I’m not on Twitter (are you really going to make me call it X?) anymore because I have shit to do, but periodically I like to check my mentions. The latest tweet I received came from a fellow Canadian (according to their user bio) irked by a recent piece I wrote Hillary Clinton: “For a CND looking in you have some tough opinions and protected tweets … How participating in a real democracy in the lower 50?”
America’s Independence Day is perpetually under harsh criticism; after all, it celebrates a nation that remains divided, in debt, with racial inequity a load-bearing pillar of national life. But did you know that on July 1, Canadians also have fireworks, police drones, cookouts, arguments with our conservative family members over how dangerous right-wing politicians actually are, street fairs, little flags to wave around, and a convenient mass amnesia over the fact that our country was full of Indigenous before we gave them smallpox? We’re just not as flashy it as Americans are. You think you invented being jingoistic a holiday predicated on colonialism and the attempted eradication of who were there first? Please! We’ve been doing that since John Cabot ruined Newfoundland in the 1490s. This shameful history is so bad that, in 2022, my alma mater had to rename itself after all those murdered Indigenous children were found buried under a school the previous year; turns out my university was named after the guy who helped develop the residential school system in Canada.
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