Juno News - Will there be less societal division in 2022？

00:00:00.000 One of the things I wish for New Year's for Canada moving forward is that the year ahead

00:00:09.980 can have less societal division than in the year past and in some of the years before.

00:00:16.260 It's really gotten over the top. I hear from so many people who are upset by it,

00:00:21.100 frustrated by it. They want to put it all behind us. Now a lot of it is just media stories,

00:00:26.660 social media antics that make things look worse than they do, but still it has been been such a

00:00:32.140 chill I think over over human interaction, over politics, over so many issues. Just the incredible

00:00:38.460 divisiveness that we have seen throughout well the past two years and years before it.

00:00:44.600 Main examples of course being the pandemic, COVID-19, how we're supposed to treat other people

00:00:49.820 with suspicion, how sometimes we were even encouraged to basically call the cops or the public health

00:00:54.560 officials if your neighbor had too many people at their gatherings. All that sort of stuff. So

00:00:59.560 frustrating. By all means you want to look after the vulnerable, you want to take smart precautions, but

00:01:04.500 this whole distrustfulness of others and this whole accusatory nature of others, it's really awful

00:01:10.860 stuff. It's taken us in a really unfortunate and an ugly direction. We got to put it behind us. But you

00:01:16.760 know it's increasingly the case in politics as well. I'll never forget a poll that I read a number of

00:01:21.220 years ago back shortly after the 2016 American election where it asked people would you have

00:01:26.360 someone over for dinner or be friends with them or what have you if they had voted for the other

00:01:30.120 person. So would a Hillary Clinton supporter befriend a Donald Trump supporter and vice versa. And it was

00:01:35.820 shocking the high number of people who said no. And actually the Democrats were less tolerant of the

00:01:42.460 Republicans. The Hillary Clinton supporters were somewhat more likely to say no I wouldn't allow a

00:01:47.480 Trump supporter over for dinner. What on earth is going on here? Look I'm a guy who clearly has a lot of

00:01:52.620 strong opinions but at the same time you live in a community, your family members, your friends, your

00:01:57.820 neighbors, there's people of all sorts of different views, all walks of life. It's like come on. You can't

00:02:02.720 say I'm not going to be friends with someone because you know like this guy voted for Trudeau and I didn't or I did

00:02:08.080 vote for Trudeau and this guy didn't. Like there's more to life than all of that. You know I think I'm a big

00:02:13.180 Star Trek fan. I think people who think Star Wars is better. I think those people are crazy. They don't

00:02:18.100 know what they're talking about. Clearly Star Trek is significantly superior to the Star Wars universe

00:02:21.900 but that's okay. I'm still friends with people. I still hang out with the die-hard Star Wars fans.

00:02:28.060 I want to use that example because I don't even want to use the more polarizing and divisive examples

00:02:32.660 that are out there of how we can be divided on all of these issues. I just really hope and pray

00:02:38.160 that moving into 2022 we can just put a lot of the division behind us. By all means have your strong

00:02:45.140 views, your passions, advocate for what you believe in but this idea that we just can't even talk to

00:02:50.640 people if we're not a hundred percent lined up with them on these various issues. We got to put that to rest.

Juno News - January 01, 2022