The Structure of a Nation

July 1st, 2024

So we celebrate Canada Day next week and I want to share a reflection of how my beliefs about this country have changed a lot since 2020. I'd like to share with you what I used to believe until sometime before 2021 and why my beliefs have changed regarding both Canada and the United States. Make sure you have a coffee and some time to take this all in, because there is a lot to consider.

Let's begin by taking a step back. Image the country you live in whether it is the USA or Canada. Imagine your country is a nuclear family. The parents are a hetero man and a hetero woman who have agreed to a marriage where each spouse has specific roles to play. The man is the head authority of the household. His role in the family is to protect it from people who may harm the family as well as internal dysfunction. He is enforcer, protector, and in many situations, his word is final. His role may be seen as nurturing the kids, fixing the car, washing the dishes after work, or to do the budgeting, but its not. It's no surprise that the woman in this marriage is submissive to this man. She is seen as an innocent creature. She is ideally a mother. She is seen as someone who needs to be protected with her children. She is loving, caring, nurturing, and is the "heart" of the nuclear family. She gives life to the family. She "maintains" the family. She gives so much life to the family that it continues to grow as long as the enforcing protective man is present and "planting seeds in her garden." The perfect woman in this partnership has never been with any other man until marriage. Her innocence extends to her own purity and loyalty towards her one and only man. She prioritizes her own purity until the right man with the top protective enforcing qualities comes along. This is what is called a complementarian marriage.

The complementarian marriage in this nuclear family is a metaphor. It's a metaphor that shows how far-right nationalists, hardcore conservatives, and a lot of evangelical Christians view their own country. I know because I used to see Canada and the US like this since my mom, dad, and I attended Springs Church in the mid-90s. If one thinks of this complementarian marriage in the family that I described, there's a structure to how this family is supposed to be. The country, according to the religious right, is a virginal homeland chosen by God. This homeland needs protection, love, and care in order to preserve this metaphorical complementarian social order. To provide that care, love, and protection, the nation needs its perfect man (protector and enforcer) and perfect beautiful unblemished woman (submissive caregiver and maintainer) who will uphold the country's "family values." In this order, the parents MUST be heterosexual, otherwise there is room for chaos and the downfall of the nation. If a man shows nurture, care, meekness, and mercy instead of aggression and protective qualities like strength, a man isn't fulfilling his role in that perfect family. If a woman is a tomboy, shows aggression, or can literally fend off a powerful man, she is also not fulfilling her role in that perfect family. If men and women don't fulfill their roles in this metaphorical marriage, the country is doomed.

The man also has to protect the family against internal rebellion like children who throw tantrums or talk back or a wife who doesn't submit to his authority. If both women and children cross the boundaries he makes, he not only has to protect the structure from outside threats but he also has to enforce the order and law of his own household. The man does this by either using strong words or using physical force to keep order and to keep foes away from harming the family or structure. The things a man fights are also considered things that can harm the methods, nurture, and care that the woman provides for her children. If his own children become sympathetic to an outsider, the man may have to choose between his children and the structure of the family.

Another thing to note in this family is that there is no back-story of how they got here. That family is just the universal ideal standard, a symbolic couple with obedient kids that represent how a country is supposed to be. There's no story of how the children were born, how the couple met, if there was adultery in the marriage, or if they decided to get a divorce at some point. All we know is that this family represents the harmony of the country. All we know of, is that this family is a symbol of innocence. When nationalists think of the country they live in, through the lens of this perfect nuclear family, there's no room for a back story. There's no need for drama. There's no need to see how members of the family fought and reconciled. There's no need to talk about who was the favourite child and how there was hurt and exclusion because of favouritism. There's no need to see a miscarriage, domestic abuse, or the maxed out credit card from either the man or his wife drinking because the family is suffering. There's no indication of a struggle to become a great loving and flourishing family. What's important in the history of this family is how the man protected the structure, and how many children the pure untouched woman had only with that one man. What's important is that no other man has penetrated his home and family structure. This family is not like a body going through time. The family has no wounds or bandages and never says "The struggle is real." It's a family that is eternal with no history. It's just there. And that's the toxic positivity that nationalists fight for when they scream about wokeness or oppose movements like "Every Child Matters" or "Black Lives Matter." They cater to spiritual bypassing while refusing to understand their country as one with historical elements. They only want to see their country as one chosen by God that always existed in perfect harmony and structure.

This metaphor is exactly how the far-right talks about the United States or their own countries that they live in. And with the lack of awareness of their cognitive dissonance, they also discuss this metaphor with the inclusion of threats and conflict. And who brings the conflict to this complementarian marriage and family? Who or even WHAT does the man in the family have to stand up to in order to protect his wife, children, and the made-up social order of this nuclear family? It could be those with unfamiliar cultures from far away lands. It could be the next door neighbor with a mental illness that is undiagnosed. It could be anything on the outside that the family isn't willing to try to reason with or understand. This is also what nationalism does. And I may use some politically incorrect terms here. It paints foreigners and immigrants as threats to the family and its structure (which is why we start to get country citizens complaining about Indians from Punjab taking jobs or Latin Americans bringing in drugs or Mexicans raping women). Based on the lack of back-story, history in itself is a threat to the family structure. History, according to nationalists, causes division and destroys the harmony of the nation. It exposes the uncomfortable conflict or problems that brought that country to where it is today. It changes how family members see each other. It even changes how friendly neighbors see the family. History may have even revealed that the country in question is actually the opposite of the complementarian nuclear family it claims to be. This is why the far-right is threatened by Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, slavery, Japanese incarceration, Martin Luther King Junior, the US colonizing the Philippines, or in Canada, truth and reconciliation and the policies related to those things like the change of Bishop Grandin Boulevard to Abinojii Mikanah in Winnipeg. The nuclear family is now identified as far from innocent.

The other threat the family commonly faces is sexuality outside of marriage or heteronormative families. The woman and the kids in the family are highly threatened by foreign sexual acts and ideas which would threaten the structure of the home. Remember, in this structure, the parents and the kids HAVE to be heterosexual. The far right believes that the family and the country it lives in falls apart if this is not the case. If there are similar families with two dads or poly parents, binary, or trans-members, those families are considered not ideal or even threatening to conservative groups that hold up the nuclear family as a standard. It doesn't even matter if any of these other families do nothing offensive in public. It doesn't matter if they stayed in the closet. It doesn't even matter if they are virgins. It doesn't matter if they want to be left alone. Just because certain groups simply exist, conservatives are afraid of those groups taking away this nuclear family structure. The other kinds of families become foreign invaders. They become something that will overtake the kids or stop parents from fighting back for their kids. They become something that will change how society views what is morally right and wrong. The family is exposed to things that are not nuclear family friendly, just because something they see as abnormal exists. There is never a time when those other families will be considered appropriate or accepted. There is never a time when the two groups can sit down and discuss each other's differences or how to live in peace and harmony. They are simply evil just because they breathe the same air as straight Anglo-Saxon Jesus-loving citizens.

The reason nationalism is being hyped up is because their ideology is at the end of its life-span. They also want to keep this family structure because they feel it holds society together. It also keeps the rich from losing money and everyone else from thriving. And that's what they want: rich white straight men to rule the world, the free market to keep them at the top, and everyone else to stay in their place in silence and submission.

In this reflection, I also want to share what these folks may eventually do to people like me. I believe that anyone who is neurodiverse, anyone who has anxiety attacks, anyone who is schizophrenic or experiences paranoia, anyone who is autistc that protests like Greta Thunberg, anyone who helps people on welfare or gets poor people off drugs or off the streets, and just anyone who ACTUALLY loves their neighbors as themselves will be forced to comply to Eurocentric white culture. That's right, I said the quiet part out loud. We are on the edge of completely destroying our society and becoming either an autocracy or theocracy because of Project 2025. Just watching the US presidential debate in June 27th gave me absolutely no hope in the America where my relatives live.

In the next few years, autistics and neurodivergent individuals will become the next group most of the far-right and evangelicals will be targeting heavily with moral panics. Why would autism threaten the family structure, you ask? Because many members of the far right believe in body fascism which means that anything neurodiverse is impure in the eyes of whatever god they believe in. The believe that autism is the name of a demon or the cause of an unnatural immunization via vaccination that goes after children, thanks to people like Andrew Wakefield and Greg Locke. They believe that autism and other neurdiverse thinking will lead children or even wives in the family structure away from the required complementarian roles and thinking. They believe autism will cause boys to become homosexual and less aggressive (or more aggressive against the family structure). They believe autism will cause girls to be less nurturing, innocent, and "lady-like" when they grow older. The other big reason is that recent studies show that autistics can be friendly/ empathetic / compassionate to things that are foreign like trans-rights because they don't hold what's called a "just-world view." I've seen this personally in Facebook comment sections of disability activist pages and video reels mirrored from Tik Tok.

This is also why I'm done with evangelicalism. Most evangelicals I know don't care at all about the strengths and identity that is beautiful because of autism and see neurological thinking or living that is different for neurotypicals as something to be healed like someone who must get out of a wheelchair and start walking. Most neurotypical (non-autistic) folks only care about the cure for autism and not about how autism can be used to create a harmonious country or an even better family structure than the metaphor most of this post is about. They want to pray all the diversity and colour away when it should have been prayed FOR in the first place. Being autistic is just as natural as being neurotypical (which is the accepted neurology in a nuclear family).

To close off, every time I've encountered so-called "threats" to this family structure that I used to be a part of for so long, the only reaction I've gotten is that they either want to be left alone or they just want to be accepted for who they are, not who the far-right neoliberal "family" wants them to be. Besides really friendly autistic people, I've encountered single men at previous jobs who are into other men and they never tried to date me. I met women at comic conventions who loved other women and never looked down on me just because I'm a man. A few of my closest friends are individuals in a poly relationship. These people have been nothing but good to me and my wife and if I was an acquaintance with them, they mostly minded their business. People can be uncomfortable and even have opinions I disagree with about many folks in my life, but that doesn't mean that how they see the perfect family has to be enforced into law or that one family deserves to exist while all others are the big scary demon possessed monsters that should only come out at night, remain unemployed, or stay in their cages and closets.

Every single living creature deserve dignity and the right to self-actualization. Love is love. Every living individual needs food, shelter, and an income to live on with absolutely no conditions or gatekeeping. We don't need this restrictive ruling role-based social order just to be a functioning society. We don't need this divide between the rich and the poor or white and black or indigenous. If all lives truly matter to white people, we need to solve the systemic issues that cause marginalization and it can't be done by individualist means in reaction to guilt. We need to come together in order to do better. We need to speak up. We need to be motivated to sacrifice the harmful status quo and put aside our differences. We need to actually do what our parents taught us to do and stop being divided by the system, wether its media, corporations, or even police and the military. I want to change the world first, however, getting employment for myself comes first, but here's my question. If you're more privileged than me and want to see change, when are you going to get off your blessed ass and get people together and at least begin to learn what you can do to correct where we are in this hellscape of a planet today? Think about that as you gather with your friends and family around the BBQ or go watch some fireworks today.