VIEWPOINT
Heather Mallick
Once-polite Canadians spat in the streets for supremacy
Last Updated: Monday, November 9, 2009 | 1:48 PM ET
By Heather Mallick, special to CBC News
I wish people would stop screaming in public, particularly at me.
"Aaaargh!" a woman shrieked at me a couple Sundays ago. "It's either your perfume or the flowers, but you're making me sick!" And she ran out of my local ice cream shop in tears of rage.
I had just bought a bouquet for my neighbour's 90th birthday and ran next door into Ed's Real Scoop to see whether they had any of their macaroon-flavoured ice cream, which I eat by the bucket. The store smells heavenly, but I had apparently tipped the balance.
I could use more flowers and fragrance in my life; she preferred none, which is her right. But it was a public space that the woman was claiming as private by virtue of her allergies.
"Remember, we're all in this alone," as Lily Tomlin used to say, but who thought it would come to this.
I see incidents like this daily. As the recession makes us increasingly stressed and paranoid, we turn what used to be minor, private annoyances into public skirmishes, each a little Two Minutes Hate that degrades us.
Last week I watched a young blond woman mocking an obviously panicked and mentally troubled older dark-skinned man. She then took out her moisturizer and massaged her elbows. We happened to be on the Toronto subway, but the woman clearly felt that spiritually, she was alone in her apartment, where mental illness is laughable and her flaking skin, sacred.
Kids vs. dogs
These days, private interests fight to control the commons.
For instance, parents are waging a running battle against dog owners in my neighbourhood. The dog owners — who with their doggy cuisine, matching outfits and special dog floats in the Easter parade can only be called a cult — are winning. Living in Toronto, a lakeside city where E. coli pollution means you never see children swimming, is shaming enough. But dog owners break the leash bylaws and let their Baskerville-like hounds run free in public parks and on the beaches, frightening children and leaving piles of excrement that their owners don't pick up because no one is there to make them do it.
There is said to be a child-rearing cult, too: Parents are demonized for being so child-centred that they endanger the peace and quiet of grown-ups. But surely we were all children once? Perhaps the child-haters were themselves hated as children and now return the favour.
This week I read a column on normally civilized Salon.com about a U.S. woman and her apparently noisy child being removed from a Southwest Airlines flight. People should control their offspring, columnist Kate Harding wrote, and hundreds of people agreed with creepy enthusiasm, saying noisy children should be stowed like luggage or thrown from the plane to their deaths.
The problem is, Harding has built her career within the "fat acceptance" cult, which posits that obesity is neither unhealthy nor unattractive, nor within human control. It's ironic for her to enlist adult passengers against children when she knows how viciously those same passengers treat fat people on planes. Look at the dread on people's faces when a fat person shuffles down the aisle with his carry-on. The narcissism of minor differences, Freud called it — the feuds between communities with adjoining territories, feuds that serve to create social cohesion within each group. And the difference between children invading your eardrums or adults your seat space is truly minor.
This sniper war reached its nadir in my doctor's office recently where I praised a mother's gorgeous baby. "Thanks," the mother said. "He's too fat though," she added hastily.
The baby obviously had a health problem. But could there be a more legitimate place to take it than a medical practice? If we demonize both childhood and obesity, a fat child stands little chance. Why did that mother feel she needed to apologize to me, a stranger?
Parents of autistic children, now that they dare show their faces, have a special problem. Their beautiful children are lively and loud, they have tantrums, they may grunt rather than speak. And unthinkingly cruel people in restaurants berate the ashen-faced parents for allowing public indiscipline.
Another example: Humans in a crowd have a genius for dodging each other's bodies. We never touch. But we are jostled all the time now by people wearing iPods, devices that jar the auditory mechanism that regulates body balance and position. Wouldn't it be more polite to leave the things at home?
Yet another example: The gun registry hurts the feelings of rifle-owners, but killing it will endanger police officers. Shouldn't health and safety come first? Don't our cops deserve to know what weaponry they're facing in the middle of the night? Politicians — and I mean you, Jack Layton — have been intimidated into silence, which is not why we elected them.
Unfair is foul
Allergic people vs. random floral scents, dog owners vs. parents, people who floss and pluck in public, hunters, iPod wearers, cellphone users — they all seek personal dominance as they stride the streets. But the essence of Canadian life is its tolerance. So why is our kindly democracy being challenged in these multitudinous tiny, personal ways?
It's because people increasingly believe that life is unfair. Why, for example, should private clinics give flu shots to the rich when the rest of us line up outside for hours with our children? Why is EI still so restricted even after massive job losses? Why do politicians ride around in limousines at our expense?
More and more, citizens sense that no one is in charge. People feel that Canada is disintegrating — decentralization is, after all, part of the Conservative prayer book — and that cowardly political parties don't bother to represent them.
No wonder people lash out for some form of control in their private lives, and it spills out and makes a mess in public. This ridiculous endless backwash of bickering and rage on the streets is a symptom of how helpless we feel, and how nasty we can be when threatened even tangentially.
It is the temper of the times, and God knows it is foul.
