Sorry, ma’am, you can’t do that anymore

The video went viral — as so many videos do nowadays, especially when we wish they wouldn’t. Over a million people watched Kelly Pocha of Cranbrook, lean over the back of a booth in a Denny’s Restaurant in Lethbridge, and yell at the inhabitants of the next booth, who appeared to be of Arab origin.

Her comments were clearly racist. She told them to go back to their own country. She said they didn’t belong here. She threatened physical violence.

To her credit, she later went back to the restaurant, and apologized to the manager for causing a scene. And on the media, she apologized to the subjects of her harangue. “If I could rewind and take it back I would, but I can’t,” she said. “That’s just not who I am.:

Pocha learned a hard lesson — you can’t do that anymore.

Pocha herself lost her job as controller at a Cranbrook auto dealership. Firing her was a legitimate act for her employer, explained Micheal Annett, an assistant professor of human resource management at MacEwan University in Edmonton: “Employers generally have the right to terminate at will for non-job performance that is seen as harmful to the company.”

Once, what you did on your own time was considered entirely separate from your onthe-job performance.

No longer. Remember the young man who seized a female reporter’s microphone after a ball game and shouted obscene suggestions into it? Just high spirits, he claimed later. He lost his job at Ontario’s Hydro One, even though his misbehaviour had nothing at all to do with his technical competence.

Because you can’t do that anymore.

There was a time in this fair land, as Gordon Lightfoot wrote in his Railroad Trilogy, when white men ran it. White Protestant men. Who believed that everyone should become like them. The infamous Indian Residential Schools were an institutional embodiment of that belief. But, indigenous peoples were not the only victims.

Black men had just one sure job on Lightfoot’s railway — porter on the Pullman cars. Jazz pianist Oscar Pederson’s father was one of them.

B.C. passed laws restricting Chinese immigration. Even as it exploited Chinese labour to build the Fraser Canyon Highway to the goldfields inland and used Chinese miners as expendable powder-monkeys underground.

B.C. also herded all Japanese, regardless of birth or citizenship, inland to concentration camps after Japan invaded Pearl Harbour in the Second World War.

A former moderator of the United Church of Canada, Bruce McLeod, remembers growing up in WASP Toronto where signs in the parks said “No Dogs or Jews Allowed”. You can’t do those things anymore. There was a time in this fair land when business leaders believed they had a Godgiven duty to stamp out unions. As late as the 1980s, I attended a meeting where the chair declared, “We’ve got to do something about these damn socialists. Look what happened when we let them get into power in Germany.”

You can’t go union-busting now. At least, not openly. Except, perhaps, in some American states.

There was a time when men assumed they had a right to ogle, flirt with, and grope any attractive woman. Thanks to the #MeToo movement, you can’t do that anymore.

Even those of us who never crossed the line now wonder where the line is.

The problem, it seems to me, is that society has changed. Everyone recognizes that. But, not everyone changes at the same pace.

Same-sex unions are now legal throughout Europe and North America. But a 70-yearold lesbian woman, who had spent 30 years in a committed relationship with her nowdeceased partner, was driven out of a seniors’ home by harassment from other residents. One told her, “Homosexuals will burn in hell.” Another deliberately rammed her with an electric scooter.

The residents didn’t realize that you can’t do that anymore.

A car goes by silently. It’s totally electric — a laudable effort to protect the environment from fossil-fuel fumes. But, the driver tossed his Tim Hortons coffee cup out the window as he went by. You can’t do that anymore either. Social evolution happens as a series of small changes. None of those changes are earthshaking in themselves. But, the accumulation adds up.

We tend to recognize those changes only when, like Kelly Pocha, we get tripped up doing something that might, at one time, have been considered normal. And we discover, perhaps painfully, that you can’t do that anymore.

Society never goes into “Park.” Life is always a work in progress.

Jim Taylor is an Okanagan Centre author and freelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca. This column appears Saturdays.