Recently I had a conversation with another immigrant to Canada, a woman who has lived in both Vancouver and Toronto. I asked how life in the two cities compared. She told me that she prefers Toronto to Vancouver, but likes British Columbia much more than Ontario as a province. 'The beauty!' she said. 'Come on. My god!' I know what she means. I have seen some pleasant lakes and colourful woods in Ontario but nothing to make my heart go pit-a-pat. So, I made the flippant comment that the obvious solution is to move to California, where one could live in a dynamic city and on the spectacular West Coast, see the sun set (as it should) into the ocean, and without the incessant rain. But here my interlocutor disagreed, saying that life in the US is far too dangerous. Too many guns. She described a friend who, after travelling for some time in America, arrived in Canada having acquired a nervous distrust of strangers in the street.
This assertion ruffled my usually quiescent red, white, and blue feathers. I know there are too many guns in the US and I don't like them. I know there are rednecks and survivalists and conservatives and xenophobes and far too many people who are tired and poor. The thing is, though, that such people exist in Canada as well; and that crime, violent crime, occurs with depressing frequency in Toronto (last week, in fact, in the next street over from ours). Nor do I feel that Canada, or at any rate Toronto, has solved the problems of deprivation and income inequality. Far from it.
(Anodyne platitude alert.). There are a lot of great people in Canada and I'm lucky to have some of them as friends. This doesn't stop me from appreciating the US as home to a vast number of brilliant, interesting, curmudgeonly, funny, cynical, liberal, bitchy, creative and dynamic folks in beautiful cities (I mean all the adjectives as compliments). It's my great good fortune that a few, a tiny proportion, of these people are my own family and friends. I can sympathize with someone who had a challenging journey from the New York islands to the redwood forests, but I find myself wondering whether it's the travelling, the being a tourist, as much as being in the USA, that made the person jittery.
In other words, as is my occasional expatriate wont, I waxed patriotic.
However, today, I am duly chastened. The US is scaring me, too. Yesterday my compatriots (though I hope not my friends and family) voted into congressional office, into the US Senate in particular, a bunch of Republicans. From what I've read they are a divided group unlikely to cooperate enough successfully to press home their own multiple agendas, but if they unite in anything, it will be in hobbling the executive branch for the rest of this term. Hang on to your Obamacare hats, everyone.
Very, very frightening.
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