It has been suggested that my previous posts on the Olympics make me sound like a redneck. Maybe so if by redneck we mean someone who has travelled this country from sea to sea to sea and has spent a considerable amount of time in 7 provinces and one territory and was able to experience the various cultural differences in those provinces. I'm a redneck if by this knowledge of my country I'm able to see the narrow mindedness of Canadian people who think of only their little sand box of a region, let alone their province. This country is by far the greatest I have visited in all aspects of life for a human being. And I've only visited the US, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Bermuda, England, Germany, Holland, Italy, Croatia, Bosnia, Hungary, Slovenia, United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan. So not that many but enough to allow myself the freedom to comment on how we are not helping our image by dwelling on the past and not reinforcing what we are and what we are becoming.
The aboriginal culture is part of our country but not THE country. The US does not represent itself as cowboys and Indians. The Aussies were founded as a prison colony. You don't see crocodile Dundee going around. Japanese people don't carry samurais and fight like Ninjas. The opening ceremony and the 16 days following were our chance to showcase a UNITED country. I hear a lot of French on English TV yet there is constant complaining from Quebec that this guy didn't say it in French and that guy only spoke a few words and we couldn't understand his French. There are a lot of French speaking Canadians outside La Belle Province and they are not bitching. Why is that?
I guess I must be a redneck because I want my country to be united as one bilingual voice and all these little things bug the heck out of me. I go back to a comment I made in a previous post, I hope Quebec doesn't get the Olympics because the riff between this province and the rest of the country will open up and never close again. No Quebec "separatist" government will allow the CANADIAN Olympic committee to dictate the rules to follow and Mayor Labeaume will surely fight with every rule imposed to him. Is this how we want to be seen by the world? That's a big NO for me.
Redneck Chuck
1 comment:
I agree with a big part of your comments. I just think that you exagerate by saying that there is 4 million separatist in Quebec witch if it was true would be separated already. I also think that not all the natives are drunks and criminals. I also think that the Montreal Olympics were great for Canadians even if it was the year the PQ was elected.
You have been out of Quebec for too long. There will always be journalist French or English that want to sell their papers and are ready to create a contreversy but if you walk and talk with the Quebec French Natives ;-) you will see that most of them don't give a shit that the opening ceremony had almost no French.
With the new communication medium available to the world in 2010, there is no problem in showing a little folklore in our events. People know that we don't dance arround fires at night because they get Tweets from our kids and posts from our hard core defenders like yourself.
Don't worry be happy and proud for real.
Dino
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