The feedback was tremendous!

It's official. We are spoiled

                        by Robert LaFrance

            Whew! I never got such a whack of letters in response to a column since I wrote about killing that mouse with a broom. Back about 2006 I think it were. Yeah, I know, your question is: where did the mouse get the broom?

            This most recent deluge of letters I refer to all contained complaints about my column on how spoiled we are today, what with all the modern inconveniences—when they work.

            I got a postcard from a local man. One thing that made his blood boil was the sight of someone using a snowblower and operating it from inside one of those transparent plastic tents “so the wimpy souls don’t actually get cold”. He went on to say that real Canadians face the weather, whatever it is, and only go inside when the wind chill factor is –50C or lower. “It’s time Canadians toughened up,” he said. He signed the postcard: ‘Albert Finogloss, Birch Ridge’ but I noticed that the picture on the postcard showed scenes from Hawaii. The postmark was Maui. He’s an example to us all.

            Amanda Johnstory wrote from Bairdsville, NB, that she was in full agreement with my opinion that we are spoiled today. “When I was growing up,” she wrote in a spidery hand, “a bottle of pop was eight cents and a gallon of gas was twenty cents, and woe betide the person who got them mixed up. I find people today to be whiney, spoiled, and a total pain in the aspect. Paved roads? We went to town on horseback through the woods except in the winter when we just stayed home. We didn’t have any money anyway, so we couldn’t buy anything. I was twelve before I could afford an elastic band to wrap up my…well, that’s personal. We had outhouses, now we have 2-tier flushes.

            Liberal MLA George Clumpe wrote that without the Internet he wouldn’t be able to do his job which includes buying his vacation plane tickets online, Tory MLA Shirley Clumpe wrote that I should ignore anything her husband wrote “because he is an idiot”. Federal Defence Minister Peter McKay wrote to say that he wished the media hadn’t found out about his personal trips paid for by the taxpayers. “In the old pre-Internet days of snail mail, nobody would have found out about it until I was in the Senate,” he moaned—in an email letter.

            “Spoiled is right,” thundered MaryLou Grayee over the phone one morning. “My husband Bill can’t walk across the room with his TV remote, he starts the car with his remote—different one of course—and raises his garage door with yet another remote. He also has a remote to keep track of all his remotes, and a remote for his electric blanket, his electric toothbrush, and a remote for tying his shoes. Spoiled? Well, I should smile.”

            The Reverend Josie LaTour was a little calmer about things, but still was vehement in her agreement with me that we are spoiled. “Bless you, my son,” she said. “You told it like it is, just as I used to tell it when I was a member of Satan’s Neighbours motorcycle club. In those days we had to actually start our own motorcycles, not push a button or use a remote control as they do now. When I hear about someone who has a remote car starter or an iPhone, I curse them up and down the hills from my very pulpit. Woe be unto him or her who abandons the old ways, I tell them, and whosoever does is going straight to hell. Or Toronto, which is pretty much the same thing.”

            “A snowblower is a tool of the devil,” the good reverend continued. “What’s wrong with shovelling or scooping, or hiring the kid down the road to shovel or scoop? I know that it’s good for the economy for us all to go out and buy a new $2000 snowblower, a $700 computer, a new $168,000 Rolls Royce like the one I just purchased. I know we should all spend, spend, spend to get us out of this recession, but we’ve become a high-tech bunch of useless wastrels who acquire a bunch of stuff to make our lives easier and all that happens is that everything breaks down and we have to drive to town to get it fixed. Infrared sensors in restaurant washrooms so we never have to turn a knob? Come on. Let’s do like Thoreau and simplify.”

            I felt like writing back to say that Thoreau lived and wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century when things were fairly simple as it was, but I just settled back on my computer chair and downloaded some more emails. I like people telling me I’m right. Next I might say Christmas is becoming too commercialized. I’ve only had 87 people point this out since Thursday.

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