Comparing and Contrasting American and Canadian People

Comparing and Contrasting

Many Americans believe that the U.S.A is the best country ever and that everyone wants to live here. That is sadly untrue, many people, just as Margaret Atwood author of the essay A View From Canada believe that Americans are arrogant, obnoxious and wasteful. Atwood is a native Canadian, her idea's of Americans were completely bias when she was a child, she was told that Americans are lazy and that they are stupid. Americans and Canadians have many differences between each other; they are also similar. One way that Canadians say they differ from Americans is that Canadians claim that Americans are lazy and wasteful. According to Atwood, she believes Canadians are different from Americans because they are more humble and Americans are arrogant. Although Canadian and Americans have many differences, they are similar in the fact that the Canadians follow the American pop culture.

As a country girl, Atwood spend most of her childhood in the vast beautiful natural forests of Canada. Her parents talked about how Americans were lazy, and one day she witnessed this bias judgment for herself, "We once met two of them dragging a heaving metal boat, plus the motor, across a portage from one lake to another because they did not want to paddle" (Atwood Pg. 80). Atwood believes that Americans do not want to do the simplest tasks, even if it requires some work. Some other things that Atwood bashes Americans on are that she says that Americans do not burn their trash, and that they are unable to survive in nature. Atwood's perspective is very bias and it seems as though she has not taken the time to really get to know an American and realize that not all are as she thinks that they are.

Atwood talks of traveling to India on a vacation where she experienced new things that she had tried. Here is where she talk about how Americans are arrogant and how they are unwilling to try new things. "Americans enter the outside world the way they landed on the moon, with their oxygen tanks of American air strapped to their backs and their protective spacesuits firmly in place"(Pg. 83). What Atwood means by this is that Americans go into other people counties and see their way of life style as wrong and unwilling to accept it, she is saying that Americans are unwilling to open up to new experiences. The Canadian people have voted to abolish the death penalty for all crimes. The United States has a law that allows each individual state to make its own rule about the death penalty. Ironically, the murder rate in Canada is much lower than the United States'.

America is a country that is seen as a trend setter and Canadians are some of the main supporters that follow the American pop culture scene. Atwood talked about watching American movies and listening to American radio. "We knew they talked funny, but we didn't mind" (Atwood