Just after the onset of the pandemic, my friends, a married couple with two young children, put their Indianapolis house on the market, threw all their stuff on a utility truck, and moved to British Columbia. Forever. I admire them. They left behind successful careers, family, friends, and all the roots that one lays down by age 40 or so for the sake of their kids, who are thriving. In their school, they go hiking by the mountains every day. They are immersed in the French language. And they don’t do active shooter drills. Why would they? That’s an American thing.
The adjustment has been harder on the adults, as it always is. One of them was born in Canada, so it’s a little easier for her. The American half, however, is a trial lawyer from New York who landed in Trump country a few years back. “There’s not enough fighting,” he says. “Not enough conflict. Everyone’s too nice. It’s fine, I guess.”
I, too, am used to constant trauma and stupidity as a way of life, and so I find the dispatches from my Canadian friends almost offensively charming. They describe a sanitized, Bizarro America, a Norman Rockwell painting drenched in maple syrup, an idealized version of human group life that only ever existed in the fever dreams of our upper-middle-class liberals. Democratic Socialists are in a dead heat for parliamentary seats against Liberals, with Greens not too far behind…
