Land of the Free. Home of the Brave.

In the inbox today is an article explaining the differences between Americans and Canadians. The authors are husband and wife with some interesting credentials: the former is a circuit judge with the infamous 9th Circuit of the US Court of Appeals and the latter is a director of the Northern Studies Program at UA-Fairbanks. Interestingly, they touch on a harmonic of the Social Security debate. There is a trade-off between protecting life and stifling it. At one end of the spectrum, you have the Soviet Union where you, supposedly, never had to worry about anything but had little hope for an interesting life. At the other end, you have the wild west, where you made of your life what you could with what you had.

I've lived in Europe and I can tell you that there is a tedium that pervades life there. Everything is warm, comfortable and pretty but it can be boring at times. I've also lived in India where the risks to life and limb were common but there was a certain vitality and novelty in each day. I think we need a little of both to shake us up, to help us set our priorities. With too much comfort, you sink into mundane existence. Too much chaos will have you running a macabre tribe of savages in the Cambodian jungle; then one day, Martin Sheen shows up to put you down. Right now, in the US, I think we wait to live our lives at the end after we've forgotten how.