Don't like me? Go blame God

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Canada's Sidney Crosby, right, celebrates after scoring the game-winning goal in overtime against USA in the men's hockey gold medal match at Canada Hockey Place in Vancouver, British Columbia, during the 2010 Winter Olympics, Sunday, February 28, 2010. (John Lok/Seattle Times/MCT)

God, it appears, never wanted me to win Dancing with the Stars. That is, as almost everybody must know by now, the television show that pairs professional dancers, who are very good at what they do, with celebrities, some of whom are not, in a dance competition. On the few occasions my wife has made me watch the show, I haven't known who most of the celebrities are, but that may be related to my current separation from mainstream North American culture.Most of the content on shows such as Entertainment Tonight and The Insider, which feature the straight poop, quite literally, on the entertainment industry, mercifully remain a mystery to me and when actor Corey Haim died this week, sad to say, I had no idea who he was.

But I still could have won Dancing with the Stars or even, just imagine, American Idol, or, for that matter, Canadian Idol, if it had been God's plan for me. But instead God gave me two left feet and a tin ear and less personality than Michael Heung.

God also didn't want me to be a professional basketball player (too short), a gigolo (too shy), a pro hockey player (weak ankles) or a best-selling author (no imagination and I can only type with one finger). What God did want me to be, aside, perhaps, from a better person, remains a matter of debate, a work in progress if you like, although unlike God, I am rapidly running out of time.

I am able to blame my wasted life on God because of an article I read in the newspaper Friday. It claims that a study conducted by Canadians reveals that a vast majority of Americans believe God is directly active in their lives, that both the good things and the bad things that happen to them as they wend their way through this vale of tears are a result of the personal intervention of God in their lives.

Eighty per cent of Americans look to God when they need help making difficult decisions; 70 per cent believe that both the good things and the bad things that happen to them are part of God's plan for them; and 60 per cent believe that God has preordained their lives, or at least plotted their course for them. One might think that this would pretty well piss them off, life being what it is, but it doesn't.

Here in Canada, where we are more sophisticated, this is a gift, one more opportunity to sneer at our American neighbours, but Canadians actually seem to be more frosted by fate than they are.

Perhaps that is because we are not so very much different from them than we like to think. We like to sneer at their embarrassingly boisterous patriotism -- imagine loving your country and saying it right out loud -- but the recent Olympic Games and Canada's proud showing in them, particularly in the number of gold medals won, elicited a national surge of patriotism that left even the Americans wide-eyed with wonder.

When the Canadian men's hockey team lost to the Americans in the last game of the first round, Vancouver officials shut down the bars and rolled up the sidewalks, not just out of self-pity but because they feared fans might express emotions exaggerated by having drowned their sorrows in a beer. Americans wouldn't do that, and we can, thankfully, only imagine what Canada would have done if we'd lost the gold medal game to the Yanks. We'd be dry for a year. The nation would have been engulfed, perhaps destroyed, by a throat-parched, weak-ankled despair.

Instead, we became patriots. No weak ankles here. Polls show that Canadians -- and even the most ardent Americans don't get more ludicrous than this -- got a jolt of high-powered nationalism like they hadn't had in years. At the moment, we are the cock of the walk.

But hold on a minute, cocker. What if it wasn't us, but God, that won that game? A surprisingly large number of Canadians may think that it could have been. We are not as plainspoken as the Americans about this, but according to the researchers who measured American faith, a lot of Canadians are on board, with 82 per cent believing in God. Of those, 41 per cent believe God has acted personally in their lives, 65 per cent think God cares about them personally and 70 per cent believe in miracles.

Who knows who really won that game? Was it God or Sidney Crosby; perhaps Crosby, because God wouldn't have lost his gloves and stick? What we can know is that we are not so different from the Americans as we like to think, and that should logically mean that, because we like ourselves so much now, we should perhaps like them more than we tend to. We can know that even if God were wearing a maple leaf in the Olympics, it is up to us to wear it from now on. This is our country, after all.

And, sadly, we can know that among all the other things that are not in God's plan for me is winning the lottery.

tom.oleson@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 13, 2010 A18