I have never bought a lottery ticket.

That’s because I don’t need to hit a multimillion dollar jackpot to persuade me that I have already won the most important lottery of them all. I won the lottery of life when I was born in Canada. Through no effort of my own (but plenty of effort by my grandparents on both sides of my family) I was born in a safe and secure country.

I’ve been able to grow up, get an education, have a rewarding career, find a loving woman to marry and have children with, watch my children make their way in the world, and now take pleasure in walking a grandchild to her school bus most mornings.

It’s easy to take all this for granted when you’re born in Canada. But anyone with two eyes in their head can look around and understand that not everyone is as fortunate. Canadians take pride in opening our doors to some of them.

But now the United States has decided to shut everyone out if they were unlucky enough to be born in one of seven countries, which happen to have mostly Muslim populations.

That is a policy we can’t ignore.

Part of why it’s so good to be a Canadian is our proximity to the United States. Unlike many countries in the world, we are blessed with a neighbour that has no plan to launch a military attack on our territory. In fact, their strongest-on-the-planet military helps protect us from any foreign invasion. We have our differences from time to time, but we rely on our two democratic governments to work things out. And even with Donald Trump as president, things like NAFTA, NATO, pipelines, and Arctic sovereignty, can be left in Ottawa’s hands.

But the reprehensible Trump travel ban demands a personal response. As an ordinary citizen there is something you can do. You can tell the president that if he closes the door on people who don’t deserve such callous treatment, we won’t be using the door he has left open for us. We’ll stop visiting the United States.

A lot of Canadians go to the U.S. on business and that probably can’t stop. And Canadian snowbirds who own property south of the border can’t be expected to stay home. But plenty of us choose to vacation in the United States, and we don’t have to.

In 2015, Canadians made almost 21 million overnight trips to the United States. We stayed for about 216 million nights. And we spent almost $20 billion. On top of that, we made 23 million same day car trips south, scooting across the border for some bargain shopping.

There are a lot of things we can’t control in our lives. Hydro prices. Traffic congestion. Doctors who leave you sitting in the waiting room for an hour. But no one tells us where to spend our vacation. And no one forces us to cross the border to buy a sweater or a TV set.

So let’s not do it. There’s no need to start a campaign. Just make a personal decision to avoid the United States whenever you can as long as the cruelty persists.

It was a more enlightened president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, who said, “Perhaps once in a generation there comes a chance for the people of a country to play their part willingly and fearlessly in some great battle of the age-long warfare for human rights.”

This may be our chance. We can’t go on behaving like nothing has changed. A hateful darkness has descended over a land that we know and care about. And there’s actually something each of us can do to say we won’t be part of it.

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It’s not a terrible sacrifice. Wait four years. We can hope the Trump presidency will then be over. The Grand Canyon will still be there. The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Disney World. They’ll all be there. And with any luck, the Statue of Liberty will still be there too.

Mark Bulgutch teaches journalism at Ryerson University. He is the former senior executive producer of CBC News, and the author of, That’s Why I’m a Journalist.

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