It's a quarter to six. The arsenic hour. The kids are screaming, a pot is overboiling and the cat just threw up a hairball. Then the phone rings. After a brief introduction, the woman at the other end asks me if I would like to take part in a "marketing survey" for one of the big banks, "to improve the services we offer you".
"How much are they willing to pay me?", I ask, irritated..
"Pardon me, sir?"
"They're paying you to collect this information, aren't they?"
"Why, yes sir. But..."
"Well, if the information is valuable to the banks; why should I give it to them for free?"
I was irritated at being invaded, and I apologize now for toying with the poor woman who was just doing her job. But it begs the question; if large companies are legally allowed to accost me at home asking me to give them something, not to mention the gas marketers who are rude to you at your front door, why is there so much anger and resentment against squeegee kids offering to sell a service on the street? So much so, in fact, that they are the prime target for the Ontario Government's fall session, ahead of health, environmental or educational issues.
Well, the number one reason given is fear. Strange people with weird clothes are approaching us in our cars while we are trapped at a light. Just as, a generation ago, the current aging boomers were feared for their differences -- long hair, weird clothes -- now the "squeegees" are feared for their purple hair and body piercing. Not only are they non-conformist in their dress, they actually want to interact with us. In a way, squeegee kids are a re-incarnation of the stereotypical pencil seller of the depression. Unlike the left-leaning hippies of a generation ago, they have bought into capitalist ideals and are selling a service. Pragmatists, instead of idealists. And we will punish them for it.
But are we really that afraid of young people wandering around with squeegee's in their hands, often quite cheerfully? Usually they point their squeegee at you and move on at the briefest shake of the head. We may mistake our discomfort as fear, but lurking subconsciously is more likely that great human motivator, guilt. While we all want to be doing a bit better than the next guy, we don't like to be reminded just how much better we are doing than some. This is the reason foreign relief agencies put pictures of malnourished children on their advertisements. They know we react to guilt. And invariably our reaction is to get rid of the guilty image. Arguably, the chief reason for the creation of the welfare state half a century ago was to get the poor off of the streets and out of sight, rather than as a pure humanitarian measure. Of course, memories fade. Now we are witnessing the dismantling of the welfare state because we are tired of supporting it and forget the images that it protects us from. Not surprisingly, co-incident with reduced welfare and EI support, higher tuitions and a cap on social housing, we are witnessing the reemergence of visible poverty.
We are in no mood, however, in the middle of tax cut mania, to take a depression-era approach to assuaging our guilt. So we turn to that other great tool for social order, the law. We've used the blunt end of the law before, of course. Before the creation of our social programmes, and the creation of the make-work programmes for the masses of unemployed men riding the rails, there was the March on Ottawa. At the time, socialism was gaining popularity as an answer to the obvious flaws of capitalism. Fearing social disorder, the government used thugs to break-up the march. Now it's not likely that many people really see squeegee kids as a threat to our social order, but the impulse to use co-ercion over more positive approaches to solve perceived problems is not new.
There is, perhaps, a more obvious reason for the attention being given to squeegee kids. We have a province with its health and education systems in shambles. Squeegee kids are a relatively powerless group that are easy targets for the vocal diversion of our interests away from the more serious problems at hand. A scapegoat, if you will. It's easier to get up and promise to crackdown on the scourge of squeegee kids than it is to devise a plan to restore health care while still supplying us with our tax cut and a balanced budget to boot.
Before I am accused of being too negative towards the recently re-elected provincial government, let me raise one final, troubling, possibility. For many of us, the current Ontario government acts as our paid enforcer. We have elected them to do the distasteful things that we don't want to personally own up to. Its easy to roll our eyes and say, "Harris is at it again." But we just re-elected them, and they did not hide their intentions. They act as our convenient thug, doing the things we want done, and taking the rap for it, while we can sit back absolved of our guilt.
In the end, our reaction to the squeegee kid phenomenon tells us a lot about ourselves. It tells us how we react to people who are different. It tells us how we react to guilt. It reminds us that powerless and outcast groups, ethnic or not, can still be exploited to divert attention from other social issues. And it says a lot about our current social philosophy for dealing with the disadvantaged. The next time we feel fear when a squeegee kid comes loping down the medium, maybe we should look into our review mirror and make sure that the person we see looking back at us isn't even more scary.
The End
Richard Deadman is a Java Consultant and writer who lives in Ottawa.