"Elbowgate"?

Now that we have had time to digest the circumstance, I'd like to talk about the event that happened in the Canadian House of Commons recently: Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, à la WWE, delivered a “flying elbow” to a female Member of Parliament (and yes, exaggeration intended).  Actually, the title of Michael Enright’s article, “What the prime minister did was supremely dumb, but so is the reaction,” adroitly summarizes the whole affair.

As Mr. Enright states: “You can usually weigh the serious or silly elements of a political scandal by the time it takes the media to apply the word “gate” to it.  The shorter the length of time, the sillier the scandal.”  So in this case, it took but a few hours for the term “Elbowgate” to get thrown around.  The Prime Minister did not drop or kill someone with a single blow in a supreme act of violence and in total disregard of the pain inflicted.  In actuality, Trudeau accidently bumped the lady, but she was so traumatized that she had to remove herself from the Chamber, thereby leaving her constituents “high and dry” when she missed a vote on an important matter; that’s to say she believed the bump was bigger and more important than fulfilling her responsibilities to the people regarding the subject of the vote.  Some representative!

This is but another example of how low our society has gotten, when so many people purposefully “make mountains out of mole hills.”  Why?  To advance their own agendas, while trying to present themselves, or “look,” better than all others who might not be sympathetic to their belief or cause.  Everyone else is a three-headed monster that is out for everyone else’s blood.

So, what is behind this?  In my view it is quite simple: The “me-me-me” mentality that is so prevalent in our society creates people who are self-centered, self-absorbed, and egotistical, believing that the entire world revolves around them.  This has been manufactured by the conglomerates who continue to sell the idea that the world is theirs for the taking.  They do this by brainwashing citizens into believing that they must get everything that their hearts desire yesterday because they are entitled to it rather than required to work for it.  It’s a perpetual mindset of total disregard for others and what is real.

I feel as if I am headed toward another tirade!  If you too are starting to do the “slow burn,” I think it might be time to resurrect a term that was popular after Trudeau’s father made his own faux-pas.  Therefore, I emphatically say, “fuddle duddle!”  If that is insufficient to appease anyone’s anger, then we might as well blame it on fast foods.

- B. J. T. Pepin