Let’s give our heads a shake
In the spring of 1983, preparing to move to Toronto from Montreal, my wife and I landed at Pearson airport on a house-hunting trip. We left our young daughters with their grandparents (our dog stayed behind, too) so we would have no distractions from our mission. After all, Toronto was a big place and we didn’t know it well.
We rented a car and headed toward downtown. Naturally, I turned on the radio, looking for a local newscast. The first story we heard was about a community that was upset because stop signs were being installed at all four corners of an intersection. This was the top of the newscast!
I turned to my wife and said, “This is what they fight about here. They fight about whether there should be four stop signs at an intersection, or just two. Must be a great city.”
If I could insert a chip into everyone’s brain, I’d call it a “perspective chip.” It would force people, when they look around and find something to complain or worry about, to take a step back. It would force them to realize that very few things are the end of the world. You think taxes are too high? That’s why we have elections. You think traffic is bad? It probably is. You just brought home milk from the supermarket and you notice the best-before date was yesterday? Definitely annoying.
But a perspective chip would stop you from getting carried away. Some people don’t like it when governments try to slow the spread of COVID-19 by advising against international travel or by reducing the number of people allowed into sporting venues. Disagree to your heart’s content, I say. But likening those measures to the Holocaust, genocide or crimes against humanity, as I’ve seen in some places, is ignorant and dumb. These people are in desperate need of the perspective chip. Give your heads a shake.
I know some people don’t watch the news on TV because they find it upsetting. Wars. Disasters. Refugees. Hungry children. Dictators. Mass murders. Of course, it’s upsetting. But there’s value in seeing all that. Let’s call it … perspective. It should make the rest of us thankful for the good things in our lives. It should restrain us from going berserk over every perceived “injustice.” Or from worrying about things that don’t really matter in the long run.
If you waste one brain cell fretting over who plays left-wing on the fourth line of the Toronto Maple Leafs, that’s one brain cell too many.
If the phone rings and it’s the guy offering to clean your ducts again, you could scream at him that you are sick and tired of his calls — or you could just hang up and get on with your day.
I’m all for engaged citizenship. We shouldn’t accept everything with a shrug; some hills are worth dying on. But the good news in this country is that most things do work. And when they don’t work, we’re really good at course corrections.
Our political “scandals” get resolved. We have a social safety net that catches most people. We aren’t put into prison for speaking our minds. Fighting for or against a stop sign is a truly wonderful thing. As long as we know that, we’ll be OK.
MARK BULGUTCH IS THE FORMER SENIOR EXECUTIVE PRODUCER OF CBC NEWS. HIS LATEST BOOK, WITH PETER MANSBRIDGE, IS “EXTRAORDINARY CANADIANS.”