I’m not trying to make a change.
All I’m planning on doing is refusing to stand for the anthem, which I hope is my Constitutional right.
The definitions of words isn’t really opinion based? I’ll respect you, but I respectfully disagree.
About the “native land”, the point is when you compare us to Aboriginal people, they’ve been here thousands of years. We’ve been here less then 400. We aren’t natives even if we are born here.
Couple of points off the OP, but I will quote this response and state that I think you are taking this too literally:
- “Native Land” does not literally mean the land of the natives, aka Indians, aka Native Americans. Native Land simply means the land that you were born unto, if that is what you are hung up on.
- What does it matter who was on the continent first in regards to nativity? What time limit do you set before someone gets to call themselves a native of a place? Are the Angles and the Saxons foreigners in Britain today? Do we kick the Turks out of Turkey?
The fact is, Canada exists as a country because European immigrants, specifically the British and French, created it. There would never be a Canada if this did not happen. Before the arrival of Europeans Canada and most of North America was simply wilderness with sparse tribes of hunter-gatherer peoples roaming across it. And as these Europeans and their descendants created the nation, they have every right to call it their native land.
- “Sons” in the context of your anthem is not sexist as it does not actually refer to one sex. This is because “man” is a root word stemming from German that basically means person, and as such, so can its derivatives. And, besides being linguistically unnecessary, “sons and daughters” is bulky and doesn’t flow well, and “people” is bland and un-poetic.
When the Canadian anthem was written everyone understood that in English “son” could both mean the male offspring of his parents, or alternatively mean the collective descendants of a group of people. You would not say “daughter”, because that very specifically refers to a female. Again, this is not sexist because to be able to communicate with each other with any real meaning we must have some differentiation in descriptive language. We as a culture used to (and still do, apparently begrudgingly) grant a special status to women in language indicated by separating their pronoun from the generic “man”. Similarly, the reason that, say, in our caveman days the men went out and felled trees or hunted mammoths was not because they looked at women as beneath them. It was because women were valued and so the men were sent out to do the dangerous, deadly work because they were expendable. Is that sexist? I think it is only if you think that women must be EXACTLY like men to be equal.
Think about it for a moment. If we continue down this road and eliminate all “sexist” language from English, we will soon have no idea what the other is talking about. Say we decide that there will no longer be the words “man” and “woman” because it is sexist to denote differences and replace them both with the generic word “zan”. A conversation could go like this: "A zan and a zan went to the store where they spoke to a saleszan but decided not to buy anything because ze was too pushy. Plus they couldn’t understand ze well because ze spoke with a Gerzan accent. Then they went to a restaurant where the waitz spilled wine on the ze’s shirt and the other ze who was the romantic partner of the first ze called for the head waitz and complained that their waitz had ruined ziser zefriend’s shirt.
That is a bunch of needless nonsense and pretty soon we would have to make up new words or revert back to “man” and “woman” to understand each other again.
Another example. When Neil Armstrong stepped in the moon his words were “A small step for [a] man, a giant leap for mankind”. Was he only referring to males with this line?
Unfortunately today we are quickly trying to destroy the English language in some misguided quest to eliminate “sexism” and “male privilege” because we as a society don’t seem to understand where words come from anymore.
Regardless, the point is, “sons” isn’t sexist. In this context it means roughly “people of this land”. And even if it did refer literally to male sons, the context probably referred to a specific point in time (WWI) when the actual sons of the country fought for Canada, Britain, and France.
- Lastly, we all know that mankind is flawed and that we are all sinners. And as such our institutions are not perfect. That said, a nation’s flag is a physical representation of the ideals of that nation, and the national anthem is the vocal celebration of those ideals. Saluting the flag or singing the anthem does not mean you approve those failings, but that you would like to see your country meet those ideals.
To sit during an anthem does not tell people “I disagree with the wrongs this nation has committed”, even if you say so. What your actions are telling people is “I despise what you stand for and I am not a part of this country or culture, whatever my citizenship. I renounce it.”.
As an American, there are many things both my state and federal government do that I disagree with or see as immoral. Singing the anthem does not mean I support those things, only that I believe in striving towards “freedom and justice for all” and respect those who have given their lives for it.
Sorry for the long reply.
