Water
A little adversity and people fall to pieces. Recent heavy rainfall resulted in a 12 day long boil water advisory in my fair city. I’d like to think most of us took it well. I personally stopped washing dishes (as the full advisory and not the media instructed) and took to ordering food or eating things that didn’t require water to prepare. I did fly in the face of danger and brushed my teeth with tap water.
I’m a rebel.
Actually I’m just too cheap to justify brushing my teeth with bottled water when there were no cases of contaminated water reported. It was a precautionary advisory after all.
One thing that really annoyed me during all this was one interview I saw on TV with this woman wearing designer clothes getting into her luxury car. “This is just like living in the third world” she said.
Yes I’m sure most people in Africa have to put on their DKNY coat before getting into their Escalade to drive 4 blocks to buy water. You’re exactly right.
IT’S A MINOR INCONVENIENCE! The sky is NOT falling, you’re not in need of world aid, and don’t expect Bono to be singing a song with other celebrities to raise money to pay for your gas! What would she say if she had a hangnail, “now I know what cancer patients go through“? God! I’m ashamed to live in the same city as these babies.
Now not all stories are that bad. Yes a fight broke out at a Costco but if you dig deeper it’s not quite what you think. Apparently someone was hording 2 shopping carts full of bottled water, cleaning out the last of the supply just as an elderly man was trying to get a bottle. The fight occurred when a younger man asked the hoarder if he could spare one bottle for the old man to buy.
Yes it was stupid but rather than 2 jerks fighting for no reason it was someone sticking for someone who couldn’t do so themselves. Instead of two bad guys it has a hero, a victim, and one bad guy who lost in the end.
Then came the logging debate. I admit my first thought was ‘why are we discussing this?’ but then I remembered something from Grade 8 Science: the healthy roots of trees prevent erosion. The environmental lobby came out to say logging in the watershed during the 90s made the situation worse than it would have been otherwise. The GVRD came back to say logging wasn’t a cause of the advisory.
This is a case where a careful manipulation of language allowed them to defend a position that should be indefensible. The media treated these two statements with equal weight but had they thought about it while both statements are true, the GVRD just pulled a fast one.
Well OF COURSE logging wasn’t the cause of the higher turbidity, the rainwater was the cause. And yes there hasn’t been watershed logging for a decade BUT had the watershed not been logged in the 90s the soil that slid into the reservoir would have been better held in place by the larger roots. Logging wasn’t a cause but NOT logging could have prevented it or at least limited the damage.
People aren’t used to playing the long game and thinking in those terms, that’s how we got here in the first place. And since the societal watchdogs known as the media deal in 5 second sound bytes people like Bush can get away with answering tough, pointed questions with barely relevant statements of basic fact.
Like “I believe when you kill someone, you’re a criminal” doesn’t really answer the question of civil war in Iraq (nevermind the inherent hypocrisy of saying that but supporting the death penalty, even The Daily Show dropped the ball on pointing that out). “Every time I meet with him I get to know him better” doesn’t say whether negotiations have made any progress or not. When will people wake up and begin to question these things? Would the police accept a murder suspect answering “did you shoot her?” with “bullets are peices of metal that come out of guns“?
And by people I mean Americans. Us Canadians need to work on not falling apart and crying “woe is me” when the slightest inconvenience is tossed in our path. Yes, the water’s a little muddy but you’re not exactly a starving refugee without access to medical care as you run from warlords attempting genocide.
Actually, a lot of that sentence could describe some American war deserters or conscious objectors or whatever they’re called. Weird.
