I changed my Mastodon profile picture to a Canadian flag today. That may not seem like much to you, but it means a lot to me. Let me explain.
My parents emigrated from Germany to Montreal, Canada, around 1956. The reason for leaving Germany, as I understand it, was intra-family. My dad and his father-in-law were both carpenters. The two didn’t get along. At that time and place (as my dad explained it), you had to work for your father-in-law. If not, everyone would ask why they should hire you if you weren’t good enough for your father-in-law.
So they left for a different country. (I expect there was more involved that I never heard.)
They went to Montreal because my dad spoke some French (but only a few words of English). He’d been in a prisoner-of-war camp in France and spent some years after the end of WWII fixing infrastructure that other Germans had destroyed during the war.
I think that going via Canada was an easier way to get to the USA, because they decamped to Springfield, Illinois, a year or so later. My dad had relatives who’d come to work in coal mines but later shifted to construction work, and there was a tight and welcoming German community (identity politics!)
My parents did well and died modestly wealthy. They got US citizenship and were patriotic. They generally voted Republican because they were German-style fiscal conservatives. (I still have, via my grandfather, German “inflation money” from the hyperinflation days.)
I myself have been more critical of US internal and external policy than they were. But I inherited a strong feeling that the US is my country. I grew up in its similar-to-Germany-but-different culture.
Had I been born in Germany as the person I am, I bet I would have done pretty much as well as I have here. But the US is still home and the root of my values.
I have an old-fashioned attitude toward the US flag – not sure why, but it matters to me. Using the flag in clothing offends me. When using our family flag, I take care not to let it touch the ground. Riffing off the US flag with copycats like the “thin blue line” flag seems like defacing it – practically blasphemous.
But somewhere between 30% and 50% of my country do not believe in the country my parents came to. Somehow, renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America – and Google’s happy acquiescence in this latest chipping away of what America’s been for so long – just pushed me over the edge.
Canadian culture is still probably less to my taste than American culture, but they’re decent people, they’ve been our allies forever, and I cannot countenance the current regime’s attitude toward Canada. I support Canada fighting back. Thus, I feel obliged to signal my support – little as it matters – for a country that is now incontrovertibly less assholish than my own.