happy canada day
Today is July 1st, and in a couple days it will be the independence day of the country I grew up in, in which I still reside.
I am ashamed of my country. My country is destabilizing the global order, cannibalizing its system of checks and balances (including, most recently, judicial review), terrorizing immigrants, and forcefully tearing hundreds of thousands of people (including U.S. citizens) who have built lives in the US away from their families, their communities, their children. There is nothing in America to be proud of, this Fourth of July, except for the resistance building against this shit.
(I do want to record, though, that the No Kings protests on June 14 turned out to be the third-largest protest in American history, second only to BLM and the first Earth Day in 1970. Somewhere between 1.2 and 1.8% of the U.S. population was in attendance, which is meaningful. I recently learned about the 3.5% rule, which posits that when 3.5% of a nation's population protests nonviolently against their government, that government is likely to fall from power. Let's keep going, guys.)
So, in the spirit of the people who come to protests waving a flag with a red maple leaf, I am instead going to celebrate Canada Day (at least on this blog). This is the healthy, stable democracy that American scholars of authoritarianism have fled to — a place where intellectuals can write without fear of governmental backlash. Canada is stepping up as a member of NATO, protesting in solidarity with the No Kings movement, and replacing its reliance on US imported goods with support for its own local businesses.
You guys are doing great.
