Be cautious in how you feel about our southern neighbours
By Lethbridge Herald on February 24, 2026.
Dear Editor,
As I was watching the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, the U.S. Vice President was booed by spectators. He may have deserved it, but I felt bad for the American athletes entering the arena at the same time. They didn’t deserve it. Those young athletes do not represent the policy of their President. I have a few distant relatives in the States through my cousin’s marriage. So I know many Americans do not agree with the policy of the current President. Some of them are angry with his behavior. They dislike him more passionately than I do. We need to think carefully about our mixed feelings about our neighbour. I know one thing: our Southern neighbor is not our enemy. The current situation is not normal. I know it will pass. We went through it before and survived: Prohibition, McCarthy, Viet Nam, etc. We are different but friends and neighbours.
When I was growing up in Japan, I was not aware Canadians were not Americans. Now I know. I became a Canadian citizen and pledged allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II, not the flag. The flag was not the Maple Leaf at the time. In Canada one incident of mass shooting at school called for a nationwide day of mourning and flags were lowered to half staff. The Governor General representing the King, the Prime Minister, and all Leaders of opposition parties flew together to attend the memorial service of a small town of three thousand people to mourn the murdered children. Mass school shootings happened 288 times in recent years in the United States while in Canada it happened 3 times. Yet so far as I remember Barak Obama was the only U.S. President who visited the site of the shooting to pay respect to the deceased children. We are different. But how?
In the spring 1964, I finished writing the thesis for my master’s degree, took a break from school work and went to Nigeria for volunteer work. My volunteer colleagues were three African Americans and five Americans of European descent and one Japanese Canadian. We helped the construction of a Women’s Community Centre in a remote village of Igbo nation called Abakaliki in South Eastern Nigeria. At the welcoming reception of the village, the President of the village Women’s Union welcomed us. In her speech she was grateful for the volunteers’ help but she was particularly happy to meet a Canadian for the first time in her life. She said, “I knew Canadians looked different.” Americans and Canadians are different, but not in the way our Nigerian friend described it.
Americans aspire to go after personal freedom in pursuit of happiness. Canadians on the other hand seek peace, order, and good government. Therefore our friends in the South feel they have the right to carry guns to protect themselves. Canadians believe that safety of citizen is the job of the Police. So many Americans carry guns but most Canadians don’t. Americans stand up for personal freedom much more passionately than Canadians. Americans dislike limitations and taboos. So they are more adventurous and creative. Overwhelmingly larger number of Americans (425) than any other nationalities have received Nobel Prize in all fields including Peace Prize. The U.K. citizens come next in the number of prizes (144), Germany (116), France (78 ), etc. Canada is 8th with 29 Nobel Prize recipients. We have to be grateful for America’s contribution to humanity at large. Many people sought freedom, escaped restrictions and persecutions and came to the United State. They enriched culture and science for the benefit of all humanity while living in the U.S. But it’s not easy to be big and powerful.
A Chinese sage said, “It better to be the head of a chicken than the tail of a cow.” Cow is big but the tail of a cow gets a lot of sh*t. It can not be easy. Chicken is small, can be pretty, and can announce its presence loudly. Which is better?
Tadashi (Tad) Mitsui,
Lethbridge
9-8
Over half of American voters chose Trump. Those who didn’t bother to vote were OK with Trump winning. That included these athletes. Even those that were on the other side of the ballot have to ask if they did enough and are doing enough to stop this. They do deserve to be held responsible for the racism, xenophobia, misogyny, bombings, shootings, pollution and corruption that’s occurring now.
another wise entry, tad.
in the end, we are each a combination of individuals and the society that conditions us. while the one affects the other, we are each condemned to some degree of the effects of socialisation, which has us believe that somehow, despite the very many approaches and outlooks to life’s situations, each group seems to feel they have it right. some societies are more humble, while others are nationalistic jingos. the latter relfects perhaps half of our southern neighbours. consequently, there is often an ongoing inner turmoil to be witnessed there. many americans do not support what their country does to other nations, or to its own citizens. thus, to paint a people entirely as one is hubris.
people had best come to understand that the degree of power the masses had come to exert in the “free” world, over the past hundred plus years, is now no longer only being usurped at an alarming rate by the financial elite of our increasingly oligarchical planet, but it is also going to be lost further to artificial intelligence.