What I don't seem to be able to "get over, already!" relates more to what I was talking about last Saturday.
People in Canada walk around internally okay with someone they didn't elect (or at least have the opportunity to vote against) representing them internationally as their head of state. They're OKAY WITH IT. It's status quo. Normal. NORMAL.
Not that they generally think about that kind of thing. Americans don't, either. But if you scratch the surface of your average American, she or he would say, quickly, that we-all want our official representatives to be elected. (Insert offhand reference to W's first term here.) It's the default assumption: we may not vote, we may not believe that our vote matters, but hey, we believe in the concept of voting. (Also Botox and gun ownership.) (Not me, so much, about either of those.)
Anyway. That's what I mean when I say that the default settings in each country are different, and the default settings of Americans are more familiar to me than those of Canadians.
All of which are the kinds of ideas and questions one ponders at times like these:
and these:
Ahhhhh.
