I was heading home from the city, the other night. I dashed up the escalator from the TTC subway, and spotted the coach I had to catch sitting outside the bus station. I sprinted across the platform and landed just inside the front doors of the bus. The bus driver wasn’t pulling out right away, so I caught my breath and moved down the centre aisle of the bus to make room for others.
“Don’t crowd me, man,” said a young commuter next to me. “Keep the f___ away!” And I stepped back and apologized.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” said another man to the guy spouting the profanity.
And on it went. More expletives. More intensity. Back and forth between the two young strangers on the bus. So, before the bus left the station, I asked the driver to open the door and, as he did, I thanked him and said, “I think I’ll catch the next bus.”
What a sad way to begin the New Year, the new decade, I thought. It bothered me all the way home, that night, that two strangers could get so hyper about space on a bus, that they’d threaten each other. They might even have come to blows. I don’t know. I just figured that I ought to get away from all that ego, all that hostility, all that emphasis on self. And the more I thought about it, the more I sensed that the bus moment was a reflection of the decade, maybe even a sign of the times.
The 2010s were truly a decade of attitude!
By coincidence, I happened to be sitting in front of the TV a lot over the holidays. Why? Well, I’ve always considered the world junior hockey championship an annual guilty pleasure. I love watching the youngsters play our (my) favourite winter game. And, consequently, I watched a lot of expensive TV ads. Several caught my eye.
One featured a brand name exercise machine with a rapid succession of close-ups showing millennial adults sweating, grinding, swinging and puffing their way through strenuous exercise – each one grimacing and grunting like Sylvester Stallone training for the world boxing title in Rocky.
Similarly, in its “Are CPAs boring?” TV campaign during the games, ads about the new image of chartered professional accountants showed a kaleidoscope of mostly young faces, all focused and all with that Hunger Games death stare. OK, I get it. Business accounting is serious. But is a death-staring accountant the only route to a successful bottom line?
All this tough pride stuff has bothered me for years. The first years of the millennium, after all, have been all about the “selfie,” what Michele Moses of The New Yorker magazine called “that ubiquitous symbol of millennial navel gazing (that suggests) millennials are self-absorbed, narcissistic and entitled.”
Or, as author Will Storr chided in his book Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us, “this crazy idea … that in order to free ourselves of all these social problems – everything from drug abuse to domestic violence to teenage pregnancy, we just had to believe we were special and amazing.”
Whether narcissism or pushback against hovering parents, there’s no denying that a generation of people repeatedly turning the cellphone on itself does reflect an attitude. And not always a positive one. Selfie proliferation has, for example, just as often become the weapon of choice for cyberbullies.
But why only blame millennials for flipping the viewfinder? We’ve got a baby-boomer president of the most powerful nation on earth flaunting middle-of-the-night rants on social media as his version of the truth. Indeed, this week, we witnessed Donald Trump judging the activities of Qassem Suleimani, Iran’s army commander, and apparently unilaterally (because he couldn’t be bothered consulting Congress) arranged for the general’s assassination. Trump’s was the ultimate in rogue selfie attitude.
Attitude, however, is not always negative. And in this, my first column of 2020, I’ve saved some space to compliment the young men whom I watched on TV, the past two weeks, playing some of the best hockey this country has ever produced and exhibiting some of the best attitude this country has ever known.
Despite a humiliating 6-0 defeat at the hands of Team Russia in the opening round of the world junior hockey championship in the Czech Republic, no matter the serious injuries that would have driven lesser humans whining to the sidelines, and then falling behind 3-1 as the third period of the gold-medal game began, these young men persevered (much the way the Canadian women did at the Sochi Olympics in 2014) and fought through adversity to win Canada’s 18th world junior gold medal.
And, I might add, they took off their caps and arm-in-arm sang O Canada loudly and proudly.
That kind of attitude, I think, we could use more of this new decade.