Hey America, you’re great!

Yours Truly, stopping to admire the West Virginia scenery while moving to Tampa
(and yes, I still own that jacket).
Click the photo to see all this America at full size.

In the midst of a bitter, divisive, and surreal election season, the Toronto-based creative agency The Garden Collective have come up with an idea that feels like a breath of fresh air: a campaign for Canadians to tell America how great it is.

The idea behind the Let’s Tell America It’s Great campaign is simple: America could use some cheering up right now, so why not rally Canadians, the people who make up America’s neighbour (note the Canadian spelling) and largest and most trustworthy trading partner, to send it some love?

They created this video and told their fellow Canucks to do the same:

In their campaign, they also us to to post tweets with the #tellamericaitsgreat hashtag. Here’s a sampling:

Speaking as a Canadian who was born in the Philippines and now living in the U.S., here are the reasons why I think America’s great:

• Star Wars and Star Trek!
• Creating not just the industries in which I’ve worked — computers, telecommunications, software, the internet, e-commerce, RFID, the internet of things — but also the job that I do: technology evangelism. And let’s not forget giants, from the originals like IBM, Unisys, and Honeywell, to Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and Oracle, to the scrappy startup cultures of Route 128 and Silicon Valley.
• Only in America could both the piano accordion (everywhere else, they used button accordions) and Weird Al rise to greatness.
• The Avengers and the Justice League!
• My home country couldn’t have been liberated without the Americans.
• Bourbon. ’Nuff said.
• Barbecue.
• America’s contributions to music, which include jazz, country, gospel, bluegrass, rock, hip-hop, house, and Ween.
• Spaceships, as both big government projects and scrappy private efforts.
• The “can do” attitude that underlies America’s official philosophy — “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — as well as the unofficial one — “Hold my beer. I’ve got this.”

Let’s not forget this American ideal:

And finally, what I love most about America: Anitra.