You don’t often find the words “fun”, “humorous”, “light-hearted”, and “B.C. government” in the same sentence, but there is one place where they intersect and overlap, and that’s on the BC Transportation and Infrastructure Facebook page. It’s one of my favourite pages on the social media site, containing as it does occasional features such as “Wildlife Wednesday” (fun things pertaining to wild critters along B.C.’s highways) and “Throwback Thursday” (a trip back in time to see roads, bridges, tunnels, and more as they used to be in days gone by).
There are also interesting (to me, anyway) explainers about things like rip rap, all written in a fun and engaging way (the title of this particular piece was “Rip Rap is Actually Hard Rock”, and after explaining why rip rap is such a “rock star” the piece concludes “They are rocks that help stop the roll of erosion”). Of course, it’s not all fun and games: the site contains a lot of news about current projects, major highway events, and things to beware of.
Back on May 31, however, there was a lovely post that began “Commercial Vehicle Safety and Enforcement officer stops fluffy road user.” The post explained that while driving along Highway 16 in the Fort George District, a CVSE officer found a baby bird walking along the yellow line. They stopped and managed to get the little one across the road and back with its family, because, the post noted, “CVSE is out to protect all road users.”
The cuteness factor was increased 100-fold by the accompanying picture, showing the fluffy yellow “road user” in question. The post, hardly surprisingly, drew a number of appreciative comments, but one stood out. Someone named Jerry Baker posted “Waste of taxpayers [sic] money. Example) how about the truckers smashing the overpass’s [sic] in the last couple of years? Where were they?”
Presumably by “they”, Baker meant CVSE officers, the implication being that if they weren’t mucking about rescuing baby birds hundreds of miles away from Highway 1 in the Fraser Valley, they would have been able to prevent the rash of too-tall or improperly loaded commercial vehicles that have indeed been smashing into overpasses there on a depressingly regular basis. Now, it’s something of a leap to connect the two things, and I’ll leave others to pick apart the logic (or lack thereof) in trying to do so. What struck me most about Baker’s comment was how exceedingly petty, mean-spirited, and just plain ugly it was.
And here we get to the crux of the matter. Why oh why do some people seem to go out of their way to parade their pettiness, their nastiness, even, for all the world to see? It would have been easy enough for Baker to skim the original post, shake his head with a “tsk-tsk” of disapproval for such frivolity, and pass along without comment, but he felt compelled to rain on the parade, as it were, deposit a little brown piece of ugly in a place where others were expressing delight.
Of course, this is not a new phenomenon. In an issue of the Journal from June 1923, there was a short note reading “Look about you. Think of something beside your neighbour’s faults, then life may mean more to you.” I have no idea what prompted someone to write that, a century ago, but I strongly suspect that it was someone like Jerry Baker, who sees the world through whatever the opposite of rose-tinted glasses is. Earlier still, in 1837, Charles Dickens noted in The Pickwick Papers that “Some men, like bats or owls, have better eyes for the darkness than for the light.”
We’re all grown-ups, and we know that life isn’t a bed of roses, but there seems little to no point in going out of the way to make it even less pleasant. One or two people pointed this out to Baker, but my favourite reply to him was the shortest: “Dude, you need a hug.” Now that’s a sentiment I can get behind, and support, wholeheartedly. The world needs more hugs.
editorial@accjournal.ca
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