Canada, Our Oldest Good neighbor

There is a great story in Jacques Poitras' Imaginary Line:  Life on an Unfinished Border about how folks living on the U.S. northern border feel about Canada:

"Lloyd Woods, the former head of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in nearby Madawaska, Maine, used to ask [U.S.] students in his school visits, "How many here have travelled to a foreign country in the last six months?" Two or three students would raise their hands. "How many of you have travelled to Canada in the last six months?" Every hand in the class would go up."

So it is with great astonishment that I learned that the Trump administration is provoking a  fight with the Canadians.  Given the long history of cross-border contact, swapping of populations, intermarriage, and mutual dependence, my response to this is "WTF?"  Canadians aren't just neighbors, they are family.  I am not alone in having relatives in both countries. For a closer look at the human beings involved in all this, I recommend  Migrants and Migration in Modern North America edited by Dick Hoerder and Nola Faires.  For Trump maybe it would be best to hand him this 1946 brochure which explains just how important Canada and Canadian are to the United States.



With the Trump administration I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.  What he wants to do is so nonsensical and silly that even children know better.  Stephen Colbert  treats this latest act with the ridicule and contempt that it deserves.  And once we are finished laughing, let's invite the Canadians to pick up their hockey sticks and have at the U.S. president. We need all the help we can get to knock some sense into him.