"Rise Up!"

That appears to have become the phrase du jour. Didn't President Barack Obama encourage voters to do just that? Hasn't Venezuela's verbosely irritating Chavez urged Latin America to do that against the United States? Didn't Michael Ignatieff invoke the image of a Canadian population prepared to shake off the yoke of Conservative oppression by chanting during the election campaign, "rise up! rise up!"

There's a lot of uprising around. Most of them currently in the Middle East and North Africa, and making a lot of news in the process, but not an awful lot of real progress, unless you pull in the body counts of repressive regimes reluctant to allow their people to rise up. And here in Canada we've another source impressing upon a specific audience their need to rise up.

Senator Don Oliver, he of the sober 'second thought' gilded and red-velvet Chamber, expressing his violated and verbose opinion that Canada remains a land of misery for its people described as visible minorities. Particularly that most visible of minorities, Blacks.

As though people of hue, particularly those gorgeous shades that whites are so anxious to emulate during the summer, have not achieved positions of great public and private prominence and acclaim.

Senator Oliver speaks of his childhood as being one where he was exposed to outright racism. A prejudice that is firmly positioned in society and refuses to depart. To the extent that it has followed him throughout his life, and he is now 72. Perhaps Senator Oliver is not cognizant of the fact that people are prejudiced toward those unlike themselves.

There are many Jews, for example, and Chinese and people from the Indian sub-continent who might regale him with similar stories of overt and covert racism that they too have suffered. This is inexcusable, but it is also a fact of life, a human tragedy, imprinted as it were, on the consciousness of humankind.

Generally speaking, most people make an effort to be socially aware and accepting. For some this comes readily and easily, for they've been raised in a familial environment that does not suffer bigotry and racism. For others it's a lot harder because their social and family environment allowed for suspicion of the other.

And for some, hateful racism is a natural expression.

It would seem that the Senator is being naive in his assertions and his demands. There is as much that separates blacks from one another as there is Caucasians. There is ignorance, cultural savagery and stupidity, lack of social grace, disinterest in education, proclivity toward a life of welfare, attraction toward crime, drugs, alcohol, gangs, guns and violence on all sides of the colour spectrum.

The 'family' Senator Oliver speaks of sparks of racism in and of itself. The 'family' might more aptly describe, irrespective of colour, what we have socially, culturally, politically in common; our similar and recognizable cultural, educational and social roots.