Introduction
“Where there was once admiration, there is now a firm and angry resolve. Schoolyard bullies don’t want to be buddies. They want your lunch.” wrote Pete McMartin in the following opinion piece, for the Vancouver Sun, entitled “Farewell to my American friends. It’s over” which has been edited and abridged below to provide you with a fast and easy read.
“America, it’s been nice knowing you. Here’s why:
- Goodbye to the cowards whose fidelity to democratic ideals extend only so far as their self-interest…
- Goodbye to anyone who bends the knee to Trump, rather than standing up to him…and telling him to piss off.
- Goodbye…Your Narcissist-in-Chief has decreed that my countrymen and I have the choice of becoming destitute, vassals or enemies. I’m choosing the latter…The silence of most Americans in response to this aggression leaves me disheartened. That silence speaks volumes. I — we — have heard you loud and clear how little our friendship as a country means to you…
- Goodbye to what I envied as the country that prided itself on encouraging unparalleled innovation in science, art and business. Any good that remains of it has been overshadowed by rapacity, cheap commercialism and egotism.
- Goodbye to that ever-present sense of inferiority I once had when considering the relationship between Canada and the USA. What doubt I had of our own greatness is gone, and in its place is a certitude that Canada is superior to the U.S. in all the ways that matter. I look across the border now and see a violent, burgeoning autocracy now ever on the edge of civil war, and a population that is either cheering on this new brutalism or quaking in fear from it.
- Goodbye to tepid patriotism. If Trump has done us any favour, it is awakening us to the fact that we can no longer take Canada’s existence for granted and that the bad actors in the world [i.e. Trump] have begun to look covetously upon our vast land that is laden with riches…and that niceness as a national character is not enough to dissuade him from taking them. Schoolyard bullies don’t want to be buddies. They want your lunch and, after a long era of living a geopolitical life of convenient economic and military subservience, we’ve awakened to the fact that we are going to have to relearn our independence and fight any way we can to keep it.
- …Goodbye to negotiation, wheedling, genuflecting or feel-good hands-across-the-border fairy tales. The American government has shown that established alliances mean nothing to it now, and so cannot be trusted. In Trump’s new world order, all the old verities are off the table, so let us make new ones….
Conclusion
Goodbye America, it’s been nice knowing you, but I don’t know you anymore.
I’ve reached that point in our relationship where any admiration I have had for you has been replaced by a new, angry resolve, which is: I won’t consort with the enemy.”
