OH! Canada

 Last night I went down a YouTube rabbit hole of videos about how Canada is not the land of Storybook Gardens I thought it was when I was 12 years old. It's not. In fact, Storybook Gardens is closed!

Well, that's just for the season. It'll open again for skating and other snow-filled fun when it gets down Celsius enough for that stuff. But Storybook Gardens was all I really knew about Canada (except for hockey and SCTV) for most of my life until recently when Trump got ugly with them and decided to make them great again by further denigrating America. I really thought they were just like us, but without guns. I was pretty much right about that and- no spoiler alert- I'm still right about that. It's just that I learned last night that Canada really doesn't have the Trump-given right to be so smug about themselves as I thought before I hit the rack last night. They're a little fucked up too. And unfortunately for them, they don't have a Trump to point to and say, "Well, THIS fucking guy!"

Their guy- I think his name is Art Carney- is a truly smart man who looks like he'd be a leader. You can take him places with no shame whatsoever. Europe likes him. And they don't even like themselves. 

Boot (which I think might be Canadian for "but") they have pretty much all the problems we have, just on a smaller scale than us here. We have 300 million more people than them even though they have more land than us. Boot problems are Bigly on any scale when you are in the midst of them and they have their share of drug addicts and layaboots(?) that distress them and their neighbourhoods. You can't spell neighbor in Canada without "u", so this draft is going to look like a bloody red mess until I hit publish. They are like the English that way because they used to be them. I haven't determined yet if, like the Brits, they say: "aluminium" for "aluminum". That's really taking liberties with letters. Boot I digress. 

I watched 3 videos from Roca News on YouTube about Canada and its problems. Roca News is a pretty good site. They drive about the US visiting various distressed areas (that'll keep you busy) and actually get out and talk to people about their lives where they live, what they know of the town or city and what improvements they think should be made. These are two fine young men who aren't looking to shame anyone or become gonzo journalists at the expense of others. I urge you to check them out. One very telling thing I heard last night was their observation that it was harder- wherever they went- to talk to the well-off folks in the nice parts of town, because those people were oddly suspicious of them and afraid of saying the wrong thing; going viral and losing their job. But poor people, whether here or in Canada, will talk to anyone about anything. Why is this? It's because they want to be heard. That's the universal need of the poor. No one is listening to them. 

Canada's problems are just like ours. The movers and shakers there are pricing people out of decent housing just like here. Their immigration problem is self-inflicted because they invited immigrants to come in an effort to build the population. Some fucking genius wants the population to be 100 million by the end of this century. Evidently, Canada has a low birth-rate. What do they do on those cold winter nights that dominate the year? And border-wise, all they have is us and we haven't gotten that desperate yet. Others in the world have though and Canada welcomes them in by the planeload. A lot of Hindus, for example. Even some of the second-generation Hindus aren't happy about that. This is because the new ones don't seem to want to assimilate at all. Talk to America and Europe about that. Any country really. Assimilation is not too much to ask for, but it's hard to ask without sounding racist. And maybe becoming racist. A lot of the Canadians interviewed didn't mind sounding racist. When you are competing with people of another color for jobs and housing, you can get jingoistic pretty quick. I heard a lot of that, and it dovetailed with the Trump induced patriotism that I'm seeing all over the internet that is kinda annoying. I'd like to punch Todd Maffin. Well, not too hard. He's small and funny sometimes. 

Anyways, the Canadians are just like us. Maybe a bit more polite. They have the same hopes and fears that we do. They have greedy and foolish politicians and business leaders, just like we do. We all thought Justin Trudeau was a picture-perfect leader and many of us envied Canada for that. They didn't like him! They were probably right not to. I've got enough on my political plate here to care too much aboot Canucklehead politicians. Life is the struggle of people to survive, not governments. Everybody north or south is just trying to make the best of life that they can. Sometimes that's "or are allowed to". That sucks everywhere.