“For
the record, I love winter. I love snow. I love the cold. I love being
outside in the snow and the cold.”
Me
too!
Or,
at least I did as a child. In the time since, I've grown up, moved beyond sharing a roof and groceries with my parents, and experienced numerous consecutive mild winters. These events have
conspired in such a way that the only investment I have in enjoying
winter now is a pair of oft-neglected snowshoes. Despite the
childhood days spent building snow castles and forts and
(occasionally, when I was lucky) on a snowmobile, I just don't have
the same connection to winter that I once did. Still love it, but don't live it.
That's
not to say that I am who Trevor Taylor was writing to in his opinion column published
in The Telegram yesterday.
On my end of things: the power went out in
the morning,
returned shortly in
the afternoon
long enough for me to catch a period of Canada's Junior hockey
team
playing
in their semifinal loss to Finland,
and then went
out again until later that evening. After a short spell of eating cold leftover potatoes, I settled in with a beer and a book.
Without encouragement from Taylor or anyone else, I caught myself
stopping on Saturday to consider my lot.
Still in the candlelight,
I thought to myself: what a cruel fate has befallen me indeed—instead
of drinking beer and watching a hockey game,
I'm drinking beer and reading a book. Seriously
though, I
have no children nor seniors nor other potentially vulnerable people
in my care, so I could've
happily
survived
like that
for days.
Of
course, not everyone was as lucky or as content as I was, and I did experience some of the people Taylor addressed directly. Living in the 21st
Century, we're not even bound to a wall socket to experience the
wonder (and, all too often, the lack thereof) of the internet. With a
charged smart phone, I could still log into Facebook and Twitter for
hours to read complaints about the snow clearing, the power outage,
the impending cold because of said power outage, and plenty of other
plights of the modern Newfoundlander in a blizzard.
For
the record, I love winter. I love electricity. I love warmth.
I love being inside when it is warm and I have electricity. Still, I
didn't take to social media to complain. I may have made a
couple comments on twitter about how abysmally the power situation was being handled
politically, but far from the diatribes of many on social media about
how I was cold or snowed in. Surely, some of these rants were merited
because of difficult situations and responsibilities, and—just as
surely—some were not.
But then, who am I to judge?
What
does it matter to me if someone wants to use their Facebook or
Twitter accounts as a soapbox?
Soon
after, another breed of complaining began to pop up, a breed where
I quickly filed Taylor's column. By my read, the gist of it was how dare this
first set of complainers use their social media accounts to
complain? Social media quickly became flooded with as many
complaints about complaints as there were complaints about the
situation causing the complaints. These meta-complaints often
bothered me more than the original complaints: made by people who
were as lucky as I was or as prepared as Trevor Taylor was, they came inherent with a pretension; like they're saying
“I have it just as bad as you and I'm not
complaining!”
Some
even took it a step further. I saw some variant of the
following trope
several times on the same social media sites. For
example, K-Rock
personality JLaC tweeted
a sentiment (also found in the TT article) implying that
somehow it's not just that people once
personally coped better, the statement was that the entire
previous generation wouldn't complain about a bit of snow nor an
inconvenience.
I
really don't care to debate whether people are better or worse off now than they
were growin' up'n SaintAntney t'irty yearago, because such
debates are pointless. People are different because the context
is different, and each context comes with a complex set of advantages and disadvantages. We're generally not as prepared in the face of
these sorts of adversities because we generally don't have these
sorts of adversities. It's been decades since we had a
storm that dismantled our infrastructure on the level that the most
recent one did, at such a critical time of the year. The politics of
why the infrastructure broke down aside, it's just not something the
populace is accustomed to anymore. Especially young people.
Thought
experiment: put the shoe on the other foot. Take your average and/or
stereotypical Newfoundlander in the mid-20th century. Put them into a
context where they don't have a harsh winter for a decade, and give
them years of social media experience. Given a similar storm in a similar context, I have
no doubt that Sally Brown, Sally Tibbo and Lizer would be tweeting
their frustrations.
[If
I'm keeping up the classic Newfoundland stereotype, a personal
favourite from my family that I still don't understand
would sound like “Jump'n Jesus, Mink'n Mile! Katty Dunderdale
better get me power back on!”]
Again:
it's not the people, it's the context. Although the life skills
that Trevor Taylor learned in the context of his youth gave
him a marked advantage in terms of preparing for and dealing with
this weekend's situation, it shouldn't give him any reason to be so
pretentious while he's prescribing preparedness. If so, I'm going to act absolutely insufferable toward the next older person who asks me to fix
their printer or make them a spreadsheet.
Seriously though, at the risk of being as pretentious and prescriptive as a certain former MHA, wouldn't it be nice if, instead of being cranky and negative about power outages and snow clearing and about the complaints/plights of others, we just accepted that sometimes situations and other people are going to be negative, and tried to help things get better when and how we could?
I
mean, my Aesop phase was a long time ago, but I remember the fable of
the grasshopper and the ant pretty well, and I think it fits here.
The ant was right, the grasshopper should have been better
prepared... but did he have to be such a dick about it?
That's
where I come to what I'd consider the bright side of this whole
affair. Mount Pearl mayor
Randy
Simms said that the storm
warming centre
in
Mount Pearl
didn't see as much traffic as expected this past weekend.
He
credited
it specifically to
“neighbours helping neighbours”. In my case, we got power back
hours before some friends did, and I
quickly invited them into a house with electricity to keep warm and
cook a meal.
This doesn't make me special or different; there are thousands of
similar stories from the last week. I have no doubt
that the power-outage-complainers, the complainer-complainers, Trevor
Taylor, JLaC, Lizer, Sally
Tibbo, Sally
Brown and Katty Dunderdale would do (and did) the same.
Despite the negativity found online, there were examples of
people being positive and good to each other all over the Avalon
Peninsula during
#DarkNL.
And I
can't think of a better way to help our neighbours feel better than
to be there to help them when
they need it.
Although.
One
thing is certain; complaining isn't going to help them feel better.
At least I hope it doesn't.
