On Trevor Taylor, and Others Who've Failed to Shed Light on #DarkNL

“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.