As we approach the end of hurricane season, another storm is brewing south of the border. It is an irony of history that the next U.S. presidential election is on Guy Fawkes Day.
Fawkes’s unsuccessful attempt in 1605 to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London and assassinate King James I has been memorialized in the doggerel: “Remember, remember, the Fifth of November — gunpowder, treason and plot.”
The potential contemporary parallels are too scary to be funny, however. At times, it even seems like we are watching a bad American remake of The Man Who Would Be King. Former U.S. president Donald Trump has never said he would accept the results of this election, if he loses, and (when he remembers his lines) still denies that he lost to Joe Biden in 2020. Though it is hard to create a doggerel that rhymes with “the Sixth of January,” Trump and his self-styled “Trumpites” make Guy Fawkes look amateurish, as they brandish weapons more subtle and dangerous than barrels of gunpowder.
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Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock in the Star Trek series.
“Make America Great Again” (MAGA) remains their slogan. Whatever this really means, it certainly puts the U.S. first — not the planet or any American allies. This kind of American isolationism has historically been very popular, with presidents elected at the start of both world wars on promises (obviously later withdrawn) to “keep America out.” Yet in a globalized economy, on a planet in crisis everywhere, America’s interests — like everyone else’s — have gone global, too, making it impossible for any country just to stay home and stay safe.
Even as hurricanes recently pummelled the Gulf Coast twice in two weeks, climate change was virtually ignored in the election campaign. Both candidates focused on more jobs, cheaper oil and lower grocery prices, though the Democrats keep reminding voters about other issues, like health care and abortion.
But throughout all of the rhetoric, lies, threats and insults, one common, consistent and dangerous thread has been running through this campaign: racism. Diversity (of all kinds) is under attack by the Trumpite Republicans. Whether it is arguing about DEI initiatives; gender; orientation; reproductive rights; religion; ethnicity; or racial identity, the value or legal status of “diversity” seems to vary from state to state, diminishing where the state electoral map is red.
Justice of whatever kind is only possible, however, where diversity is not merely tolerated, but embraced. With Vice-President Kamala Harris running for the Democrats, diversity itself is literally on the ballot.
Racism, like intolerance, comes in all colours, shapes, genders, ethnicities and religions. Embracing diversity in everything is the only way racism and intolerance can be countered, everywhere.
Even in North America, this is not a new idea, especially for those of us who remember the original Star Trek series — broadcast on television in the late 1960s — in which the concept of “IDIC” first appeared.
For all you real Trekkies, you will recognize “IDIC” as the acronym for a core Vulcan philosophy — Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations. The character of Spock — half-human, half-Vulcan — embodied this philosophy, something that was truly a product of both the counterculture of the 1960s and the fertile mind of Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry.
In a country torn apart by racial desegregation riots, fractured by opposition to the draft and the Vietnam War, with foreign policy able to justify ending all life on Earth through nuclear war (under the slogan: “better dead than Red”), overlooking difference and embracing diversity were hardly common or popular ideas.
Hatred, fear, division and fighting was the norm. “Give peace a chance” was a plea more than a slogan. When John Lennon released his song Imagine in 1971, it was seen by the older generation as a product of the 1960s drug culture (and perhaps better named “Delusion”).
It took a strange character with pointy ears, crossed over from an alien race in the future, to demonstrate what human society could be like if diversity was the norm and tolerance the expectation — a society in which acceptance was the default, in which opportunity, success and happiness did not depend on what you looked like.
Yet Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations has been harder to embrace than Mr. Spock himself, who (as a Vulcan) was supposed to suppress all emotions.
It is so much easier to gain political power by focusing on difference, rather than on what makes us all citizens of Earth — turning that difference into a source of anger and hurt rather than something to celebrate. To the power-hungry among us, diversity is inevitably a threat.
In the 1960s, the “V for Victory” sign morphed into a symbol for peace. But Spock reminded us that to really give peace a chance, we needed to embed it in a culture of tolerance and acceptance.
Only then, as Spock reminded us in many episodes, will we truly be able to “live long and prosper.”
Peter Denton writes from his home in rural Manitoba.
