Update: Re-balanced audio levels.
I LIKEN TALKING about Canada at this point as kind of the way you feel on the rollercoaster ride up that steep, steel incline. You know two things: You can’t get off and you better hang on.
This is my personal reflection on growing up here, leaving, returning home, and whatever this is now.
JMDA
‘O_Canada’ Episode Script
Episode length: 10 mins
Producer/Writer/Voice: JMDA
Music: Sam Eber, ‘Corals’
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O_Canada
MUSIC INTRO
Welcome back to REDPIN ANNEX.
I’m not gonna lie. I’ve been sick for weeks with a respiratory lung thing that also completely blew my voice out, and I’m still not back to normal, so, bear with me.
Speaking of episodes (a hard segue), I call this one, ‘O CANADA,’ for reasons that will become clear and for which I make no apology.
And now, coming to you fresh from the 49th, home to Timmies, poutine with maple syrup, and a world-famous psychopath that may or may not have finished high-school, I give you …
‘O Canada.’
MUSIC CHANGE
If I've learned anything, it's that I have a great chin. I can take a punch. From life. Repeatedly, it turns out, and keep moving forward.
The mark of someone who tilts against injustice, I suppose, when all other sensible people are doing whatever it is sensible people do.
I don’t quit, though it wasn’t always the way. I plant myself and lean in — like a brawler who against all odds USUALLY finds a way to win.
I loved it tough. Still do. The good fight. Mission-critical. Serving God. Loving others.
As I said, it didn’t begin this way.
Anyone who grows up living in the cold cellar of parental neglect learns early on the value of escape: For the longest time, I was an escape artist.
Anywhere but here.
For me, leaving Canada was good medicine.
Better medicine was giving my life to Christ.
Anyway, I left. A Scarborough boy who'd never really been anywhere or done anything except for weaving drunkenly down a broken road of nothings, the fruit of my own frustrated designs.
Later on, I would describe living here to someone as that weird state you sometimes slip into when driving long distances, where waking dreams and passing scenery merge into one and you have to force yourself to stay awake to keep from crashing into the next world.
Confounded is the word I think we're looking for. As a society, spiritually speaking, Canada is confounded.
I would know. I'm an expert.
What a strange and paradoxical thing, that for all our renowned politeness … divisions exist in us and between others, as a sort of national defect. Cracks. Crevices. Cravaces. Not emptiness. More, phantom spaces. In ways that would deserve clinical attention if the down-pressure to normalize ‘being Canadian’ wasn’t so widely accepted.
And because I grew up here I have a longstanding relationship with living inside the personality disorder that is Canada.
I was raised in beautiful homes, around beautiful things. My parents were handsome and cultured and to all outward appearances … we looked well put together.
But not all that glitters is gold, beloved.
Life had its darker side. Alcoholism. Depression. OCD. And the taint of something else you couldn’t shake or put a finger on that hung on us like a wet blanket.
No, such things aren’t unique to Canada any more than mental illness is, but our other famous trait – passive aggressiveness – smacks of a cranky dualism rooted in something like the emotional equivalent of irritable bowel syndrome.
Yeah, I just said that.
What we’re not getting or refuse to see in the Canadian experience makes us frigid, resentful, lonely, overly sensitive, and too self-aware … while our functional dysfunction keeps us all running, but not fast enough to get away from whatever it is we're running from.
Beat
Years ago, between stints over there, I met an American team of evangelists who preached Christ to many different parts of the world.
They were good at it and were turning their sights on Canada.
Fast forward, they had done several missions before we met up again, and when we did, they asked me, ‘What’s wrong with Canada?’
Where do I start?, I said.
No, seriously, they said. Wherever we went the fire never took. It didn’t spark. It didn’t light.
Having brought thousands to Jesus over the years, they were completely baffled.
So, I told them. Nothing is required of anyone here. Obey the law. Pay your taxes. Color inside the lines. It’s more like Park & Fly than a country, I said.
We trade being individuals here for blending in. Obsessively.
We’re not totally present. And people encouraged on some level to live detached from the whole don’t need saving I guess.
They find their own answers … or pretend there are none.
What made you so different?, one of them asked.
Me?, I grew up in the lie, became the lie, hated the lie, and couldn’t go on living it.
I was awake early.
Evil has a direct hold of this country, in my opinion, I said, and people are too blind or lazy to see it. Most consider the devil they know to be a friend. They’re happy to climb in his lap and stay there, living monotonous lives of relative comfort stuck on repeat, forever.
In America, life is or was Gershwin; in Canada, it’s a single sustained note that gradually fades to black.
I was lucky. I got out. I got to see how other people lived and was able to enjoy freedom for the first time in my life as I had never imagined it before … in occupied, militarized zones of all places.
But first came getting right with God. And I knew I had to do it here, buried as I was under the sins of my youth. And against a steady howl of spiritual blowback – and with pieces of me all over the floor – I did just that.
But hang on.
With age also comes perspective. I can’t NOT value the repressive slog of Canadian life that drove me into lonely confines and dark corners … because it took all that and more to bring me back to God.
And no, I’m not suggesting anyone adopt an insidious mindset that leads us to worship at the altar of well-fed desolation.
But God turns everything good for those who believe.
And I’m proof of it.
Not of my goodness, beloved. But His.
And this is where someone shoots a hand up and says, ‘But what you’re saying isn’t true because there’s always an exception.’
The freedom convoy. Granted.
But an exception doesn’t change the course of a river any more than a protruding rock does, no matter how big.
There's a reason we're in the trouble we're in.
Dissolve the ties that bind in any society and you change the meaning of what that society is, by what it isn't.
Canadians don't know each other, and people who don't know each other don't trust each other.
As a result of daring to be average and unseen for so long, were too afraid of unknown risks, and too afraid of each other, to pull together when it counts. And so we do what we're told because that same fear makes us weak and compliant.
Freedom Convoy catharsis notwithstanding.
Canadians are programmed to be alone together. And if we don't change direction in a hurry and realize that living divided lives is already half the way to being conquered, then we’re finished.
We’re finished.
It’s only a matter of time, and time is not on our side.
And so the question begs, Is there hope for us?
Of course, there is.
But hope requires a foundation built on hard truth – true truth – and the corresponding sacrifices needed to sustain it.
Having said that, for a nation of strangers in love with their pet sins and indulgences, who care only about themselves, and who completely ignore what is clearly life under siege …
… I, wow, I don’t know.
What I do know is remove God and strip away national identity and what you're left with is empty consumption and a country full of shoppers who believe buying stuff will solve all their problems.
Lol.
Exactly what your Enemy wants you to believe.
Mark for REDPIN, next time.
**End**
.30.
O_Canada