by Robert LaFrance
After a couple of months of watching TV commercials and listening to people tell the world how they will simply pass away if they don’t get the latest electronic gadget, and how walking to their car exhausts them, I have come to the conclusion that we are all incredibly spoiled. When you start getting the idea that ‘roughing it’ is only being able to afford an iPod Nano instead of a Touch, something is askew.
Surely we’re out of the recession now; people seem to be buying everything that isn’t duct-taped down. The phenomenon known as Black Friday was a good example of this. Over in the U.S. shoppers pitched tents in store parking lots so they could be on hand when the store opened for business. They could get an eight-person tent for $1.29 or a 5000-watt generator for fifty cents—plus tax of course.
The iPods, X-boxes, and the StarMax 3010Js (whatever that might be) were selling like Ex-lax at a constipation convention all through November and December, even while our political leaders were telling us that their next budgets were going to hit us hard.
In the midst of all this, I was talking to a couple who had just come back from Caribou and Presque Isle, Maine, where they had spent many hundreds of dollars. Since both the husband and wife had, in 2011, undergone expensive medical procedures in New Brunswick, I was tempted to ask if part of Maine’s sales tax went to help our medicare system in any way, but I didn’t bother.
I can sit in my living room, in my favourite chair that is moulded to my every indentation, and listen to radio or watch TV from every part of Canada and the U.S. ‘Podcasts’ allow me to listen to my favourite shows at my own convenience. Remember when we would say: “Wouldn’t it be great if we could record a TV show and play it later?” I believe something called a VCR came along about then but now that is ‘veille jeu’ as they say in Paris, Ontario. An old game, or old hat.
Spoiled. I can send an email letter to Shanghai, China and receive a reply in five minutes. Marco Polo, sailing in the 13th century, took months to go from Italy to China. In our cars today we have tire pressure sensors because we’re too lazy to check the inflation of the tires. We have remote controls for an array of things; otherwise we would have to actually cross the room to change a setting. Remote car starters, the GPS, satellite dishes, heated seats in cars, and digital cameras. How energetic we are!
NASA put people on the moon, but I am not sure their Apollo spacecrafts had bigger instrument panels than my Chrysler Intrepid—and it’s only a 2000. I can use something called Skype and telephone Aunt Rennie in Liverpool, England by using my computer and a ‘digicam’. I said I CAN do that, but since she informed me I am now officially out of her will in favour of a tennis instructor named Glenn, I don’t bother. Besides, the downside of calling on Skype is that I would be able to see HER and she’s had a hard life, if you know what I mean.
I can request library books via the Internet and have them delivered to my home library (as long as Stephen Harper continues to allow the post office to charge only book rate for this); I can ‘Google’ any subject and get information on it in seconds; I can watch a soccer game from Lille, France at the exact instant it’s taking place there; I can take a photo of my great niece and mail it using my cellphone to her great grandmother in Montreal where it’s printed out before the little girl has time to say “did you use the proper DPI settings?”.
Every few months my cousin who lives along the Darling River in Australia sends me the Tompkins Family newsletter and I see what various cousins are up to. Mail is rather fast these days, and I don’t mean the kind that arrives in my mailbox outside, the one that used to be at the end of my driveway and is now 2.5 kilmetres away in a group box.
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