Tutorial:
Is the Political Culture of Canada Becoming Americanized?
REFLECTION
My first thought after reading this article was that
the author was an idiot who had no idea what he was talking about and liked to
hear himself talk. The reason for this
was because I feel that this article is very complex, and so in order to
understand it completely I had to re-read it over and over again, highlight key
points, and define the words that I didn’t understand. After I did this, I realized that article did make a lot of sense in it’s own
confusing way. It took me a while to get
past the fact that the author was arguing the NO side of the argument, because
before I really understood the article I felt that he was arguing the YES
side. I finally realized that he was arguing NO, but just in a different
way than I had originally expected. He
focussed on the fact that the reasons why Canadians nationalists feel we are
becoming Americanized are false. He
never really tried to prove whether or not we really were becoming
Americanized, instead he disputed all the common reasons why Canadians feel
they are becoming Americanized, and offered examples which clearly showed that
Canadians and Americans, as people, are alike in many ways. At first I closed my mind to his ideas,
refusing to accept them, telling myself that I knew we were different from Americans. Then I stopped to think about it, and all the
reasons I came up with were the exact reasons that the author argued against.
This gave me some interesting questions to consider
when I began the discussion with my group members. The first thing I asked was what my group
thought Canada’s political culture was like.
I decided to start with this question because I felt that the answers
they would most likely give would be a good way to start off the discussion of
the article, and would help me explain how the author disputed their
ideas. The answers that came up had to
do with bilingualism, health care and welfare systems, and peace. I then asked my group why they came up with these answers, or where they had heard these
theories before. Most of them said from
TV, and this helped me to explain how the author believed that the media,
university professors and the government are leading us to believe that we are
different from Americans for the wrong reasons.
We then discussed the thing that I found the most fascinating out of the
whole article…whether or not we have in
fact been brainwashed into believing these ideas without sufficient proof. Of course there was no clear answer to this
question, but it generated interesting opinions about the issue. The next topic of discussion was whether or
not my group agreed with the author’s opinion that technology is what
ultimately dominates the culture of both Canada and the United States. The conclusion that we came to was that in
reality, both Canada and the United States are becoming “North Americanized” or
“Westernized” because of the rapid increase in technology over the last few decades.
Although I agreed with the author on most of his
points, there was one idea that I strongly disagreed with. His opinion that Canada has less of a sense
of community than the United States because of our government run healthcare
and welfare seemed ridiculous to me. He
argued that because the United States health care and welfare systems were
privately run, that it brought the people closer together because they had to
work for what they had. I feel that this
is false, because in reality the privately run system could create more of a
divide in the community, because the lower class people might resent the people
who could afford better health care.
This article opened my eyes to ideas that I never
considered before about the so-called “Americanization” of Canada. Although I still haven’t completely made up
my mind about where I stand on the issue, our class discussion has made me
skeptical about ideas that I automatically considered to be true before I read
the article. Now whenever I hear an
opinion about Canadians or Americans on TV or in the newspaper, I will question
it, wondering if I only believe it because it has been subconsciously implanted
into my brain to think a certain way. It
brings up memories of the novel 1984,
because I am now open to the possibility that our society, to a much lesser
degree, is being brainwashed into believing that we are different from
Americans. In reality, we probably
aren’t any different…but I’d still like to believe we are.