Canadians, who like to think of themselves as a largely amiable people devoted to humility, apologies, and occasional hockey riots, now and then get a bit smug because they're not Americans. We have universal health care. We tend to believe that dinosaurs existed and were not the pets of prehistoric man, that children can be taught evolution in school without becoming god-hating, socialist homosexuals, and that god-hating, socialist homosexuals are often quite decent and deserve to be treated just like everyone else.
That's a self-serving generalization, obviously, and it springs from the complacency that can flourish up north when the north looks down below the forty-ninth parallel and sees everyone pepper-spaying everyone else in the face.
But then you hear about something like Attawapiskat and you're forced to acknowledge that Canadians can suck as much as anyone else.
Attawapiskat is a remote native community in northern Ontario where people are living in uninsulated shacks (or lucky enough to live in poorly-insulated houses crawling with black mould), enjoying a range of exciting experiences made available to them by a lack of indoor sanitation and potable water, and where children learn not to take education for granted because they have no actual school due to the fact that their old school building was condemned.
Of course, the most important lesson one should learn from this story, according to the people who spend their time being unfettered by the demands of basic human decency and then commenting on websites, is that the natives in charge of such communities are rich and corrupt, and the natives not in charge of such communities are drunk and lazy, so, really, the children with those rashes on their faces brought about by unsanitary living conditions had it coming to them and have only themselves to blame.
The federal government draws strength from and then reinforces such opinions by pointing out that it's sent Attawapiskat a whole lot of money - more money, even, then was spent on inexplicable Huntsville gazebos during the G8 summit - and implying that if the people there have squandered the money on trying to make up for a massive housing shortfall and didn't succeed, can't we all rest easy in the knowledge that those big-eyed, rash-faced children had it coming to them and had only themselves to blame?
The feds are absolutely right. I have no sympathy for fat-cats who use tax-payers' money to feather their own fat-cat nests and don't even bother creating a credible paper-trail to convince those same tax-payers they haven't been paying a great deal of misappropriated money for superfluous gazebos.
And is it really reasonable to expect the federal government to start putting time and effort into caring about sick, poor, disadvantaged native children? I mean, there are a lot of them, and not just in Attawapiskat. If the feds took that on, there'd be very little time left over for the construction of gazebos, and I don't want any child of mine growing up in that kind of world.
That's a self-serving generalization, obviously, and it springs from the complacency that can flourish up north when the north looks down below the forty-ninth parallel and sees everyone pepper-spaying everyone else in the face.
But then you hear about something like Attawapiskat and you're forced to acknowledge that Canadians can suck as much as anyone else.
Attawapiskat is a remote native community in northern Ontario where people are living in uninsulated shacks (or lucky enough to live in poorly-insulated houses crawling with black mould), enjoying a range of exciting experiences made available to them by a lack of indoor sanitation and potable water, and where children learn not to take education for granted because they have no actual school due to the fact that their old school building was condemned.
Of course, the most important lesson one should learn from this story, according to the people who spend their time being unfettered by the demands of basic human decency and then commenting on websites, is that the natives in charge of such communities are rich and corrupt, and the natives not in charge of such communities are drunk and lazy, so, really, the children with those rashes on their faces brought about by unsanitary living conditions had it coming to them and have only themselves to blame.
The federal government draws strength from and then reinforces such opinions by pointing out that it's sent Attawapiskat a whole lot of money - more money, even, then was spent on inexplicable Huntsville gazebos during the G8 summit - and implying that if the people there have squandered the money on trying to make up for a massive housing shortfall and didn't succeed, can't we all rest easy in the knowledge that those big-eyed, rash-faced children had it coming to them and had only themselves to blame?
The feds are absolutely right. I have no sympathy for fat-cats who use tax-payers' money to feather their own fat-cat nests and don't even bother creating a credible paper-trail to convince those same tax-payers they haven't been paying a great deal of misappropriated money for superfluous gazebos.
And is it really reasonable to expect the federal government to start putting time and effort into caring about sick, poor, disadvantaged native children? I mean, there are a lot of them, and not just in Attawapiskat. If the feds took that on, there'd be very little time left over for the construction of gazebos, and I don't want any child of mine growing up in that kind of world.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by axident.
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