Steve Campbell – Oh! Canada! What’s Become of You?

As usual, I did manage to get away for a blissful week of vacation, in the middle of our Spring turmoil at County Magazine.

This year we managed to find a great price on Montego Bay, Jamaica, which has long been out of reach price-wise.

But, according to the local Jamaican papers, the economic downturn, problems with airlines disappearing suddenly (just the companies, not the planes), and the huge popularity of the Mayan Riviera, have put them under the Tourist Crunch, so the prices were good.

So we’re in Jamaica, and it turns out that our hotel has more  Canadian channels on the TV than we can get at home. That’s because  we have ‘antenna’ at home, so we only get Ottawa and Kingston, if  the moon is not full and the wind isn’t too strong.
We could see the Winter Olympics from a Canadian point of view, without the nasty American justifications about why they suck at Winter Sports.
While we were there, CNN was reporting – non-stop – on the  Earthquake in Chile. (For those of you on ‘antenna’, CNN is a  constant 24-hour news service, so you can view atrocities from all  over the world, every single hour of the day, until you firmly  believe the whole world is going to hell in a handbag, smash your TV, and kill yourself.)
We’re watching the horrible death toll of one of the poorest (and unluckiest) places on the face of the earth. Then we’re watching the Americans getting slammed at hockey, then we’re watching a report in which hundreds of people in India are trampled to death while running away from the seashore, in expectation of a tsunami from the Chilean earthquake!
We switched channels, because I couldn’t stand the thought of  hundreds of people dying because of something that never happened.
And we found CITY-TV from Toronto. Even a few seconds of viewing  showed me why everyone in Toronto is moving to the County.
It was some kind of ‘Morning Show’ in which the handsome/beautiful, equally air-headed co-hosts were – at that very moment  – fielding phone calls from Ontarians to answer the question:
“What’s You’re Biggest Problem?”
I swear to God, I’m not making this up.

The first call was from a woman who said:?“My husband always uses the last of the milk, and puts the empty milk bag back in the fridge!”
They discussed this for several minutes, while waiting for the next  caller.
Whew! A new caller came in.
“I organize all of my spices by alphabetical order but, when my  husband cooks, he just puts them back wherever he feels like it!”
I swear this is true!
Kathy and I looked at each other with that “Oh My God!” kind of  look, hot on the heels of trampled Indians and Chilean families with  no homes, hoping desperately to find their various family members alive.
At that moment, I decided to write this column.
The painful realization that Canadians have no pain, have no  earthquakes, have no tsunamis, have no revolutions, have no bombers and military helicopters circling in search-and-destroy missions,  have no armed guards in the streets – have no real concerns – has made us an embarrassingly complacent people, desperately searching for something to bitch about, in the vacuum of real worries.
Hot on the heels of being proud of the Canadian hockey team, I was ashamed to be Canadian.
On the flight back, my airline (which went broke after we landed), handed out free copies of The Toronto Star. This was surprising, considering you have to pay five bucks for a cheap non-County glass of wine, and three bucks for earphones that don’t work.
In the Star, my heart was broken yet again. In the Letters page,  everyone was discussing how they want to change the Canadian anthem because some freaked-out women’s group took exception to the line: “All thy sons command.”
Yes, that’s right, nobody in Canada even knows what that line  means. If McCartney had written it in a Beatles song, Lennon would  have said, “It’s gotta go. It makes no sense.”
They want to change it to “All thy dost command!” Yes dost,  pronounced ‘dust’. There’s Canada, leaping ahead into the 16th  Century.
Oh, but that’s not all. Other letters bemoaned the fact that:?“I can no longer sing the Anthem, since it has a reference to God in it!”
Another says: “Canada is not my Native land … I was born in  Pakistan.”
So, first of all, I would like to say:?“If you don’t believe in  God, don’t sing it. We don’t care! But, for God’s sake, sit down  and shut up.”
Let’s face it, if you don’t believe in God, there’s no harm in  shouting the words right out loud – because you believe there’s No  God, so who the hell is going to care?
Second: If all countries of the World want to be represented in the Anthem, it would be 3,000 verses long and, frankly, not everybody here even knows the first verse.
It’s nice to be accommodating, and Canadians like to apologize for everything they do. But, please! No self-respecting country in the  world apologizes for their National Anthem.
As you know, I like to find solutions for any problem I present in my columns, so I would like to offer you my New Canadian Anthem:
“Oh, Canada! It’s a great big chunk of land,
We’re on the earth, but it’s not something we had planned.
We have people here from everywhere.
but we can’t tell you where they’re from.
That would not be nice, because you see, we treat them all equally!”
(I?haven’t finished the next part, but it should include:)
“We stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific; We have sexes too, but  we can’t be specific.”
“Oh, Canada! I’m sorry and really sorry, and once again really
sorry. Sorry.”
I think this would please just about everybody in the world, except for the Germans and the Brits. We can only hope the rest of the people can’t understand English.