Recently, a rather aggrieved and agitated gentleman wrote to say I was the most despicable man in Calgary.
This was in response to my somewhat skeptical viewpoint regarding the growing global belief we’ll all be boiled alive because of climate change, like daft frogs that won’t hop from the heating water. (I prefer thinking of myself as optimistic.)
Anyhow, although I’m far from sainthood — morals have always been a bit of a movable feast — it was reassuring that if indeed I’m the worst of Calgary’s citizenry, then this must be a darn good place in which to live.
So I’ll reluctantly accept the despicable moniker. Just don’t dare call me middle class.
I thought I’d escaped the dreadful class system when fleeing England and that awful, striving, middle-class woman, Margaret Thatcher: hated by the working class and treated with utter disdain by the upper-class lot, regardless of her accomplishments.
See. The stink still sticks. That whole “putting people in boxes” thing, where chips grow relentlessly on shoulders, aitches are dropped or re-hitched and what your father did for a living becomes key in getting that job or place at college.
Hallelujah for Canada, where such dreadful, self-limiting stuff doesn’t matter. We’ve enough challenges battling racism and sexism without adding class to the divisive mix. Only an idiot would do such a thing.
Oh, hello. It seems the federal Liberals have got themselves a new minister of middle-class prosperity and now won’t stop yakking about this new political food group they’ve discovered.
[…]
See Also:
