Advice for politicians, or aspiring ones
As we count our way down to an election that will happen within the next few months, we will hear all the same old rhetoric some of us have put up with since the days of Joey Smallwood.
As we count our way down to an election that will happen within the next few months, we will hear all the same old rhetoric some of us have put up with since the days of Joey Smallwood.
Here are a few examples:
No.1— I know your problem and you have my sympathy.
No. 2 — I know where you’re coming from.
No. 3 — This will be looked into; we will look at this.
Let’s look at No. 1. Sympathy don’t put furnace oil in the tank. Sympathy don’t put medication in the medicine cabinet. Sympathy don’t put a coat on the back or groceries in the refrigerator.
No. 2: you know where I’m coming from. But you don’t know where I have been, so how the hell could you know where I’m coming from?
I helped my father cut wood with a bucksaw to put food on the table. I teamed a 1,500-pound horse whose main ambition in life was to kill me. I was a river driver and I spent a summer in a trap skiff fishing cod on one of the roughest shorelines in this country before I was 16 years old, and that don’t give me anything to brag about. There are thousands of men my age who have done the same and a lot more.
Now, where are we going? To some extended-care home owned by a government member and subsidized by government, where we will give up our pension cheque and get $150 for personal care, a meal on the table, a bed to lie in and a chair to sit in to slowly turn into a vegetable.
No. 3: I’m going to look at this. Now there’s a statement that many’s a phone call has ended on. “Don’t you worry, me son, this problem will be looked at. You haven’t got a worry. If elected, my party will be looking at this.”
Well let me tell you this, Mr. Politician or Mr. John Doe with aspirations to be a politician — seniors have been looking at their problems for 10, 20, 30 years. We don’t want you to look at our problems, we want someone who will fix them.
So don’t stand in front of me when you want my vote and offer me your sympathy. Don’t tell me you know where I’m coming from. Don’t tell me you’re going to look at the problems we have. We are not stupid or deaf. We have heard these things many times. Save them for the recruits. Help us stay out of the vegetable chair.
I will end on this note, and it may seem a little corny, but what the hell.
John F. Kennedy used this phrase in his inaugural speech: ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.
Let’s rejig that a bit as seniors and ask not what we can do for this province but what this province can do for us, because we have done for this province and we can’t do any more. We have paid taxes, some for decades. We have given the best years of our lives to help this place grow.
Now perhaps we will have to go back to work again and stand as one until we find the person who understands where we are coming from; who will look at the problems we present and fix them.
In other words, cut the crap and make an honest effort.