CURRIER: Canadians feel a measure of sorrow for fractured America

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At the local gym on Monday and scanning the row of TV screens positioned above the treadmills and elliptical machines (designed to make you forget you’re exercising) there it was. On one screen an ad for a show called History’s Greatest Mysteries. And on the screen right beside it, U.S. President Donald Trump delivering his inaugural day speech.

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The irony was too obvious to miss. An outsider, and doubtless many Americans as well, must be asking “How did it come to this?”

How is it that this great and powerful nation has presented so few qualified options for the office of President in recent years? Joe Biden and Donald Trump are not exactly Thomas Jefferson.

But beyond trying to explain how Donald Trump has been elected U.S. President twice, there are much deeper concerns. Not since 1865 and the end of the Civil War has the United States been so divided. Secessionists haven’t taken up arms yet but the divisions are palpable. The January 6 riots on the part of Trump supporters serve as a stark reminder of how rapidly a civil society can degenerate into anarchy.

In spite of the numerous unkept promises and outright lies told by Trump in his first term, he garnered huge support this time around and has a clear mandate to govern. What he’ll do with that power is impossible to predict. Based on his first term in office we can’t expect peace in the Middle East, the gassing of NAFTA or withdrawal from NATO.

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Canadians have always had something of a love-hate relationship with the U.S.A. We generally are quite fond of our American sisters and brothers and we very much enjoy heading there on vacation, whether it’s to the sunshine of Florida or California or the ski hills of Colorado, we love going. We like shopping there when our dollar isn’t quite as weak as it is these days. We enjoy the hospitality and friendliness of the folks there.

We don’t so much enjoy the bully-on-the-block stance sometimes adopted by our friend to the south. There have been plenty of tensions between our nations over the years but we typically get along fairly well despite the sometimes conflicted feelings Canadians harbour.

But in recent years another feeling has found its way into Canadian hearts as it pertains to America. That feeling is sadness, perhaps it might even be described as sympathy. Of all of the things that non-Americans might feel about that country and its inhabitants, sympathy was not one that would have ever come to mind. Until now.

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It’s difficult to not feel a measure of sorrow for a country that is so fractured with friendships lost, neighbourhoods ghettoised along political lines and even families torn apart. And, you don’t have to have spent any time reading the Gospels to be familiar with this piece of wisdom: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

While it’s possible millions of people around the world will obsess about Trump, it’s best to remember that he is not a cause but rather a symptom of something much more profound. The divisions in the United States are threatening the stability of this great experiment in democracy.

The words of another president at his inauguration resonate today. That president appealed to what he called “the better angels of our nature.”

Sadly Abraham Lincoln’s words went unheeded and the Civil War erupted. Even sadder, there’s no one on the American political stage who is making the appeal to Americans’ better angels. It certainly won’t be Donald Trump.

— Geoff Currier is a former Winnipeg broadcaster.

Have thoughts on what’s going on in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada or across the world? Send us a letter to the editor at wpgsun.letters@kleinmedia.ca

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