One Hundred and Fourty Four

In which our Hero writes a different sort of a love letter to a different sort of a love

It’s weird how my perspective somehow keeps changing. It made sense, more obviously, when I was away, and contrasting that to being back was an inevitable succession, but now that I’ve been back for a while, where I’m from stops being a matter of foreground consideration and just fades into the background noise.

This year, curiously enough, I think I’ve seen two lessons. The first is how personally varied a thing like a national identity can be, as I see and here what I can’t deny are Canadians yet think them so foreign to me. The second is how fragile that identity can be, as I feel sadness and even anguish and some of the turns and twists of my home.

Nocturne rolls with a surprising number of displaced Canadians and I say with some horror that Nocturne seems vastly more true to what I’ve always seen as a national identity than my actual countrymen around her. To me, humility is part of the Canadian identity. So we’re proud of being Canadian but we’re embarrassed about being proud. So we don’t make a big fuss about it, and rather than fireworks and huge vacations, we just enjoy our long weekends and pass around the beer.

But these people who are from places that I know and have been, say things about Canada that I have to look up, and describe things that are so far outside of my personal experience that make me wonder if maybe what I think of Canadian isn’t the same as what it is now, or if my connection to an older generation now makes me part of a view of ourselves that is not current, not entirely living.

And add to that the painful open contempt that our sitting government seems to have for our citizens and that same identity. It is plainly arrogance and exploitation, because they don’t answer to us, in a literal sense. There’s no shame, there’s no personal responsibility. They just ignore the questions whose answers would demand accountability, and in what I have always seen as a Canadian, that humility that would make them ashamed of their failings, and drive them to do better or fix what they’ve done.

It’s terrifying to me, because it diminishes the voices of the people, and it diminishes the conversation. It feels like as a country we’re starting to degenerate into the kind of polarized talking-past-each-other shouting match that is unrecognizable to someone who grew up with great and mighty leaders and statesmen.

Is it that we’re smaller now? Have we grown more more petty? Is this the aftermath of some trauma I missed? Or am I older now and seeing what was always there and I just never recognized. I don’t know.

I don’t feel entirely proud of being Canadian this year. Not the way I have in the past. Not in the aftermath of the embarrassing behaviour of police and protestors both, still being unraveled after last year’s G20 summit. Not after the not-actually-as-unusual-as-it-should-be rioting in Vancouver after losing a hockey game. Not after a conversationless election (though that wasn’t entirely the winning party’s fault).

But I don’t feel ashamed of my homeland either. Not after reading about a cop, pinned under the car that he was dying under, calling for help for the occupants of the car. Not after seeing the “after-riot,” in Vancouver, where thousands of people came out to clean up, and many more were guided to responsibility for their actions by themselves, by friends, by family.

A nation is the product of its people and a national identity is what we feel about our country, and what we’ve done, and what we do. I think we need to be better, but I also think that we have the fortitude to do it.

Happy Birthday, Canada.