(no subject)
Re-posted from Kat's journal. I fear for my wonderful country...I really do =/
ELECTION EVE LETTER
By Spider Robinson
http://www.spiderrobinson.com
Do you know when I am most proud to be a Canadian?
When I drive onto the Lion’s Gate Bridge, and cross the harbour into Vancouver.
Why? Because during the hours I do my traveling, that ridiculous three lane bridge only has a single lane going my way. Four lanes of traffic must merge into one. There is always a jam.
But there is never a problem.
Without fail, all four lanes merge smoothly, correctly, fairly. Nobody cheats. Nobody tries to cut in. The rare few who do always bear American license plates. I don’t know about you, but that makes my heart sing, every single time.
I grew up in the US, lived there for 25 years. Trust me: anywhere in that nation, the scenario I have just described is literally unimaginable. Every merge is a dogfight. It is not only a dog eat dog country, they are proud of that. For thirty years now, I have listened to Canadians trying to define what distinguishes them from Americans, and it always baffles me because it so simple.
I can put it into a single word: kindness.
We treat each other with marginally greater kindness than many other peoples do. I do not say with perfect kindness-I have spoken with a few of our oldest residents, you see. But on balance, we cut each other rather more slack than most humans.
It’s a rural attitude, I think. If our neighbours want to have sex in a different manner than we do, we tend to mind our business. If they choose to put something different into their pipe than we do, we let it slide. We draw the line only at behaviour so weird it threatens us-we permit it to merely annoy or offend us. And we try not to annoy or offend ourselves.
I think that is magnificent. I think that is the single most admirable achievement of the human race in the last century: to have produced a place where kindness is practiced. That is the source of our famous good manners, and our alleged boringness: we are kinder than anyone else I know.
Canada headed by a majority Conservative government would become steadily less kind every day. It would-the Conservative Party says it would-align us with people who do not believe their citizens have a right to health care. It would align us with people who think anybody who needs medical marijuana should be denied it, and anybody who wants it for fun should be imprisoned. It would align us with people who like to tell other people what to do.
Forget all that. Forget all the side-issues and smokescreens. My wife, a Soto Zen monk, just broke silence tonight to phone me from a Buddhist monastery in California where she’s having her annual three-week spiritual tune-up. Jeanne did so because during meditation, clarity had come to her, and she felt compelled to remind me of the one issue that actually means anything in this election.
Argue all you want about health care or marijuana or corruption or money for oil or any of the other crap: if we elect a majority Conservative government, Canadian boys and girls will die bloody.
Canadian troops will die in a foreign land, to help Americans protect themselves against the dread specter of 19 fanatics who have been dead for nearly five years, and whose living friends (if any) have in all the time since then failed to so much as injure a single American on American soil.
Canadian parents, too, will get to have their children come home in a bag, just like Americans. We’ll be helping that process to continue, for parents in both countries. Not to mention for parents in Iraq, who are just as deserving of kindness.
Not all soldiers’ parents, no. The rest will get back children who have killed people. People who were trying to kill them, for reasons neither side could articulate. Our own generation of shattered Vietnam vets-with no Canada to flee to.
Does anything else matter?
Some of my friends went to Vietnam. The ones that came back included junkies, drunks, religious fanatics, and eventual suicides. None came back healthier. None came back happy.
I can understand anyone who would like Canada to be more like America. They sure make it seem like a good deal there on TV, don’t they? I tell you from my heart that it is a good deal I walked away from thirty years ago, and I am sick with terror that it may yet pursue me even up here, to the Land of Kindness. I left New York City because I could no longer summon up the strength it takes to step over homeless people sprawled on the sidewalk to get to the store. I could no longer bear to live in a place where cynicism was the only imaginable mindset, where only fools and hippies hoped. If Canada gives up its kindness, where will I go then?
Americans say they believe, above all, in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I’m alive, I’m free, and I can do what makes me happy! Does that sound like a proud boast to you? It once did to me. It sounds childish to me now. Even oafish.
Canadians say they believe in peace, order, and good government. Look at that first word. You’d have to define it for an American: most of them think it means “a state in which the fighting is out of earshot.” That second word you could not even define for them: they have no common referent. And the last two words will induce laughter of clinically dangerous intensity.
Peace? We haven’t fought a war with anybody since the Nazis. Order? Despite some of the most irritable minorities on earth we have never had a Civil War. And while I will be among the first and loudest to admit that we have never in our history had good government, we’ve come a lot closer than average. Our governments have certainly imprisoned vastly fewer of our own citizens than those of our neighbour to the south, healed infinitely more of our sick, helped many more of our poor.
And sent fewer of our children off to kill or die. Hell, we’ve stopped a few squabbles. And cleaned up after others.
Please don’t pick this moment in our history to reverse our course. Please cast whatever vote-even if it isn’t your ideal vote-will have the highest chance of preventing a majority Conservative government, nationally and locally. I don’t care if we’re corrupt, bumbling, misguided-as long as we remain kind.
Thanks for listening.
--B.C. writer Spider Robinson is the author of 33 books, most recently a collaboration with Robert A. Heinlein, VARIABLE STAR; his Globe and Mail Comment columns are collected in THE CRAZY YEARS [BenBella Books].
ELECTION EVE LETTER
By Spider Robinson
http://www.spiderrobinson.com
Do you know when I am most proud to be a Canadian?
When I drive onto the Lion’s Gate Bridge, and cross the harbour into Vancouver.
Why? Because during the hours I do my traveling, that ridiculous three lane bridge only has a single lane going my way. Four lanes of traffic must merge into one. There is always a jam.
But there is never a problem.
Without fail, all four lanes merge smoothly, correctly, fairly. Nobody cheats. Nobody tries to cut in. The rare few who do always bear American license plates. I don’t know about you, but that makes my heart sing, every single time.
I grew up in the US, lived there for 25 years. Trust me: anywhere in that nation, the scenario I have just described is literally unimaginable. Every merge is a dogfight. It is not only a dog eat dog country, they are proud of that. For thirty years now, I have listened to Canadians trying to define what distinguishes them from Americans, and it always baffles me because it so simple.
I can put it into a single word: kindness.
We treat each other with marginally greater kindness than many other peoples do. I do not say with perfect kindness-I have spoken with a few of our oldest residents, you see. But on balance, we cut each other rather more slack than most humans.
It’s a rural attitude, I think. If our neighbours want to have sex in a different manner than we do, we tend to mind our business. If they choose to put something different into their pipe than we do, we let it slide. We draw the line only at behaviour so weird it threatens us-we permit it to merely annoy or offend us. And we try not to annoy or offend ourselves.
I think that is magnificent. I think that is the single most admirable achievement of the human race in the last century: to have produced a place where kindness is practiced. That is the source of our famous good manners, and our alleged boringness: we are kinder than anyone else I know.
Canada headed by a majority Conservative government would become steadily less kind every day. It would-the Conservative Party says it would-align us with people who do not believe their citizens have a right to health care. It would align us with people who think anybody who needs medical marijuana should be denied it, and anybody who wants it for fun should be imprisoned. It would align us with people who like to tell other people what to do.
Forget all that. Forget all the side-issues and smokescreens. My wife, a Soto Zen monk, just broke silence tonight to phone me from a Buddhist monastery in California where she’s having her annual three-week spiritual tune-up. Jeanne did so because during meditation, clarity had come to her, and she felt compelled to remind me of the one issue that actually means anything in this election.
Argue all you want about health care or marijuana or corruption or money for oil or any of the other crap: if we elect a majority Conservative government, Canadian boys and girls will die bloody.
Canadian troops will die in a foreign land, to help Americans protect themselves against the dread specter of 19 fanatics who have been dead for nearly five years, and whose living friends (if any) have in all the time since then failed to so much as injure a single American on American soil.
Canadian parents, too, will get to have their children come home in a bag, just like Americans. We’ll be helping that process to continue, for parents in both countries. Not to mention for parents in Iraq, who are just as deserving of kindness.
Not all soldiers’ parents, no. The rest will get back children who have killed people. People who were trying to kill them, for reasons neither side could articulate. Our own generation of shattered Vietnam vets-with no Canada to flee to.
Does anything else matter?
Some of my friends went to Vietnam. The ones that came back included junkies, drunks, religious fanatics, and eventual suicides. None came back healthier. None came back happy.
I can understand anyone who would like Canada to be more like America. They sure make it seem like a good deal there on TV, don’t they? I tell you from my heart that it is a good deal I walked away from thirty years ago, and I am sick with terror that it may yet pursue me even up here, to the Land of Kindness. I left New York City because I could no longer summon up the strength it takes to step over homeless people sprawled on the sidewalk to get to the store. I could no longer bear to live in a place where cynicism was the only imaginable mindset, where only fools and hippies hoped. If Canada gives up its kindness, where will I go then?
Americans say they believe, above all, in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I’m alive, I’m free, and I can do what makes me happy! Does that sound like a proud boast to you? It once did to me. It sounds childish to me now. Even oafish.
Canadians say they believe in peace, order, and good government. Look at that first word. You’d have to define it for an American: most of them think it means “a state in which the fighting is out of earshot.” That second word you could not even define for them: they have no common referent. And the last two words will induce laughter of clinically dangerous intensity.
Peace? We haven’t fought a war with anybody since the Nazis. Order? Despite some of the most irritable minorities on earth we have never had a Civil War. And while I will be among the first and loudest to admit that we have never in our history had good government, we’ve come a lot closer than average. Our governments have certainly imprisoned vastly fewer of our own citizens than those of our neighbour to the south, healed infinitely more of our sick, helped many more of our poor.
And sent fewer of our children off to kill or die. Hell, we’ve stopped a few squabbles. And cleaned up after others.
Please don’t pick this moment in our history to reverse our course. Please cast whatever vote-even if it isn’t your ideal vote-will have the highest chance of preventing a majority Conservative government, nationally and locally. I don’t care if we’re corrupt, bumbling, misguided-as long as we remain kind.
Thanks for listening.
--B.C. writer Spider Robinson is the author of 33 books, most recently a collaboration with Robert A. Heinlein, VARIABLE STAR; his Globe and Mail Comment columns are collected in THE CRAZY YEARS [BenBella Books].