Almost four years ago, I helped my father load our station wagon with the basic accoutrements I needed to begin university life: clothes, bedding, and a new laptop. I also packed one more thing: my recently approved Canadian student visa.
As a relatively apolitical New Yorker, I assumed going to McGill would be like going to any of the American liberal arts colleges I was considering, except that I needed to cross an international border to get there. Canada was a country to which, like most Americans, I had never given much thought: I knew it was cold, I knew Canadians liked hockey, and I had heard that they often finished sentences with “eh.”
What I foolishly didn’t realize was that I was entering an entirely different world. I was suddenly a foreigner with an accent, thrust into heated political debates. “How do you defend the fact that not all Americans can get free health care?” “How did you manage to elect Bush?” “What about the fact that gay people can’t get married?”
Being “American” was never a part of my identity in the way that being female, Jewish, or a New Yorker were. Only the second generation of my family to live in America, pledging allegiance to the flag and learning about the pilgrims were things that I did; they were not, as far as I knew, who I was.
Eventually, however, the heated conversations of first-year—the ones we all engaged in because we were confronting the “other” for the first time—soon gave way to what became the reality of my life; declining un sac at the grocery store, trudging through icy winters, and ordering drinks at the bar sans fake ID. There was something special about being in a country where everyone was free to get married, to choose whether they want an abortion, and to obtain health care. There was also the revelation that cold weather wasn’t necessarily something to survive, but something to celebrate in its own right. On a recent trip to Quebec City, I experienced many of what my friend called “Canada boners” as I ate frozen maple syrup, watched dog-sledding competitions, and panned over breathtaking landscapes of snowy mountains and rivers filled with floating ice.
But this isn’t about ragging on American values—I’ve heard more than enough of that—and exalting Canada for everything that it is and does. America will always be the place that welcomed my grandparents and gave them the chance to start a new life, and the place that continues to reallize the dreams of countless individuals. Nor would I ever make the mistake of calling the lifestyle and values of the relatively small population of Canadians I have encountered in Montreal representative of the entire country—just as I am outraged when my politics are assumed to be the same as those of George W. Bush.
This isn’t really about America versus Canada at all, but about how my haphazard decision to live in another country gave me a perspective I would never have had living in only one country or the other; how it exposed me to a larger set of values from which I can now pick and choose; how it taught me that we as humans are formed by a random set of factors—where we were born, under which political systems we were raised, the customs we were handed down, and the chromosome combinations that make us like the things that we do. It has made me realize how important it is to decide how we feel about a given issue based on reason and careful thought, rather than on a given list of stances we think we should take because we happened to be born Canadian, American, Jewish, Muslim, white, black, gay, or straight.
We certainly can’t change where we came from—nor should we ever try—but what we can do is recognize that every perspective has something to give, and offer our opinions not as already-formed individuals but as fellow human beings trying to figure out how to best live together in this world.
