On Friday morning, I heard Kim Campbell on CBC Radio, where her suggestion for an alternate lyric to replace "in all thy sons command" in our national anthem seemed a remarkably sensible one.
Why not sing "in all of us command"?
It turns out that Ms Campbell had first made that suggestion twenty years ago. It is far less radical than reverting to the original words penned by Robert Stanley Weir: "thou dost in us command."
I found myself nodding my head. "From far and wide, O Canada" has been added to the version I learned as a child, so it is not as if our national anthem cannot be altered. And "sons" does feel anachronistic to me, while "us" is nowhere near as bend-over-backwards earnest as "he or she," "s/he" or "sons and daughters." So, even as the government was backtracking from an idea surely rooted in watching dozens of women olympians singing, it seemed as though Ms Campbell had the solution.
But she could not stop talking.
Why not take this opportunity to purge O Canada of all religious references, she wondered. And, while we are at it, let us change "our home and native land" to "our home on native land." No controversy there!
Ms Campbell's ideas, according to the speaker who followed her, demonstrate only that no amount of tinkering would satisfy everyone; while that is true, that is not what I found most objectionable about Ms Campbell's wider plans. What bothered me was how they demonstrated so clearly that people are never satisfied with incremental change, people are never satisfied with small, obvious fixes. If we are going to go to the bother of a fight, after all, we had really better make it worth that bother.
Small, meaningful change is hardly worth the effort. But other things are so dramatic, they scare us back to inaction. From health care to climate change, can we not see this is true?
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