4 ~ Sunday. July 28, 1991 - North Shore News

Why I don't
want to live

e

in the USA,

THE FIRST time I ever went ‘‘across the line’’ to the
States, I was badly disappointed. I'm not sure what I ex-
pected, but the dusty Minnesota town of Duluth wasn't it.

Except for the bright star-
spangled banners everywhere and
the neon Schlitz beer signs, it
looked just like home.

1 was suffering, in faci, from 2
lack of culture shock.

When | was a kid, the games we
played at recess and lunch hour
were American imports. You ei-
ther wore a Yankee hat or a Con-
federate hat, and that determined
whose gang you were in, or else
we were all Daniel Boones with
our fake raccoon-tails hanging
down.

I remember when CBC tried to
match Walt Disney by coming up
with a scries called Radisson. We
tried to follow it. We really did.
We were up for the idea of a Ca-
nadian hero, but by the time the
CBC got done with him, poor
Radisson was almost as boring as
the history books from which he
sprang.

Allof which is to say that,
from childhood onward a Cana-
dian is the product of a pan-
American culture with probably
less sense of national identity than
any other person on Earth.

It works to the advantage of
Canadians who do decide to
emigrate to the States. They can
blend in so well that many of
them become aciors and television
personalities.

The real Americans can’t tell
the difference. There are only
about three or four Canadian ex-
pressions that have to be jettison-
ed, ch?

[ jokingly refer to the Cana-
dians | know who are working
down in the States as
“*frostbacks.*’ They just laugh at
me, of course.

They can write off the mor-
tgages on their homes for tax
purposes. The federal government
only takes about 15% of their
earnings, as opposed to nearly
50%. There is no GST. A pack of
smokes only costs a buck-eighty.
Food, booze, shelter — everything
is cheaper.

Alas, that includes human life.

And there’s the main rub. For
all the ease with which I can fit
into American society, for all the
freedom from excess taxes 1 would
enjoy, and despite the fact that |
think the American political
system is more democratic than
ours, the primary reason for not
wanting to move to the U.S. still
comes down to stark terror.

The murder rate is roughly 16
times the rate in the biggest Ca-
nadian cities. You are also 10
times as likely to be mugged,
raped or robbed.

For what it is worth — and I
think it is worth a lot — by the
sheer weight of numbers, you
would find yourself living in a
physically smaller country that is
10 times as crowded.

Overcrowding. Violence. Pretty
good reasons in themselves to
avoid the place. But there is
another, in some ways deeper,
reason.

I happened to be down in South
Carolina when the first of the

Bob
Hunter |

STRICTLY PERSONAL

brave American war heroes came
marching home from the Gulf.

Now I know that the so-called
objective media can be jingoistic,
but the outpouring of patriotic
rah-rah-rah stuff, the yellow rib-
bons and fags, flags, flags, the
gushing and fawning, the national
anthems-singing, the chest-thump-
ing and saluting, saluting, saluting
was cnough to make me want to
puke.

And therein is to be found the
element of Canadian existence
that I have come to cherish the
most. It is precisely the lack of
absurd nationalistic frenzy.

Oh, the politicians try to whip it
up every once in a while, but even
at its most raucous, Canadian pa-
triotic fervor is a muted thing.

Thank goodness.

You don’t have to sit down and
think about it very deeply before
you realize that the modern na-
tion-state is an artificial construc-
tion, a product of power politics,
not nature.

We are biological creatures
speaking different languages and
having different colored skins, but
we are all human beings sharing a
world.

The national differences that
have been stamped on top of our
tribal identities are purely and
simply the result of brainwashing
by the state — each and every
state being culpable in this matter.

For English-speaking Cana-
dians, few of whom know the
words to their national anthem,
there is an intellectual freedom
involved in not having been sav-
agely programmed into a patriotic
frame of mind. The melting-pot is
actually the melting brain.

There is absolutely nothing in-
telligent about nationalism. And
to the extent that most Canadians
are relatively free of nationalistic
hangups, we are able to use our
brains, rather than functioning
like jingoistic robots — which,
i’m sorry to say, is exactly what
Americans turn into at the sound
of the first bar of The Star
Spangied Banner.

One good reason for not mov-
ing to the States: it’s full of
Americans.

English as a Second Language

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For Returning Students Only

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