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Peacetime Concerns

Health, employment, and education are Canada’s primary concerns leading up to the January 23 election. (My primary concern is that Stephen Harper keeps on creeping out the majority of Canadians with his fundamentalist America-centric views and never, ever, ever get elected. But that’s neither here nor there.)

Anyway. Health, employment, and education. And I thought, “When’s the last time Americans had the luxury of those concerns?” From 1945 to 1950, during the most conspicuous period of American peace, an alarming number of women went insane from isolation and boredom. Families imploded quietly. The Korean War soon followed, then the Vietnam war – and all those kids who’d watched their valium addicted mothers fall apart suddenly stood up and said, “Um…NO,” and okay, they also did acid like they used to eat Pez, but for a little moment America…tried…to change.

Then someone in government said, “Hey, I have an idea. Remember that Cold War thing? Let’s start talking that up again. Let’s have a war for free. Let’s scare the fuck out of a bunch of little kids and their parents and gain back the control we lost back in the sixties.” And that was the country I grew up in, a country waiting, waiting, for nuclear war. Christmas was especially frightening for me, because I was sure that the Evil Russians would attack on Christmas, becuase no one would be expecting it. I woke up once at 3 a.m. to the sound of thunder and was sure that the bombs had finally started to fall. I wrote letters to Ronald Reagan and the San Jose Mercury Times. I was always afraid. But I really had no idea what kind of fear lay ahead, that terrorism would rear its head in the form of a new president and a gradual eroding of the separation of church and state (a law I heard about for the first time and EVEN IN the middle of my religious phase I applauded) – listen, people, it’s not the fact that they want to teach creationism, it’s the foundation they’re trying to lay for the future.

These are the things I think about when people say, “Oh, but don’t you feel any loyalty to your country? How could you just leave like that?”

My country?

For me, the concept of patriotism has always been an alien one, rather like believing in God, except I went through a religious phase as a child and never once felt anything for the American flag. It’s akin to being born to a monstrous mother and being told you should respect her anyway and stay in the house until you’re blue in the face from screaming and trying to make her stop burning down the neighbour’s houses and eating kittens raw for breakfast when this little old woman who wouldn’t hurt a fly lives right next door and keeps inviting you in for tea and cookies.

And then one day when your mother is away, fundraising for Focus on the Family, you walk out the door, your husband on the left and your son on the right, and walk up that cobblestone path and knock on the door. And the little old lady lets you in.

Patriotism was an alien concept until I stood in a room full of people with my hand over my heart and tried my best to sing O Canada. But I was crying too hard.

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