Issue 3

  Babak Layeghi

As Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was exiting the Canadian political life after four decades, he remarked that Canada today was a multicultural nation.  This statement is true of many Western states as over the past two decades they have seen a massive surplus of immigration to their countries.  As families and individuals have left their war torn and economically deprived countries in search for better lives in the West.  It is here in their new homes where these new immigrants begin their struggle of adapting to their new life styles while attempting to keep intact their cultural roots.
However, today the diversity of people in metropolitan cities such as Toronto, New York, London, and Paris is so great that not one immigrant feels the pressure to adapt fully into the new culture of their environment as they may have done four or five decades ago.  Ideas such as ‘multiculturalism,’ ‘mosaic’ and ‘melting pot’ are thrown out there to validate the notion that an immigrant need not discard with his or her cultural roots in favour of the new cultural attributes he or she will encounter.
On the surface it all seems ideal but in reality the picture is never as perfect.  For example, watching the news today it was interesting to note that the first report that the broadcaster began with was that of the one cow in the United States who may or may not have extracted the mad cow disease from a Canadian farm.  This piece of news received higher attention than the 30, 000 deaths that had occurred due to the earth quake in Bam, Iran.  One must wonder could it possibly be that as a society we value cows more than people? That statement does not seem right; perhaps it could be said that a North American cow is valued more then a Middle Eastern person.  
After all, recall how much attention the ‘Black Out’ in September of 2003 on the East Coast received.  For several days the media showed shots of every day men and women directing traffic and helping one another out, and we sat back in our living rooms thinking perhaps the world was not such a bad place after all and that there were still some good people out there.  Then on the other side of the world for four to five months cities throughout Iraq were without electricity and not much news coverage was given to that.  
Therefore, it would not be hard to argue that the life of a North American person is valued much greater then one of an Iraqi person.  Also bear in mind how much mourning the 9/11 victims received from the media and yet Palestinians die each day under the apartheid rule of Israel and the coverage the media gives them is as little as the time spent on reporting the weather for the upcoming weekend.  I guess in the end it should not be so surprising to learn that a cow residing in North America receives more precedence in the media then 30, 000 innocent people dieing to a natural disaster who just happen to live in the Middle East.