Psst! Someone's Watching...!
Yep, sure enough, someone is casting an eye your way. If not your way, then someone's. We are inhabiting an increasingly-public world. There are curious eyes everywhere, eager to report back to those who have an interest in what others are engaged in, particularly if that engagement runs counter to our vision of honour, fairness, reputation and trust. Thanks to new technology and peoples' nosiness (or sense of justice) coming together we now disseminate news of another kind for curious onlookers through this world of transparency, where nothing is truly private, and everything becomes grist for the mill of public oversight.Sure, there's always been that old low-tech but time-honoured method of passing the word along; one neighbour informing another of a particular neighbour's malfeasance or at the very least, social transgressions. And people can be a right royal pain in the arse, some of them. Like our neighbour Melanie, giving us an earful about the family next door to her. Sending their 6-year-old little boy over to play with her 8-year-old, and then just taking off. No word to her, or their child who, on returning home, found no one in residence. It took hours before Melanie was able to return the child, when his parents finally returned.
This happened more than once, and when the mother was finally confronted, no word of apology, although her actions held her neighbours captive to the necessity of remaining at home, rather than feeling free to run off themselves, going about their own business. The confrontation was charged with arrogant neglect on the one side, affronted sensibilities on the other as Melanie asked the recalcitrant mother what she was supposed to do with the child, waiting hour after hour - call the Child Welfare Society? Neither now speak to one another.
This is the same caring mother who dotes on her two little children, who loves to talk about her artistic temperament, her bright kids, her sadness at leaving her native country behind, but managing somehow to put up with the Philistines living here. That same lovely woman who attempted to confer the honour of permitting my husband to design and construct a stained glass window for her house, in emulation of ours. He wisely turned down the opportunity and encouraged her to develop her own latent talent at stained-glass design.
This proud and loving mother whose solicitousness of her children's future successful integration into the colour mosaic of Canada's reality prompts her to teach them to value or devalue their playmates on the basis of skin. This, from a Cuban ancestry that has graced her and her children with a decidedly lovely dusky hue. She, who exhibits strenuous non-comprehension of the civil niceties of communal charity; fitting right in with the values of her elderly, tight-lipped husband of dour Scottish close-fistedness...a union made in the heaven of paramount self-interest.
So, c'mon, let's face it, people can be pretty irritating, maddeningly so, at times. There's the story in today's paper about the Vancouver bus driver with 28 years of experience, volunteering for a transit route everyone hated, having his tolerance for human nature stretched to the limits and just incidentally captured on film by a local TV camera crew, then posted on YouTube. The bus driver is shown yelling and swearing at a man he accused of boarding his bus without paying, then spraying him with spit when apprehended.
The driver left his bus, charged after the man attempting to board another bus, swearing all the while, and finally getting his chance to spit back at the panhandler. Then realizing he was surrounded by flabbergasted pedestrians, and returning to his own bus uttered: "Anybody else want to f...ing spit on a bus driver?" He's now on 'paid leave', scheduled to meet with management and receiving private counselling.
And how about the Toronto high school class project on, of all things, the growing use of surveillance cameras by police? With their own video camera they just happened to witness an assault by a car driver on a bicycle rider. The driver of the car was furious because the cyclist stopped at a light, preventing the motorist from continuing into the intersection. The students filmed the driver approaching the cyclist, kicking his back tire, then punching the cyclist repeatedly, before fleeing the scene.
Turns out a 21-year veteran constable at 52 Division of the Toronto Police was the car driver. A spokesperson for the Toronto police was quoted as saying "Everybody knows that you are there to serve and protect and [that] you are an example as a police officer. I hope people will [still] think that we are an example." Um, yes, of course. Example? Of what exactly, though? That people have their bad days and events conspire to draw them to the edge of their patience before striking out at others? Yep, yep.
Things do go beyond that, though, don't they? No one is immune to the kind of attention they surely don't crave, but invite anyway by their idiotic, non-thinking behaviour. Think of celebrities, for example, dangling their infants over balconies, over crocodiles, and the ensuing outcry. Think of celebrities, for example, driving off with babies in their laps, unsecured; other instances of juggling handbag, hot coffee, and baby, whoops, there goes the baby.
How about high school kids shooting their teachers' explosive lapse in self control for the delectation of YouTube? And posties, caught in the act of boot-lifting the yappy little dog that always makes his life a misery. All right, too mundane? How about a Bush/Blair conversation picked up by nearby mikes, with the Most Powerful Man on Earth quipping "they can't do that kind of shit"; the arbiter of civil discourse.
Incautious, entitled municipal workers whom a bemused, then outraged taxpayer observes filling in a single pothole; three men engaged in 15-minutes' work taking 3 languid hours in the doing. Explicable when two breaks for coffee and doughnuts and a side order of a trip to the local bank were included. Observing taxpayer calls City Hall, an auditor is brought in, and it's verified; not only that but there's more where that came from. Ouch.
Want to talk about entitled? how about haughty press barons to the manor borne, scooping up non-compete fees rich enough to fund the purchase of a small kingdom all their own. Ahh, how about a security camera in Hollinger Inc. headquarters in Toronto capturing in its beady eye Conrad Black removing boxes of files. Life is so unfair; a court ordered he return the boxes and all they contain; now they're being used as evidence in his too-tedious trial. In his gleeful musings on the accumulation of vast wealth through allegedly underhanded means he cautions "care should be taken not to allow this to degenerate into decadence". Isn't that his sin, after all?
Gotta watch out how your outrage-of-the-moment toward your children translates when you get carried away from exercising better judgement. When your vituperatively-rising voice and unflattering characterization of your very own dearly beloved child comes to public attention through a deliberate public airing for the delectation of former fans, it can carry away your reputation, impact your livelihood, make you very humble.
Raises peoples' hackles, don't you know. Public censure becomes deafeningly righteous. Causing embarrassed, even obsequious defenses to crumble. Oh, the pain of it.
Labels: Human Fallibility, Realities, Troublespots
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, May 10, 2007
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