Shad: Soul-searching and the cost of change

When society changes, and the ground seems to me to be shifting right now, it doesn't only alter the future — it also changes the past.

And that might be one of more painful parts of social change: it's easy to look ahead, towards a brighter tomorrow. It's harder to look back — with new understandings — that threaten to re-cast our collective and individual histories in darker shades.

But this is the cost of change.

This week we talked with the author of the explosive New York Magazine piece that featured 35 women allegedly assaulted by one of my childhood heroes, Bill Cosby. Allegations of rape have been circulating about Bill Cosby for a long time. But many of us, myself included, weren't always eager to hear these stories. Not because we didn't want a better, safer present and future for women, but because we — I — didn't want to give up my pretty picture of the past.

The true history of this land is another one that's difficult for some to confront. Most of us prefer to focus on the future, imagining a nation with opportunities, dignity, and rights for all. And with good intentions, we want to know what we can do to get there. But as Joseph Boyden suggested on the show yesterday, the way there requires going back… accepting the true, complete story of how exactly this country came to be what it is today. The good and also the bad… A relatively peaceful, multi-cultural nation, yes, but also one where police violence and racism here inspired hundreds to take to the streets of Toronto in protest just this week. And a place where suicide rates among Aboriginal youth are among the highest in the world.

The resistance that some of us feel to accepting the true, complete history of Canada — or Hulk Hogan, or Bill Cosby — is the same instinct we feel to protect the narratives we've built up about ourselves as individuals. I know I often find it hard to accept the times that I've hurt people, or ran away, or been victimized, and to hold those moments in my story along with the good; to embrace the full truth of who I am.

But again, this is the cost of change...whether on a personal or much larger scale.

—Shad