I acknowledge that I am an awfully bad blogger. I'm just going to lie to myself and say the stuff I do blog is extra good/relevant/interesting to make up for the weeks/months of inaction.
The following are a few lessons my American friend taught/reiterated to me last night.
1. Canadians listen up. We like to think that we're better than Americans. We're nicer, we're smarter, we're more accepting, the list goes on and on. We need to get off our high horse because this makes us both arrogant and blind. Yes some Americans (especially in the south) are incredibly racist and ignorant, but so are some Canadians. Proof? When I was raising money for Somalia this summer in Ottawa, one man told me he didn't want to donate because "They're all pirates". This was not an isolated incident. Just because some Americans are racist doesn't mean all of them are, and it is not a defining feature of the country. To be fair there are some things that happen in America that would not in Canada (trying to pass a law that would define a fertilized embryo a person, just as one example), but our culture/history is very similar.
2. The fact that we have more social welfare in Canada than America doesn't make us better than them, it makes our programs better than theirs. This is a HUGE difference that many people don't understand. My American friend has health insurance for the first time in his life because the Netherlands requires you to get health insurance if you're studying here. His dad was an architect and mom was an artist so their jobs did not provide them with a health insurance plan and they couldn't really afford to pay for private health insurance on their own. A couple years ago his sister had to get her kidney removed, because of the medical bills their family went bankrupt and lost their house. Their family is separated now. I did not ask why, but going through that might have had something to do with it. Regardless, this is an incredibly sad and common story in America, people there go through things like this all the time. Yes, things like this happen in Canada as well but they're not as common. For this, we should respect Americans and the things that they have to go through because of a bad system, not feel better than them.
3. My American friend works 12 hours a day most days and still goes to school back in California. It took him three years to save up money so he could come to Europe. I have never worked that hard in my life. I work a fair amount, but my parents help me a lot. He reminds me of one of my best friends back in Ottawa. She mostly provides for herself to go to school, with the help of the government etc. I admire her a lot, she deserves everything that she wants from the world and rarely ever gets it. My American friend works harder than she does. What does this say? One, as people we are very similar and there are incredibly hard working and amazing people everywhere. Two, we need to stop giving Americans crap for being Americans, they go through enough crap already.
These aren't brilliant epiphanies, they're just a few things I learned last night once a party died down and there were three people left in the room.
Stay tuned from lessons I learned and am still learning from my Lithuanian friend.
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