Nationhood in your ‘Hood?

The first week of July is very important to those in North America. Both the U.S.and Canada celebrate their Special Day, when everyone takes a day off work (or more) to celebrate their unshackling from an Imperial past with beer, sausage products, and fireworks. To me it often feels more than just a birthday; almost a groundswell of thanks for everyone that has ever lived in those countries, it is a celebration of the human spirit, more than just a Federal decree that everyone should enjoy baseball.

So should those that were born in these countries feel the same, no matter where they are? Obviously, this modern world is now home to millions of people born in one place, and now living or working abroad. Should those take their own special day, and celebrate how clever and industrious their forefathers were, no matter where they are on the planet? Of course: Coming from a country that doesn’t have a ’special day’ like this, I wouldn’t begrudge anyone the chance to spend a weekday at a sporting event, clutching suds and hot pork. How about those people not born in that country, but a passport holder of there? Same rules, I guess – everyone else has the day off, so why not? But the more the global borders come down, the more the entire issue of nationhood and belonging has changed.

Canada announced this week that there are more than 3 Million passport holders that were born on foreign lands and have moved back, or elsewhere, on the face of the earth today. For the U.S., I imagine you could at least triple that figure. At the same time there are more than that amount of illegal workers in America that, if they were rousted and left the country, would affect the economy negatively by $1.8 Trillion dollars. It may be an unspoken truth, but rich countries in the First World needs it’s modern slave labour in order to simply keep the wheels turning on the hamster cage of Commerce.

Last summer, Israel’s attack on Lebanon resulted in a cadre of hundreds of Canadian citizens scrabbling at a steamy, sunny port to get on a ship out of there. Because they were passport holders, the Canucks sent a ship in at huge expense to save them, but it became obvious that most of these people hadn’t been born anywhere near the North. It is almost as if it no longer matters where you were born, unles it gives you an edge in something. It only matters who you declare you are a citizen of when it suits you – crossing a border easier, or having the Navy coming in to get you out of perilous mortar fire.

I am British. That’s what I am. I am still a passport holder of that country, but I don’t pay taxes there. I pay taxes to my new country, but refuse to change my citizenship. Believe me, it’s a bitch getting over the border to the States, too, so I know it causes me a level of discomfort to be this person.

But, I wouldn’t hit the British Consulate if something violent happened to the city where I live, because my partner for life is Canadian, and she is the reason I am here in the first place.

If it doesn’t really matter where you were born because you are welcome elsewhere for your skills; if it doesn’t matter what passport you hold because you can change it like an outfit for a special occasion, and it doesn’t matter where you work, becasue you know you will never be a part of that country, what is the use of a nationality at all?

The wired world means that you can run your life from anywhere with a lap-top and a cell phone. Your language skills can be brushed up to appear in any country you wish, with whatever language you want.

If none of it really matters, and you are part of a community purely due to your great-grandparent’s heritage and a certain striking flag, it shouldn’t really matter who your neighbour is, or which God they pray to.

What matters? I remember watching January 1st, 2000 unfurl across the Globe from my seat on the Pacific coast – the penultimate place on earth that it did. From simple ceremony in some countries to a complete waste of cash in our hemisphere, I saw everyone in the World celebrate one day in a manner that we will never see again. This is what we should be celebrating annually: A day for all of us despite where we were born, where we are, what we do, or how we speak.

In my global travels, the one common denominator that tied everyone together no matter which country they were in was the need to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. Isn’t our nationhood one of being human?

When the Children are all grown up…

I was surprised to see that many 20-year old’s are looking for a special kind of property in the North American urban market: One that has a ‘granny flat’ so that they can have their parent or parents move in with them when they no longer need to pay the mortgage on the Family home. This is a wonderful idea when you consider the reasons why this has come about:

Families are having children later in order to enjoy a firmer start to their careers, which means they aren’t ending with their mortgages until their late sixties. This delay in their career line has been passed down to today’s teenagers, who expect a ‘gap year’ when they leave High School! This used to be the preserve of either the rich after a handful of years in Further education, AND getting their degrees, or gangs of perma-drunk females from Australia in VW microbuses – well it was if you were brought up in Europe.

Just like everything else in today’s life, the culture of entitlement we have in the ‘developed world’ now means that everyone must have it, so most kids aren’t even looking at a career until their mid-twenties. Following the ‘gap year’, there’s now the ’sleeping-in-till-noon-while-living-at-home year’.

So we extend our adolescense, and work until our early 70’s, pay the mortgage off, and go get our revenge on our kids by living with them, and blasting Adam Ant on the Stereo to say to the kids: “There! How do you like it?”

While on the same subject, there is a distateful commercial on TV from Exxon, that mentions the rise of the Middle Class in the BRIC countries (Brazil, India, and China), in a very haughty way, mentioning that they need ‘greater access to fuels’, like those same parents, trying to get their 22-year old’s to work.

What we in the Western world, the ‘parents’, have done is raised the expectations of people that have taken two generations to go from the Colonized, through the Poverty struck, too something resembling life as we know it. We have used them as cheap labour, and a home to factories and plants too poisonous for our neighbourhoods for almost half-a-century, and are now blaming them for the mess that they have left, and the strain on the environment.

At some point in their life, every parent realises that their kids have grown up (and gotten their butts out of the TV chair?), and then we expect them to look after us. Isn’t it time that we did this with these developing countries? They are the next generation of this planet’s First World, as we fade into the background.  It’s time to start a dialogue about them looking after us in our dotage.

If they need more R and D assistance, more education, more fuel, more leeway, less Culture of ours being forced on them (Adam Ant, again), and more of us beginning to understand theirs.

We are going to need someone to look after us in the next 20 years – let’s see if we can use our lives as the Granny Flat under their ever expanding house.