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I'm thinking through the recent events. Some of it fits very much into some recent evolution in my thinking over the past few years, and some has challenged some ideas that I had.

I have some relatives who moved a while ago to the United States, and I think that was really the start of a process that changed my smug Canadian anti-American attitude. They fit well into the community, everyone was very welcoming, the school was actually at a more advanced academic level than the one they had had here. I started to realize that if you are a middle-class American, your life is not much different from a middle-class Canadian, other than perhaps being more materialistic. It's really on the extremes, in poverty and in great wealth, that the greatest differences are seen. Canada has this perception of the US as a violent place, but a lot of that violence takes place in impoverished ghettos full of despair - it's as if the Americans were to base their perception of Canada on the tragedy that is our aboriginal reserves.

Because of my relatives, I had the chance to visit Chicago. We stayed in downtown Chicago and again this was part of changing my perceptions. Here in Canada we tend to think of American cities as dangerous, dirty, scary places. But downtown Chicago was amazing, clean, huge, incredible architecture, massive museums like the Art Institute of Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History (which has an entrance building that is an incredible vast space)... and the people were very nice, polite - not at all resembling our stereotype of the loud, rude American.

It was then that I really started to think about Halifax and Nova Scotia, and our relationship to the United States. Before Confederation, we were very proud, independant, successful. The Americans were viewed as our close partners. Particularly Halifax had a close connection with Boston, and many people would go down to Boston to work. Americans were viewed (I think, it was of course a long time ago) more as just another friendly group to trade with - sure they had some different ideas and laws, but so did we. It was really with Confederation that all our attention turned to Upper Canada, and Halifax gradually seemed to turn into just a gateway to central Canada, a stopover on the way to the "real action". Our attitudes towards the Americans turned negative, they were stereotyped, just like any other cultural, racial or religious group, as having all sorts of undesirable characteristics, attitudes and behaviors.

I was thinking about this, thinking about where we sit on the continent - here we are in Halifax, considered by others or even considering ourselves as a "poor backwater", while just down the coast, there's Boston and New York, two of the richest, most successful and most important cities in the world. That was one of the reasons I took a Christmas vacation in New York last year. It seemed incredible that here was the leading city in the world, just a few hours flight away from Halifax. And in New York, just like in Chicago, I found safety, nice people, and incredible architecture and museums.

That's also why I have already planned (starting months ago) to go to Boston this Christmas - the tickets and everything was all arranged weeks ago. It seems incredible that Halifax, with a deep harbor unmatched by any in the world, and close to Iceland and Europe, still hasn't yet seemed to think of itself as central, a city that could succeed just as well as Boston or even New York. I'm looking forward to my trip. I really think Halifax and Nova Scotia and the Atlantic provinces should start to look more to our southern neighbours, and think of ourself as just part of an incredibly successful eastern coastline, rather than poor cousins at the edge of Upper Canada. Anti-Americanism is just a form of racism, and is just as stupid.

Also, on that topic, I plead with everyone, for the love of God, no religion counsels violence and hatred. Turn to our Muslim friends with compassion and loving kindness, not with intolerance.

The other effects were in my thoughts about cellphones and airplanes. I could never see any point to cellphones, but they seem to have been incredibly useful during this crisis, so I think I will get one. Also, I have always been very anti-car, and I always felt very safe in airplanes, I would think about the thousands of car deaths every year and the (until now) very few airplane crashes, the statistics said that you were 30x more likely to get hurt in your car on the way to the airport than in the plane itself. I would think about the extreme and seemly excessive security and safety precautions they take for planes, so much greater than the considerations for cars. The training and checks needed for a plane to get off the ground. I even resented the intrusive security checks, I thought they were foolish. A few (until now) airplanes had been hijacked unsuccessfully like 50 years ago, and yet every day millions of people had to go through security scanners. Who would ever hijack a plane between Halifax and Ottawa, I thought. If you wanted to hijack something, why not a bus, train or boat, where there are just as many people and NO security. I didn't have the evil twist of imagination to realize that a plane can be a flying bomb, thank God.

Premier Hamm was talking on tv the other day as he was donating blood, his thoughts were just as mine were, remembering the help that Boston sent immediately to Halifax after the Halifax Explosion (an act of kindness which Nova Scotia remembers every year by sending Boston a huge Christmas tree). The east coast of the United States are our close neighbours, close in geography and even, although we sometimes haven't liked to admit it, in culture as well. I hope this event will bring many people to stop their knee-jerk anti-Americanism, and to start looking at the eastern United States with new eyes. posted by Richard at 09:17 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)