In a world that seems to have to gone mad, it’s nice to know at this time a year that there is still place where that madness may be just a little bit less.
This is not to suggest that rural Saskatchewan and rural Canada are places without their problems.
Rural anywhere still has stresses in families and squabbles between neighbour. This is human nature and— even a Christmas time — not everyone has the ability to forgive and forget.
But in rural settings where being slightly further apart might offer an opportunity to be alone in thought, one would like to hope that people arrive at the peace and wisdom that accompany the season.
Maybe this is just wishful thinking. After all, there remain a lot of intolerant people in rural settings who fall into the collective wisdom of the local bar or coffee row.
There again, it’s probably no small co-incidence that Republican Presidential hopeful Donald Trump — the loudest most obnoxious and irrational voice, now advocating banning all Muslims from the United States — is from New York City.
That Trump has considerable business dealings in Dubai, including several golf courses, makes his latest bluster all that much more rich.
Nor is really all that surprising that some of those in Canada most eager to open up their door to Syrian refugees live in rural Canada.
In the wake of the brutal and senseless terrorist killings in Paris and the Los Angeles suburb of San Bernardino, CBC Radio’s As it Happens interviewed Bloomfield, Ontario’s Carlyn Moulton. Her community recently welcome a Syrian family of 14.
” I think they had been in a rural area in Syria, for many years,” Moulton told the CBC’s Carroll Off.
They’d come from a farming background. They had a small grocery store where they were selling a lot of things that they had grown themselves. They owned cows. They made their own yogurt. And they really weren’t urban people when they were bombed and displaced.”
That they happened to arrive the day before Halloween when the town “looked a little scary” might have been a bit unsettling for them, but Moulton said the kids were very eager to go to school because they hadn’t attended school in four years.
The kids seem to be fitting in rather well, but so have the adults, Mouton told As it Happens.
“That’s really changing our community in ways that we hadn’t even imagined,” she said.
“I don’t think we’re exceptional. I think that rural communities depend on one another, and they’re much more adaptable than possibly some people might think.”
Maybe rural people aren’t exceptional.
As suggested earlier, rural communities can have as much strife and disagreement as anywhere else.
But if you are a smaller community where, as Moulton so aptly put it, you rely more on each other than people in the cities do, maybe there is a deeper appreciation for people as people.
After all, it’s no small coincidence that Doukhobors, Hutterites, Mennonites and many others settled in rural Saskatchewan to escape religious prosecution a century ago.
Some groups like Ukrainians, Germans, Swedes, Poles and French tended to settle together in larger communities. It’s alsowhy Saskatchewan and Alberta entered confederation on the condition of minor “separate” school systems to respect religious freedoms.
But it also wasn’t uncommon to see single men or lone families — hardworking Chinese who faced their own discrimination in Canada — settle as entrepreneurs and become a big part of rural communities.
So the notion of having Syrian refugee families — the kind of people that seem to scare Donald Trump and other city dwellers — welcomed with open arms in small communities is not all that far fetched.
Really, it’s a big part of the way rural life has always been.
Murray Mandryk has been covering provincial politics for over 22 years.
