It is best not to get overly emotional about various topics in the news and then make decisions or take positions based just on your immediate emotions. Emotions don’t think. But on the other hand it is natural to become very emotional about some topics in the news. For example, most of us naturally become emotional – sad, angry, and some of us get very upset and tearful — when we hear of deaths of thousands of indigenous children in residential schools decades ago in Canada, up to perhaps 3,000. We get especially upset when we hear that the first 215 of their their graves have actually been located in B.C., and then we hear that another 751 have been located in Saskatchewan. Many more are to come. Although we have known about this for many years, when things are visible and tangible that makes it real, so when we see the videos of the markers of the gravesites it proves it in as real in our minds emotionally. Many, many indigenous children died after contracting infectious diseases – tuberculosis, measles – after being taken from their homes on First Nations Reserves by the Canadian government run by white people, to be placed in Residential schools, supervised by priests from the RC Church. And their otherwise obvious health issues were not properly recognized or treated when their infectious diseases first came to their attention, although some were treated and sent to southern Canada for treatment, as noted below. Some also possibly died from accidents, like when teenagers tried to jump into passing freight trains to escape the schools. Others likely died from suicide.[1] This is truly awful. They couldn’t see their parents. When you read this you not only may get emotional but you probably also connect the dots and see the systemic racism that was involved.
Many people are confronted with cognitive dissonance when we read this. Cognitive dissonance is the term that indicates that we are distressed when we are confronted with facts that go against our morals and values. Facts like this. That makes us upset, confused, anxious. The Canadian government’s decisions and actions caused children to die. It was supported by the RC Church. When we read this printed this way some of us can’t accept it and don’t want to believe it, because this involves two institutions we trust — the government and the church — and yet it involves the death of children, very many children. Innocent children, taken away from their families by the government and supported by the church, just to try and make them follow the white culture. We know what it says but it strikes some people as too discordant from our beliefs as to what should happen, as if the government and the church couldn’t do this, so we may try and just sweep it away, pretend it didn’t happen. That is human nature. So if they also tend to support the governments they would just deny it could happen because they couldn’t tolerate the anxiety they would feel if they kept both beliefs, beliefs that would be inconsistent with each other. This is at the point that people can get emotional and judgmental about others’ actions if they are challenged. So they may quickly and harshly judge someone who condemns the government. The distress comes out openly when we try to bottle it up by sweeping it away and then it is challenged.
(This discussion doesn’t indicate my support or lack of support for these actions or my agreement or disagreement with their harsh judgments, it indicates my attempt to remain neutral to understand their actions and how emotions affected and influenced them).
Yes we shouldn’t sweep it away, but that is what thinking emotionally does. It is better to learn ways to deal with the emotions when we hear of these facts, for example, by being aware of people’s tendencies to do things they may not also agree with, because of the difference between subjective and objective thinking. For example, we may be against abortion as a principle but when someone we know gets pregnant and very upset and approaches us for help with an abortion, we may be in favor of guiding them to an abortion clinic, even if we keep it secret. The objective thinking in this example of deaths in Residential schools was that the government and the church can be trusted. The subjective thinking is that innocent children died, without their parents, as possibly without proper medical care, and the government and church were at fault. The subjective thinking was true and the objective thinking not so, but people maintained that belief at the time, at least those who were aware of it did. The facts state that malnutrition at the time increased the risk of disease, and the confinement of First Nations people on crowded reserves allowed the disease to spread rapidly.2 Death rates in the 1930s and 1940s were in excess of 700 deaths per 100,000 persons, among the highest ever reported in a human population at the time, in the ’30s and ’40s. Tragically, TB death rates among children in residential schools were even worse — as high as 8,000 deaths per 100,000 children. Many were actually taken south, for treatment in hospitals, but their parents were rarely ever notified, and some died in treatment.2
It is best not to let these emotions infect and determine our thinking on their own, because emotions don’t think. Our mind thinks. I do not mean that we should ignore our emotions in this case or in other cases because emotions can teach us a lot. I mean we shouldn’t just automatically let our emotions immediately determine our actions. There may be other aspects we haven’t thought about. We could take feedback from our emotions to use in our rational mind to think realistically about it. We are correct to feel sad, angry, upset and tearful when we hear these stories. We need to take action to deal with them that uses careful, reasonable thinking.
We need to remember that when we get emotional, that we cannot think of all the factors involved. Our emotions narrow our thinking, so we cannot recall facts and details. When we are angry and think about the facts that make us angry, we broaden our attack on who we think is the source of our anger without thinking of other possibilities.[3] Those feelings intensify when others join us, which often happens through emotional contagion when we think of who the villain is. We catch emotions from others and they multiply within us, which means they intensify. For example, these deaths happened decades ago. They didn’t happen in Canada this year, last year, or last decade. We have already taken steps long ago to stop these horrendous actions. Good for us. But this doesn’t mean we can sweep it away because it still happened under the government’s and church’s watch.
Emotions can blind us. Canada Day in 2021 came close to being cancelled because of this. But the emotions are understandable, we are dealing with it as a country and as people. It involves empathy, sadness, shock and grief. But when we think of these deaths, we may be blinded to the point that we cannot celebrate our country’s national day. There was nothing to celebrate, because that involves emotion, and when emotion is involved, the prevailing emotion wins over and any other emotions we have, such as pride in our country, is submerged and suppressed. We forgot about all the good things about Canada, because the emotions wouldn’t let us, because that is the way emotions are, they can just focus on one thing at a time, and emotions don’t think. But we do forget that many indigenous people who suffered during these times are still alive, many are adults, and have many problems. Let’s think about them and offer our apologies to them. We feel guilty. We are sorry. This was their land. We are trying as we recognize and acknowledge that we are living on unceded territories, territories that were never signed away by the Indigenous people who inhabited them before Europeans and the British settled in North America. Many of us are descendants of Europeans and British people. When the indigenous people have serious problems adjusting to urban life, drinking irresponsibly and recklessly and continuously, and being involved in violent, sometimes murderous crimes, this behavior can be traced back to the abuse they experienced as children. Maybe we never realized this before and just judged them as lazy, no-good people who didn’t work and who expected the rest of the country to take care of them. The reason some of them didn’t work is because they were not educated or raised properly because their parents were in residential schools as children, so never learned how to be a parent properly. We are still seeing the results. We need to see the connection and think realistically. Our mind can think it through and see the connection. Our emotions can’t.
How many times do you hear of someone being so angry they have done something incomprehensible and targeted someone?? This requires an intense focus that is prone to disregard other facts. And yet later they realize they made a mistake. That is because the emotions intensify. That is why we need to remember that if we are really quite emotional that we need to make sure that we do not act on our emotions because we are very likely forgetting something. We have tunnel vision, which means that we think of things as if we are in a tunnel, and cannot think of other things that are factors, as if our peripheral (side) vision is blocked, as it is in a tunnel. Likely if people were aware of this tendency they would stop themselves from doing impulsive actions. If this is you, or you know someone like this, just think “Probably there are other ways to handle this that I will think about tomorrow.” Positive emotions come to us after the event, and broaden our thinking so that we can think more creatively, and guide us to dealing with the unknown and unspecific,[4] so that we can tolerate possibilities instead of certainties. Through entertaining possibilities we can do brainstorming. We do not have to be on guard then, like we are when we are angry, instinctively, and instead can feel free enough to loosen our thinking because we feel confident in ourselves and ideas when we feel positive and less stressed. If we learn to think outside the box we can teach ourselves to be creative in our thinking.
This could include realizing that ideas only are current in the times they come up in. People don’t allow themselves to have any ideas any more about building more railway tracks across the country because it’s an old idea and has already been done, so they don’t try and figure out ways to build tracks anymore. Even when they think of high-speed trains they don’t think of ways to build it across the country, just in corridors between cities. But maybe it’s a good idea if we think outside the box. For example, they have hop-on, hop-off buses in cities where tourists get to travel about the city by tour bus and stop off in places they want to investigate. Would a “hop-on, hop-off” train across the country work? So people could stop off in farms, villages, towns and even cities to tour around or experience the life and attractions there and get back on the train hours or days later. It’s an example of thinking outside the box. Don’t just dismiss it right away by thinking that trains are not exciting or that this is impossible. Brainstorm and think about it. I haven’t so am not implying it is a good idea, or a bad idea. But it seems worth considering.
Let’s get back to emotional thinking about controversies such as residential schools. Should all citizens of those times when the schools were developed bear some responsibility for those decisions? I cannot say that I as a child, or even my parents were necessarily aware of the atrocities in the residential schools in the 50’s or early 60’s in Canada. My parents were not harsh people, but they tended to think like others did then. People shift their vocabulary and knowledge with the times, and along with it their beliefs, to reflect what becomes current thinking. We can only judge what is right based on what we know at the time, and what the mood is at the time, as the feelings at the time about people would unfortunately rule the judgments of people at that time. We think emotionally about various impersonal and political topics. For example people get emotional about criminals and want them locked up forever. But what if 100 years from now governments abolished all jails and prisons, or, in the opposite, built many more? Would it be correct for people then to judge ourselves in this time harshly, as being wrong today? And destroy statues that may be erected 10 years from now? Perhaps notes with provisos could be left with the future citizens to explain that no one is all good or all bad, that we all make mistakes like these politicians did, and this does not excuse them of responsibility for their decisions. It just means they were not always making the right decisions. None of us do.
[1] https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/kamloops-residential-school-children-dead
2. Canadian Public Health Association. TB and Aboriginal People. https://www.cpha.ca/tb-and-aboriginal-people
[3] https://imagogg.org/emotionality/
[4] Ibid.