Less Pop, More Punk...And I Don't Mean Music

I was sitting in my room this afternoon, having just arrived home from our latest ski trip (this time to Eastern Canadian Championships, in Ottawa) when one of my best friends signed in on msn. After the usual:
“hey”
“hey…whats up”
“oh, not too much…just got back from Ottawa”…..
she starts telling me about a facebook group one of the kids in her rez started a little while back. It’s called “I Hate Canada”. Apparently this guy, who is from a small rural community in Lebanon, decided to start a group about ‘how much Canada blows’.

Aside from the obvious questions about what he has against us Canuks, or why someone feels the need to vent his whiny, pre-teen worthy views on cold weather in such an offensive and very un-comical way, this really got me thinking. How is it possible for someone from such a war-torn and impoverished area of the world to suddenly be totally concerned with the mud that splatters on his newly purchased American Eagle pants? Doesn’t it seem a little odd that, coming directly from a situation that us lowly Canadians only hear about through that mouthpiece of Whitehouse spin-doctors, the corporate media, this guy’s primary concern is that he “always has to go outside in the cold for a smoke”? In a country where (presumably) his relatives still live, where suicide bombings and U.S. backed Israeli air strikes kill innocent people on a monthly if not weekly basis, there are uncountable real problems that go totally unnoticed by almost the entire western world. This one guy decides that instead of trying to raise awareness of the plight of his fellow countrymen and women, he is going to put time and energy into creating a web page for people to fume uselessly about the Canadian climate, our drinking laws, other people’s privacy and its inconveniences and his now ruined khakis.

Why?

Clearly I don’t know. I also can’t phone this guy and ask him, because my friend would not give me the link to his website. This was actually a very wise move on her part. Instead of risking an escalation which would probably have no effect anyway, she has devised a much more creative solution which I am not at liberty to discuss. The point is, I can’t contact this guy to ask what’s on his mind. What I can do is (after much pondering) try to draw my own conclusions. This is what I’ve come up with. Life is cushy here in Canada. Actually, that’s an understatement. Life is cushy in almost all of the G8 nations. This cushy life that our country affords us gives us a certain perspective, a certain view of the world. What’s the one thing that you dread most about tomorrow? Name one thing you will go to bed tonight hoping doesn’t happen to you tomorrow. What is it? You hope it won’t be cold any more? You hope you car won’t fail to start? Oh, I know! You hope you won’t be late for work/ school tomorrow. That one’s pretty common. Ok, now stop and think for a minute. Did you, even for one second, stop to pray that tomorrow you wouldn’t be killed? Maybe. But, was it a prayer that the lord above won’t send a cruise missile after you? ‘Cause one of those can ruin your whole day. Or that some poor misguided suicide bomber/ freedom fighter won’t send himself to heaven in a cloud of fire, smoke and TNT, and take you along for the ride? No, you didn’t think that. You worried about what are normal, every day things, things like your car starting or being late for work. Thanks to our soft cushy lives, the volume on everything else in the world gets turned down. We don’t worry about bombings, or cruise missiles, or rogue states and war, because we don’t think we need to. I can fully understand where this young Lebanese person is coming from, why he feels like making this website and cranking the volume for people who don’t like the cold. I know its cold. Right now its –32 outside my room. And I love a solid base line, or a face melting guitar riff as much as the next person. In our soft, cushy lives we need the volume cranked every once in a while to wake us up to what’s going on around us.
To use one last cliché, as an illustration for our young, anti- Canadian Climate man: Your being very much like the Nickleback. Your loud, boisterous and some people will listen to you; it may even make you popular. But it’s also just as useless. They write songs about things that don’t matter; you write blogs about things that don’t matter. If you have to rant, at least rant about issues that are important. Think less mass-produced, souless pop band, more politically relevant punk. And please, stop bitching about the cold already!