HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2019-07-25, Page 5Other Views
Teaching how the buck stops here
The bully gets to shape reality Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Early Monday morning, if you were
driving past my house, you might have
seen either myself or my wife,
Ashleigh, taking the covers off our Evenflo
children’s car seats to double check if the
straps had been fraying at the edges.
It turns out that Evenflo seats, in Canada,
have had 94 complaints against them for
fraying straps. The incidents, many of which
has been in the last year, have prompted
Transport Canada to encourage parents to
check their seats.
The initial report came out last week, and I
checked the seats then, but after CBC picked
up the story and provided more information,
Ashleigh suggested that we give them another
look. Given that those straps are the only thing
standing between death or dismemberment
during a collision, I readily agreed.
It was frustrating, to say the least, to have to
remove the cushioning a second time, and,
fortunately for our family, the seats seems to
be in good condition.
After I had checked the seats, I decided to
look into the issue, reading stories about it and
watching the segment on CBC news before
heading in to work on Monday morning.
It was all pretty standard fare for a story
about potential safety hazards – here’s what to
check, here’re the statistics and here’s the
response from the manufacturer.
It was at that latter part, however, that turned
my frustration to anger.
For those of you who know how Evenflo
responded, this narrative pause for dramatic
effect may be wasted on you, however, for
everyone else, stay with me.
Parents have discovered (prior to anyone
getting hurt, fortunately) that straps are
fraying, sometimes on one side or both, and
reporting it to Evenflo or to Transport Canada.
There is, in the images provided, a degree
of uniformity to the straps that were
frayed on both sides.
There is no other damage to the seat to
indicate any other kind of underlying problem.
When you add it all up, it looks like some
kind of engineering or manufacturing
problem, but, early on in these reports, instead
of admitting the company needed to take a
deeper look at the problems, Evenflo passed
the buck, blaming it on rodents.
At first, the claim may seem to make sense.
Where are there more crumbs in a car than on
a toddler’s car seat? Between Cheerios,
crackers and the occasional French fry, a
rodent would have a veritable feast.
But when I started looking at the other
particulars of the situation, a few questions
popped up in my head.
As a parent, I’m adjusting the straps on
Mary Jane’s car seat constantly. Aside from
constantly growing (and growing, and
growing, everyone says she’s so tall for her
age), you also have to loosen them in the
winter for heavier clothing and coats and
inversely tighten them in the summer. That
usually requires untwisting the straps and an
inadvertent review of the car seat. I think, at
that point, any parent would notice chewing
marks on the cushions of the seat, where the
rodents would most likely be. After all, that’s
where most of the crumbs would be.
None of these parents have reported damage
to the seat, just to the straps, and Evenflo has
provided free replacements (the seats can be
pricey) to those reporting the damage. That
leads me to believe that Evenflo was passing
the buck.
Experts in the field, according to the CBC’s
report, feel the same way, saying that
consistent damage being reported by this
many people is not likely to have been caused
by rodents.
In fairness to Evenflo, the company has
since announced it will work with Transport
Canada to evaluate the situation, however that
was after telling numerous customers that
rodents caused the problem (and giving away
free car seats that typically cost between $200
and $400 each).
The whole situation hit home for Ashleigh
and me because, recently, the two of us have
been making a concentrated effort to stop
passing the buck to set a good example for
Mary Jane.
It’s so easy to blame other people for our
problems (politicians, manufacturers,
corporations, take your pick) instead of just
owning up to the fact that none of us are
perfect.
We need to be better than that. We need to
learn to place blame only against those who
are culpable and only when it’s necessary.
Nobody’s perfect. This weekend I knocked
down a half a dozen things in our kitchen
while trying to hang up a tea towel. Instead of
internalizing what I did wrong and admit to
not paying enough attention, I got angry
because of how many things were hung on a
towel rack that weren’t towels. Obviously I
still have gains to make.
I guess the difference is me knocking down
a measuring cup doesn’t measure up against
Evenflo putting children’s lives at risk by
claiming rodents are magically ignoring food-
filled cushions of car seats and going straight
for straps hidden underneath said cushions.
Let’s all try a little harder and let the blame
rest where it should.
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JULY 25, 2019. PAGE 5.
An old man rant
While Denny is often referred to as the
resident “old guy” on this page
(ignoring the fact that Keith is an
actual, bona fide older guy) please allow me to
take my moment in the old guy spotlight.
This is truly a “get off my lawn” column if
there ever was one, but as someone who writes
stories about people and their lives week after
week, I can’t ignore the erosion taking place in
the richness of some of these stories.
Just this week I spoke to Kelsey Falconer, a
Blyth-area native who has, in just a few short
years, made a significant impact as a Toronto
actor. She told me that as a child, she was
inspired by a passion to sing and dance and
exhibited her talent through local workshops.
Now that’s a good background story. It
shows a true, organic love for a craft and then
the follow-through to make it her career.
It’s these kinds of stories that the world
loves. Look at newly-famous congresswoman
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York. A
rising star in American politics, she was a
bartender before she ran for congress.
However, with the internet and social media,
an old faithful of an interview question is
becoming less and less interesting.
Denny wrote a story about a new venture in
Wingham a few weeks back. It got the point
across, but it was short. Why was it short? It
was short because the creation story was
someone posting on Facebook. Thrilling.
In another recent story about a successful
tradesman, he said he learned much of his
skills by watching YouTube videos.
Now, that’s not to denigrate people learning
a new skill online. That’s been one of the
bright spots of an invention that has brought
about, and I’m being nice here, a fair amount
of negativity along with it. Whether it’s online
university courses or watching how-to videos
or online manuals, you can learn a lot from the
internet – it just doesn’t make for a good story.
I was floored by an example of this in the
Netflix documentary about the failed Fyre
Festival, Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never
Happened. One of the earliest interviews is
with German pilot Keith van der Linde.
Now, van der Linde expressed his concerns
about the soon-to-be-disastrous festival very
early on, but it was a comment he made about
earning his pilot’s licence that stuck with me.
Van der Linde said he had just recently got
his licence and bought a plane. This success
came after he taught himself to fly on
Microsoft Flight Simulator. While it must have
worked (he did pass the test, earning his
licence after all) it’s not very exciting.
He taught himself how to fly a plane by way
of a video game. Let’s hope the teenagers of
today aren’t teaching themselves how to drive
by playing Grand Theft Auto or how to solve
problems by playing Mortal Kombat.
Nothing beats a good origin story. They’re
an absolute staple of superhero lore (you
know, literally every movie being made these
days) and I imagine that today’s superhero
origin stories might be a little boring.
Perhaps in the next Superman movie we’ll
join Clark Kent as he plays Microsoft Flight
Simulator: Human Flight Edition for countless
hours as he learns to fly or come along for the
exhilarating journey of Peter Parker watching
a few YouTube videos on how to swing from
building to building en route to becoming
Spiderman. (Videos like those probably exist
somewhere on YouTube, by the way.)
So, there it is: an old guy column from yours
truly. Complaining, shaking a fist at the youth
of today and taking a fond look back at the
way things used to be – it really had it all.
Watching U.S. President Donald
Trump’s latest bullying tactics
against four members of Congress
who are also women of colour, I couldn’t help
think of Tara Westover’s memoir Educated.
Westover’s book telling of her experience
growing up in a loopy Mormon/survivalist
family in Idaho has been on the New York
Times bestseller list for 73 weeks, probably
because truth is stranger than fiction.
Her father had his own brand of
fundamentalist Mormon belief. He thought
regular Mormons were going to hell. His belief
conveniently meant his interpretation of what
God wanted ruled the family. At one point he
read a passage from the Old Testament and
interpreted it was God’s message that they
shouldn’t eat dairy foods, so milk, cheese,
butter and yogurt disappeared from the
refrigerator.
He believed that the government was out to
get them and so he built a stash of weapons and
hid some away so they wouldn’t be found if the
family was taken by surprise by a government
raid. He was convinced that the changing of
millennium on New Year’s Eve, 1999 would
bring the breakdown of society, and so he made
his wife preserve enough food to keep the
family eating well for months.
When you grow up in a family you come to
think that’s just the way the world is, especially
if you are homeschooled – though the
“schooled” part was an exaggeration in
Westover’s case. The confusion about what is
normal behaviour left her vulnerable when an
older brother began physically beating her up
when he flew into rages at what he interpreted
as her immoral behaviour, such as wearing
makeup.
The thing is that as a reader, looking into
this world as a “normal” person, you know
these men are not behaving normally. But
the bully controls his world and the people
in it and even the people being abused
can’t help but accept the bully’s version of
“facts”. So even though, miraculously,
Westover had qualified and been accepted to
Brigham Young University through her own
initiative and intelligence, after one of her
brother’s beatings she was ready to give it all
up and stay home.
It’s this shaping of their world by the bully
that caused me to make a comparison of
Donald Trump to Westover’s story. From the
outside, we can see that the U.S. President is
clearly wrong when he claims these women
hate America and should “go home”,
despite the fact three of the four were born in
the U.S. and the fourth loved the country
enough to become a citizen and run for
office. But when Trump stands before an
audience of people who see the world by his
terms, they’re ready to viciously chant “send
her back!”.
Just as it was important for Westover’s
father to maintain his version of reality for his
family by refusing to allow his kids to attend
public schools, bullies and dictators often try to
prevent any influence from reshaping their
reality by shutting down media outlets that
oppose them and preventing people from
having internet or radio and television access to
the outside world, as Russian President
Vladimir Putin does to his countrymen. Other
dictators like Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan also try to control the thinking of their
people by allowing only their own version of
reality.
In her book Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar
Nafisi tells of bringing a group of women
together in her apartment for a weekly
discussion of great novels from Western
literature. These women would arrive in long
dark robes and scarves to hide their hair, which
Iran’s Islamic imams see as a temptation to
men. Once inside the women would peel off
these outer garments to reveal their real selves,
with forbidden jewellery, luxuriant hair and
bright t-shirts and blue jeans. Within that room
they could be themselves and think for
themselves. Outside they had to live by rules
imposed on them, whether they agreed or not,
by the imams.
The U.S. is still a free country, so Donald
Trump doesn’t have the opportunity to impose
his will and shut down criticism of his
outrageous statements. Still he shapes the
conversation in his own way. The onus is
thrown upon the four women in Congress to
prove they love their country, not for Trump to
prove they don’t. As long as he has enough
followers to see he gets re-elected in the 2020
Presidential Election, it’s his version of reality
that matters, despite what non-supporters and
those of us looking in from outside the U.S.
think.
Westover finally escaped her father and
brother’s world, studying at Cambridge
University in England and Harvard. Still, for a
long time their world haunted her.
Someday Donald Trump will be gone, but
what legacy will he leave behind if he wins re-
election, giving him a whole generation
reaching adulthood under his influence?
Keith
Roulston
From the
cluttered desk