I'm Done

How is everyone keeping their anger in check these days?

Let me tell you what I'm done with:

• Winter
• The Pandemic
• The "Freedom" convoy
• The vaccination war
• The Supply Chain
• "Experts" commenting on anything and everything
• Businesses being closed on Mondays because they can't find staff
• My outdoor cat beating up the other cats because it's too cold outside
• Social media
• Crappy internet
• Paying bills
• Cleaning my house
• Cooking
• All of the people in the world

That's a start. It's getting harder and harder to find my rose coloured glasses... I'm afraid my tunnel vision is focused solely on cynicism. It's a funk- a phase. It'll pass, right? I want to throw things - break things. I want to scream. I wish I didn't have feelings - can I just go to sleep and someone wake me when it's over? With my luck, that'll be in a hundred years in a full on, apocalyptic, uprising of the machines - Terminator style - end of the world. Only the strong will survive. Those of us dependant on medication and the elderly will be the pawns - the sacrificial lambs. We can be your human shield while you dig you holes and shelters and gather your forces..

That's a bit bleak, huh?

Remember when we were kids? Really young, unaware of ... well, anything? Wouldn't that be bliss? I've read a few studies that say small children living through this pandemic will never have a normal life. They won't be able to learn how to socialize, proper public etiquette (as if that's even a thing anymore), learn, work... you get it. I call Bullshit. I think these kids are the ones that will fix the world because they were brought into it when there was nowhere left to go but UP.

When I was six years old, I made a friend at school. I'm going to call her Audrey, simply because I don't know anyone with that name and she'll stay anonymous.

Audrey was the smartest kid in my first grade class. It was like all she did was study and learn - she hardly ever played. She had two sisters - one a year older and one a year younger than her. I thought that must have been perfect... not one, but two sisters? And almost the same age? That would be like being born with two best friends!

We would have lunch together. I'd eat a peanut butter sandwich and a mini-sip (Remember those? Like little pillows full of Kool-Aid that you stabbed with a straw?) I usually packed my own. Her lunch was cooked - by her mother! "Pan Toast" she called it. It seemed exotic to my young self - simply because it was different. Actually, it was a piece of Wonderbread, one side buttered (or margarined or larded) and cooked in a frypan. Like a grilled cheese without the cheese. Or the 2nd piece of bread. Sometimes she had a sugar packet to spread on it. I went home and told my mother that I wanted "pan toast".

"You know, honey," Mom said to me. "Audrey has that for lunch because her family is poor." What? I didn't believe that for a second.

I had a play date at her house. It was small, there was plastic on the windows, but my house also had plastic on the windows and we weren't poor (were we?) so I didn't think anything of it. She wanted to play outside, but I wanted to go to her room. Other people's things are fascinating to children.

She shared her room with her two sisters. And it was not a big room. I thought that was... AWESOME. It must have been a sleepover party every single night! Share toys, share clothes, tell secrets. Boy, was Audrey a lucky kid, I thought.

She was skinny - she could wrap her hands around her thigh (in jeans) and touch both sides. She said it was how movie stars and models took their measurements. If you couldn't touch, you were fat. I was fat. Everyone was fat. Except Audrey. Smart, pretty, and practically a supermodel - that's what I saw.

OMG, she was poor! One piece of bread and a thermos full of water for lunch? No wonder we could see her collar bone through her sweater. Two sibling jerks in her space 24/7? I should have played outside with her.

My point here is... Kids will see what they want to see. They don't automatically look for the worst in everyone - or even the differences.

I'm 51 years old and grew up in a small East Coast Government town. When I was a kid, everyone was 6th, 7th, 12th generation Canadian - from England, Scotland.. you get it. We all looked the same. Almost..

I had a fascination with curly hair. My hair was always the consistency of wet spaghetti... limp and straight. Mom would curl it and within ten minutes, it was straight again. I was getting perms (Toni's) from the time I was five years old and even they didn't last long. I made a little friend in kindergarten who had curly hair - and that's probably why I chose him to be my buddy. I told mom that I wanted to invite over the Boy With the Curly Hair... so she called up his mother and made a play date. She was probably expecting a tiny version of the Greatest American Hero. Nope.

My little friend was black. I had never seen a black person before - even on TV (we only had 1 channel). But guess what? I didn't see one when I played with him, either. All I saw was the curly hair that I so desperately wanted.

We could learn so much about humanity from children.

I find it easy to look at what's left of this so-called Freedom Convoy and automatically despise them en masse. I see a group of haters that are no different than the Americans that stormed the white house. They aren't individuals with personal goals to me anymore. They are one entity, Hell-bent on making Canada look like a bunch of rogue rednecks to the rest of the world. They are a force field preventing goods and services from entering or leaving the country. They are thieves, taking away our food, jobs and sanity.

But are they? No - they are not one person of one mind. Sure, some of them are blind followers who have no clue what they are fighting for or why - but those are the ones we should be thinking of - the ones that we need to push to think and opine for themselves.

We should ask a bunch of six year old's what they see when they look at the convoy. I bet they can pick out the individuals with curly hair.