Now I am one who does not let hate be a part of my life.  I have chosen not to let hate color my view of the world.  Of course I can’t say that for others who have reminded me time and time again that intolerance and ignorance still exist in this day and age.  Of course I wish that would change and hopefully it will.  Soon.

There is too much hate toward people and some of that I imagine comes from being lazy and not wanting to put any effort toward getting to know someone.  I have in my past shared a story of having to work with someone who chose to be intolerant and ignorant toward myself and two others who were of Native descent.  I think I will share it here and hopefully it will show that things can change for the better, that it is possible.

Now this person that I want to talk about brought to the table so to speak his experiences, his knowledge of what he knows Natives to be.  I will just get to the comment that I am sure was meant to antagonize.  We were in a classroom and the instructors were about to start in a few minutes so the normal chit chat ensued.

This guy made it a point to loudly state that in his business he will not hire Natives simply because they expect so much time off work when one of their family passes on.  Now here is where I know his ignorance or his lack of understanding was showing.  I imagine that most policies will have allowances for employees that have lost a loved on and for the most part this is for the immediate family.  Natives have responsibilities that are beyond the nuclear family and in my own culture, it is Family of the Father that looks after us in our time of need.

To be clear, my late Father was laid to rest by the family of his Father.  Hmm, I can see how this might be difficult to explain.  I guess I can see where the easy path of Ignorance can come into play here.  When someone dies in a city (the easiest way to show a non-native society) it is the immediate family who make arrangements and deal with everything that is involved with the burial and the funeral.

We don’t do that.  We mourn and it is our extended family that do most of the work on our behalf.  It is a basic tenet of our culture.  We look after our extended family and in turn our extended family looks after us.  I guess herein lies another point of contention between Natives and Non-Natives alike; it is difficult to explain the collective to someone who is individualistic in nature.

So there we were, in the classroom waiting for things to get started when he makes his comment about not hiring Natives followed by several more comments on why Natives were not good to hire.  Of course this was his way of antagonizing and seeing how much he can get away with.  That is something else that I see in the intolerant, the need to push the envelope and see how much they can get away with.  Needless to say, he raised the hackles of myself and the other two native guys in the class by saying that we were not good employees and by showing his lack of respect for our deceased family members.

He was trying to push buttons, that was obvious.  You can recognize that sort of behaviour in the school yard bully, the challenge the bouncer bar patron and worst of all, the online voice chat sniper who stabs you with hate trying to get you off of your game.  I feel bad for them and their lack of interconnectivity but I digress.

It was obvious from the beginning that this guy was going to push buttons as much as he can.  He was short and stocky like a pit bull and it was easily noticeable that he had been in a fight for the better part of his life.  This continued throughout our course and for a couple of weeks, he tried to push my buttons having succeeded with one of the other native guys already.  You eventually do get tired of it and it finally boiled over when I found myself in his group for the day.  He was the sub foreman and reveled in the fact that he was the boss, my boss for that day.

He would not bend on my assertion that we were going to have to cut new wires for the transformer that we were hanging.  Perhaps it was his business sense to conserve and recycle but he would relent on using the old wire.  I am sure that he wanted to be the first group to finish, that he wanted to show how great he is as a sub foreman but all it really did was emphasize his lack of tolerance for others and their ideas.

So I am up on the pole and the transformer is already hanging, the wires connecting it to the electricity grid were all that were left to finish our task.  Now these connection wires have to be done a certain way if you wanted to pass (there had to be slack).  His reluctance to my assertion that the wires were too short and that there would not be any slack didn’t matter.  He was the sub foreman and it was going to be done his way.  I had no choice but to do as the sub foreman wanted and proceeded to use the shorter pieces of wire.

Of course this all stopped suddenly as our Instructor started yelling at me and asking me what the hell I was doing.  =)  I “explained” to our Instructor that I had mentioned the short wires to our sub foreman but he wanted them put up so there I was, putting up those short pieces.  I wanted him to see that they were shorter and that he was going to have to cut and prepare new pieces that had to be brought up to me.  I didn’t get that far before our Instructor came over and started giving us shit.

Of course I was pissed off for having to take the brunt of our Instructors wrath but that changed once I explained that it was the subby who wanted them put in and would not relent.  This of course pointed to how much of a piss poor sub foreman he was and he was given the business by our Instructor.  I am smiling at this point by the way.  Prick deserved that.

He of course didn’t deserve any of that near the end of our program though.  Up until now, I have been describing him at the early part of our program.  After several weeks of working together and a couple of BBQ’s where we drank together, I could see that throughout all his intolerance, he was a Father.  It was where we had common ground, it was were the mutual respect began.

He may have had hate in life life for me and for all Native People at the beginning of our program but by the end of it, he was a good guy.  I got a long with him and that is remarkable given his intolerance and given the fact that he was the other driver in an accident that took the life of a guy that I knew and to this day still miss.  It was remarkable because I had found out about the accident in the first week, couple that with his intolerance to Natives and yeah, his reassertions that he was culpable, that he was not at fault, that he beared no responsibility whatsoever for that tragic accident really bothered me.  It was like he saying that it was okay for him be an asshole and that he did not have to bear any responsibility for being an asshole.

If I allowed hate to govern my life, this guy would certainly be the guy for me to hate but it is not me to do so.  It is not who I was raised to be.  He is a good guy just trying to make the life of his daughter a good one.  I hope he and his daughter are doing well.

Hate is something I want to do away with.  It should not be used on and toward people, ever.  That may be an ideal but after this, can you still say that it is unattainable (like an ideal)?

If hate is to be a part of my life, I choose to direct it toward something inanimate.  Like my fucking car.  Fucking thing.  The passenger window dropped down again and I can’t raise it.  The motor is not working and it seems to be off its track again.  Fucking thing sucks mostly because it has been raining and yeah, I hate my car.  Damn thing is costing me more money than it is worth.  The thing is, I need the car and the timing just sucks.

Fucking car.  =)

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