Happy Fourth of July

This is a belated Canada Day and current Fourth of July Celebration message written by the true writer in the family – my husband.

Any public speaking class will tell you it’s good to start with a joke. In this case that’s tough because our two countries don’t really share the same sense of humor. Canadians enjoy our homegrown humor from fellow Canadians like Mike Myers, Martin Short and more recently, Seth Rogan. Americans seem to like Jerry Lewis and Carrot Top. There will be no opening joke.

Jack Kennedy once said of Canada “Geography made us neighbors, history made us friends, economics made us partners and necessity made us allies.”

I‘m quite sure that’s why they shot him. Today is the day both our countries celebrate our betrayal of England.

We went about it in slightly different ways. Yanks, of course, gathered troops and fought a long drawn our bloody war over an 8 year period in which 25,000 revolutionary soldiers died culminating in a glorious victory at Yorktown ensuring that all of the colonists could now rule themselves, own an assault rifle and play a different song prior to baseball games. We Canadians asked if they would mind very much if we could be a country on the condition we leave the picture of the Queen on some of our money. The British seemed fine with that.

The point is we have our freedom. Freedom from rich culture, freedom from wonderful tradition and freedom from the fine literature of Britain. We are now free to go to Walmart, pretend the Oscars are a tradition and watch competitive ballroom dancing by stars we’ve never heard of.

We are no longer saddled with Shelley, Keats the Bronte Sisters and Shakespeare. We are now free to enjoy our own literary giants such as Farley Mowat, Jackie Collins and Paris Hilton. Instead of the Royal Family to look up to we have the Kardashians. Instead of being part of the Queen’s Jubilee we have reruns of Don Messer’s Jubilee.

Rule Britannia? I don’t think so. Thanks to our forefathers we now have government by the financial institutions for the financial institutions and of the financial institutions.

There is an old joke in Canada that we had the opportunity to have American politics, British culture and French cuisine. We ended up with French politics, American culture and English cuisine.

America, of course, ended up with American culture, politics and cuisine. All of which might seem a bit dodgy at the moment.

Perhaps we were hasty in our decision to leave the bosom of the mother country. Wouldn’t you rather pay a little tax on your tea consumption and be able to watch Downton Abbey and other fine BBC productions that have as a ruling oligarchy lobbyists and have to sit through another tribute to Inuit dancing at the Grey Cup half time show? I think today is the perfect opportunity for us to get down on our hands and knees and beg the Queen’s forgiveness and ask to be let back in.

We Canadians at Lakeside have become accustomed to the racial slurs of our American counterparts about being cheap. Conversely, Canadians get quite snotty about fact that our politicians can admit to believing in evolution without fear of alienating southern Canada. They do, however, have to pretend to enjoy curling.

Why can’t we put our differences behind us?

Given these trying times, especially today, I think we might want to try and think of things that we have in common that unify our countries and show that we actually enjoy as a shared experience. The first thing that comes to mind is, of course, the fact that we all hate Celine Dion, Justin Beiber, Donald Trump and Karl Rove. Okay, it’s kind of negative to talk about things we hate and shows limited imagination. There’s another think we have in common. Hateful and limited. It’s a start.

Secondly, I couldn’t think of anything else but I’m pretty sure there’s other stuff we can agree on.

Does anyone think that health care is an unalienable right for the American public and is long overdue?

See? Our hearts beat as one.

There is other thing we undeniably have in common. I have watched the expats interact with the Mexican culture over the last 18 years and have concluded that we both disgrace ourselves with equal aplomb.

Hopefully, I have succeeded in making everyone feel warm and fuzzy about our homelands and if not, oh well, if they were really that great we’d probably still live there.

Here’s to Mexico! Viva Mexico!