Why? Part 1 of ??

This has been hard for me to start because I don’t know where to begin and I don’t know where to end. But I’ve been meaning to take a stab at it for months, so here goes and I hope I have some coherence:

First, it’s important to know that Alan and I are wanting to relocate to Canada because of what’s happening and happened in the United States and because of what’s happened and what’s happening in Canada. Could the United States be worse? Yes. Could Canada be better? Yes. Are we extremely lucky to be born in the United States and have the possible opportunity of moving to Canada? Yes. And I think I’ve said all of the above before, so now you’re saying, “OK, and …”

Well, one of the reasons I got the courage to tackle this post is because L-girl at the blog we move to canada wrote this post that gives this summary:

Some things Canada does better, relative to the US, by differences of kind. Health care, personal freedoms (abortion rights, same-sex marriage), justice (no death penalty). A fair election system. Democracy! Some things Canada does better only by degree. Those degrees are important, they represent real progress.

Also, I’ve been reading Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the myth of converging values by Michael Adams. I’m fascinated because it makes a lot of intuitive sense and it’s giving me a vocabulary to discuss what I’ve been observing and feeling. I can’t do it all justice, which is OK because Mr. Adams wrote a whole book about his studies and theories. :-) Basically, what he is saying is that society in the United States is going in one direction and the rest of the “first world” is going in another. Alan and I are in the latter category, which, I suppose, can help explain why I feel like an alien in my country of birth.

What is remarkable about social change in America is the society’s absolute failure – or refusal – to postmodernize. Nothing is more striking about the socio-cultural portrait of American social values than the country’s wholesale retreat from the idealism and fulfillment side of the map. Americans are moving en masse from the trends associated with civic engagement and social and ecological concern.

The author, based on many questions and the patterns of answers, categorizes society into four groups. Two of the groups are easy to describe because it’s the dichotomy we’re all used to: what we would call the religious right and progressive left. (I’m simplifying.) But there are two others. There are the famed “soccer moms,” suburbanites that believe in following the rules and maybe not questioning much, but aren’t so big into the judgment thing. They are the swing voters that the other two groups try to lure.

And there’s a fourth group which Adams identifies as “Exclusion and Intensity” and that is where society in the United States has been drifting, unlike the rest of the first world which is moving to “Idealism and Autonomy” (which I labeled progressive left above). (Note that when Michael Adams refers to left and right quadrants, he is referring to his own chart and method, NOT the traditional usage of political left and right.) This is more than a bit frightening:

It seems, then, that much of the culture war rhetoric has gotten one of the armies wrong. The group against whose cultural pull religious conservatives are struggling is not the aging hippies with their casual Buddhism and blended families, but the nihilistic denizens of the Intensity and Exclusion quadrant with their Everyday Rage, their Acceptance of Violence, and their general hostility toward the world around them. These findings would discomfit both the liberal progressives and the religious moralists. The political war in America is being waged between the upper-left (Status and Security) and lower-right (Idealism and Autonomy) quadrants, with both sides vying for the votes of the nice, “regular” people in the upper-right (Authenticity and Responsibility) quadrant. What few have realized thus far is that the team that’s winning the cultural war (the one that really matters) isn’t even wearing jerseys: the nihilistic lower-left (Exclusion and Intensity) quadrant is the fastest growing group in America, and they don’t vote.

Some people find solace in seeing the world in black-and-white and will cling to that view because they believe that anything else is chaos. Others, when discovering that the world includes many shades, just throw their hands up and decide that it’s everyone out for themselves. I guess I feel that too many Americans fall into those categories.

Canada, on the other hand, seems to have evolved more into a place that can embrace diversity. For example, there are many types of families and recognizing that is not anarchy or weakness, it’s a strength. Of course, that’s an issue near and dear to my heart, but as I’ve said before, it’s not the only one.

It drives me crazy when the religious right in the U.S. refers to “morals” and “values” when what they mean is THEIR morals and THEIR values. What’s worse is when the media picks up on this usage and refers to “values voters” meaning social reactionaries. I vote based on my values and my morals. I have a brain and I use it; that doesn’t make me a hedonist or an anarchist.

I just hope that the current Conservative minority government in Canada is the voters' punishment to the Liberals for their misdeeds and not a move closer to their neighbo(u)rs to the South.