When you’re at war, you usually find out pretty quickly who’s-who and what’s-what. It’s in moments of high import, or a crisis, where you find out a lot about the people in your life, whether they be family or your circle of friends and associates. Your colleagues at work fall into this as well.
We’re at war with the United States.
Economically, yes, but just like any shooting war, they aim to cause us harm, are doing it intentionally, and have as their end-goal the weakening of our own country to the point where we desperately request to be officially absorbed by them, or annexed if you will.
Whether it be done with bullets and missiles or tariffs and dollars matters little.
They have intentionally set out to cause us existential harm. That, to my mind, meet the criteria for a declaration of war.
Never mind their nonsense involving hordes of undocumented immigrants pouring over the Canadian border into the United States. And ignore their stated intention to stop the dangerous flow of fentanyl across that same border, a peril of epic proportions, what with 43 pounds of the stuff having crossed in the past year, about one one-thousandth of the amount sneaking into America through Mexico.
This is the casus belli of the American attack, their justification for being the jerks that they’ve become. But it really has nothing to do with any of that, since the real problem at the Canadian border has to do with hard drugs and guns that flood across in the opposite direction, as in into Canada from the U.S.
It appears that, when it comes right down to it, they’re the problem at the border, but that doesn’t sell at home, so they blame us for their own failings and use it as a pretext to come after us and our country.
There are words that exist that help describe people such as these, but I’m not going to use them, some unusual restraint on my part because the other words available don’t seem to contain the same level of satisfaction.
As to the who’s-who and what’s-what of the whole thing, it’s gratifying to see examples down in the States of American citizens being concerned over the way their nation’s government is going about treating their friends and allies, chief among them us, as in Canada.
Town hall after town hall down there is showing evidence that many Americans are angry at their government, not just because of DOGE and Elon Musk, but specifically for the way their president and his sycophants are treating and threatening Canada.
This is especially so in towns and cities and states that border on Canada and are accustomed to the fairly routine movement of goods, services, and money that cross back and forth on a daily basis. For many of those places, there is no Canadian or American designation, it’s just all about neighbours being neighbours.
I feel for the citizens of Port Roberts, Washington, a community surrounded on three sides by Canada and on the other by the Pacific Ocean. These people have to cross the border twice just to get to the seat of their local government. The result is that they’ve become as Canadian as the rest of us, and many are in fact dual citizens. This recent Trump-inspired nonsense has resulted in a drastic reduction of Canadians coming to town, something that significantly and negatively impacts the local economy. The people of this community would line the streets waving and welcoming cars with Canadian licence plates in an attempt to make their feelings known. But as noble as the gesture is, it hasn’t stopped that reduction in visiting Canadians. How long will it be until they begin to resent Canadians for this?
It’s worth noting that often, fights within a family can be the very worst and have the most damaging lingering effects. Nobody can hurt you more than the people you love, and I believe this may apply in this case as it does in families.
A while back I mentioned an American couple that drove into Windsor and bought breakfast/lunch for a restaurant full of patrons as a display of solidarity with their Canadian friends. That’s the kind of thing that makes all of us feel good, wanted, and respected.
That couple wasn’t, and isn’t, alone in their thinking.
Plenty of Americans voted for Trump, mostly because of border security, the scourge of drugs, and not wanting to send their boys to school only to have them return home as girls. They voted for Trump because they didn’t want all the dogs and cats in Springfield to be eaten by those voracious Haitian refugees that inhabit the place and wrangle the local pets. With the price of eggs down there, this phenomenon might not be limited to the Haitians.
But they didn’t vote to have their government go about the process of taking Greenland, Panama, or Canada away from their rightful owners. In the view of many, making America great again doesn’t involve taking over Canada.
I’ve recently written of some of the things I’ve seen where Canadians display their anger towards Donald Trump, and as well, Elon Musk. A lot of it is pretty profane, but again, as I said before, there’s only a certain sub-set of words that can truly measure up when it comes to referring to either of those two most profound losers.
But there are other displays.
One such is right here in Renfrew, where the main drag, Raglan Street, was adorned with Canadian flags on every lamp post, something most often reserved for Canada Day. It probably cost money in terms of equipment and workers, and yes the town has seen better days financially, but it still felt good to see those flags flying, especially for a reason other than anti-government or anti-Trudeau sentiment. A display of patriotism, offending no one, excluding no one, making us all Canadians of the same sort, the sort that gets its back up when somebody threatens us.
But the display of the Canadian flag that most choked me up was one that happened at a town hall meeting in Spokane, Washington recently. Someone in the audience asked the Republican congressman if he agree with the “attack” on Canada. While the politician paused to get a grip on how he was going to possibly respond to this in a satisfactory manner, a couple in the front row of the theatre unfurled a Canadian flag. People in the room began to applaud, then joined by a few others. One person stood, applauding. Then another. Then a couple more.
Then the whole room, a standing ovation for the Canadian flag at a Republican town hall meeting in Spokane, Washington.
There may be hope for us after all.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 