Recently, a petition circulated the internet, suggesting that the United States could easily take a big bite out of our ballooning Federal debt by liquidating some latent assets. Specifically, the petition suggests that Montana could be sold to Canada for a cool trillion dollars. It’s unclear whether this is USD or CAD, which is, what, like a few hundred grand?
As you might expect this proposal was met with mixed reviews, although most Montana residents I spoke with were ready to take the leap. It gave me reason for reflection that I have never really explored the Great White North, and it seemed like a good chance to visit Canada and learn a bit more. It has been illuminating, and quite frankly I’m on board. Let’s have a look.
Facts About Canada
Canada is sort of like if the United States and France got pretty drunk at a company holiday party and accidentally had a kid. They tried to stay together for a while, you know, for the kid, but it didn’t really work out and now the child has an aching guilt that it (Canada, here) was maybe responsible. This explains why Canadians are always apologizing.
Contrary to popular belief, Canada has been here for a long time. In fact, it is nearly 6,000 years old. They just didn’t tell anyone.
Canadian dollars are valuable to Canadians.
The mountains here are very real.
Tim Horton’s is much more exciting to non-Canadians than it is to Canadians. This is the opposite of In-n-Out Burger, which people from California love and no one else can figure out why.
The mountains here are very real, and you can just drive right up to them.
Canadian truck drivers do not care about your feelings, but every other Canadian does.
There are many jokes about Canada, Canadians, etc. (Sorry!) The only jokes about Americans are covered daily in the Washington Post.
There is a strange sense or communal understanding that it would be very uncommon, tragic, and out-of-character to be shot at in a public space. It’s almost as though Canadians have collectively shrugged and just, like, decided they don’t need to shoot at each other all the time. It’s odd. I’ll report back when I learn more, but some cultural differences can only be explained by the fact that it is a foreign country.
Have I mentioned that the mountains are very real?
You can get by with only English, no French necessary!
Poutine is a thing and it is french fries, cheese curds, and gravy. Somehow this existed before they legalized recreational marijuana.
So let’s put a band aid on this national debt, eh? I say sell!
Good lord, we’re going to reelect Donald Trump next year.
With Bernie Sanders’ entry into what was already shaping up to serve as a clinic in how not to win an election, the only thing that would add more fuel to the fire is for Hilary Clinton to run again.
And yet, here we are, just lining up to pick each other bloody like a bunch of damn poultry.
To be fair there are better and worse candidates on the left, and the primary system is a decent way to suss that out. Bernie did a lot of good to energize his progressive base and move the Democratic party to the left. But with the nervous hand wringing and dissonance that is already shepherding in the next election cycle, we’re getting ready for a second term of 45.
All of the candidates will have some kind of problematic past, or record, or stupid party costume when they were 19. All of the candidates are 100 times better than what we currently have. During primary season their differences will feel profound. They will be separated by chasms in debates over healthcare, foreign policy, and the environment.
The Republican establishment is already laying a foundation to vilify the left as baby-murdering eco-terrorists, but the reality is that nothing that is proposed in the next election cycle will be particularly earth shattering. Policies that are rejected here as radical and socialist are commonplace in most of the industrialized world. What has passed for progressive in the United States for decades has been nothing left of center-right on any honest conversation of scale.
This next year, let’s recognize that we as Americans elected an authoritarian, right wing nationalist government. Not Romania, not Ukraine. The President of the United States is on the record defending neo-Nazi violence. And he has been met, generally, with disdain.
But in order to do that, we need a candidate who can energize voters and get them to the polls. This will not happen if we spend the next year or so ruining the credibility of the pool. All of the democratic prospects are functionally identical in that they are not Donald Trump. Let’s not forget that, because doing so will all but guarantee a second Trump term, and that is unforgivable.
Last week our newly reasonable House of Representatives introduced long overdue legislation to require background checks on pretty much all firearm purchases. The timing so early in this Congress at once signifies that gun control is a priority for progressive voters, and corresponds with the 8th anniversary of a mass shooting that targeted, well, Congress. It is the latest step by our elected officials to stint what is now a hallowed American tradition of gun violence.
In spite of overwhelming public support for gun reform, this bill is laughably basic and still expected to face fierce opposition in the Senate. It’s likely dead in the Halls of Congress, like Gabrielle Giffords nearly was (and six people, including a child were) eight years ago. The bill is also unlikely to curb the American epidemic of violence, but then it isn’t really meant to.
Epidemic is a great word to describe our culture of gun violence because it is so harmful and pervasive, but also because it evokes an analogy of disease or infection, which is apt.
Say, for instance, you have a badly abscessed molar. You have let it go far too long because a Good Guy with essential oils, or quartz crystals, or something, convinced you that it would help. Your cheek is very swollen and puss oozes into your mouth and it’s much too painful to chew and your European friends and loved ones are starting to stare. You have a problem, and you’ve finally decided to listen to your mother and go see a dentist.
Your dentist sees the problem clearly and prescribes a suite of treatments: narcotics for the pain, steroids for the swelling, and antibiotics for the infection. You take the pain pills and anti-inflammatories, obviously, but those won’t treat the root cause. That is basic, commonsense gun control. Stemming violence requires more.
This is not an argument against gun control. When your tooth is pussing and bleeding you take the damn pain pills until the antibiotics kick in. But the root of gun violence is the root of violence, which can’t be addressed by treating symptoms.
35,000 people die from gunfire in the United States every year. That’s about four times as many Americans as have died in the War on Terror, and more than half as many as died in the entire Vietnam War. Two thirds of these deaths are suicides, gun murders tend to be concentrated in city centers, and about 500 women are shot to death each year by partners (which is certainly under reported). These numbers can be reduced, but not eliminated, with meaningful gun control.
Any NRA talking head can quickly rattle off the exploding rates of knife violence in the United Kingdom, where gun ownership is very low. It’s easy to blow them off as partisan hacks, but at some level they’re right. The Brookings Institute has found that violence in general stems from social and economic uncertainty. Gun control will not address the underlying issues that drive violence: manufactured resource scarcity, social inequality, and the poisonous politics of masculinity that drive domestic violence.
Gun control will, however, make us much less lethal while we work out the real problems.
Time will tell whether the recent Congressional slide to the left has the staying power to effect meaningful change to the social and economic policies that underscore widespread violence. Meaningful reform to health care, urban planning, food security and wealth equality is necessary to treat the systemic sickness that drives violence.
But while the antibiotics are at work, you still take the Lortab. Gun control is not the answer but it is a stint to save lives while we do the real work. It’s the least that we can do.
It’s time to learn a second language. We’ve had a good run with this one, but it really is far past due that we broaden our horizons and pick some Tagalog, or Farsi, or at least a little Spanish.
Now, don’t get me wrong: English is great. Hold on to it. Don’t forget it. It’s beautiful and fun and you’re still going to need it. But it really is past time to take the plunge and fire up that DuoLingo, or some classes at the lifelong learning center, or something. Because English has had a good run but, our infatuation with it really speaks volumes to where we stand today as a country.
Like many institutional shortcomings that plague this country, we need not look much past the current President for an example. He has said, for instance, that he is not anti-immigration, but simply expects that immigrants speak English (and are wealthy). And why shouldn’t they? This is America, after all. Where English is the official language. It’s only reasonable that to be welcome here our new guests should learn that much.
Only English is not the official language of the United States – we do not have one. It’s as though we only recently decided than a nation of immigrants can settle on xenophobia as a tenet of national policy. And really, any insistence that new Americans speak English is another glaring example of our tradition of double standards. Like meddling in foreign elections, and corporate espionage, we really do expect so much more of others than we do of ourselves. Consider the president:
That this president has chosen to hang his hat on immigration and language is an irony that should not be lost on any of us. He has demonstrated time and again that he has, at best, a basic understanding of the English language. He coins demeaning terms like “chain migration” and “anchor babies,” and then flaunts those very same practices with his own family.
Our infatuation with English grows not from the fact that it is a wonderful language, but from the fact that we happen to speak it. Our clinging to it has nothing to do with its beauty, but that it simply reaffirms a self-centered status quo, based only in hubris and narcissism. Remember that we’re the people who just one day said, “Nope, we’re Americans. All you other people living on the American continents gotta pick something different.”
And no differently from burying our heads on climate change, our clinging to English ignores the obviously changing conditions around us.
Is English going anywhere? Of course not (so really, don’t forget it), but the Cervantes Institute estimates that by 2050 (within our lifetimes unless we’re wiped out by an anomalous natural disaster or disease curable by vaccines) Spanish will be the most spoken language in the US. Even today there are large swaths of this country where it is the primary language, and is spoken at home by more than 41 million people.
English is not obsolete, but monoligualism is. Sure, speaking Spanish, or Russian, or Salish will help you practically. But more than its practical benefits, embracing a second (or third, or fourth) language recognizes at a base level that the world does not revolve around us. That there are many, many other cultures and perspectives, and that it really is possible that we don’t have all the answers. Is ‘merica the best goddamn country on earth? Maybe. Probably not. But it’s a bold claim from someone unwilling to even look around.
Hot damn, the government is back open! President Trump has come around, finally, that it was sort of a silly idea all along, and that yes, he will be blamed for suspending nearly 1,000,000 of his employees for no reason. He even seems to be realizing that he will not receive funding for his pie-eyed campaign promise to build a southern border wall (he long ago abandoned the promise that Mexico would pay for it), and reverted again to musing about declaring a State of Emergency to get what he wants.
Now, just because there is no illegal immigration state of emergency, that does not mean that everything is all good. There are a number of emergencies facing the United States (and humanity) right now, and none of them are illegal immigration.
Here’s a short list:
Citizens United and the Decay of News Media Credibility
This is a big one. Generally speaking I like to think that most of us just want everyone to be happy and prosperous and to do the right thing. And, sure, we disagree on how best to do that. That’s what makes this country great! As we sift through this Great American Experiment, it only makes sense that we’ll blow it every once in a while. There are good policies and bad policies, and we can probably be trusted to figure it out and do the right thing, given real information.
That’s the problem with unfettered campaign finance policy, the evisceration of small and medium newspapers, and a relatively recent effort to undermine the credibility of the media (a move made easier by bone-headed reporting in pursuit of The Big Scoop!). These issues are much more problematic than individual policies because they influence how we make decisions about policies. With real information, we humans can probably, usually, come up with something like the right answer. But with cultural and policy missteps that degrade how we get information, we probably can’t be relied on to make the right call. That’s why half you idiots think there’s a state of emergency at the border.
Global Warming
This is another one of those manufactured controversies. Of course what’s manufactured here is that there is any controversy at all. Global warming is not controversial. It is happening. Humans are causing it. Giving up straws is not going to fix it. Driving everywhere all the time in a Prius is not going to fix it. Buying any kind of “green” gadget is not going to fix it. Immediate, dramatic change, both collective and individual, may help. Sorry not sorry.
Wealth Inequality and Widespread Financial Insecurity
The 1% take a lot of flak, and that’s fine, but they don’t get nearly as much shit as Millennials. Good lord. It seems like “kids these days” are ruining everything from macro-brewed beer to terrible restaurants. It’s pretty amazing, really, that all these twenty- and thirty-somethings manage to kill so much and still have time to piece together part time side hustles in the gig economy.
Young people now have more debt, less financial security, and fewer prospects than our parents’ generation. The dream of the American Meritocracy, where those who work hard will succeed, is now a myth, and ours is the first generation in memory that will be worse off than our parents. This is a bummer for us, sure, but it’s bigger than “poor me.” People born after 1980 are not buying houses, which is pretty much how Americans have built wealth since forever, but we’re also much slower to settle down, get married, and have kids. And that will be a problem.
In fact four decades from now this will ruin us, and we can look to Japan, where 20% of the population is older than 70, to see why. Longer, higher-quality lives and historically low birth rates are wreaking havoc as a contracting work force and decreased productivity ripples through economy and social services there.
Runaway wealth inequality and a precarious economy is not about whiney Millennials and avocado toast – it’s about the cannibalization of the American economy and how that will reverberate into the future.
The Anti-Vaxxers
I’m not sure how this needs to be said, but good lord. Did you see that an outbreak of an easily curable disease is ravaging the children in an enclave of people who think vaccines are poison? And that they’re afraid, and don’t know what to do? I wonder if this comes back to how and where people get their information . . .
Shit maybe we’re due for a plague.
Latin American Refugee Crisis
And you know just because there’s not an illegal immigration crisis at the border does not mean there isn’t a humanitarian one. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that of the 700,000 people who overstayed visas in 2017, 20% were from two countries: Venezuela and Brazil, where economic turmoil and right wing governments have made life untenable. We’ve discussed before that pretty much every cultural and economic driver of Latin American human migration has roots in American colonial foreign policy. Whether we were trying to get cheap bananas or make sure those scary communists didn’t get a chance to provide healthcare, there are American fingerprints on the vast majority of coups, death squads, and genocides in Central and South America. We did this, it’s our responsibility, at least, to recognize our role and try to make right what we can.
