I am reminded this morning of something my late mother told me more than once, about when she and her grandmother (adoptive mother) went for a long walk one day in their west Toronto area when Mom, born in 1920, was still a young girl. They saw a sign on the gate of a large industrial company, Dominion Bridge. The sign said the company was hiring; but it also said, “Scots and Irish need not apply,” as my mother recalled.

By that time, Scots and Irish, made up the largest ethnic groups in Toronto, and most were second or third generations sons and daughters of immigrants, many of them Scots-Irish from Ulster, or Northern Ireland. Yet still, vestiges of the Anglo establishment of the 19th Century, clung to their sense of cultural and political superiority. Unfortunately, such is the experience and fate of every wave of new immigration. Yet, many of them in turn show the same unwelcoming attitude toward the next waves of immigrants.

What’s happening now in Springfield, Ohio, USA, is typical. Meanwhile, there have always been low-life politicians who take unprincipled advantage; but not to the terribly tragic extent now taking place in the context of the U.S. Presidential election. It is not only the fate of the world’s once-greatest democracy at stake: the whole world is ‘on the edge.’