[URBAN NOTE] Some people hate Toronto
Dec. 23rd, 2005 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldWednesday morning, someone boarded my eastbound subway trained at--I think--the Spadina TTC station. Large and hulking, wearing a canary yellow trenchcoat, he set to talking about Torontonians: "This city is so cold, there's something wrong with you all." For the next three stops, he denounced Torontonians for their coldness, for their unwillingness to talk to others, to be nice. By the time I got out, he had begun to talk about how he wanted all us motherfuckers to die, preferably when someone dropped a bomb on this city.
While I don't normally heed the words of crazy subway people, it is quite true that Torontonians are rather cold. While I acknowledge that my sample size is small, in the course of my tri-city tour of the summer of 2002--first Toronto ON, then south to Richmond VA, finally to New York City--I was spectacularly impressed by the warmth, friendliness, and genuine interest expressed by almost all of the Americans I met. Toronto may be cold, but that's only because it's the largest city of an English Canada that's noted for a supposed politeness which--I'd argue--is actually a deeply suspicious sort of reserve, fearful of making commitments. (Québec may well be different, but I'm not competent to speak of that incipient nation-state's conditions.) English Canada, far more than the United States, is the adoptive homeland of Max Weber and perfect gesellschaft.
Let's grant that English Canadians and Torontonians can be rude, if not entirely consciously. There's still more than enough kindness to go around. Canada might not be home to the stereotypical patterns of Mediterranean hospitality, with extensive commitments and fierce loyalties, true. The virtue of gesellschaft societies is that they also don't required the exhausting reciprocal commitments of such warm and hospitable cultures. Kindnesses come in small ways, as in the solidarities of busriders on the Dufferin route, or the security guard who let me into the Reference Library after hours to retrieve my dayplanner before the holidays, or the pedestrian I cornered to ask the direction to an intersection of note. Small politenesses are more than enough.
While I don't normally heed the words of crazy subway people, it is quite true that Torontonians are rather cold. While I acknowledge that my sample size is small, in the course of my tri-city tour of the summer of 2002--first Toronto ON, then south to Richmond VA, finally to New York City--I was spectacularly impressed by the warmth, friendliness, and genuine interest expressed by almost all of the Americans I met. Toronto may be cold, but that's only because it's the largest city of an English Canada that's noted for a supposed politeness which--I'd argue--is actually a deeply suspicious sort of reserve, fearful of making commitments. (Québec may well be different, but I'm not competent to speak of that incipient nation-state's conditions.) English Canada, far more than the United States, is the adoptive homeland of Max Weber and perfect gesellschaft.
Let's grant that English Canadians and Torontonians can be rude, if not entirely consciously. There's still more than enough kindness to go around. Canada might not be home to the stereotypical patterns of Mediterranean hospitality, with extensive commitments and fierce loyalties, true. The virtue of gesellschaft societies is that they also don't required the exhausting reciprocal commitments of such warm and hospitable cultures. Kindnesses come in small ways, as in the solidarities of busriders on the Dufferin route, or the security guard who let me into the Reference Library after hours to retrieve my dayplanner before the holidays, or the pedestrian I cornered to ask the direction to an intersection of note. Small politenesses are more than enough.
