Pride in difference blooms with the knowledge that there is safety where there also may be censure. So a little girl whose mother never wore a hijab and blesses Canada which allows her the freedom not to, decides to wear one herself.
She has decided to embrace her background and her religion in a manner never seen necessary by her parents, deliberately, to set herself apart and in a romantic sense, above. She takes pride in her acceptance by the others not of her background and religion, despite her deliberately-fashioned apartness. And they, for their part, exercise the delicate judgement of tolerance, careful to respect her self-esteem.
Most people want nothing to differentiate themselves from the crowd, strive to look exactly the same as everyone else, since that is the likeliest way to find acceptance, to be one of the crowd. Most children don't particularly want to bring attention to themselves as being somehow special or different. But some children actively search out ways in which to present themselves as being different, because these children have a need to be noticed.
Which brings us to 11-year-old Asmahan 'Azzy' Mansour, the soccer-playing girl from Nepean whose coaches in her team knew very well that in going along to a tournament in Quebec she would be sporting headgear not permitted in soccer leagues in the province.
Coaches and referees are well versed in the dos and donts of acceptable behaviour and apparel in the sports that they engage with.
There is a sports federation concern for player safety and for this reason there are items of clothing or jewellery which are not permitted to be used. This little girl's coach would be aware of such rules, and aware of the situation which pertains wherever tournaments occur. The child's parents have done her no favours by not teaching her that her religion demands no such overt sign of adherence or piety as the nijab.
In any event, the nijab, as a fashion statement, as a public statement of defiance in an otherwise-tolerant society used by women and girls to proudly proclaim their allegiance to an idea, an ideal, an ideology apart from religion itself, although purporting to be an integral part of religion, is not a matter to be declared one of acceptance or a symptom of rampant societal racism.
If the ideals of healthy and good-natured sport activities leading to comradeship in working together as a team is to be upheld, there is no place for deliberately divisive tactics as an attention-getting mechanism to satisfy the whims of someone who doesn't really understand the consequences of her decisions and their deleterious impacts on those who support her right to be wrong.
But the debate will go on.
Sometimes, though, we get carried away by our distinctions and our insistence upon our rights to be 'different' if only insubstantially. It's as though human beings require a certain amount of tension in their lives, to give them a reason to forge on. Otherwise, what do we do? succumb to boredom, because everything is proceeding so swimmingly?
Some children for example - and let's not forget children's impressionability, inborn romanticism and personal needs - seem to gravitate to attention-seeking behaviours while at the same time seeking acceptance. The need to belong, for example, and to feel valued despite engaging in activities that seem to deliberately push away normalcy. Accept me for what I am, whatever I seem to represent.
Sometimes those two elements alone inform children and solidify their impressions of self. They become acquainted with the idea that they 'belong' to an identifiable group, then they may become aware that outside sources hold that group in less than outright esteem. Which outrages their sense of self, their idealization of group identity, causing them conversely, to value both all the more.
How to react to outside infringements on one's dearest concepts of self and group-identity? Defiance. Flaunt, in the most visible manner, one's identity. Thus bringing attention to oneself. Thus declaring oneself, flinging down the gauntlet. Here I am, this is what I represent, do what you will, and face my defiance, my presence. This tactic succeeds only in an otherwise freedom-loving, equality-dependent society, needless to say.
So we have children from immigrant families taking on the observable trappings of ethnic or religious origin that their parents may have been glad to leave behind. Children of immigrants who become, in defiance of the little discriminations that they find and which offend them in the larger society - more visibly immigrant, though they are not in fact, more than their parents before them.
They have the courage of their convictions because they are really no different at all than all those other children with whom they've grown up in Canadian society, knowing that this is a society overall, which seeks to accept and protect differences. Pride in difference blooms with the knowledge that there is safety where there also may be censure. So a little girl whose mother never wore a hijab and blesses Canada which allows her the freedom not to, decides to wear one herself.
She has decided to embrace her background and her religion in a manner never seen necessary by her parents, deliberately, to set herself apart and in a romantic sense, above. She takes pride in her acceptance by the others not of her background and religion, despite her deliberately-fashioned apartness. And they, for their part, exercise the delicate judgement of tolerance, careful to respect her self-esteem.
Most people want nothing to differentiate themselves from the crowd, strive to look exactly the same as everyone else, since that is the likeliest way to find acceptance, to be one of the crowd. Most children don't particularly want to bring attention to themselves as being somehow special or different. But some children actively search out ways in which to present themselves as being different, because these children have a need to be noticed.
Which brings us to 11-year-old Asmahan 'Azzy' Mansour, the soccer-playing girl from Nepean whose coaches in her team knew very well that in going along to a tournament in Quebec she would be sporting headgear not permitted in soccer leagues in the province.
Coaches and referees are well versed in the dos and donts of acceptable behaviour and apparel in the sports that they engage with.
There is a sports federation concern for player safety and for this reason there are items of clothing or jewellery which are not permitted to be used. This little girl's coach would be aware of such rules, and aware of the situation which pertains wherever tournaments occur. The child's parents have done her no favours by not teaching her that her religion demands no such overt sign of adherence or piety as the nijab.
In any event, the nijab, as a fashion statement, as a public statement of defiance in an otherwise-tolerant society used by women and girls to proudly proclaim their allegiance to an idea, an ideal, an ideology apart from religion itself, although purporting to be an integral part of religion, is not a matter to be declared one of acceptance or a symptom of rampant societal racism.
If the ideals of healthy and good-natured sport activities leading to comradeship in working together as a team is to be upheld, there is no place for deliberately divisive tactics as an attention-getting mechanism to satisfy the whims of someone who doesn't really understand the consequences of her decisions and their deleterious impacts on those who support her right to be wrong.
But the debate will go on.
Labels: Realities
posted by Pieface @ 11:37 AM
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