A Canadian flag at a park in Quebec. (Photo by Anakay via Flickr | CC-BY-SA 2.0).
Perhaps if you grow up in penthouse on top of a gilded tower in the middle of the predatory capitalist shark tank known as “New York City,” your world view is eternally corrupted by your pitiful life experience. Perhaps you think every human and nation on the planet are wholly focused on trying to rip you off every day on every thing.
But when you bring that sorry and twisted perspective to the White House you make real mistakes in discerning who is or isn’t your enemy, who is or isn’t trying to wheedle every nickel they can get out of you, and who is or isn’t a threat to our nation.
So it seems as Donald Trump tries to convince the American people that somehow our oldest, most loyal, and kindest neighbors and allies — the Canadians — are an enemy bent on destroying the United States through imaginary economic attacks.
Such are the mistakes made when one sees the world through the blurry and myopic lens of greed, driven by endless avarice to always want to take what others have for yourself.
But then there’s the rest of us. You know, the people who have actually lived in border states, traveled the breadth and length across the vastness of Canada’s incredible landscape from ocean to ocean. And most importantly, interacted with and received the kind and courteous reception of which Canadians are justly proud and internationally famous.
As those of us who have spent time in the Great North know, Canada is indeed a nation of immigrants, but who are welcomed rather than vilified and demonized, and rounded up in detention camps for deportation — legally or not.
Canada has also treated its Indigenous citizens, whom they name the First People, far more honorably and fairly than the U.S., going so far as to give Nunavut, the nation’s largest and northernmost province, to the Inuit people to self-govern.
And no, Canada has no ambitions to take over Greenland, Panama or threaten the rest of the world by interjecting itself as a destructive influence in the lives and governance of other people and nations. Nor does Canada threaten the planet with vastly more than enough nuclear weapons to completely end life on earth — that would be the U.S.
The Canadian people do not in any way, shape or form deserve the treatment they are receiving from Donald Trump. Where, in any form of international diplomacy, is a threat to simply subsume another sovereign nation accepted — particularly when both nations are long-standing democracies and allies? Nowhere but in the twisted mind of Trump who thinks insulting Canada’s Prime Minister as “governor” is acceptable.
None of this makes any sense for the rest of us and runs completely contrary to our personal experiences with Canadians. As a friend who recently returned from a week skiing in British Columbia related, there is now a proliferation of bumper stickers that simply say “Pro American, Anti-Trump.” Indeed, that phrase is finding wider use across the globe as the rest of the world wonders what happened to the United States and how we went from considering long-standing friends as enemies?
And so I say to my lifelong Canadian friends: “I am flying the Canadian flag to say I’m sorry and embarrassed by the baseless tariff war, the insults, and the aggressive threats to take over your nation — and urge others to do so.” Remember, more than 75 million Americans voted against Donald Trump, who failed to even crack 50% of the total votes cast. We are still here, and we will continue to be pro-American, pro-Canadian — and anti-Trump.