Just when you thought it was safe to express an opinion...

This post by Peter Rukavina gave me the chills a little bit. Link.

Island Bush Supporters Phone Home

Here’s a larger chunk of the Guardian article that ran this morning headed “Watching our neighbours,” and written by Jim Day:

The actual number of people residing in the province who are eligible to vote in Tuesday’s United States election is not known. About 600,000 U.S. expatriates living in Canada have registered in time to vote.

Peter Rukavina of Charlottetown is one of them.

Rukavina, who has dual Canada/U.S. citizenship, considers himself a citizen of the United States. Although he spent only the first four months of his life living in the States, the website developer is in the U.S. on business about six weeks a year.

“I consider it a duty to vote,” he said.

Rukavina said he has been following this U.S. election more closely than any in the past. He has cast his ballot by mail for Kerry, which, he said, is really more a vote against Bush.

He has concerns with Bush’s war in Iraq. He said the president seems arrogant and unwilling to listen to other opinions.

Rukavina said he has friends in the United States who say they would seriously consider moving to Canada if Bush is re-elected.

“I think they just don’t feel they can stay in a country that Bush represents,” he said.

As a result of this excerpt, Catherine received four angry telephone calls this morning from Guardian readers while I was out at the market with Oliver.

In general, I was accused by the callers — all of whom somehow assumed that venting to Catherine was reasonable in lieu of me — of being some combination of anti-God, anti-family, a draft-dodger, a university professor, or naive about the war.

While everyone is entitled to their opinion, it does seem a little much to make unsoliticed Saturday morning calls, to my partner, about political disagreements. Send me a letter. Write me an email. Disparage me on your weblog. Rent a billboard.

It's a funny thing, because politics can be pretty heated here on PEI. We've not historically had any sports teams to follow so we've turned politics into the island passtime. But I'd not heard of someone receiving 4 angry phone calls in one morning because of their support for eiter the Liberal or Conservative parties, despite people describing themselves as life-long members of one single party. Yet the level of emotion people have invested in the American political system, with teh stark two-party divide representing two nearly-separate cultures, is so strongly-entrenched in people that it results in incidents like the one described above.

Perhaps I'm just very isolated the other way. I can't say I've ever met someone who's said they support George W. Bush. (Kayla says her parents are big into the war on 'those people over there' but I've never talked to her otherwise hilarious mom about such things.)

When someone says ‘I'm a libaral’ or ‘I'm a conservative’ there's an ambiguity there between whether they meant capital-L Liberal as a term of inclusion or small-l liberal as an adjective. That ambuigity isn't there when someone says ‘I'm a Democrat’ or ‘I'm a Republican’. When someone says either of those statements they are identifying themselves as part of a group, and in a world where Yankees fans and Mets fans get into fistfights outside of ballparks on a regular basis this mentality can get way out of hand.

As incorrect as I think some Conservative or BQ party supporters seem to be, at least none of them claim that Stephen Harper talks to God. Perhaps if they did they could justify harassing people in this way.