Marc Legare is a philosopher and motorcycle adventurist.
He has travelled extensively, worked and lived in Australia, US, and across Canada.
He has a varied working career including: Firefighter, Lawyer, Navy, Motorcycle Importer, plus others.
He chose to return to southern Saskatchewan because of his family's deep roots here.
As a columnist, Legare's columns will offer food for thought.
The reason so many puny, petty social justice issues make headlines in our society is because we don't have enough genuine big ones. The ever increasing volume and ever diminishing rationality of them is a testament to that. We have had it too good for too long. Our excessive attention given to our out of control, frivolous, so-called social injustice "horrors" is due to our material abundance which has removed us from genuine troubles. We have lost sight of what real problems look like.
Countries that have tangible, real world, life-threatening issues do not entertain our penny-ante melodramas. Here is the meat of it: societies that have vast numbers of citizens dying of starvation do not debate which pronouns are suitable to use. Countries that do not have clean drinking water do not have concerns about who can or should use which bathroom. They would be happy to have a bathroom in the first place.
Yet in our society we hear the constant drum beat of these, and other, disgustingly insignificant concerns. Our attention to such things, by any objective standard, is, or ought to be, an embarrassment to us.
In dozens of countries, hundreds of millions of people do not have clean water to drink or enough food to stay alive. Those people live in abject misery and watch their children die each day. At the same time, our society is having major discussions over whether Mr. Potato Head has a suitably gender neutral name. What kind of light does that shine on us and what does that look like through the eyes of the 690 million people who are malnourished?
When we hear of our next socially troubling issue, let us remember the 27,000 people who will die today from hunger. They are in too much agony to care a tinker's damn about our "seriously important" Mr. Potato Head nightmare. All that occupies them is getting a crust of bread before it’s too late.
The fact that we have more than a crust of bread today, concomitant with a high degree of certainty food will be available tomorrow, is exactly what gives us the ability to be so small; and lord, don't we take full advantage of that opportunity. Our refrigerators, overflowing with foods from around the world allow us to fill our lives with numbingly paltry issues.
For those who are seeking a society of bliss by reforming the proper use of pronouns or washroom entitlements, be reminded that for hundreds of millions of people, their idea of paradise looks different. Their notion of a healthy society would be one in which children do not go to sleep with an ache in their belly and they do not have to live in fear those children will die during the next 24 hours.
While giving endless time, energy, and attention to all the two-bit social injustices that are spewed out each day, we should keep an objective perspective.
Better still, perhaps we ought to first feed everyone enough so that they too have a chance to be as troubled about a mountain of miniscule problems as we are. After all, if we believe in equality, shouldn't everyone be given the opportunity to be as pathetic as us?
Sholom Aleichem said it best, "The rich swell up with pride, the poor from hunger".
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of this publication.
