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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2012-04-12, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, APRIL 12, 2012. PAGE 5. T he test of good manners is to be able to put up pleasantly with bad ones. – Wendell Wilkie I’m worried about the increasing disappearance – and possible pending extinction – of two critical English language expressions. Those expressions are (a) Please and (b) Thank you. Used to be common as song sparrows, those expressions. “Could you pass the potatoes, please?” “Yes, here you are.” “Thank you.” I can still cast out as many Pleases as I want, but I seldom hook a thank you. Instead I reel in “No worries”, “Sure”, “Cheers”, “No problem”,” You betcha”, “Right”, and occasionally “Have a good one.” Such expressions are hardly hostile, but they’re also not quite as heartfelt or sincere as a simple thank you. There’s an ironic aura of ‘no big deal’ about them. They don’t represent a connection between two people; it’s more like a disconnection. Lisa Gache, a consultant in Los Angeles has noticed too. She says what used to be common courtesy in civil discourse is on the way out and being replaced by all things casual. “Casual conversation, casual dress and casual behaviour have hijacked practically all areas of life,” she says, “and I do not think it is doing anyone a service.” Wade Davis, the Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author and photographer travels the world but when he’s in North America, he says, it’s never hard to tell whether he’s north or south of the border. Just go in the nearest supermarket. In Canada, he says, you usually have eye contact with the cashier and a brief conversation, while in the U.S. the transaction is totally impersonal. You could be dealing with a robot. Davis says it’s a class thing. In Canada, the chances are very good that the cashier’s kids and your kids go to the same school, play on the same soccer team, and live in the same neighbourhood. Whereas in an American store you’re often dealing with a bused-in, part-time worker from a poorer neighbourhood, working for minimum wage and living in a whole different society. Why would she or he be friendly? Aside from a few bags of groceries on the checkout counter you two have almost nothing in common. I notice a growing remoteness with the people I deal with in public here in Canada. My partner, who has a way of crystallizing my various melodramas, laughed when I mentioned the Public Chill. “What do you expect – you’re a geezer,” she said. “That makes you invisible to anyone under 25.” A retired scientist I know concurs. “We’ve noticed that the lack of acknowledgement and general politeness isn’t confined to strangers”, he writes, “Neighbours, friends and even spouses of our children seem to have a hard time giving thanks of any kind”. Maybe it is just a generational thing. If so, there are signs that some adults are getting a little tired of being treated like doormats. Tom Jordan of North Carolina, for instance, who discovered that his 15-year-old daughter Hannah was cursing her parents out on Facebook, telling the world they treated her ‘like a damn slave’ because they expected her to do chores around the house. Dad took the laptop out in the yard, set up a webcam, shot the laptop nine times with a gun and posted the video to YouTube for “all those kids who thought it was cool how rebellious you were.” Now that’s an extreme (and extremely American) reaction to bad manners. I prefer the approach taken by the famous actress Ethel Barrymore who once invited a young actress to a dinner party. Not only did the guest not appear, she didn’t bother to let Barrymore know in advance, or to account for her absence afterward. Several days later the two women met unexpectedly. “I think I was invited to your house for dinner last week”, the young actress said lamely. “Oh, yes,” replied Barrymore brightly. “Did you come?” Arthur Black Other Views Would you read this, please? Last weekend I found myself with a bit of time on my hands and no Easter plans, so I got caught up in the spirit of Major League Baseball’s opening day weekend and made the drive to Detroit. The Tigers were playing the Boston Red Sox and it couldn’t have been a more perfect day to take in a baseball game outdoors. There is no other sport so tied to its season as baseball is to summer. Sure, everyone identifies hockey with winter, but the hockey season often begins at a time when people are still wearing shorts outside and it often ends when people are digging out those same pairs of shorts. To me, and to a lot of people, baseball means summer is here. The arrival of spring training means that winter is on its way out and the beginning of the playoffs means that winter is rolling back around once again. Baseball is summer. Walking around Comerica Park the air was full of the smell of cotton candy and beer nuts and sausages cooking on the grill. The reality of the situation is that Jess and I got into a bit of a push and pull because I was so excited, I drifted off into my own little world. I wasn’t watching where I was going, I would speed off to see something, leaving her behind in a stadium she’d never been in and I couldn’t sit still. I think she just wanted to bring it to my attention that was acting like I was eight years old and I needed to calm down for my own good. For me there was just no better feeling in the world than last Saturday. The air was warm, the grass was green and there was baseball being played. In Detroit, Comerica Park is an open-air stadium. In many places there are fences instead of walls and the outfield wall is so short that a collection of people stood on Brush Street able to look into the stadium and follow the game without having purchased a ticket. This is how baseball stadiums are meant to have been built. As a child I grew up watching Chicago Cub home runs get hit onto Waverly Avenue and balls going over the Green Monster at Boston’s Fenway Park dropping among the hundreds of fans collected on Yawkey Way. So growing up, what did I have? I had the SkyDome. Sure, now it’s called the Rogers Centre, but it will always be the SkyDome to me. When it was first opened at the beginning of the 1990s, it was revolutionary. The roof opened and closed depending on the weather report. It was the end of rain-outs, while at the same time preserving the ability to experience a game under the blue sky and bright sun. However, after doing a bit of a tour in recent years, I’ve seen how an open-air stadium can preserve that baseball feeling that made it America’s pastime for decades. There’s something about being outside on a beautiful day, enjoying a game with no time limit on a lazy weekend day that can feel like watching grass grow to some and mean the world to others. I looked around the crowd to see young men and women participating in the age-old art of keeping score with their pencils and programs and I was inspired to do the same, giving Jess a bit of a lesson on trying to keep statistics in the most statistics-driven game in the world. She was overwhelmed at times, but in the end she did well. So baseball is back, which means summer is back and everyone should be just a little bit happier when they pass you on the street. The boys of summer Last week’s issue of The Citizen had quite a few stories regarding local Sunshine Lists. Both the Avon Maitland District School Board and Huron County released theirs, but the Huron Perth Catholic District School Board stated that the system needs an upgrade. Trustee Ron Marcy stated the $100,000 list needs to be adjusted for inflation since it was created in 1996. He stated that $71,000 in 1996 would be $100,000 now and that $100,000 then would be $139,000 now. I ask, when we’re talking about people making two to four times the average hourly wage (based on a 40 hour work week) of a Canadian over the age of 15, do we really need to worry about inflation? Maybe we should be considering other concerns with the Sunshine List. I’m sure, for example, Dr. Nancy Cameron, Huron County’s Medical Officer of Health, is a very accomplished individual. However, in the middle of an economic downturn, she made $297,252.96 in 2011. Based on Statistics Canada’s 2011 data and a 40 hour work week, that is approximately six times the average hourly wage of someone over 15. ($23.53 and to me even that number seems very high.) Heck, even based on an 80 hour work week that’s still three times the national average. Now I’m not going to say doctors shouldn’t make more than, say, a journalist. They go to school for years, they reach inside of people and... I’m going to stop that line of thought before I start feeling ill. At one point I did want to be a doctor until I realized that a doctor has to be comfortable with blood and needles and all that stuff I’m definitely not comfortable with. Anyway... they do all that squishy medical stuff that makes me uncomfortable and for that they definitely should make more than me. But should they make 10 times (or more, who knows, I’m just spitballing here) more than I do? That’s a discussion for the budget makers. All I can do is sit there slack-jawed as I see the correlation between how much people make and how much money isn’t available for the institutions they work for. A doctor makes $297,252 annually and we can’t afford improvements to local hospitals. I’m not saying there is a causation relationship there, but I’m sure the two are not independent situations. We are in the process of building a new school (which is setting the bar for other schools to be built at $11 million according to a recent comment at an accomodation review committee (ARC) process in western Huron County) which is closing several other schools to promote educational excellence and enrich education. Those schools are being closed because they don’t have the necessary population to make them financially feasible. Meanwhile, 97 members of the Avon Maitland District School Board made more than $100,000 this year. That’s $9,700,000. It seems to me we could keep a lot of schools open with half of that kind of money and those employees could still annually make more than $50,000. Heck, if Director of Education Ted Doherty cut his $188,000 annual salary by 75 per cent then the board would have $141,000 to help keep local schools running while leaving him with $47,000. I know, that doesn’t seem like a heck of a lot of money, but I make ends meet with a lot less than that. If we had $4,850,000 (half of the $9,700,000) to spread around the Huron and Perth areas we could probably save a lot of local schools and upgrade, repair and maintain them. I went to a couple schools with relatively low populations and I found them to be some of the best learning environments available. So, back to Marcy’s comments: I don’t think we need to update the requirements for the Sunshine List. I think we need to keep the Sunshine List as it is and view it as a mark on public sector employers if they have anyone make it to that list. I’m sure that $99,999.99 is more than enough to run a household on and no one, especially living in Huron County, should need anywhere near that amount to make ends meet. The Sunshine List should be seen as a “hit list” for budgetary cuts in my eyes. The second you start making enough to buy my car every two months you should probably be making less than you currently are. A lot of people will probably think I’m just griping about the fact that they make more than me, but that’s not really what this is about. I had a lot of options when I was in school. I could have done a lot of different things but I chose the path that I wanted and I’ve never regretted it. I don’t care if people make more than me, money doesn’t dictate the quality of my life and it shouldn’t dictate the quality of anyone else’s. What matters to me, and to anyone who matters to me, is the measure of someone’s character. To get away from the emotional stuff and bring it back to the point here; I’m not suggesting communism; I’m saying that the disparity in the range of wages in this country is far too great. I’m saying the more people get for running an institute the less there is for the institute itself. I’m saying that there are a lot of problems in this area caused by a lack of funding, especially in the health care and education arenas. Those two areas are also home to some of the highest wages in the area. I see a problem that needs to be addressed. Shawn Loughlin Shawn’s Sense Denny Scott Denny’s Den Sunshine List should mark budget cuts