Posted on 06/29/2019 11:02:55 AM PDT by rickmichaels
I am a recovering American. This is a major admission on my part. Since moving to Canada in 2017, I’ve kept this part of my identity hidden from everyone except my closest friends. It’s a fairly easy sleight-of-hand. I’ve lived in various parts of the United States so I’m not easily pegged by any regionally-identifiable accent. The rest was simply a matter of a few linguistic somersaults: saying washroom instead of restroom; parkade, not parking lot; chatting at dinner parties about stratas rather than condo boards; and casually ordering deli meats by the gram (thanks to the conversion app on my phone). And to my utter delight, if my dirty little secret is revealed the universal response has been: “You’re American? But you seem so nice!”
To address the elephant in the room – quite literally, I suppose, since it’s the mascot of the Republican Party – yes, the tipping point for my relocation was the 2016 presidential election. Yet, I wasn’t one of those people who wrote angry Facebook posts and threatened to leave the country if Hillary Clinton didn’t win. That seemed overly dramatic – until, well, until the unimaginable actually happened.
I know some of my American friends think I took the easy route – the coward’s path, if you will. To the people who question my decision, I respond, “Do you really think it’s that easy to just pick up and leave the country where you were born and lived your entire life?” But the day after the election – and this is actually hard to really put into words – I just felt a seismic shift in my overall sense of well-being and thought, “I’ve got to get out of here.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theglobeandmail.com ...
Never ran into that. Thanks.
LOL
The person writing the Article doesn’t believe in Personal Firearm Ownership, they are Liberal.
They do believe in Free Speech though, from their side of the aisle of course.
Of course. “Free speech for me, not for thee’’.
I agree. Either this person doesn’t exist or he made it up the whole thing.
Yeah, I know. I’ve worked in Canada a oouple of times but sheesh that was 30-40 years ago. The C’s I knew, I got along with very well and we had some good beer drinking nights together at their homes and the pubs. They were almost reverent of us Americans. I didn’t realize at that time the we were both living in peak civilization times...and as Zimmerman said, “The Times They are a Changin”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7qQ6_RV4VQ
I salute him if he actually left the country. I encourage more to follow his example.
Secondly, I really don’t care what foreigners think of us. When’s the last time you heard of any other country obsessively fretting over the results of opinion surveys of foreigners about them? I lived in 4 countries in Europe. I never once heard them worrying about their popularity dipping with Americans.
**********but I’m in a fairly back woods part of Ontario where most of the folks would fit in well with the rural folk in flyover county.
Hmmmmmmm.....You and I or some family member of mine might be neighbours (neighbour with a u in it).
BTW.....I could have written that piece but with the places changed. Made the decision to close on a northern Michigan property on Nov 9, 2016.
“His only criticism of America was the guns. He explained to me how he was horrified at the very idea of shooting a gun and cannot understand why we allow them.”
Explains Canadian arrogance right there. Let them enjoy their Muslims.
It may be an Ontario thing. For having spent so long in Canada, I’ve seen precious little—made it to Quebec 2-4 dozen times but have only been to BC once, and that was over 30 years ago now.
You’re now a Yooper? Drove through once. My mother in law and her parents are buried on the far west of Manitoulin Island, a hop skip (and an island) away from the west end of the Upper peninsula.
I had ancestors in Michigan from the 1820’s to about the 1890’s, including one who was in on the founding of what became Hillsdale, but the most immediate ancestress from the area took off to Dakota territory in the 1880’s. Still, distant kin probably have interacted.
From my experiences rural Michigan and rural Ontario are tremendously alike.
We’ve had a fair number of students from the lower peninsula here and they fit in very well. For some reason the upstate New Yorkers aren’t as natural a fit, even though one can make upstate with a two hour drive and I think that it takes at least five to make Michigan. It may be that upstate New York is fundamentally tame, and we have wolves and bears that occasionally make it into town. One of my neighbours made a compelling case to me about the need to revive the spring bear hunt (there used to be two bear seasons, now there is only one). One good reason to get married in this neck of the woods is that you can get your wife to apply for a bear tag and try to fill that tag too. Bet the idiot in West Vancouver doesn’t operate in that sort of culture.
For that matter, who cares what Canadians think?
I’d like to know how he got a job and is able to stay up there.
Far East end, not west end.
Dude, while it is not clear that he thinks, he still isn’t a Canadian. He’s still a Yank—own him.
FWIW—I’m dual so I own him either way. For those who can’t stand dual, in my heart, I am a citizen of an Oregon that has ceased to exist. My immediate family in which I grew up mostly migrated to Ohio about 20 years ago after the economy of our part of Oregon was destroyed. It had been clear to me after my first semester of University (fall of 88) that there was no future for my generation in my home county. When I attended my 10 year reunion only one guy had managed to settle in county at that point—and this was out of the biggest high school on the coast. A few of the gals had managed to marry older guys with jobs and hadn’t lost them. Since then more have made it back to in county, but it is pretty bleak.
I have nothing against Ohio, but I am not an Ohioan and have no business voting in their elections. While I have left Ontario twice with no intention of returning, I somehow ended up here a third time “for a year” in the summer of 2000, two years later married a girl from Toronto (probably, from a human perspective, it would have been wiser to import one from rural Oregon or rural anywhere, but I was still somewhat young and foolish, and I trust that in the end God knows what He is doing), and now have six kids who are most definitely rural Ontarians. My three year old was messing with legos a few weeks back and built a lego Zamboni—thou he called it “an ice sweeper.”
Immigration is a natural evil. So is starving to death. The Oregon south coast is beautiful, but unless they figure out a way to eat scenery or make it legal to eat Californians and people who pop in from Portland and Eugene, it will remain very difficult to make a good life there. An Oregonian is not an Ohioan. And an Ontarian is not an Albertan. I envy Wyoming and Oklahoma, but bloom where you are planted, I don’t care for Toronto—and I don’t care for Portland—though in both cases the odds seem overwhelming from an electoral perspective. Fight to the last cartridge, and when you are out of bullets, use your gun as a club, unless it is handier to use an Arkansas toothpick.
Well, you covered all the bases. Dad was born in Ohio, and I was born in Arkansas.
Did you follow all of the recent goings-on in Oregon?
I had no idea that he was born in Ohio. Where?
Does the family on that side go back far?
I knew about the Arkansas bit.
That such an incredible comp teacher could arise from Ohio is a little less miraculous than Arkansas. That said, my Grandad’s family is from the Joplin area, going back in part to the 1830’s, which is roughly all the same kettle of fish.
Yeah, you’ve got a lot of Coos County in ya when you consider bear tags when weighing the pros and cons of matrimony.
He was an Army Air Corp/Air Force brat. The city in Ohio escapes me at the moment. He spent some of his early years in Okinawa, post-war. Some time in the 90’s I was helping the neighbor across the street clean up. They threw some magazines on the pile, and the word Okinawa jumped out at me. It was a military phone book from 1952 that had my grandfather in it. He retired to Arkansas and dad went to college there.
I’m not sure if any geneological stuff was compiled. He made mention of looking into it, once, but never got into the Internet.
If an Army Air Corp brat, the city doesn’t mean much. My Grandad was a navy lifer, so Mom was born in Norfolk, but unless the people who crawled out of the Arkansas hills were from Roanoke (a theory that has been floated), we had no connection with there. That said, when Mom asked if she might join the Society of the Native Oregon Born with an allowance for military service, her membership was refused on the sound grounds that Grandad should have sent Grandma back home for the birth.
I can’t imagine your Dad liking the degeneration of writing that the internet spawns.
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