Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.
After a summer and early fall watching our neighbours to the south sliding into a full-scale pandemic that’s killing a thousand Americans a day, and watching an election campaign turn into a display of political rancour almost without equal, it all comes to a head with tomorrow’s U.S. presidential election.
I’m afraid I’ll be thinking about almost nothing else.
I know there are plenty of people who say we should just focus on our own country, and give watching the neighbours a rest.
I can’t. We really can’t afford to.
American culture swims into us regularly, touching ears and eyes and attitudes, perniciously changing people, poison dripped in Shakespearean fashion into every available earhole.
Too much of what happens in America bleeds into Canada — it’s not as harsh or commonplace here, but the Trumpian “fake news” mantra has certainly taken hold in this country. There aren’t many days of the week that someone doesn’t email me to shout “fake news” about something I’ve researched broadly and spent time tracking down. Answer the “fake news” bleat, and all you get is another attack, or a link to an easily questionable single source. (I’m 100 per cent sure there are people who have sussed out the cash value of being contrarians, and make a healthy amount of ad money propping up already-held opinions with their own regularly-supplied and creative but deliberate falsehoods.)
With some Canadians, American political rhetoric has taken root as well — it doesn’t matter if you’re accurate or honest, what matters is how loudly you keep making your point. Political opponents aren’t people you sit down and discuss differences with — they’re people you belittle and profess to hate, building walls every day.
American culture swims into us regularly, touching ears and eyes and attitudes, perniciously changing people, poison dripped in Shakespearean fashion into every available earhole.
I’ve worked in my business for a long time; I’ve been on the receiving end of complaints and concerns for years, and nothing has been as shocking to me as the sheer deep drop in common civility that has occurred in the last five to six years, a drop I attribute to the easy regular hostility of social media.
Little pitchers have big ears: our kids are learning bad habits from us, just the way we’re learning bad habits from our more populous neighbour.
So I’ll be apprehensive all day long on Tuesday, and up late to watch what actually happens — if it actually happens on election night, and doesn’t work its way out over the next few days of mail-in ballot-counting.
For the first time, though, I’ll be actually worried that violence may erupt. I hope it doesn’t, and I hope that, in short order, Americans find a way to live together as Americans, rather than as opposing factions goaded into arming themselves like never before. I want racists to stop being emboldened by tacit, and sometimes explicit, support from the highest levels of government. I want all Americans to be treated equally by their government, regardless of who they voted for. I want them to regain the bigness of “we,” rather than keep on with the current focus on the smallness of “me.”
Don’t worry about it because we’re in Canada?
It’s just on the other side of the world’s longest undefended border — right there, in a country that so much of our economy still hinges on.
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve spent time in the United States, and know it is also full of good, helping hardworking people. That’s equally true of other countries that have fallen apart, despite great successes.
Tomorrow’s going to be a long day indeed.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada.
He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
