Great line of the day

Patrick at Firedoglake writesLessons from a kitchen garden. One paragraph struck me as true of Canada, too:

Pat Buchanan has said very little in his life with which I agree, but one thing he said that has resonated with me: America was a great country before it was a rich country. My grandparents scratched a living out of the earth and lived humbly. They were able to save their pennies and buy building materials over the years, and they never had a mortgage payment, a car payment or a credit card payment. To paraphrase Loretta Lynn, they were poor but they were proud. There was a time when it was not illegal to be poor, nor was it considered a moral failing. Men who took advantage of honest people to enrich themselves were not thought of as honorable men.

Emphasis mine. When we were in the Maritimes this summer, it struck us both how proud the Maritimes people are, in a way that has nothing to do with money -- perhaps it was just this kind of old-fashioned pride that we saw there.