John Hartig

You Love Our Milk and Honey John Hartig

My wife and I came back to Canada after living in France for a year. The job market was tight back home in 1989 and teaching was stressful. I became a wedding photographer, a web designer and a writer. Now I am retired, and though not living on easy street, I do what I love best, which is photograph scenery, design websites and write. When Don Cherry got fired from Coach's Corner in November 2019 for calling new immigrants, "you people", urging them to buy a poppy to honour Canada's fallen soldiers for Remembrance Day, I said to myself, "This is a good time to write about my life story as a refugee, coming from war-torn Europs as an 8 year-old boy in 1954." Covid-19 gave me the time to express my thoughts on systemic racism and how my family made a new life here as new Canadians. 2020 has been a special year, not only with trying to get a global Pandemic under control, but also a year that highlighted a lot of problems which have not been fixed in North America. As Canadians we can say that most of the problems lie south of the 49th parallel in the United States, but we too are not completely exempt. George Floyd died under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, suffocated after an 8 minute and 46 second ordeal. The Black Lives Matter Movement erupted in violent riots and protests. Torontonians also marched in protest. Here in Canada indigenous peoples also pointed to the systemic racism they endured in residential schools. There have been other areas where the social fabric has cracked: migrant workers in Essex County getting sick from Covid-19 because of crowded living conditions and seniors in old folks' homes dying at higher rates from the virus than in the normal populace. My question was, how do I fit the second half of my life, as a former immigrant, into all the global injustices that surrounded me? Maybe just pointing them out is the first step towards what Pierre Elliott Trudeau wanted for us Canadians, a "Just Society". - John Hartig, Canadian Author