“I’m Sorry It’s Not White.”

1,790 words

Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 post-apocalyptic novel The Road tells the story of a nameless man and his son traversing what was once the United States in the years following an unexplained apocalyptic event. The world was covered in ash, causing plant and animal life to gradually die off. The boy was born shortly after this world-ending cataclysm, giving him no memory of the times before.

The man’s wife committed suicide, as many people had done, seeing no future in the post-apocalyptic hellscape. Though he doesn’t know what they will find, the man sets off with his son, who is at that point around 10 years old, navigating the former road network south in the faint hope of finding the warmer southern latitudes more hospitable.

Toward the end of the novel, as they are nearing the coast, the man shows the boy their location on an old highway map. When he sees the map’s depiction of the ocean, the boy eagerly asks his father, “Is it blue?” The man was alive before the apocalypse and had gazed upon the deep blue of the ocean’s broad expanse, therefore he gives no second thought to its representation on the map. The boy, on the other hand, has lived his entire existence in an ash-coloured wasteland, devoid of the vibrance which the natural world once had to offer. For him, a view of blue waters stretching to the horizon would constitute a sight of unspeakable beauty.

The man is doubtful that the ocean would still look the way it did in the before times. However, the promise of finding a blue sea at the end of their arduous journey through thousands of miles of desolation is a rare moment of optimism for the boy. Not wanting to dampen his son’s hope, he ambiguously replies to the question, “The sea? I don’t know. It used to be.” When the two arrive at the coast, they are not greeted by an endless sea of blue, but a depressing tide of slag-coloured waves beneath an ash-filled sky crashing upon a grey sandy beach. Seeing the visible disappointment on his son’s face, the man somberly remarks to the boy, “I’m sorry it’s not blue.”

This part of the story captures a particularly devastating kind of heartbreak. That is the disappointment of having an idealistic vision of one’s imagination crushed by bleak, uninspiring reality. This anguish is not only felt by the boy, whose hopes of finding a rare sight of beauty in such a dejected hellscape were dashed, but also by also by the man, perhaps even more so. For him, the blue of the ocean was real. It wasn’t just an abstract conception, but something he saw with his own eyes. He took his son on their punishing trek over thousands of miles in the vain hope of finding something worth living for in the post-apocalyptic world. For the man, the realization that he can’t give that to the boy upon reaching the coast is gut-wrenching.

I was reminded of this moment in McCarthy’s novel when, a while back, a friend of mine told me about an experience some of his acquaintances went through. I have never met the people in question. I’ve only heard of them secondhand. I don’t know their names or their political opinions. Despite them being total strangers to me, I couldn’t help but see parallels between them and this allegory from The Road and found myself feeling as the man did in this scene. These folks are a family made up of a Ukrainian man, a Russian woman, and their young child. They lived in Moscow but left Russia as a result of the 2022 Russo-Ukraine War which made their livelihoods there no longer possible. Since the husband is a Ukrainian citizen, they were offered asylum in Canada. I was told that they were going to Toronto, my hometown, to see if they’d like to settle there.

I grew up in the North York region of Toronto. When I was a kid, Canada was the envy of the world. Our ordinary family of four enjoyed a world-class standard of living. We had a house in the suburbs, two cars, and a summer and winter vacation each year. This wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. It was the case for most of my peers. The lifestyle was not too dissimilar from the one depicted as typical in media of the era. While we took this for granted at the time and thought nothing of it, the neighbourhood I grew up in and the elementary school I attended were supermajority white.

However, things slowly changed over the years. By the time I was an adult, Toronto was unrecognizable from the city of my youth. The opportunities had dried up, home ownership went from the norm to a luxury of the wealthy and the old, and the city was no longer as clean and well-run as it once was. Unlike my elementary school and neighbourhood which were majority white, I now found myself in a small minority at university and in the workplace. With the prospects my hometown had to offer having diminished, I went abroad for a few years in my 20s, spending some time working in Saint Petersburg.

When I heard that this Russian-Ukrainian family from Moscow was considering making Toronto their new home, I had an idea of what they were coming from having spent several years in Russia myself. I also had an idea what they might expect to find in Canada and what they would actually find there. I hoped for the best for them but had a feeling that there was a good chance they’d be disappointed. The conception of the orderly, affluent, and implicitly white suburbs of North America seems like a dream when compared to the slate-coloured concrete apartment blocks of the former Soviet Union. However, the new reality of overpriced urban centres cramped with vape shops, Indian takeout, and Vietnamese nail salons, populated by a hodgepodge of third world migrants isn’t nearly as appealing.

It was depressing, though not at all surprising to hear that it only took this family two weeks of being in Toronto before deciding that they didn’t want to stay any longer. From what I was told, their impression of the city was that it was dirty, expensive, and most notably of all, majority non-white, something which they considered a deal breaker. Last I heard, they decided to settle in Poland instead, another former Eastern Bloc country, ironically a lot more similar to where they had to left in the first place.

When I was growing up, I knew a Polish WWII veteran who lived in my neighbourhood in North York. He had moved to Canada in the 1950s having escaped Poland’s postwar communist regime. In those days, Canada undeniably offered better prospects for a white family than Poland. The choice of Poland over Canada would’ve been unthinkable back then, but today, that decision is quite understandable. This isn’t much of a solace though, since the decline of Canada is not an anomaly. The same process is taking place throughout the entire white world. Some countries are further down the line than others, but all are heading towards the same fate.

This personal anecdote of mine is representative of a broader phenomenon of pessimism permeating Western society. There seems to be a gradual wide spreading acknowledgement that life in the West isn’t what it once was. Countries like Canada, once renowned for their exceptional standard of living, are steadily losing that reputation. Underlying the economic woes, political chaos, and collapse in social cohesion is the issue of demographics. The quality of life which these countries once knew is declining alongside the share of the population of the people who built such prosperity. While this process has been underway for decades, its implications are only now being understood on broad scale as the issue has become unavoidable.

The phrase Paris Syndrome denotes the disappointment tourists feel while visiting Paris as a result of the city not living up to their lofty expectations. They build up the French capital in their mind as a place of unrivaled luxury, beauty, and romance only to be disappointed by the reality they find when they arrive the city. Implicit in that idealized vision of Paris is that it’s a French city, populated by actual French people. Whether it is acknowledged or not, the primary catalyst of Paris Syndrome today must be the fact that the French themselves are increasingly scarce in Paris, with Arabs and Africans becoming a more common sight on the streets than the natives.

I struggled to come up with a satisfying conclusion to this essay as there is little optimism to be found in such a subject, though, looking back at the novel which served as its inspiration, it might be able to provide some reprieve. Despite being possibly the bleakest post-apocalyptic story ever written, I found The Road surprisingly uplifting. McCarthy presents the reader with the most pessimistic of worlds imaginable and tells a story of perseverance through the most hopeless of situations. The reader isn’t guaranteed that the characters will find safe haven, only that they will go on searching.

When the man poignantly says to his son, “I’m sorry it’s not blue”, in spite of his disappointment, the boy simply replies, “It’s okay.” This reflects a resilience the boy has built up against the harshness of the post-apocalyptic wasteland. In that sense, he has grown stronger than his father. He had hoped to find a rare moment of absolution upon reaching the coast and looking out at an azure sea, only to have those hopes dashed. However, the boy doesn’t dwell on that shattered idealism. That letdown didn’t mean that his quest had been a failure. It just meant that the boy’s journey in search of salvation continued. After all, that is why they chose not to lie down and die as so many others had and set off down the road to begin with.

Maybe this is the best approach to dealing with the sense that we have lost what we once knew in the West. Will my hometown of Toronto ever again be the ideal place to raise a white family as it was during my childhood? I don’t know. However, there’s a danger in fixating on sentimentalism. It serves to dishearten oneself into helpless demoralization. Uncertainty should not dampen one’s resolve. The past is gone, but that does not mean we must accept continuing on this trajectory. Rather than dwelling on what’s gone, one must harden themselves to the reality of a less safe and secure world and take up the task of changing that course towards a more promising future.