Canada or USA?

I'm married to a Canadian, and I absolutely love the people & the Country, but I also love what this country is "suppose" to stand for.
Nuts, I know.

What's this about anyway?

The good ol' USA.

i date a canadian too :D

I've found that they have all the problems they usually tell themselves are the domain of Americans only.

Like what? :)

For instance, like those four poor Mounties killed in Alberta recently. They were blown away with some monster rifle. I said "oh, I thought there wasn't any gun violence in Canada". Turns out there is.

Then some of my girl friends were complaining that they were afraid to take the subway to one neighborhood. I asked why. They said they were afraid of getting robbed or raped. I said sarcastically, "but I thought Canada was a crime-free land of paradise". Wrong again.

As it turns out, Canada has the same crime-sensation problems that we have. Some crazy dude threw his 5 year old kid off a freeway overpass a month ago and then killed himself. Before that a 10 year old girl was abducted and brutally murdered. Last spring there was a rash of anti-Semitic vandalism in west Toronto.

Then they always give me grief over supposed American racism. Yet I hear people complain about the growing non-white population of Canada all the time. Their Indian reservations are as bad as those in the US.

So yes, Canada is no land of happiness and loving tolerance. It's just another country. The only difference is that the US media doesn't make every wacko in Canada into a front-page story. But every time there's a racist crime in the US you can bet the Canadian media is trying to paint us all with the same brush. I've seen way more of Fred Phelps' demonstrations on Canadian TV than on US TV. There are plenty of Canadian homophobes, but they don't make it on CNN.

I'm not saying there's a conspiracy, but this Canadian self-righteousness over America is not realistic.

But I still think there are better places to live than Amurka.

The grass is always greener, you know. I always thought Switzerland was a progressive country, what with their pacifism and all. Then I found out that their democratic system is almost totally broken and non-representative because it's based on an outmoded system created in the 1950s. Next I learned that they didn't allow women to vote until the 70s.

So yeah, they've got a socialist health care system a lot of US progressives would like to see, but they have lots of other problems. Your vote is more likely to count in the US (even with Diebold) than in Switzerland, from what I understand. It's complicated, but you can google it if you want.

That was the end of my overly high opinion of Switzerland.