Blackfaced

Can I just say this?And then I promise I’ll go away.I dressed in drag, as a samurai warrior, and as a snotty faced kid intent on destroying Optimus Prime in my high school comedy performance written and directed by my OAC drama class. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it all week. Because, although I’m almost certain I never wore blackface, I can’t promise you I didn’t. There may be a photo of me out there (as I’m certain there’s one from ‘08 with me holding a beer in pile up of twenty something friends — while wearing my clergy collar) and there is nothing I can do about it. But, like other pivot moments of generational shift, the earliest forms of social media happened just as my generation launched from high school. We didn’t have to live in a high school adolescent world where many old photos were our crisis of mini-virals.I never had to think to myself,“Gee, I wonder if I’ll ever become Prime Minister (or Emperor of the Galactic Republic) one day, and I wonder if this photo that we’re taking —that currently has no ability to be shared digitally or widely— could have 11 million hits by noon when it really catastrophically matters.”Yes. He wasn’t wise. He really should have been better educated with all those opportunities. Maybe he shouldn’t have been a drama teacher who liked to dress up. 🙄But for the record. We knew he was a drama teacher. It was on his CV. Spend five minutes with the man. Go on an international trip with him. He was a drama teacher. It’s part of him.Did you really think his love for costume began with the socks that you raved about.Did you really think mine did with sacred vestments?He’s come up short in my political estimation, in a number of ways. But, I now have progressive friends trying to justify themselves in voting for him with some kind of extremist posture I imagine our republican friends feel about having to vote for a Democrat over Trump.We’re starting to devolve so badly, we cannot tell which scandals effect real systemic issues and actual cultural toxicity and between a sometimes air-headed, young wealthy kid of privilege (who turned out to be pretty impressive by the way) who enjoyed his time in costume at parties in his younger years — not really knowing what he was doing wrong at the time.Should we have elected him? I don’t know.He still seems a hell of a lot better than the old grump he replaced. But, we get to answer that question again at the polls this year. I’ll probably vote NDP in my riding, and Jagmeet would make a formidable Prime Minister.But Justin is a good Prime Minister, and from the people I know that know him, he’s a good man as well.What a leader did before they were our leader should matter to us. How we react to that news matters too.#cdnpoli #canada #blackface