Excellent and thoughtful. As a Canadian, I am jealous of your 12,000 km ocean buffer from the US. Here we are the mouse sleeping next to the elephant, and the elephant has been rolling over an awful lot lately.
When we travel to Europe, when the locals find out where we are from, they want to talk about Toronto's NBA basketball team. Often the only thing they know about Canada is an American import. It is suffocating. We are struggling in Canada to keep our own media ecosystem alive, but our own movies and TV shows are often steamrolled by American productions which vastly bigger budgets. When we do cultivate stars, they get absorbed into the US cultural sphere and lose their Canadian identity. When they film movies in my neighbourhood, the park across the street is usually a stand in for Central Park. They cover our Canada Post mailboxes and bring in fake US postboxes and yellow NYC taxis.
I've taken a hiatus from writing on Substack lately partly because nobody seems to click on anything that isn't at least tangentially related to Trump and US politics. It's exhausting. I don't want to care about these people in another country who, in actuality, should have little to nothing to do with me. I never asked for it, but I cannot safely ignore it, either.
Sometimes 12,000km isn't enough. I wonder sometimes if speaking a language other than english helps dampen the 'mono-cultural tsunami'.
I'm also heartened by the fact that tourism in Asia is booming. Hopefully it will inspire many of us in the 'West' to have the courage to embrace and flaunt of our cultural identities.
Excellent and thoughtful. As a Canadian, I am jealous of your 12,000 km ocean buffer from the US. Here we are the mouse sleeping next to the elephant, and the elephant has been rolling over an awful lot lately.
When we travel to Europe, when the locals find out where we are from, they want to talk about Toronto's NBA basketball team. Often the only thing they know about Canada is an American import. It is suffocating. We are struggling in Canada to keep our own media ecosystem alive, but our own movies and TV shows are often steamrolled by American productions which vastly bigger budgets. When we do cultivate stars, they get absorbed into the US cultural sphere and lose their Canadian identity. When they film movies in my neighbourhood, the park across the street is usually a stand in for Central Park. They cover our Canada Post mailboxes and bring in fake US postboxes and yellow NYC taxis.
I've taken a hiatus from writing on Substack lately partly because nobody seems to click on anything that isn't at least tangentially related to Trump and US politics. It's exhausting. I don't want to care about these people in another country who, in actuality, should have little to nothing to do with me. I never asked for it, but I cannot safely ignore it, either.
Sometimes 12,000km isn't enough. I wonder sometimes if speaking a language other than english helps dampen the 'mono-cultural tsunami'.
I'm also heartened by the fact that tourism in Asia is booming. Hopefully it will inspire many of us in the 'West' to have the courage to embrace and flaunt of our cultural identities.