Celebrating Canada Day and the Fourth of July This Week On A Continent Gone Mad

Thoughts of a 'From away' during my Freedom Week: Today is Canada Day, and Friday is the Fourth of July. Yay, and uh....yay?

Photo by the author

Audio here

I’m a ‘from away’ who’s lived in Canada for twenty years and I’ve never lost that sense that I’m still a bit of an outsider. ‘From away’ is an Atlantic provinces expression meaning someone who’s not from here or has moved from way the hell somewhere else in Canada.

This is ‘Freedom Week’ for this ex-pat From Away, when I feel most conflicted about where I come from and where I am.

I feel most at home with my fellow ‘from aways’. My neighborhood is nothing but foreign—us. Lately, we’re deluged with Ukrainians. We were up to our butts in them before as home to a fairly large diaspora; but since the war began, we’ve been up to our earlobes in them. I’m considering learning Ukrainian after French.

While today’s Canada Day is more intense and aggressively patriotic than previous ones, I expect the Fourth of July in the Ignited States of American’t will light the skies more easily than their own muted souls, with questions of how much longer it will remain the Land of the Free, along with soul-searching about how the American Project all went so unimaginably tits-up.

Canada is now under threat from the United States, which is now a national mental health casualty driven collectively mad by insane split politics that re-elected a demented criminal madman to replace the senile but sweet old man before him. The current geezer seems hell-bent on destroying his own country, and everyone else’s, although I imagine it will eventually be mostly America pulling itself out of the wreckage. Canada has gone uber-patriotic in a way that would shame a MAGA after Donnie Demento forced us to realize neither Americans, and by extension their political parties, can be depended on to nominate and choose their leaders wisely.

Fifty-first state, indeed. It’s a MAGA mentally masturbatory delusion to think any other country wants to become part of the Ignited States for the same reason Ukraine and other European countries resist the Putinocracy. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled a week or so ago that Trump can, in fact, deport migrants to shithole dumping grounds like El Salvador and South Sudan to which they have no ties. No doubt ‘traitorous’ ex-pats like me, especially us dual citizens, and other ‘enemies’ of the state are next if we dare cross the border again.

The U.S., to be perfectly blunt, is skipping down the failing-state path.

How American wars against Canada always turn out.

As The Eagle falls, the Mighty Beaver rises

I remember telling my mother when I was maybe ten or so, “I’m really lucky to have been born when and where I was.” I was old enough to recognize my life was pretty damn good in the United States, not like the ‘starving children in China’ Mom would invoke to shame me into eating my vegetables. I knew my mother and my uncle got crappier Christmas presents than my brother and I because they grew up during the Depression, when Grandma would say, “Jim, only cut the pot roast this far, I need the rest for the weekend.” Whereas in our house it was no big deal whether there were leftovers or not.

I recognized, also, that I was better off in 1973 than people were when kids died regularly and girls didn’t have much freedom to do anything except boring household chores, and teenage boys went off to die in foreign wars fought on someone else’s soil.

My adolescence and college years were an era of free speech and thought in which I could say anything I wanted, except to call my mother a bitch, as I found out the hard way.

But the American sense of can-do degraded over the years, along with freedom of thought, more reasonable politics, and social movements with actual problems to solve. The country seemed no longer to stand for what it used to. Little by little, Americans’ collective identity as all-that-and-a-bag-of-chips declined, and by the time I moved to Canada in 2005, a moron running the country approved of prisoner torture, and manufactured new America-hating Islamofascist terrorists in a Cuban prison.

Moving north made me feel safe again.

Shortly after, I met an American lesbian who told me she and her girlfriend also felt safer here, too—the very reason they emigrated. I concurred, thinking of how faintly ominous was the flapping American flag while crossing the Blue Water Bridge to visit my mother country.

I knew I would return, but still. Mass shootings. Conservative crazies who recognized, on some level, that Canada was more like Golden Age America than the U.S. was now. Rising crime. Racism from all sides and a growing hatred for women.

Then, Obama. “Hello again!” I’d cheerfully greet Old Glory at the bridge.

Today, America be crazier. My flag looks more like a skull-and-crossbones. I’m so afraid of my mother country I won’t cross the border at all.

My fellow Americans, in a fit of madness, re-elected a demonstrated incompetent again, who has now gone mega-MAGA-toxic full-blown megalomaniac.

Canadians and other foreigners literally fear crossing the border for hassles, pushy questions, and demands to access our phone data. Or worse, detention. The very worst: Jail on Trumped-up charges. And maybe not in America.

So here we stay, and vacation anywhere that isn’t the U.S., a trend that’s spreading around the world as the U.S. tourism industry quickly collapses. Absent Canadians lead the world in the American exodus, as it was we who until now provided by far the most U.S. tourism and vacation trips annually. America’s loss is Canada’s gain.

Hell, we’re even visiting our own country more.

America may actually Make Canada Great Again

While America commits seppa-kook, Canada turns hopefully to a new endearingly crooked-smiled Prime Minister who embodies what American politicians used to before fuzzy but affable Ronald Reagan.

Mark Carney is the adult in the room, a kind and sober father bringing a steady voice, a strong hand, and a willingness to stand up to an intellectual peon of a President the way our former deer-in-the-headlights prettyboy couldn’t.

The ‘governor’ crap stopped with Mark Carney. “I hear what Donald Trump says, but I don’t take direction from him.” Trump, he says, isn’t bringing up annexation anymore in private conversations.

Complacent Canadians are forced to grow up as the empire next door melts down. No longer can we casually rely on U.S. support for defense or allyship. Trump declared war on our economy, hoping we’d knuckle under and become a state, but he severely ‘misunderestimated’ how proud and patriotic Canadians actually are, and how fiercely we are willing to fight to retain our sovereignty. Trump knows little of American history and may not know America’s two previous attempts to annex Canadian territory failed. And America collectively forgets, over and over, how it’s inevitably forced into guerrilla wars by Canadians, Vietnamese rice paddy farmers and Middle Eastern goat herders, only to return with no mission accomplished.

America is still exceptional. Sort of.

No country is perfect, including Canada. My adopted people, like Americans, have become too ‘woke’, with the concomitant reductions in free speech and an ugly antisemitism every bit as virulent as the U.S.’s. Although left-wing ‘progressives’ assure me Nazis and fascists are only on the right, the only Nazis I see here scream Free Palestine rather than Heil Hitler. Our economy is in the crapper, housing is unaffordable, and we’re sitting ducks not just for our deranged neighbor to the south, but just as critically by China and Russia, who are eyeing our melting polar caps for the buried treasure beneath.

Mr. Carney is strategizing heavily for our defensive future, creating priorities, forging new alliances with Europe, and warning Canadians sacrifices will be required. He didn’t elaborate and I wish he would. I want to know what to expect, as I’m sure my countryfolk would too.

But as a Canadian, I feel more hopeful than I have in a long time. I feel less stress, despite our immediate threat from the south. The TrumpInSloMo for Canada is that he’s forcing us to become a better country and closer Canadians.

Donald Trump may actually Make Canada Great Again. Prime Minister Carney said that if America no longer wanted to lead the world, Canada would.

TrumpInSloMo is forcing our attention away from culture war issues to the very real threats we face, rather than Trudeau’s First World problems like masking wars and ‘trans rights’. (I haven’t seen much Pride pride on my end of Toronto this year. Fewer rainbow flags and letter-jumble virtue signalling from local businesses. #PrideFatigue)

Canada: We’re getting serious. And proud. We’re waking up and, ironically, many of us see a brighter future as the demented old coot drives allies, goodwill, and corporate megaliths to the True North strong and free.

Long before I even considered leaving the States, I thought we Americans needed to get over ourselves. We were not put anywhere by God. We’re not as exceptional as we think, although we’re more exceptional than the rest of the world thinks. We Americans brought democracy back after a 1,700-year hiatus and with the help of our French, Spanish, Prussian, and even a few Indigenous allies, we won our right to sovereignty and self-determination with a victory we couldn’t have accomplished without them.

We dragged our asses behind the rest of you on abolishing slavery, but then pioneered new heights in human rights recognition and declaration.

We’ve fallen short of it in the decades hence, and so has everyone else. We have failed ourselves, and each other.

But many Americans admit now—our shit does, in fact, also stink.

I can still identify, talk, think, and be American.

You can take the American out of America, but you can never take America out of the American.

I still love my country. I still love my peeps. I believe moral right will eventually prevail. It has for 249 years.

Today, I prefer the red-and-white to the red-white-and-blue, but I harbour hopes that my mother country will one day allow me to straddle the border proudly flying both flags. With the American one right-side-up.

That one day I can cross the border fearlessly, regardless of which party is in power.

But for now, this ‘from away’ will stay away.

America will celebrate its 250th birthday next year and that’s saying something. The Bicentennial was a truly joyful year for us; next year’s—sesquibicentennial? Bicentennial-and-a-half? One quarter-millennium? Semiquincentennial!—I hope will be more joyous than today would suggest.

Happy Freedom Week to all my North American peeps, and especially all my fellow ex-pats. We get twice the fireworks!

Actor Darren McGavin, the ‘Night Stalker’, offers a 1976 Bicentennial minute. These breaks offered Americans a brief thumbnail sketch of Revolution-era stories and events. Canadian equivalent: Heritage Minutes, except we haven’t stopped producing them since 1991.

When I’m not reading the news and muttering, “I don’t know what the hell is going on. I never know what the hell is going on,” and ordering my ‘The World Needs More Canada’ T-shirt, I help women and others reclaim their power here at Grow Some Labia.