I’m reading my morning news and since I haven’t logged on to Gizmodo in awhile, I checked out some of the articles that were a few days old and stumbled upon this one.
The article itself talks about how this one staff reporter decided he was going to chastize Canadians because it is supposedly harder to get gadgets here than it is in the US. He said a lot of real lame stuff but the good content came when I started reading the comments.
An article about gadgets suddenly turned into the typical American is better than Canada debate. Of course, most of the US posters said that Canada was pretty lame, a socialist country where we are over taxed and have shitty “free” health care. Most of the Canadian posters said their piece and defended the country, and a few others from Canada went on the warpath on some of their countrymen’s repsonses claiming they were idiots to what Canada was really doing.
Now, when I read the article, it had 155 comments on it. I would bet that most of the comments are from American’s and that there were plenty of Canadians who read the article, shook their head, and moved on. Just like we always do with everything that goes on in the US.
I try not to get worked up when I read some of these things because I do a lot of work with American people and I work for an American company, but the truth is, it really does piss me off when I see the kind of arrogance that comes out of people from down there. Although our cultures are very similar, and we basically look the same, talk the same, listen to the same music, watch the same kinds of TV shows, go to the same movies, read the same books, the attitude difference between a Canadian and an American is like night and day.
I don’t see a lot of that when I travel down to the US. The people I deal with are very friendly and cordial, but then again, they are also paying big bucks to have me do work for them so it’s in their best interests not to piss off the vendor. But I do see it on occasion and typically, it’s much less obvious. Just the odd comment here and there and different things that get said. You can definitely tell the difference.
So for today, I’ll just shake my head, and plug on through my day knowing that most American people have this truly dillusional vision of what Canada is. Living here, having been born here, I know better.
