Hmm....
You know, there is something I have found amusing during my time here, and especially in arguments such as deal with 'progressive' matters. That is, that the vast majority of you with the basic assumption of a sort of lingering conservativism in the land and that there is a theocratic aura still extant. You are forgetting something important: not everything is America, and not all are Americans.
This has always confused me, and it's caused several differences in opinion over the years. That I come from a far more liberal country than you do is forgotten and, because of that, I think a bias has been set on many of my comments. The basic assumptions and presuppositions I have, the mood of my fellow citizens, is not like that which you see around you. Many of those things you talk about as requiring change, as being socially problematic, are neither so prounounced and, at times, not even extant. Religious manifestation, for example, something I have been taken to task on several times. The presuppositions I have seen within those discussions have been that I come from a culture that is American, in which an overarching Christian majority still pervades the social structure. As such, I am looked down on as someone speaking for a social elite or something like this... a matter which, even were it true in the United States, can hardly assumed the same in Canada. As much as our countries are similar, there is ever so much setting us apart.
Even in this more conservative heartland of the prairies, I think we are already far more along the road that you more liberal minded would wish your own country to be.
And that's my frustration. I have at times been treated as speaking for the status quo, or some sort of religious theocracy, or the powerful majority, or similar things. Now while that might be true were I an American, I am not, and in this country (and this is yet more pronounced if I travel east or west) my occassionally more conservative viewpoints are in fact the minority, and if I do speak against certain things it is not upholding the norm, but challenging it. I have a perspective that many of you simply don't have.
Even something so simple as this, the supposed right-leaning tendencies of the media. It confuses the hell out of me. I've lived my whole life in a culture in which the national media is predominently left-leaning. Politically, too... we might have elected a Conservative government, but typically speaking, our Conservatives are about as far right as your Democrats are... our Liberal party is yet further left, and the NDP yet a step further out yet. When I speak of left-leaning, it's REALLY left. And this highlights my bias. To me the centre is far more left than it is even to Liberal Americans. But when I talk about left leaning and right leaning, you take that assuming the American standard... but be mindful, it is not. To me a central viewpoint is like your Democrats, or maybe even a trifle right leaning still; to me Republicans are exremely right wing, to the extent that we do not often have in Canada, at least not on a national scale. So whenever an American is minded to argue with me, recall this bias.
Because it does get a bit frustrating for me that by Americans my bias is not being taken into account relative to that of many of you. You speak to me as you would a countryman, but I am not. My view is neccessarially tilted already to the left of yours - that is, if you through your maturation as people have come to see things from a more left-leaning side (as I know several of you have), keep in mind that I was born into a culture that as an initial point holds itself further left than yours.
So that's my frustration today.
