theMediaman.com

I’m falling further behind on documenting my New York trip, but something happened last week I can’t stop thinking about.

Simone and I went to see Harry Potter on Thursday night. Rushing from the Lick’s on Eglinton to the theatre, we stopped in the 7-eleven so I could pick up some snacks. I miss the contraband now that they don’t prevent you from bringing in your own food. Still, it wasn’t the adrenaline rush I was going for in this case, it was the sugar rush.

When I walked in, there was some commotion at the counter. I walked by it and picked out my chocolate bars (two for $2!).

Walking up to the counter, I watched as some bald guy was trying to buy smokes. Apparently, his ID was in French. It certainly looked legitimate, but I didn’t see specifically what kind of ID it was.  What I heard next from the older lady speaking to the uncomfortable teenager with her behind the counter was, “if you can’t read it in English, you don’t have to accept it as ID”.

Now, I’m not entirely sure that’s correct. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not. A Canadian ID is a Canadian ID as long as it’s written in one of the two official languages.  If it was a Quebec ID card like a Health Card (again, I didn’t get a good look at it but it was orangish in colour), I’m certain it would be written exclusively en français.

The guy trying to buy smokes was clearly upset, and probably at least a bit offended.  I’m not going to play sympathy with his role, because that won’t illustrate my point (which I’m getting to eventually). However, I won’t say that he’s wrong either.

Showing the older woman that I just wanted to buy two chocolate bars, I got her over to the second cashier to ring it through. As she was doing so, she said back to the other fella, “let me tell you a story”. I was focused too much on not involving myself to remember the details, but the story did illustrate a circumstance where she visited Quebec and was refused service because she only spoke English.

You know when you leave a situation and you think of the perfect thing to say later? (”Yeah, well the JERK store called…”) This wasn’t it. I thought of the perfect thing to say right there and then.

It wasn’t harsh. It didn’t take sides. It was more like a comment where they wouldn’t be sure if I was agreeing with them or insulting them. The issue, as I will discuss later, is understanding WHAT I was insulting.

“No,” I would say. “If it’s in French, then you have to accept it. We are in a bilingual country,” as the Francophone had pointed out earlier. “However, Quebec doesn’t play by the rules the rest of the country does, so only French ID is accepted in Quebec.”

Part of me want’s to sympathize with that fella, since he’s the victim of prejudice in this circumstance.

Another part of me, the one that grew up with Quebec getting special treatment from the Canadian government - at the financial and social expense of the other nine provinces and three territories - wanted to simply give into the bigotry and say, “now you know how the rest of us feel”.

Since moving from the white-bred, redneck city of Barrie to the functionally multicultural Megacity of Toronto, I’ve been filtering more and more of what I say before I say it. I figure that’s a big reason for my occasional bouts of stuttering. It’s not that I’m thinking negative thoughts or racial slurs, it’s just that so much more of what I say could be blown out of proportion. A misheard comment could result with foot-in-mouth disease when I was in Barrie. Here, a misunderstood comment could be a racial slur.

I admit that if I had said that comment out loud, there would have been some venom in my words. My hesitation wasn’t the fact that the guy didn’t look like the kind of person I wanted to risk upsetting, although that was a contributing factor. The idea that I’m an English, white, heterosexual, Christian male aged 18-35 means that any comment I have regarding any minority race, religion, race, sexual preference or gender equality issues can very easily be interpreted as 1) sympathetic to the cause, 2) patronizing, or 3) prejudiced. My words always have to be chosen carefully so that I don’t get misunderstood as 2 or 3.

To sum it up, I wanted to insult the Quebec Government’s totalitarianism and the Canadian Government’s protection of such Nazi-esque laws…

…but I’m sure it would have come across as a “dumb frogs” comment.

Actually, maybe to some extent it was. Sorry, I’m not perfect. I’m just some Redneck*.

^{Disclaimer: Using the term “Redneck” is okay because I’m White.}