Are you ready to quit? Sick of the system? Fed up with the mysterious “they” Cree leadership/your boss/the feds in Ottawa/the PQ in Quebec City and all who control your destiny?
Yes? Well friend, you may be suffering from the common disease of the downtrodden—APATHY! Apathy is defined as follows: 1. lack of feeling, emotion or sensation, insensibility; 2. indifference, lack of interest.
How many times these days have you heard someone bitching about the system, any or all of them? Just about every day—right? Compare the number of complaints to the number of suggestions to fix the problem or change the situation. I don’t think you’ll find an even ratio. Most of us run off at the mouth with the slightest provocation. Few of us ever make real concrete, rational suggestions for the betterment of all. We’re apathetic! We’d rather bitch than fight. The common excuse is, “Who’s going to listen to me. I’m just a…” What we forget is those people running, handling or in some way managing the system were at one time “just a…” Maybe some of them remember how it was. We’ll never know unless we try! Try what? Well for starters something different than apathy.
Apathy is a funny condition. Some people just drift into it, others need a little shove. That’s where the people on top do their thing. To give an example, comedians and singers who use their audiences in their acts tend to get more applause than those who come on, do their thing and go. Why? The audience who takes part in the singing or comedy sketches identifies with the performer and responds to this. They go away feeling they’ve taken part in the show and they feel good.
Compare that to our own Cree situation. Those of us on the bottom of the totem pole sometimes get the feeling that we’re in the audience and the stage show is playing to something or someone over our heads. We’re not part of the act. In some cases we don’t even know what the act is! The results are predictable, applause is minimal, as most of us are sitting on our hands.
This type of thing makes us apathetic and we get exasperated. We yell and sometimes swear and then go back to sitting on our hands. This isn’t good enough. All of us have to fight against it. We, the people, and they, the bosses. To bastardize a JFK quote: Ask not what they can do for you, but what you can do for everyone. Do it now for all our sakes.
To this end, I will make this editorial space open to Cree community residents who have something real, concrete and rational to say that does more than just bitch at the system. Give me a call at 1-514-272-3077.
