What Canadians Look Like From Here, Part 2

I was in my local California Safeway this morning, zipping along head down, with ten thousand little tweety birds vying for top spot on my "to do" list. The Chief Bird at this particular moment was "What the heck will I write about in my blog today?" when this helpful stranger served as my muse. In my distracted state, I must have wandered a little over the yellow line and we gently bumped shoulders. Before I could say a word, she huffed, "Well! Excuse you!" and voila! I knew today would be What Canadians Look Like From Here, Part 2. For WCLLFH, Part 1, please see my July 17 posting in "Older Posts" (link at bottom of this page.)

A short history lesson is necessary here to explain what was so profound about Ms. Safeway Sunshine's response to an accidental bump. As a nation, Canada had our kick-off dinner in 1867 [1]. With only 11 or so (about the same number subscribe to this blog, so I know I'm off to a great start!) people spread over the second largest country in the world, we knew that without a spirit of community reliance, we would surely die. Ice and vast geographic distance, plus some very weird accents in Newfoundland and the Ottawa Valley, made the support of the community essential to the preservation of life, not to mention personal advancement and the ability to talk and be understood. You depended on your neighbour (and that is how it's spelled for them) for help with the harvest and the emotional companionship to make it through winter.

To disrupt the peace of the community was to put everyone at risk. Expressing strong opinions on emotionally-charged subjects (politics, religion, and whether or not it is arrogant to park diagonally so you take up two parking spaces) became a subversive activity in Canada. In fact, any really enthusiastically-expressed outlook, even a positive one, is now regarded with suspicion and ends up in awkward lulls in the conversation with much shuffling of feet and gentle coughing until someone announces with relief that it's time for American Idol.

To be overtly patriotic is perceived as being vaguely disloyal. On the surface it seems okay but there is just something fishy about it. So we aren’t an excessively expressively patriotic people since Canadians defer to the group. Try this little experiment on your next visit to Regina: get on a bus at rush hour and stomp solidly on a commuter’s foot. Don’t worry: they won’t feel much through the snowmobile boots. I’ll bet one Tim Horton’s apple fritter to your Applebee’s corn biscuit that they apologize to you. With a fresh wound on their corn, they’ll coo, “Oh, I’m so sorry, are you okay?” Why? Because the very person you elbow in a crowded elevator could find themselves asking you for a car boost in the frozen parking lot. Survival, man. We are fed "order for the sake of survival" with our baby cereal.

We learn to reign ourselves in, not rock the boat or make waves. Our unspoken national vision statement has developed into, “Be Nice or Perish.” In fact, we’re uncomfortably baffled when we see New England license plates that read, “Live Free or Die.” Do they really mean this? If that’s how old ladies in New England feel, what on earth does a Texan rancher put on her plate: “Pass Me and You're Dead”? Truth be told, Quebec has their own unique version of license-plate propaganda, which reads, “Je me souviens.” (I believe this translates loosely to “Live French or Pout.”)

So now you understand why this morning, despite the fact that I was in a Safeway store, with a yellow box of Cheerios and some fine Canadian bacon in my basket, I knew I wasn't in Kanata anymore, Toto.

[1] In reality, there were a few other folk here well before our European grand-pappies flung themselves ashore. They were already sort of a nation, but if there is one thing I've learned from my seven years in the US, it's that without the proper paperwork, fuggedaboudit. No ticket? No country. The early inhabitants of Canada didn't even pretend to be documented. Technically, I think that made them "illegal indigens," and that sounds pretty darn uppity to me. Well, anyways...