I honestly don't think the American spirit existed. It existed to the wealthy and the privileged, but to the underdog, it was an unreachable dream.

As a fellow Canadian, it seemed so easy to move my life to Silicon Valley and get a job in tech. I had all the liberties to get a great education, most of it paid by the Government of Canada. America was just a money making country, and I had an easy pass in.

But what about the people like myself who lived there all their lives. What kind of disadvantages did they face? The topics of tension in their political battles were something I didn't have to think twice about in Canada: Health Care, Education, Freedom of Speech, Gun Laws. Those all seem like abstract things to debate about. I went to the doctor, got my prescription came home. I got funding, went to school, graduated. Simple.

But it's not so simple for them.

The American spirit the rest of the world has been sold, was just a facade. It covered all the underlying problems that we didn't want to admit, or had yet to surface. But 2020 did something incredibly special. Trump did something incredibly special. He raked it all up. Anything in the dark must come to the light. The American spirit is the American dysfunction.

What we have to reconcile is what we believed America was, versus what America is. America hasn't gone anywhere, but the ugly truth has come to visit.