Anacronyms Revisited

I don’t know when it happened, but it did. Sometime between the opening of theGames and the first Canada-USA hockey game, something caught fire in Vancouver.

I was always a bit of a square as a kid. The 70s were a hangover from the 60s, and peace and love was the vibe. People were anti-military, anti-establishment, and anti-nationalist. While everyone in school had long hair and spouted peace and love (even if they didn’t practice it), I belonged to Air Cadets and showed up at every Remembrance Day ceremony.

In Canada, we also had a massive inferiority complex. In the 1970s, the founding of our nation was just beyond living memory, and the most recently added part, Newfoundland and Labrador, had only been part of the nation for 20 years. We were (and are) still feeling our way toward nationhood, and we were like the scrawny little brother to the star quarterback.

When I was a kid nobody sang the national anthem. You could barely get people to shuffle to their feet when it started, and they’d often talk openly during the song. They’d slouch and adopt world-weary and bored expressions. Canadians were modest, but it was in many ways because Canadians felt they had a lot to be modest about. We were always a long way second best in North America, the country that people had to be reminded existed.

That has changed in the last ten years. I have attended Remembrance Day ceremonies almost every year, and attendance fell to a low sometime in the early 90’s, when people who had been old enough to fight in World War II, or to be married to or have grown up with those who did started to die off. But about 10 or 12 years ago, attendance started to rise, and it has risen every year since, until this last year there were probably 500 people at the cheesy little cenotaph in our adopted town, and at the Vancouver main ceremony, there were probably 10,000, where I had been one of less than 1000 around 1990.

And people have started singing the national anthem. Over the last few years, you hear it more and more. I used to just sing the words quietly to myself, not wanting to disturb the mute apathy around me, but now I sing out loud. And, probably, off-key. There’s a reason Mrs Whatshername put me into the ‘appearances-only’ part of the grade 4 choir.

But I have never seen anything like what happened at the Vancouver Games. Somewhere in the first week, a fire caught in the damp underbrush of Vancouver’s soul, and it burst into a flame of red and white and black. There has to have been one of those tipping points somewhere, but I don’t know where or what it was.  I just remember going out onto the street and realizing that at least a quarter of the people on the street were wearing red and white, hockey jerseys and Canadian Olympic team wear, flags and maple leaves… they were everywhere. And they weren’t all people geared up for an event. There were ordinary working schmoes like me wearing their pride on their backs.

Some people have suggested that this was the result of the much-babbled-about ‘Own the Podium’ program, which was poorly named and marketed, but I don’t think so. I think there is much more to it than that.

As a nation, Canada has been in the shadow of its much larger brother since it was founded. We have a national inferiority complex. As a people, we are starting to get over that, to realize that we do have a place in the world. We aren’t a sort of socialist 51st almost-state. We do many things right, and we do many things better than our giant neighbor.

We aren’t better than they are, but we’ve started to realize that we’re just as good. For someone like me, who lived through the period where everything was better in the USA, this is bit of a revelation.

Tags: Olympics