(Thomas Froese Photo)
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, February 15, 2025)
LISBON, PORTUGAL
Dear America –
I’m in Lisbon, returning to Canada, thinking of you. Thinking about relationships. About Valentine’s Day. Family Day. Thinking about your threats, of course
“Crazy times,” a young Portuguese man said to me when learning I’m Canadian. Even prior, in Uganda – Uganda! – people looked at me with sad eyes, shakingtheir heads. Everyone knows.
I realize there’s no such thing as security. Not really. Not in this world. But tell me. Tell us. What’s Canada to you now? Friends with economic benefits? Your frenemy? Your ex? Your annex? Your 30-day pause? Do you even know?
Sure we’ve had moments. That little disagreement in 1812. Some salvos fired. A few buildings burned. Some hockey game fights since then. Even good relationships have squabbles.
But haven’t our family-like ties been everyone’s envy? The world’s longest border with all those sweet goods traded back and forth, back and forth, day after night, year after year, flowing like wine, really, like love supreme.
Love Supreme is a stage-play here in Lisbon. Now our love seems supremely soured. You say you’re just Canada’s sugar daddy. Canada can’t make it without you. Really? Yet you want our precious resources? Oh America. My dear United States of Advertising. It feels so cheap now.
Of course, it’s about Donald. Some of you have fallen horribly hard for him and aren’t sounding anything like yourselves. Donald, trying to lay everyone bare, like we’re all standing naked under fluorescent lights. Which, thinking of Donald, isn’t an image you want to keep for long.
But when you’re laid bare, you dig deep. You find what’s true, the difference between infatuation and the real deal. Here’s infatuation. Break into a church basement window to find a girl’s address. Find her house. Ring that doorbell. I did all this once. And who answered? Her boyfriend. Imagine.
Years later, hours away, I had a small basement apartment. The homeowners invited me up anytime. Use the inside stairs, they said. One day I did. Did I need salt? So I knocked on that door. And who’s there to my dismay? Who’s the son in that family? Mister Boyfriend from earlier. Come on. What are the odds? Was the entire universe conspiring against me?
It seems things happen so we can grow, even grow up, especially when we don’t get what we want, or what we think we want. Much later I met my bride. Got engaged on Valentine’s Day. It was all larger than my own efforts. There was a wind, a mystery, behind it. It was a different sort of doorway.
In our early marriage we’d lay on the floor of our ground-level flat in, of all places, Sana’a, in Yemen, watching that little TV, watching Monday Night Football on Tuesday nights. We also watched you march into nearby Iraq. “Come home,” my father said repeatedly. “Come home.” But I was home. That’s the thing about the real deal. It gives you peace.
The deal with Donald, the emperor without clothes, is different. It involves infatuation and confusion, both.
By the way, 23 years ago today, Feb. 15, 2002, some 600 cities protested that Iraq invasion. Washington fed you lies then too. You got Saddam. And, naturally, the oil money. About 4,500 Americans died. And Iraqis? Some estimates surpass 500,000 dead. Children. Women. Men. Let that sink in, what the human family can do to one another. This is the lust of empirical power.
While here I’ve learned something about Lisbon’s history and suffering. A 1775 earthquake off the Atlantic coast leveled this city. Then the tsunami. Then city-wide fires. Then disease. More than 30,000 Portuguese died. Then the long rebuild.
But Lisbon is now a different place. The human spirit – and here I’ll suggest, whatever may happen, the Canadian spirit – is resilient. People can recover from losses, even from earthquakes. Nobody in their right mind ever asks for such. But they can be made better people for it.