For every event I attend it feels like there are about 10 or so I would have liked to attend. It felt important to be at an event last night. Going out into public inevitably provides more than what you were planning (for better or worse). I got there and sat next to a religious leader, scholar and activist who I have worked with over the past couple of years. She introduced me to a colleague who was a local Jewish academic who was born in Israel, studied in New York and now works here in Winnipeg. On the other side of me was a friend’s mother. I checked in about her health in relation to cancer she had dealt with. She said things have been improving and she shared about how she viewed her experience with cancer as an adventure, respecting the new terrain but open to where it might lead.

The event was the Anti-Zionist Refuseniks Speak Out tour with Tal Mitnick and Einat Gerlitz. Before they spoke, my local MP Leah Gazan got up and publicly signed her name on an election campaign to hold Canada accountable and end its support of Israeli genocide. As many know, Gazan is the grandchild of holocaust survivors. This has led her to act and speak out against all who wish to secure one group at the cost of another.

Truth be told I knew nothing about the speakers for the event and found they are young 20-something Israelis who refused military service and served prison terms for their conscientious objection. Much of what they shared was insightful and impacting but what will likely stay with me was the way Tal described Israel prior to the events of October 7 and the fierce escalation of ethnic cleansing that was enacted afterwards. Tal said that during the summer of 2023 there were protests against Netanyahu’s policies that dismantled the minimal ‘checks and balances’ in place related to Israel’s actions against Palestine. Tal went to these protests and saw the crowds filled with Israeli flags. He saw that they wanted to ‘go back’ to the ways things were, which, as a young man, he was coming to condemn as colonial violence. Seeing these flags and hearing these sentiments he thought no, we cannot go back, we must go forward to something else. These words resonated deeply for me in our own context.

While I can see in Trump a clear shift in grasping authoritarian power, I cannot get behind a Canadian nationalism that seeks to return to a model of economic ‘slow violence’ in which legal restrictions are dismantled by corporate lobbying and maneuvering, stable liveable wages are undermined and social security and public goods gutted in the name of privatized efficiency. We should not fight for a lesser evil when we have not tried a greater good. We need mechanisms to resist Trump but we also need a vision of disciplining and dismantling the power that exists among Canadian and global billionaires and their agendas. We need to figure out how to divest of the sort of asset management and financialization that we are told we need to rely on for security but in turn requires control in the service of their growth regardless of the cost.

I sometimes feel like I am being stubborn or naive but I have fewer illusions about what humanity is capable of. I have only been a part of groups with very fallible people. But we can, usually, to some extent, choose the company we keep. I remain increasingly convinced that the Christian faith seeks a world that must be refined and emerge from the contexts of those who are made to suffer most. A new segment of society is starting to feel the pinch but oppressive struggle has been the norm for many. It is here that we are held accountable. Billionaires, investment managers, and CEOs should willingly be disciplined by the reality of suffering. Christians are called to these places if they hope to follow Jesus. And governments should defend and fight for these places if they are truly democratic. If we resist Trump’s refrain of going back to America’s greatness we should also resist simply seeking a return to what now feels like security though it always came at the cost of others.