The Rural Voice, 2000-10, Page 10SERVICE CENTRE INC.
- 479 NlacEwan Street. Goderich • N7A 4111 -
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6 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
Why's it so hard to be thankful?
As Thanksgiving approaches,
many farmers will find it hard to get
in the proper mood given the twin
blows of bad weather and poor prices
this year, but for most people in
Canada there is plenty for which to
be thankful.
Sometimes
you wonder,
though, if people
in Canada even
realize what a
good life they
have. Despite the
fact the United
Nations keeps
rating us at the
top of the heap in
terms of our
standard of
living, you'd
never know it
listening to the
constant stream
of complaints in letters to the editor
columns and phone-in radio shows.
We want more, more, more. The
word "enough" seems to have been
lost from the vocabulary.
We Canadians seem to feel no
matter how much we have there's
someone else who has what we don't
have, and we want it. It's an easy
game to get into. Multi -billionaire
Ted Turner said recently he tended
not to look at all the money he had
but to look at how little he had
compared to Bill Gates.
Despite our wealth in Canada (and
have no doubt, we are wealthy com-
pared to 95 per cent of the world's
population), you'd be hard pressed to
call us a happy nation. Perhaps we
haven't learned the lesson we've long
be told that money (and possessions)
doesn't bring happiness.
Back in the spring when the
whole Elian Gonzalez fiasco was
taking place in Florida, Guelph
lawyer and writer T. Sher Singh was
in Cuba and was surprised at how
happy the Cuban people seemed to
be, even though relatives in Florida
were portraying life in Cuba as a hell
the boy shouldn't be sent back to.
"The key to happiness is
satisfaction," Singh wrote in The
Toronto Star, "and the key to
satisfaction is limiting your needs,
Enough' has
disappeared
from vocabulary
not multiplying your options."
Of course if the people of Cuba
were a little less easily satisfied, they
might not have Fidel Castro as a
dictator. They might have overthrown
the government because they wanted
a better life, just as he did in taking
down the corrupt government before
him.
If our great -great-grandparents
had been easily satisfied, many of us
would still be living in slums in
Europe. Imagine what discontent it
must have taken to risk your life on a
leaky boat on a long sea voyage, then
walk into solid bush to start hacking
out a better life for yourself and your
children.
Without the restless drive for
something better, farmers wouldn't
have made the progression from
sickle to reaper, to combine. We
have far fewer farmers today than a
generation ago, but even in tough
times those farmers remaining have
far more creature comforts in their
homes and in their work than their
fathers and mothers.
Are they happier? Good question.
Since the last 50 years has been a
time of constantly being forced to
change in farming, of never feeling
we have control of our futures, mom
and dad were probably just as
frustrated as son and daughter are
today. Stress, we're told by experts,
comes from not having a sense of
control. On the farm, somebody else
is always setting the agenda whether
it's international prices for
commodities or neighbours and
urbanites worried about clean water
and demanding a tightening of
regulations on manure applications.
And even if we're happy with the
way things are going on the farm at
the moment, there's bound to be
someone out there who is restless
enough to adopt a new technology
that's going to change things enough
that we'll have to change too.
We can't control every aspect of
our life but we can, as Singh says,
control our wants. We can give
ourself the rarest commodity in the
country: contentment.0
Keith Roulston is editor and
publisher of The Rural Voice. He
lives near Blyth, ON.