Changing an Anthem

Being politically correct has been a topic for George Carlin who referred to changing terms in society and how the essence of the word had been sucked out because of the new nomenclature. His references were obviously comical. Canada’s national anthem has been reworded in  before, the “dost command” was changed to “sons command” in 1908. It is likely then that a continued rewording will take place as older words fall into disuse and our lexicon changes.

There are words in the anthem that might offend those wanting to be fairly represented including women. Women have no safe abortion; there are issues on improving education so changing lyrics to a national anthem is a trivial thing to do especially when the government should be more concerned on those more pertinent issues and on a billion dollar deficit.  By their own admission, the government doesn’t even care about the omission of a sexist reference. Then there are so many other words one could eliminate to satisfy atheists, native people and others to make this a debate on the national anthem an exercise in the futility of being politically correct.

A committee would cost thousands. To so many the use of word “native” is foolish, as the actual amount of land still run by native people does not correspond to the present political; entity of Canada as before confederation. The use of the reference to the almighty might offend people not wanting any religious reference and the use of an international anthem is also absurd for those who don’t want to be referred to a erratic militant state. By the way the stand on guard for thee, could be seen as being militant anyway.

Changing the anthem is also absurd because people don’t even know the current version and people are going to haggle over its grammatical basis. A committee is going to cost thousands of money; a housing rebate has not improved. In the meantime the limelight ha been purposely shifted away from resolving the government deficit. Adjusting the salaries of politicians is not enough.