Smith: If you go to Canada, do pack snacks; it’s some 900 miles to B.C.

Pleasant people who ?answered the phones at the moving-and-storage firms I called Monday said pretty much the same thing:

No, nobody’s been requesting estimates of what it would cost should the outcome of today’s presidential election compel them to move to Canada.

Were there such inquiries, the callers wouldn’t have liked the answers, an employee of one longstanding Santa Rosa van line suggested. To relocate to Canada, she said, “is expensive and it’s difficult.”

So we’ll stay put. But who could be blamed for fantasizing just now about a migration across the border to escape the potential calamities of a Trump presidency or, more generally, the wholesale anger, distrust and jagged-edged polarization laid bare by this campaign?

To witness this season of political combat has been sort of like being in the stands of a nasty, nationalistic soccer match. It’s good the shamefully ugly Clinton-Trump game ends tonight, but one frets over what might happen among the winner’s and loser’s fans in the days to come.

We Americans, the campaign has made fairly plain, are ever more segregated into camps that hold starkly different views of how our country needs to change, and show meager interest in true dialogue with other factions.

Whatever happens today, I trust we’ll find better, more unified times. And we’ll feel good that we aren’t sitting north of the border and following the story of post-2016 America on the CBC.

HHHHHH

IT’S NO MIRACLE that 31 migrant workers from Sonoma County and the North Bay suddenly are seeing more clearly. But it’s pretty close.

At a day of free surgery at Santa Rosa’s 4th Street Laser & Surgery Center, the patients underwent the removal of abnormal tissue that grows often in the eyes of people exposed to great amounts of sunlight.

The nonprofit Operation Access coordinated the clinic, and a cast of volunteers welcomed patients and assisted surgeons Gary Barth, Nina Ni, Kristin Chapman and Daniel Rich.

Earlier this year, Dr. Barth represented all the partners when he traveled to Washington, D.C., to accept, from the Gannett and TEGNA foundations, a Make A Difference Day All Star Award and check for $10,000. The money helps to restore sight.

HHHHHH

JOE MANTHEY, the tenacious, self-described male advocate from Petaluma, will speak Thursday at the screening of a documentary on the men’s rights movement that was made by a woman and that’s giving viewers plenty to talk about.

Manthey appears in the two-hour piece, “The Red Pill.” Filmmaker and former actress Cassie Jaye of Marin County has said she took on the project as a feminist and came out no longer able to call herself one.

Manthey, who’s long objected to what he sees as anti-male bias, is feeling vindicated by Jaye.

“She humanized us,” he said.

The two of them will take questions after a 7 p.m. screening Thursday at Petaluma’s Boulevard 14 Cinemas.

The Hollywood Reporter’s take is that the film “demonstrates enough sincerity and openness to challenging ideas - letting representatives of this problematic movement make their case clearly and convincingly - that one wishes it were able to look at multiple sides of this debate at the same time.”

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.