Should I go back to Scotland, where my mother was born, since I am usually critical of my country?
By the way, I do that for two reasons: one, I am Canadian; two, it’s my job.
The recent ramblings of Donald Trump have got me thinking about where I would go if someone told me to “go back home” as a Canadian.
If a person — let alone a world leader — told me to go back to where I came from, where would I go?
The U.S. president has the world asking the same question after he told four progressive Democratic U.S congresswomen to go back to where they came from and fix the problems in their homeland, before criticizing the United States.
They are all American citizens — that is how they were elected leaders — and three were born in America.
So where do they go?
White House advisor Kellyanne Conway compounded the problem when a reporter asked the same question of the president and she snapped back, “What is your ethnicity?”
The press gathering was dumbfounded, leaving the reporter questioning why his ethnicity was relevant, creating the distraction Conway hoped for.
WATCH: Global News coverage of Donald Trump’s attack on Democratic congresswomen
My mother arrived in Canada on the snowy shores of Halifax after a week-long journey across the Atlantic.
It was a new life for a family that had lived through the ugliness of the Second World War. A new beginning.
As a young adolescent girl, she tried to integrate and finish school.
However, she would come home from class and tell her mother she didn’t want to attend anymore. She hated the way they made fun of her accent and how she dressed.
They would yell, “Go back to where you came from.”
She quit and was working in a factory by age 15, and did so until she retired.
I am a first-generation Canadian who has benefited from the sacrifice of such immigrants and these words hurt me.
I can’t imagine how it feels if you just got off the boat — or plane — and have nothing.
I also can’t understand why these same words don’t resonate with every person in the world who has ever ended up in a different place than where they were born.
The words tweeted by the president of the United States of America this week were divisive and nothing else — and all for votes.
Divisiveness leads to conflict and war, not a peaceful society.
In a Donald Trump world, should I move to Aberdeen, rather than be critical of the democracy in which I was born?
What’s your ethnicity?
Where do you have to go back to — or better yet, where does Donald Trump?
Scott Thompson is the host of The Scott Thompson Show on Global News Radio 900 CHML.