Radio Free Taiwan

Two post in one night. I just had a thought that matched with an earlier one from many months ago, and I thought again, that I had better write it down. Not that it’s likely to be true or anything, but I like it.

I once read that there were studies of some sort or another that claimed to demonstrate that people who know more than one language actually do think differently. (Any trademark violation there is purely unintentional.) So maybe this could be the answer to Michael Moore’s famous question of Bowling for Columbine. The reason Canadians don’t shoot each other as much as Americans is due to bilingualism. :-b

Yeah, right. Probably most of the gun deaths are committed by dual language users, right? Probably. Oh, well. So you’re dying to know the earlier thought I suppose. It goes like this: Americans shoot each other more because pre-emptivism is more than a new doctrine for that country. It is a psychological mode of the culture that has been around for ages. When did the US last fight on its own territory? Why is it so easy to get Americans to support an overseas war (nowadays)? Pre-emption has always been the theme. Vietnam was to prevent the spread of communism and so on. Canadians, not sharing this mindset perhaps, aren’t as likely to use force to prevent something from occuring. We are more likely to take our chances with getting kidnapped or talking our way out of a violent situation than to pull that gun from under our pillow (that isn’t there) and shoot at the sillouette in the doorway. We’re not quite so obsessed with getting the other guy before he gets us first. That’s the idea.