Canada is a State of Mind

I was born in Canada but I’ve lived in the United States for most of my adult life, and I became an American citizen a few years back. Over the years, it’s been interesting to note the changing role that Canada has played in my imagination. For instance, during the Trump years, Canada served as an imaginative escape. If things here ever got really bad, I knew that my Canadian citizenship would provide my wife and I a means of escape. However, over the past few days, as the reality of the Biden administration becomes clearer, I find myself imagining Canada in a new way: Canada is where I’ll go when I finally give up on America.

What brought this on was an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air. Dave Davies was interviewing Catherine Coleman Flowers, who was recently awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant for her work in rural Alabama. As the MacArthur Foundation notes, Flowers was awarded this grant because of the role that her work played in “Bringing attention to failing water and waste sanitation infrastructure in rural areas and its role in perpetuating health and socioeconomic disparities.”

Some of you might remember a series of 2017 news reports about the existence of hookworm in Lowndes County, Alabama. The United States had long thought it had eliminated hookworm, which is a parasitic worm that is usually only found in poorer regions of developing nations, because it is a consequence of inadequate access to proper sanitation. However, a 2017 study revealed that hookworm was prevalent in Lowndes County, and it was Flowers’ work that helped bring this problem to light.

What got me thinking about Canada is that Flowers’ is now fighting for what she calls “Universal Sanitation.” And I couldn’t help but thinking that while so many Americans are busy fighting for universal healthcare, the reality is that we don’t even have universal sanitation. By contrast, universal healthcare seems downright utopian, even though every developed (and many developing) countries have managed to achieve this modest goal. But what is a modest goal anywhere else is a Sisyphean task here. And this seems like a good reason to despair.

However, what brought on this sense of despair was not the story about hookworm, but the ongoing news about the Biden administration. As Trump is ever more a matter of the past, and Biden the future, the despair that existed before Trump is returning. Hookworm isn’t a Trump phenomenon, it predates him—it’s an American problem. So too with all of the “normal” American problems, including not only problems like the lack of proper healthcare, but also that we can’t even ensure universal access to safe drinking water.

For instance, just today, I was listening to a report about Biden’s plan for student loan cancellation. What had initially been floated as a $50,000 debt cancellation for all students, quickly became reduced to the point where Biden’s plan now seems to be a $10,000 “need-based” debt cancellation. So, very few will qualify for this program—if it ever gets implemented—while many more who might qualify will be excluded because “need-based” always means an onerous application process that discriminates against the most in need, while those who do manage to qualify are going to receive a piddling amount compared to the scale of the problem. So, Biden’s plan is about as “next” to nothing as you could get.

As with other “American” problems, this is another problem—along with hookworm, lead-poisoned water, COVID, and the general absence of a humane quality of life—that Americans have simply accepted as normal. Nowhere else in the world can you rack up this kind of debt trying to get yourself an education, nowhere else could you go bankrupt from a medical emergency, nowhere else in the developed world could you catch hookworm, and nowhere else in the world is handling COVID as poorly as we are here. And while you would think that each new injustice would be a wakeup call, the exact opposite is often the case. In accepting our reality as the “new” normal, we implicitly forget that there used to be an old normal too.

Be it the new normal or the old normal, the American normal offers a quality of life at which anyone who spent any time in another developed country would scoff. As Occupy Wall Street recognized, “Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit.” But the problem is that Americans just don’t want to know—not only do they not realize how bad life is when compared to other developed nations, but they don’t want to know how bad it is. It’s much easier to simply accept “fucked up bullshit” as normal than to admit what it really is, because if you admitted the truth you might have to do something about it. Or, at the very least, you couldn’t lie to yourself about what was going on. But when things are as bad as they are in America, self-deception is all that people have left. Which brings us to Trump: the answer to America’s psychosis, even if you didn’t vote for him.

With all this said, what’s actually so despairing isn’t the difficulty of the task ahead of us, it’s the loneliness. It would be one thing to fight for a humane quality of life if it was possible to stand united with others in this fight. But in the United States, those you’re fighting for are all-too-often those you’re fighting against, because as powerful as are the entrenched interests in this country, even more entrenched is the American acceptance of this reality. Rather than recognizing the inhumanity of American life, it’s so much easier to tell ourselves that this inhumanity is the consequence of that age old trope: individual choices. Instead of helping America’s victims, we blame them, but insofar as we aren’t poor yet, we get to pretend we’re not just as vulnerable to misfortune as those who have already succumbed.

Consequently, the question of fighting never emerges, because so few people even realize that there’s a need. And when everyone around you has resigned themselves to an inhumane world—a world in which fellow Americans are disposable (be it to hookworm, COVID, student debt, or what have you), and a world in which Americans tell themselves that this is all just normal rather than facing just how fucked up everything truly is—at what point does it become reasonable to conclude that this country is beyond hope and that’s its best to give up on it and move back to Canada? I’m unsure if this should even be considered despair, so much as it might just be an acknowledgement that America is never going to change until America wants to change, and this isn’t happening any time soon.

In the meantime, I’m in no rush to move back to Canada, whose role in my imagination by far outstrips its reality (and in this, perhaps I am becoming more American). But in yearning for a country where people have the basic level of decency to want the weak and vulnerable to be helped rather than blamed, I might be in a Canadian state of mind.