Culture Clashes

Migration from one prevailing culture into another brings with it more than headaches. The transference of people leaving a homeland to emigrate to another country often brings with it heartaches to the very people whom circumstances beyond their control have conspired to wrench them away from all that is familiar and consoling to them.

Yes, there's the issue of culture clashes, where we witness the home culture expressing dissatisfaction with the importation of an alien culture. And there's the very real issue of immigrants bringing with them tribal grievances, and acting on them in the country of adoption. Problem enough when the welcoming society does its best to accommodate traditions hitherto unknown to them in an effort to give newcomers ease.

But then, there's the unexpected, the unanticipated, when immigrants to another country find it difficult to break old habits which stereotype them. The relaxed attitudes in Caribbean countries where men father children to women they don't marry, then walk away from any responsibilities, has caused no few headaches in Canada. Where unmarried, unattached women with multiple children struggle to raise these children outside the traditional family structure, alone.

It's not as though Canadian women don't also find themselves raising children alone, without benefit of an at-home male figure. We have our very own home-grown single-parent families either through a product of divorce, death or simply the male-quotient walking away from a situation that demands more than he is willing to accept. We also have young women who are as casual about having and raising children as their Caribbean counterparts.

Within this demographic - and it's a sizeable one - there hasn't arisen a like situation where fatherless children drift toward destructive criminal behaviours and alliances as a seemingly structured portion of their reaching maturity. It's hard to believe that in accepting immigrants we can also be opening ourselves up to a future demographic that seems to migrate toward criminal activity, yet that too appears to be part of a culture, which in time may turn itself around.

Society does its best to help, making subsidized housing tracts available to this demographic, but where there is a lack of discipline and attention to the needs of children growing up in a society structured otherwise, problems result. Without a firm guiding hand to teach the prevailing social mores and acceptable, ethical behaviour, young men emulate the irresponsibility of the fathers they've never known.

These black urban ghettos churn out too many young men bereft of behavioural guidelines and rejecting of the prevailing culture outside the ghetto. They're bedazzled by the potential for wealth through criminal proceedings and become immersed in the drug trade. Their allegiance is to their street gangs. They intimidate the people among whom they live, and they prey upon each other with arrogant impunity.

The tragedy is that in their pursuit of material fulfilment and their rejection of society's lawful mores, they destroy their families' hopes for the future just as they destroy the lives of those with whom they interact, challenging other street gangs for primacy. They become a living canker of promise and intentions gone dreadfully wrong. And in the process of attempting to deal with them, a society sensitive to the criticism of racism confronts a double dilemma.

Dreadfully wrong too is the situation on Canada's West Coast where Sikh communities have been subject to hideous wrongs resulting in terrorist-inspired mass murder from members in their own communities whose perspectives on historical entitlements having their origin in the country they have left, have completely divided this community. Canada's most violent incident of mass murder owes its memory to Sikh terror.

Fund-raising among other immigrant communities in aid of terror groups whose purpose is to completely destabilize their countries of origin, as has occurred with Sri Lankans, for the purpose of violent agitation to advance separation and the recognition of a separate state devoted to a minority championed by the Tamil Tigers, continues to be a problem within Canada.

As has the similar problem of funding terror groups of Muslim jihadists intent on visiting terror abroad. And just incidentally, within Canada as well. Since the jihadists' purpose is an ongoing struggle as they see it, against powerful but corrupt Western interests whose singular purpose, they claim, is to spurn and degrade Islam. And whose further belief is that the West expresses a society whose time has come and gone - to be replaced by jihadist-triumphant Islamic governance and Sharia Law.

Less noticeable, but still posing a problems of a more innocent dimension, are other issues emanating from other communities. Families living in low income neighbourhoods whose cooking styles depend largely on frying foods, having to cope with the nuisance factor involved in smoke alarms being triggered by cooking fumes. In exasperation the smoke alarms, although hard-wired, are disassembled, fires occur, and people die.

Celebratory customs brought over to a new country do not necessarily transport well in an environment more given to mechanical transport on roads and highways than rural areas that are quieter and less dangerous than those in Canada. A traditional party to celebrate the oncoming wedding of an East Indian couple results in tragedy when the candle-lit procession of celebrants are mowed down by an oncoming vehicle as they proceeded down an unlit road.

In some of these incidents the larger community is uninvolved, but certainly not in all. The larger community is moved to compassion when tragedy strikes as a result of an innocent tradition not readily transposed to another geographic setting. Responding to the needs of those who do not completely understand the repercussions of practising cultural traditions in an alien culture, by expressing its sorrow in the face of tragedy.

But policing agencies spring into action when there is blood shed within a community by the intractability of internecine warfare. And the country's security intelligence agencies are brought to attention when the safety of the country and its citizens are threatened by the actions of both immigrants and home-grown violent activists whose purpose it is generally to wreak havoc on society.