A few questions this thing has brought to mind

Here are a few questions that have come to mind.

When you're talking about the buzzing hive of information into which we dip for entertainment/education, what defines a country? Lately, a country's borders, a land mass that through history has come to be defined as one thing, and the swarm of ideas that makes up its culture seem unrelated.

You read Harpers online because it represents a point of view that you agree with, not because it's from the US. A music collective out of Chicago expresses an aesthetic you find interesting. Has the internet killed "national" culture, eliminated history and replaced it with opinion and taste? Does "nationhood" have anything to do with it anymore, and should it, and if it does, what?

Obviously history has a lot to do with it, and ones personal experience of the environment. From John A. MacDonald to Fragle Rock, we have a shared history, and that binds us. That history, and the size of the land mass on which we live, and its temperature, gives us a certain shared perspective. And the culture that comes out of this land mass brings that perspective to life, injects it with meaning, creates new meanings from it, questions it, destroys it and builds it back up again.

So what does it mean now that Canada accepts 200,000 new immigrants a year? What if you take away that sense of shared history? Instead, we're a patchwork quilt of different, seperated histories. What if there is no interest in assimilation, and isolated cultural communities live in bubbles of self-sufficiancy and recreation of the culture that was left behind?

I don't know. The kids in those neighbourhoods grow up knowing a shoddy health care system that insists on fooling itself, but one that still provides for one's basic needs. In school, they learn about certain value systems we call Canadian, and bring new perspectives to it. If we can teach kids to respect where they come from, but not subject their future wives to a system of punishment that includes whipping or stoning, that would be a good thing. I love the neighbourhood I live in. Three block one way and you're in Indonesia, three blocks the other way hipsters are drinking bubble tea and buying funny T-Shirts, and then, Chinatown.

And more and more I'm realizing that absolutely everything comes down to the public education system. Invest loads in schools, and all social problems are solved. Not quite, but almost.

So what are the elements that make up that shared, Canadian perspective? If there's any common element to the stuff I've been taking in lately, it's sincerity. But that's just me - I'm not going to make some grand statement about this country's values based on my "Canadiana" playlist.

But still. There seems to be a sincerity to everything seen/listened to lately, a need to be emotionally honest. Nothing yet has been so highly stylized, so abstracted into an aesthetic, or sacrificed to irony, that it looses touch with its heart. So far, in my limited experience, Canadian culture has heart. It feels things very much. Although the Blind Assassin isn't exactly a sentimental journey. But take music - even the Wolf Parade side-projects have a certain light earnestness to them. Their music could float into the air and up through the sky, but it stays grounded in a kind of sincerity. Anyway.