View From A Canadian Soap Box

This year on Canada Day, I surrounded myself with several of my Canadian relatives. We wore red 'Canada Kicks Ass' t-shirts, ate moose jerky, said eh? after every other sentence and sang the national anthem at full volume before our main course (I stumbled on one of the stanzas, it had been so long since I'd sung the words. Lil Sis just shook her head in shame).

As we sat around the dinner table quizzing each other with questions from a Canadian Trivial Pursuit game (aside: if you guess Timothy Eaton, you have a 50% chance of being correct), our national pride brewing, my aunt began to excoriate Americans who know so little about Canada. Her story about her hair dresser not knowing where Ottawa was (hello, it's the national capital, d-uh) made us all cringe. Leave it to Lil Sis to be the rational one who interjected "Who is the President of Mexico?"

Silence.

That's the thing about Canadians. Our soap boxes exist in a tiny bubble north of 30 degrees latitude. So what if we know more about the United States than Americans know about us? That depth of knowledge is not unique to Canadians. What country doesn't know about the US, the most powerful nation in either hemisphere and arguably the leader of the free world?

So, until we multiply our population tenfold, exploit developing nations for oil and natural resources, elect a leader who can't speak his own language (but wants to enforce that language as official) and build a huge army that is highly skilled in blowing stuff up, I'm perfectly content with Ottawa remaining unknown...

Happy Belated Canada Day. Oh, and Independence Day, eh?