Terry Levine | Noggin Advertising | Copywriter | Digital + Direct Writer | Blogging | Toronto | Canada

ANGELS IN AMERICA: THOUGHTS ON GOD AND CHANGE

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.

Harper: And then get up. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

 

I really don't like the god described by Tony Kushner in his epic play, Angels in America. But if God is real, then this is how he truly is.

Let's not kid ourselves. Look around at life and our lives. Could the true God, if he exists, be any other way? God is not our protector, he is not our training wheels. God is tough love, if he is even love at all. He is the rough asphalt that tears our skin when we fall off our bicycle. He is our repeated reminder that, yes, we can have the change we dream of but that change will often come at a painful price. And it's for us alone to decide whether to get back, bloodied, on the bike, or wallow and pray for him to stop the pain and help us up.

He won't. He doesn't. That's not his business.

AMERICAN FUNDAMENTALISM AND THE CANADIAN LABORATORY.

It was fascinating at times, when I dated an American -- and a worldly, liberal one at that, to deal with a mindset that often seemed incapable of acknowledging that other countries did some things better than the US.

Whether you're a Democrat or Republican, if you're an American you simply KNOW from the moment you're born that the United States is the greatest country on earth, always has been and always will be.

I remember a heated discussion in which my American boyfriend refused to accept that the American empire, like the Roman, Ottoman or British empires before it, would one day wither and be replaced by another -- like the Chinese. This was unfathomable to him. The history of superpowers, it seemed, had culminated with the United States. End of discussion.

But while America's confidence is surely one factor in its vigor, inventiveness and success, its people's tendency toward nationalist and constitutional fundamentalism appears to make them unable or unwilling to recognize and effectively correct their weaknesses.

Gun control and universal healthcare are probably the most blatant examples of this. It boggles my mind that these issues are still being debated in America when there are so many examples outside the US that plainly show how wrong its policies are. But the reason America struggles with these issues is because, as a nation, it refuses to admit it's wrong or look outside its borders for help. The irony is America doesn't have to look far. Canada is so culturally similar -- or similar enough -- that the US could, to its benefit, simply look north on a whole host of issues.

Will socialized medicine destroy us? Let's have a rational look at how it's worked in Canada for 50 years. Will stronger gun control legislation destroy our individual freedoms? Let's look at how Canada is dealing with it. Will decriminalizing marijuana use make everyone high? Will higher taxes destroy the economy? Let's see what the Canadians are doing -- right and wrong.

If Americans weren't so blinded so often by their sense of superiority, they would recognize how lucky they are, not only to live in the greatest nation on earth, but to live right next to the greatest laboratory for change they could ever hope for.