Day 184

Canada Day is one of the days upon which I am the least proud of this country. The sight and sounds of tens of thousands of teens and 20-somethings completely drunk and/or on drugs yelling and screaming and vandlizing and warranting every cop in town to be on duty to prevent violence... it is a sad sight. I just see a group of people much the same way they might be at a hockey game, or at New Years; it isn't a day to be proud, but a day to party and follow a mass mentality of arbitrary celebration. I wonder if a mass mentlity can ever be a good thing, perhaps for motivating a just war or just cause against poverty or something like that? I still imagine not, because the mass can only ever motivate itself by one thing, and no issue is ever that simple.

But then I imagine if people did what I am implicitly asking them to do - know and understand the nation and the world of which they are a part, and celebrate only for real, meaningful, independent reasons - their nationalism would dissipate anyway; people would stand idly watching the pretty fireworks with a semi-conscious glaze of impression and of apathy, happy for the momentary and fleeting beauty of the night and tacitly sad for the incompleteness of it all. That's how I felt anyway.

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