From the time our ancestors first set foot in North America, we have needed and depended upon our neighbours.
The First Nations peoples always respected “Mother Earth” who gave them clean water, all food, and they helped each other. The best hunters used scouts to know where the most game was, and they told the hunters where to go to be sure to bring some home. When the hunters brought home whatever they had killed, the tribe worked together to butcher and prepare the meat either by drying or cooking meat which they shared with the entire tribe. They killed only what they needed and used every part they could.
When the “white man” first set foot in North America, it was the natives who helped them prepare for and survive the first years. Their medicine may have seemed very primitive, but it had been handed down and improved for many generations to save people’s lives. While there were some unfriendly tribes that their scouts watched out for, newcomers were treated with respect until they proved dangerous. The white men thought it was just an unexplored territory, but the native had watched over that land for numerous generations and didn’t understand why the white man suddenly began taking their land even though the natives had shown the new arrivers how to eat and survive and even trade.
From the time that the first pioneers set foot in the Ottawa Valley, our forefathers quickly learned that without their neighbours, fields couldn’t be cleared, building couldn’t be built. When a new baby was to born, neighbouring women would arrive to help deliver the new child. When a large animal (deer, moose, pig, or beef) was slaughtered, several neighbours helped, and often the meat was divided up so it could be eaten, dried, or canned by several families before it spoiled. Pioneers traded work – skills in carpentry, cutting the forest, sawing some lumber, or exchanged grain for a pig or a bag of flour for sugar. Some people were more skilled at some things than others.
Yes, there was always someone who had a shady background and might take something and forget to return it, or maybe even be a danger to the community. The entire neighbourhood would soon know who that person was and they were watched closely. Only very honest and respected people were allowed to be a teacher, judge or postmaster, or represent the neighbourhood at some level of government.
Today, several hundred years later, we find ourselves in a similar situation. Our neighbours are our most important assets. They can be relied on to be there when needed, are trusted like our own family, and share our grief and our celebrations. Yes, there is still that one who will try to get a few feet of territory from your property, complain about your tree, call the cops if your kids play music too loud, borrow something and forget to return it, or even poison your dog. The neighbourhood soon knows who to watch. Often, that watched neighbour soon leaves once they find out that they cannot take advantage of the neighbours here. I always feel very sad for anyone who lives near someone who just isn’t a good neighbour.
Sometimes someone gets control of a country and people allow that person to act like one of those neighbours you have to watch because they try things they’re not entitled to do – grabbing land, organizing trade to produce benefits that go only one way, pardoning themselves and other convicted people, and quitting to help those less fortunate. Their friends are often only those who are extremely wealthy because they want to remain extremely wealthy at the cost of millions of people who are not very well off. Some of those “friends” are or want to become supreme rulers and are very hard to get rid of. We all know some who were or still are. Many of those seem to be quite “clannish.”
A sentiment often attributed to Winston Churchill is that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Sooner or later, you will have the privilege to vote for a municipal, provincial, or federal candidate to represent you. Please attend any and all all-candidates debates, and if your next want-to-be politician will not attend, ask yourself how that person can stand up to questions at council or parliament it they cannot even face their constituents? Also ask them all what their plan is to pay for the money spent getting us through the past worldwide covid pandemic. And how they plan to stop and reverse the extreme climate dilemma we have been in for the last century. Billionaires own half of the world’s assets.
We have the opportunity to live in the best place in the world. Let’s keep it!
Chris Judd is a farmer in Clarendon on land that has been in his family for generations.
