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Holiday at home is your patriotic duty

Apologies for my unscheduled hiatus. Tourists have finally emerged from quarantine and they are eager to stretch their legs. Of course Americans are missing the action, as our border remains closed.
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Apologies for my unscheduled hiatus. Tourists have finally emerged from quarantine and they are eager to stretch their legs. Of course Americans are missing the action, as our border remains closed. But we can rest assured the culture of “global citizenship” that resulted in Michael Igantieff has been waylaid under the shadow of COVID-19. Hopefully this is the death of snowbirding and excursions to banana republics - that was always beneath Canadian dignity.

Touring at home is not so bad; or, rather, all the aspects that make it bad are the fault of well-known suspects castigated for years. We could have ten airlines instead of one and a half. The taxes on fuel cause cross country convoys with the family to be unaffordable. Verily I say to ye, it is a crime against our common humanity that it costs less to fly to Europe than it does to hop or drive between our oversized provinces. We need a transportation revolution immediately.

Our Dear Leader is right to a point - we are a post-national state in the sense that no one seems to know their history, save the Archie Bunker types or those agitating for an ethno-state in the old country. This could be remedied by getting on planes, trains, automobiles, and ships so we might be able to access the farthest corners of the second largest nation on Earth. Fun fact: Canadians were famous for our logistical prowess before we became suburban wastrels.

Part of the fossilization of our national spirit is that our history lives in static glass boxes, lending itself to the nonsensical interpretation of nihilistic numbskulls with post-nominals. If you actually tan a hide, raft a river with animals aboard, go “over the top” in full battle gear, or help land a DeHavilland Beaver, the hyphenated studies offered in our Marxist and pagan temples by the high priests of academia are exposed for what they are - the most pitiful kind of abject fraud.

But to get to the real world requires both personal gumption and competent government, neither of which are fostered by our current educational apparatus. Our curricula preach against any type of pride extending beyond the Person-Trudeau consensus, including the roads, ports, or aerospace structures that have never been improved since their rule. It is strange that our country, based on a drunk Scot’s vision of a 3,000 km railway, has lines sinking into the muskeg.

Here’s a hot take - almost all of our remotest communities’ needs as well as our duty to better travel our own dominion could be fulfilled with dirigibles. The carrying capacity, resistance to harsh weather, and ability to set down almost anywhere are incomparable advantages. Add to this that nearly all of the environments can be left pristine, and it seems possible to get buy in from every faction. Before you say I’m crazy, recall: drunk guy + railroad to nowhere = Canada.

Of course it all comes back to the disembodiment of our existence, a rather odd malaise to have affected a country where survival is still the central theme of all our arts, expressive as well as practical. Even in our metropolises, meeting our Maker can occur via exposure; in those places preserved from pricey coffee or awful donuts, apex predators, lacking skills, and rapidly changing weather still take people every year - perhaps even me, if I can’t get better sea legs.

So the solution is rather simple - to relive what our ancestors had to endure in order for them to build this Dominion called Canada. One can do that on holiday briefly, but to instill such an understanding in the populace, our curricula will have to be radically altered so kids grow up with a sense of what it was like to cross the ice on the Bering Strait, the prairies in a wagon, or the rocks at Juno Beach. And “a sense of” isn’t a textbook or video - it’s going there in person.

No country without a coherent understanding of its past, good and bad, can survive the onslaught of the future. So, as we open back up, save our nation - go on holidays here at home.