Though I fondly recall my father’s irreverent wit this Father’s Day in the USA, I read a story today that also brought back the worst thing he ever said to me.
Shortly after the Vietnam War ended, he cracked wise, “Your trouble is that you didn’t go into the military.” To which I replied: Right, and I would have come back in a body bag, or a killer and a drug addict.
When I was in my teens the United States sent hundreds of thousands of boys to Vietnam. That war only ended after America slaughtered nearly 4 million people. Now the USA’s carpet-bombing of Southeast Asia is being hauntingly recapitulated by Trump’s needless and malicious bombing of Iran.
Back then, Canada was an option of last resort for young men who refused to kill or be killed for another stupid president’s ego. Acting like Trump long before Trump, Lyndon Johnson kept doubling down in Vietnam, until it broke him and kept him from seeking a second term.
In my first year of college, every white kid that could took a deferment by enrolling in classes. Needing even more grunts, the government abolished college deferments before my sophomore year and threw everyone into the draft lottery.
The number you drew determined your life, whether you would wade through rice paddies in a hunt for “gooks,” or continue living a cushy life in America.
Everyone who drew a number of 125 or below would be drafted and likely sent to ‘Nam; everyone above that number stayed home. I drew the number 279. The year before — the last year of college deferments — my number was 32.
A fellow I knew, born a day before me, drew number 37. A few weeks before he was scheduled to report to boot camp, he drove to the Canadian border. Pierre Trudeau, who in retrospect makes his son Justin look like an empty suit, was prime minister.
The intellectual and cosmopolitan father Trudeau had issued an executive order that border guards were to let young men from America refusing to fight in Vietnam into Canada. They were called “draft dodgers” then, and still are.
Of course, President Trump was a draft dodger, but he didn’t have to leave New York. His daddy found a doctor that declared he had bone spurs. The poor boy simply couldn’t endure marching, though he had previously attended a military school without a problem.
Trump’s toxic macho man pose and policies stem from an attempt to cover up the cowardice of his youth, which has been a throughline all his life.
It wasn’t cowardice that drove my friend to the Canadian border, but a steadfast refusal to kill or be killed in Vietnam.
When he reached the border, the border guard asked him the usual question: “Why are you visiting Canada?”
Literally putting his life on the line, he honestly replied, “To avoid being sent to Vietnam.”
The border guard gave him a long look, knowing he was holding this 20-year-old’s life in his hands, and said, “Welcome to Canada.”
Contrast this compassionate gesture of asylum by the Canadian government and its representative with the story of Carlos, Antonia and their young son Alejandro, who fled Honduras because gangs threatened their lives.
Arriving as the US began Trump’s vicious migration purge, their opportunity to make an asylum claim in the former land of the free and home of the brave no longer existed. So they drove to the Canadian border.
The Canadian border agent said he would let Carlos and Alejandro in, but Antonia, who, unlike Carlos, did not have family in Canada, would be sent back to the US. He gave them a Sophie’s choice: Either the father and son could stay, or all three could return to the US and face detention and deportation back to Honduras.
Carlos replied, “What am I supposed to tell my son about why they’re not going to let his mother come in with us?”
The heartless border officer coldly said, “That’s your problem, you’ve got 20 minutes to make a decision.”
Antonia began crying. “There was no way I could be separated from my son. I was completely in shock,” she later reported. “And then my son started crying, too.”
The family opted to stay together. They were sent back to the US, and were promptly deported to Honduras, where they remain in hiding from the same gang they fled.
Mark Carney’s government has instituted “Trump-style” immigration policies through a slick legislative policy called “the Safe Third Country Agreement.” It forces migrants to make asylum claims in the country where they first arrived.
That’s what enabled Canada, unlike its previous policy, to send Carlos and Antonia and their son back to the USA, where they were deported back to Honduras.
Canadians insist on differentiating themselves from Americans, but they have obviously lost their soul as a people too. Despite Prime Minister Carne’s heralded “middle power moment” speech in Davos, Canada is now much more like Trump’s America than Canadians want to believe.
I had a professor from China my first year in college, a cultural geographer who had taught in both Canada and the United States. He thought and taught not in terms of nations, but “culture hearths.”
He influenced my formative worldview by emphatically stating, “Because there are so many shared cultural features, Canada and the United States are viewed by cultural geographers as belonging to the same North American culture hearth.”
America’s extractive, consumeristic, individualistic and militaristic culture has gone global, and overtaken the world’s traditional cultures. National borders are porous to the moral rot that gave rise to Trump, and his vile administration has catalyzed civilizational decline in the western world and the world as a whole.
The shallow and short-term thinking media in America is obsessively focused on the midterm elections in November, convinced that checks will be imposed on Trump’s lawlessness and corruption, and balance will be restored to American democracy.
Without tackling the cultural putrefaction that produced and sustains the Trump Administration however, that’s more wishful thinking. The question is: How are a people who have lost their soul to regain it?
It looks like Canadians that still have a chamber beating in the heart of their body politic are faced with the same question.
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