Ask me a little while ago and I'd tell you that all those picketing, poster-holding hippies might as well be complaining about how cold it is in January.

I have spent a lifetime desensitizing myself to violence. I remember coming home from school as a child and beginning my daily ritual of watching war movies. At thirty one I have played just about every violent video game ever made, and as a boy I used to go hunting and learned early on not to be shy of blood or killing. I was that big angry kid people were afraid of in high school; my temper and violence reinforced by my father's belt.

The more I have seen of human nature the more I have thought Rousseau was wrong about our innate goodness. I'm a high school teacher now. You should see the other teachers at my school squabble, gossip and envy one another as they blame their failures on the students, or the system. Over the years I went from voting liberal, to conservative. (The latter I've had to keep secret) Why did I stop being a vegetarian? Why do I feel like I'm the last living romantic? Why don't I really care about global warming?

Recently a colleague of mine had to drop out of a school trip and I was asked to take her place. With ten students and another teacher, I went to Honduras to learn about the social injustices there. It was the first time I've ever been embarrassed of being Canadian. The mining corporation Goldcorp has a gold mine there that is literally killing some of the poorest and most helpless of Hondurans. People are violently forced out of their homes, their rivers are drained while the few remaining ones are poisoned and cyanide is sprayed into the air to separate the gold from the rock. Miscarriages, skin diseases, and deformed foetuses are the result. They have nowhere else to go. It is a company that our federal pension is invested in, as is, ironically, the Ontario teacher's union. It is a stain that every Canadian taxpayer wears and it is a stain that extends to many other countries such as Argentina and Guatemala. If you are like me, that knowledge wouldn't normally bother you that much. It is so easy to dismiss this sort of thing: to assume the two sides of the issue cancel each other out, to see investing through an amoral lens, or to change the channel. If you are like me, you have spent a lifetime doing it and you probably aren't that surprised that it's happening in the first place. I wasn't so naïve as to think we were standing on a higher moral ground than our southern neighbours. This time was different though. This time I met face to face with the people. I shook their hands and looked into their eyes as they told me their stories. The most amazing thing was that they didn't hate me, and I can't help but think that if things were reversed, we might hate them.

I met the Garifuna people too. The United Nations declared them as one of the most important cultures in the world. Born from a shipwrecked slave ship destined for America they escaped the fate of their American brothers to grow over centuries into their own fascinating culture. Having lived on the coast before the Spanish settlers they never had to "buy" their land, and so when an Italian corporation suddenly produced land titles to the very beaches they had lived on for generations they were first asked, then forced to leave. As they danced for us, I saw in my mind the bulldozers that will level their homes and culture all for a beach resort. I'm sure it will be a lovely resort, the kind of place a Canadian might like to visit to escape the winter cold.

As pessimistic as I am, or was, it still shocked me that intelligent successful people are willing to do this to others. Some of the people I met had relatives and friends who have killed themselves because they felt so utterly hopeless. Some who are trying to make a change risk being assassinated. This wasn't some character in a movie, this was Carlos who came out of hiding and risked his life to show us where his home used to be. I almost can not believe that an entire culture is about to be destroyed simply for profit in today's world. Maybe I am naïve after all.

I feel guilty that I was so blind and that it took this trip to open my eyes. I would like to blame my myopic and self centered gaze on the consumer smoke blown by marketers and media but that is no excuse. We are so privileged and yet we busy ourselves stressing about making our comfortable lives more comfortable. It was not blissful being ignorant and indifferent, it was hollow, and though I tried a myriad of justifications it was not enough. Something was missing in my life - children? A dog maybe? I convinced myself that as a teacher I made enough of a difference in the world already, so it couldn't be that. I'm spreading the word here as I promised Carlos I would. Rousseau said that we are good because all of us have an intrinsic repugnance of seeing suffering in others we view similar to ourselves. Maybe that's the problem. I never really saw them, but through a television set.