Growing Up Canadian

Growing Up Canadian
By Dean Roberts

Growing up Canadian is a rare thing these days. What I mean by that is growing up as a person who is the embodiment of all those things we cherish and would call “Canadian”.

A few years’ back I was in a sweat lodge with guest-elder, Michael Thrasher, and he was angry with us. Really angry. He challenged us to heal, to grow, to better ourselves and then get back out there (into the world) and BE PARENTS to the next generation who is growing up empty out there. He taught that we had a responsibility to get outside and LOVE our children. If the current cycle wasn’t stopped, and stopped right now – by this generation – then there may not even be a next generation to be concerned about.

I read a disturbing article in the Province newspaper. A 29-year-old man was on his way to work at a construction site when he began experiencing a diabetic seizure. He got off the Skytrain and collapsed on the station floor. As he slipped into a coma, the rest of the people around him just stepped over him, stepped around him, ignored him. He was a clean cut, clean looking fellow dying there on the ground. It was almost an hour of morning rush hour traffic before someone finally called for help. His girlfriend wrote an emotionally scathing letter that summed it up quite well.

“Almost everyone owns a cell phone. Why did none of you call the police or an ambulance? Are we so disconnected from each other and so concerned about our own agendas that we cannot stop for two minutes and help a fellow human being?”

The Province followed up the next day with an Editorial that ended on this question.

“In creating a modern, progressive society, have we lost our most important quality – our humanity?”

The following week saw our news blitzed with three days of “Top Story” coverage of a whale beached in the sound and the public’s efforts to rescue it. I commend those who helped the whale but have to shake my head at the priorities of our populace. Michelle Joyal-Blumenfeld mirrored my thoughts in her letter to the Province.

“I find it appalling we make such a big deal about a beached whale yet we step over a 29 year old man suffering from a diabetic seizure after stumbling off a crowded Skytrain.”

Is it that we so consumed by what is going on in our own lives that we don’t want to see the world around us? We even feel assaulted if someone pushes his or her “life” into ours. Walking foreword with the blinders on full. Well that’s not working!