Now there’s a tradition sorely lacking in the Chicago area. Outside of George Ryan (who was implicated in a bribery scandal that led to 6 kids being burned to death in a wrecked van), I can’t think of any politician who lost office due to misconduct in office (not counting politicians who lost their office because a conviction made them ineligible to serve).

Dorktastic; many Americans are like me, where their only contact with Canadians comes at non-urban vacation spots where, just as in America (especially in the northern part), the population tends to be overwhelmingly Caucasian. My personal experience has been in Atikokan, Ontario, where the canoeing outfitter I use for Quetico Provincial Park is based. Also, on American TV, I can’t for the life of me recall one Canadian character or personality that wasn’t/isn’t white.

Maybe we just need to vote the bums out of office.

Canada has changed more because of immigration policies rather than the multiculturalism policy. I saw a presentation where a well know sociologist was noting that Canada was one of the most pro-immigration countries in the “developed” world.”

I am aware of the fact that immigration policy has been the primary engine of change in terms of making Canada a racially and ethnically diverse place to live, and I’m certainly no fan of our multiculturalism policy (check out Himani Bannerji’s essay On the Dark Side of the Nation. From personal experience with Canadian immigration and refugee law and policy, I find the fact that Canada is one of the most pro-immigration countries in the “developed” world really sad.

When most American think of Canada, we do tend to assume that the people are pretty much all white. I learned that wasn’t true when I went Windsor while in college. Of course, Windsor may easily be the most Americanized city in Canada, but it was more diverse than I expected. Canada has changed more because of immigration policies rather than the multiculturalism policy. I saw a presentation where a well know sociologist was noting that Canada was one of the most pro-immigration countries in the “developed” world.

To be truthful, Montreal was considerably less racially diverse than any major American city I have been to. I saw more Asians and Middle Easterners than you would in many US cities, but the number of Blacks and Latinos was tiny. We had an Afr0-Canadian woman speak at one of the conferences, and she was saying that there is no real Afro-Canadian commuity in Montreal, so I guess she thought people were sort of spread out without strong connections.

The expected language weirdnesses, mostly the “I’ll talk in your language so you understand me”, which ends up having an anglo speak French and a franco speak English to each other.

The stupid steep outdoor staircases in the stupid winter.

The heavy use of electricity (without worrying about the cost), and very minor use of gas for cooking.

Jaywalking, against red lights, in the middle of the block, stopping between lanes until cars stop going by, etc. It’s such fun being downtown at the beginning of a new school year and watching the new students wait at intersections.

The name changing stuff is sort of restrictive (though lots of people don’t marry anyhow), but it does cut off that particular discussion a lot, because it’s assumed you won’t change your name legally, so changing it socially is less clear a choice.

“Yeah, I did notice that, but I thought the people could just tell that we were tourists conferencing. ”

Nope. It’s prevelant everywhere. Mind you, Quebec also makes it illegal to change your name when you get married, so maybe we are just weird that way. :)

dorktastic writes:
“3. We love our summer street festivals. Caribana, Pride, SalsaFest, Taste of the Danforth, and many more. I think this is also about forgetting about the hellish winter.

4. We also love our film festivals. ”

This is duplicated in Montreal (we have a festival pretty much every week from May to Sept). I suspect it is a Canadian “fight against the winter” thing.

QrazyQat writes:
“Victoria BC — people say “thank you” to the bus driver when they stop at the bus stop and open the door. And usually the bus driver says “you’re welcome”. ”

That happens in Montreal as well. (Although in French.)

I agree completely with your rant. We ask our kids to grow up fast enough, and then we schedule them to death with soccer, little league, pee-wee football, and other after school activities that I have to wonder what ever happened to a kid being a kid and playing just for the sake of playing.

My local community is focused not on our college athletics, but rather with one particular high school’s football program. It says alot about an area when they would rather invest 200 thousand dollars on a turf field for a high school team rather than mentoring programs or even better lab equipment for the school. High school athletics generates tons of money in my area, and I suspect that most of this is motivated not out of a concern for the kids, but rather by plain old-fashioned greed.

Apartment dwellers don’t get to know their neighbors. One or two conversations with your next door neighbor in a year is unusually talkative. Turn over is high in many complexes; much like Portland, short leases aren’t unusual. (We also collect not-very refundable “cleaning” deposits and charge fees to check your credit history.)

Home dwellers may talk to their neighbors, but it’s usually just a hello when you’re both doing yard work. (Exceptions do develop over time, but it takes years to get beyond this.)

Because of Fresno’s leapfrog development, older neighborhoods mix with newer. In “good” areas of town, there are still neighborhoods to be avoided (usually due to the presence of minorites– there must be crime/gangs).

While driving is very common, especially in the newer suburbs in the north, the “Tower District” has more consistant crowds and walking traffic.

Whatever chain restaurant last opened will have immense lines for months.

Everyone drives. SUVs and pickups are popular. Taking the bus doesn’t cross most people’s minds.

A local restaurant opened last year, advertising as black tie dining. It opened in summer, and everyone predicted relaxation of dress rules and its death. Both happened in less than 6 months.

Most dress is relatively casual; bankers and lawyers are the only suit wearing people.

Parking is free everywhere but downtown. (Grousing about paying for downtown parking is mandatory.) The most successful malls have all build new buildings over their already inadequate parking, so Christmas shopping will be interesting this year. [I'm betting a park & ride type system will spring up.]

* Armenians are sterotyped positively (as wealthy, organized, influential.)
* Hmong are present in huge numbers, but are sterotyped as strange and left alone. (The first Hmong candidate for City Council did survive the primary– we’ll see if he can win in November.)
* Latin American heritage is near omnipresent; intermarriage with both blacks and whites is relatively common and (outside of family) not unusual enough to comment on.
* A significant Black or Hmong presence is “a bad neighborhood.”

I’m at a Cub Scout Pack Committee meeting; this is where the Den Leaders, the Cubmaster, the Treasurer, the Committee Chair and all the other leaders and officers get together to discuss what the upcoming month’s Pack program is going to be for the kids and who’s going to do what to make it happen. The Assistant Cubmaster talked about how tough it is to fit in Scouting because his kid is on an athletic team. This is quite common; Scouting loses a lot of kids to athletics. I asked what the specifics were.

His kid is on a football team. He just found out that the team will be practicing 4 times a week, Monday through Thursday, for 2 1/2 hours a night. Now, his kid is a Bear Cub. He’s seven years old. And then he tells me that the coach has pretty much ordered him to become an assistant coach. “My kid loves football”, he says. I asked “When is your kid going to study?” He says, “Oh, it’ll be tough”. I wanted to jump at him and say, “Why didn’t you tell the coach that he’s fucking crazy, that your kid is going to practice for an hour, or maybe an hour and a half, or he won’t be on the team, and that in any case you’ll have no part of it?!”

What, does this coach think he’s running the Chicago Bears? Has he lost all perspective? The real pisser is that I suspect that if the team doesn’t practice this much, they’ll probably lose all their games because the other teams have the same schedule and none of the other parents have the wit to stand up and get control of the situation. Whereas I have a Troop meeting for 1 to 1.5 hours a week and I worry about how much of the kids’ time I’m taking.

I’m not even sure kids should be playing football at 7 years old. If they are playing any sport, the number one objective should be to have fun. Second, to learn the rules and fundamental skills. But now the objective is to win as many games as possible and to become highly skilled so that you can make your high school varsity team (or the best club team at that age if you are in tennis or gymnastics), and have a shot at a college scholarship. That’s the pinnacle.

I interview kids for admission to MIT. I see a lot of Asian kids. What I don’t see is Asian kids on athletic teams (not counting golf or tennis). This is because no Asian parent is going to approve of his or her kid spending 2 or 3 or more hours a day practicing a sport when they could be studying. And that’s why, IMNSHO, kids of Asian heritage are a minority at MIT, but they are very specifically not an “underrepresented minority”; the MIT student body has more Asian kids on a percentage basis than the population as a whole. Not due to favoritism or some kind of racism, but because their parents don’t say, “Gee, the kid really loves football, I guess we’ll have to sacrifice so he can spend 15 hours a week at it after school and on weekends.” They say, “Are you crazy? Go study! I don’t care if you love it or not, you’re going to do what’s best for you.”

Christianity is no longer the predominant religion in suburbia. Youth athletics is. Don’t believe me? Drive around suburbia and count cars in the parking lots of athletic fields and churches on Sunday morning. There was a time when no one scheduled games on Sunday morning because everyone expected to be in church. Those days are gone. I can’t imagine what a coach would say if a kid told him or her, “I can’t play Sunday morning, I’ve got church.”

Parent: “My kid’s going to do ‘x’ because he loves it and that’s what he wants to do.” Me: “But is that the best thing for him to be doing? What do you want him to do?” Parent: ” …?” Overriding a kid’s desires and making the decision on what the best way for him to be spending his time is a null concept to these parents.

Ahhhhhh…..

[ /rant ]

That raises a question. If you define “local election” as something at the municipal level (town/village/city/school district/etc.), how many of your local elections are Democrat vs. Republican, and how many of them are not? Here in the Chicago suburbs County elections and elections in the City of Chicago are Democrat vs. Republican. But the elections at the municipal level tend to be the Village Independent Party vs. the Progress Party or something such, with no identification with or involvement of the Democrat or Republican parties at all.

In my town of 70,000 in north Texas you would notice the megachurch about a mile from my house that covers a city block. People pour into the place all days of the week. The churchgoers are nearly all white. There is also a large evangelical movement in this town, including among many members of the megachurch.

You would notice that Republicans win all of the local elections, Democrats might as well not even bother running. In the last presidential election, in my neighborhood, the pro-Bush signs in yards outnumbered the pro-Kerry signs about 4 to 1.

But then it starts to get a little more complex among the white people. There is a very large Mormon population in this town. There is a very large Mormon church too. The conflicts between evangelicals and Mormon are surprising minimal. But you do hear the Mormons referred to in private as a cult sometimes.

There are two colleges here too which has brought in a larger gay element. About a mile from my house, behind a 7-11, is a rather hidden gay bar. It has almost no outside lights. But everyone knows what it is, and it is less than a half mile from the evangelical megachurch. You would expect some fireworks here, but … nothing much.

The colleges, of course, have many liberal faculty members and students. So we have a strong liberal presence around town too.

So among the white folks there is a lot of diversity.

We have much racial diversity too. We have a predominately black side of town. Another side of town is Hispanic. The two local high schools, however, do not segregate along racial lines. The white, blacks, and Hispanics are spread between them rather evenly. The high schools are probably 40% black and Hispanic. But unlike in the big cities, most whites don’t move their kids to private schools (both of my daughters went to the public high schools).

Race relations are good. One high school has won the state championship several times recently, and the teams each year are of course very multi-racial. The team has had games broadcast live on ESPN twice in the last two years. The spirit of good will toward the team among the citizens spills over into race relations (IMHO).

In a city of 77,000 the intractable problems of the inner cities within America’s largest cities are somehow avoided to a large extent. I can’t help but think that there are lessons here for America at large. One lesson, it would seem, is that large scale urbanization has benefits, as well as significant social costs.

The theoretical reaction to a failure is:

“Gee, that failed! Why? I’m going to figure out what went wrong and do better next time!”

The actual reaction from the boy often is:

“Gee, that failed. That sucks! Why didn’t Mr. F keep us from failing? That’s what happens in everything else we do. And now we have to deal with this situation? This is hard. Scouting sucks! I want to go home.” O.K., maybe that’s an exaggeration. Sometimes. Sometimes not. But being allowed to fail without adults jumping in to prevent it is definitely a unique situation for about 80% of the kids.

and from many Moms (but again, never Dad):

“How could you stand there and watch my son fail? We never let him fail! It’ll hurt his self-esteem [a term I have come to despise]. He’ll get discouraged. He’ll doubt himself. Why didn’t you supervise him properly!”

My general philosophy is “No arterial blood, no broken bones, no problem.” Now, we do back them up some. After they burn dinner and render it inedible, we’ll let them go hungry for a bit. Then, magically, after a couple of hours, a box of cake mix and a can or two of pie filling appear, and 45 minutes after that we have a cobbler/dump cake that gets food in their bellies before they go to bed. Popcorn cooks up quickly in a Dutch oven as well. Not a balanced meal, true, but I believe we left the dietician back home.

Oh, and we definitely warn the parents, “If your son comes home dry and clean, he hasn’t had fun and we haven’t done our job. Don’t send him to a campout with clothes that can’t get torn or filthy.”

And finally; respect and self-esteem are earned, not granted. Every human is due some basic respect, of course. Name calling, bullying, “initiations”, etc. are not allowed. But past that, it’s earned by facing real situations and actually doing something. It’s not something that’s given whether you actually have done or learned something or not.

So, if you don’t load your kid up with activities guaranteed to develop his body and mind fully, cost you a damn fortune, get him or her a college scholarship (why is it that athletic activity earns a scholarship?) (BTW, nobody ever brags about their kid earning a scholarship using scholarship, just a scholarship using athletics), make him the best of his or her peers in something, spiff up his or her college application, have you and them running around like a madman all the time and leave them with no time on their own hands to do with as they please, be prepared to be treated as if you just don’t understand how to be a good parent.

Famous exchange when my kids were 7 and 11. A fine summer day.

“Dad, we’re bored.”

“Go dig a foxhole.”

3 minutes later, the kids troop by the window with shovels and other implements of destruction in hand. An hour and a half later, a hole 4′ across by 3′ deep has indelibly scarred the landscape. No other kid in the neighborhood had anything like this to play in, so they came in our yard. It was enhanced by the remains of the wooden crate our riding lawnmower came in because I was too lazy to throw it out; it made a fine fort-like superstructure. 14 years later, that hole is still out there. In fact, part of that crate is still out there. I use the hole for a (illegal) burning pit. No one else has this in their yard because they paid way too much for landscaping to let the kids do this. Me, the yard is for kids to tear up, not for me to look at.

Much to my dismay, even with all these millinaires around there’s no locally-roasted coffee. Nor is there a really good espresso shop; one of my criteria is being able to get it in a non-paper cup and there’s nowhere I’ve found so far which will do that. So I buy mine online from new harvest coffee roasters. (for those of you who are coffeegeeks with a conscience, NH sells organic, fair trade, locally-roasted, good, and affordable coffee. Yes, it exists.)

1. Torontonians are also really into patios. Like our Quebecois neighbors, we also like to pretend that we don’t live in a winter deathscape for half the year.

2. There are very distinct neighbourhoods/areas of the city, some of which are ethnically/culturally demaracted (there are about 5 Chinatowns, and 2 or 3 Little Indias). There’s also Harborfront, Kensington Market, Queen West, the Beach, etc.

3. We love our summer street festivals. Caribana, Pride, SalsaFest, Taste of the Danforth, and many more. I think this is also about forgetting about the hellish winter.

4. We also love our film festivals.

My parenting philosophy is that my kid is probably quite average, possibly less or more than, but I want him to figure out his strengths and weaknesses for himself - not tell him what they are, and the only way I can do that is to give him room to do so. He’s four, so obviously I’m not all “just go do your thing,” but I do expect him to do what he can by himself, and what he can’t I expect him to try. He can put his shoes on, he can’t yet tie them. But I make him try to tie each shoe before I do it for him, and one day, just like with getting them on his feet, he’s going to do it. And he’s going to be very proud that he learned how, and learn that trying to do things that are hard over and over is how we learn to do them. He’s also learning that my husband and I will NOT do everything for him, that some things in life are his responsibility, and that as he grows older, he’ll be more and more responsible for himself.