I had a dawning realization a couple of years ago: Although we live in a theoretically multicultural country, we're not really that interested in promoting understanding and tolerance between groups of disparate individuals. Yes, we accept and embrace a wide selection of people from all lands and creeds and ideologies, but only so long as they conform to a specific set of our own values. It's not that we're racist or sexist or adherants to any particular -ism, it's just that the world is very complicated, and understanding individual people with different values is a very difficult thing to do, requiring far more energy and effort than we're willing to expend.

That wouldn't be so bad, except we tend to push these people to the margins and make broad generalizations about them. This is how hackers became enemies of the New Economy, this is how Goths became potential psychopaths with guns, this is how BDSM practitioners became sexual deviants. It's exactly like high school: Anyone else who doesn't fit in properly gets hunted down, particularly if they're seen as dangerous. I would have hoped we'd have been able to move past high school, but apparently not.

We have become so accustomed to listening to group voices that we have forgotten how to hear the people inside. We've stopped paying attention to individuals and have become intently focused on group characteristics, most of which are generalized and not particularly representative in the first place. Why won't we listen to each other as people first, as groups second? In Canada's ever-lasting quest for self-identity and self-confidence, we have sought monolithic answers and gotten nowhere for our troubles. We either have a single national voice, or we have 28 million. For some strange reason, we can't seem to find that single voice.

So, this project: 12 Canadians with 12 ideas, speaking in 12 different voices, about who they are, where they are, and what they want. It's not representative, and it may not even be particularly accurate, but it's a start. And I think it's about time.

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