I've been spending many of my evenings and any spare weekend time over the last few weeks as an Obama volunteer. Phone banking primarily. It has been, to put it mildly a revelation. I haven't experienced or heard the kind of passionate support or enthusiasm for a political candidate that I hear from Obama supporters in years. Parts of this country have embraced Obama and his vision like nothing the US has seen in a generation. Admittedly, my direct experience in the electoral process in the US is slim. But this is a Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, JFK, once in a generation paradigm shift. Growing up in Canada, and being too young in 1968 to have appreciated the national momentum that emerged behind Kennedy and King, I can only reference Pierre Elliott Trudeau. He was, in my time in Canada the only Prime Minister who could ever be considered a leader. Canadians had an ambiguous relationship with their PET, their Trudeaumania. He was adored and embraced much the same way that Barack is by younger voters when he was first elected. There was a lot less media then, but the young nation of Canada, and the young in the nation were mad for this bold, brazen, politically inexperienced intellectual. And while he had his domestic issues, his "fuddy duddy" attitude toward the press, Trudeau brought Canada reluctantly from behind the Queen's gown, onto the world stage. And yet, I think the predominantly cautious attitude of Canadians, that they don't always want to step into the spotlight, is what ended the love affair with him. Canada, happy to be provincial second citizens to the UK, or as always, overshadowed by the power to the south of the fortynineth, shrunk back behind the curtains, and accepted the caricature of Joe Clark as its political face after PET 1.0 and a lesser man in the form of John Turner, after PET 2.0 got bored, grabbed his rose lapeled jacket at the coat check and left the show early... leaving Canadians to wonder just what that play had really been about.
When Trudeau died in September of 2000, I felt like part of my Canadian identity died with him. I had only recently moved to the US at that point, I was already falling in love with my new homeland, and could feel the ties to Canada slowly coming unbound. Clinton was in the White House, Gore looked like a possibility, the NASDAQ was stumbling, and I was here... having made the single biggest decision of my life in relocating to the US. With his passing, those soaring recollections of Canada under Trudeau became simply distant memories, now locked away as my new life unfolded. I became, and am every day since, less Canadian.
So this morning, while talking to a colleague about the passion I hear from Obama supporters, expressing my own belief in this incredible man, and trying to put my own frame of reference around it, I realized that I'd dreamed about Trudeau the other night, after not having thought about him in years. I suppose the notion that he still haunts Canada, and its people, is true for those of us who came of age in his time. From my perspective, Trudeau represents, or represented everything that a great nation could hope for in a great leader. And I realized that by subconsciously tying Obama and Trudeau together in my mind, I'm really hoping that America, as the greatest nation, will finally be allowed to realize its own destiny and dreams of change, and not be haunted by memories of hope and the promise of change that have been locked away for forty years.
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