There ought to be a law, maybe even a universal one, that punishes those who f--- with my sh-- or take it upon themselves to f--- with public sh--.

This law would not necessarily act as a deterrent, but the punishments could afford the offender an opportunity to appreciate the hard work of others, gain insight into their socially unacceptable behaviour (not in terms of conformation, but rather self-discipline and discretion), which would ultimately be a benefit to society at large.

Some of my friends describe me as uptight and anal-rententive, but I don’t like people screwing with something that I’ve taken a lot of care building or organizing. For instance, I restored a 1930s Peterborough cedar-canvas canoe last winter and I’m the only one allowed to take it for a paddle. I put hundreds of hours into the restoration, even searching out where to purchase reproduction decals, which are historically accurate. Maybe it’s a bit selfish, but my sister sure as hell has been warned from even making eye contact with my forest-green vessel.  

Now that may seem utterly irrational at best – and it is – but simply put, I don’t want people f---ing with my sh--. A more impersonal example would be rules governing the summer camp I had the great fortune of attending. If you broke something, which wasn’t directly yours – meaning a public good – you received camp enhancement. Although people always enjoyed doing it, you and your cabin mates were prohibited from scrawling your names in Sharpie marker across your bunk. If you did so and were caught – you almost always were as your name plainly identified who you were – you’d have to sand off your name, which would take hours as the marker always bled deeper into the wood grain than you could have predicted. Chances are you didn’t do that again.  

Now at least when you’re 10 years old it is somewhat understandable that you don’t quite yet appreciate the time and effort that went into building that cabin. When people my age – the 25 to 30 year olds – engage in activities which damage or potentially could damage property, it gets me a bit ticked off.

Recently in town, there was a bit of a kerfuffle regarding the use of public property. Public property obviously does not belong to an individual, it belongs to the community as a whole. People can pretty much use their own private property for whatever ends they desire, the same cannot be said for public space. Taking the point of view that “I pay taxes, I can do whatever I want” to public property, is absurd, especially for people in my age demographic.  

It has been brought to my attention that restricting the use of public property somehow infringes upon our democratic rights. I could think of almost nothing as utterly ridiculous as this sentiment. Centennial Park is far from Tiananmen Square and denying people the ‘right’ to let’s say pitch tents, have parties, skateboard and dog walk in the park really has absolutely nothing to do with rights and everything to do with personal responsibility.  

If Jasperites seriously believe that individual freedom and democracy are so fundamentally eroding that we must take to the park fences to demonstrate our resolve, I’d submit that not only are you embarrassingly naive, but you really have no idea how many people – even in glorious Canada – live day-to-day. I think that clean drinking water and proper health care for the residents of Fort Chipewyan are far more deserving causes for your zealous defence of democratic rights than are the rights to jib on a fence or climb the backstop at the baseball diamond.

The self-righteous, self-absorbed, overwrought belief in the inalienable right to-do-what-you-please is melodramatic at best and farcical at worst. If you think that John A. MacDonald, Wilfrid Laurier, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa and Aung San Suu Kyi fought for our right to screw around, your beliefs are so stunningly superficial, I find it hard to even contemplate the possibility that you could care about anybody but yourself.  

If you want to show that you care about others, our democracy and the functioning of democracy more generally, maybe look beyond Jasper, look to history, because you’ll assuredly find that you’re no Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, June Callwood, Nellie McClung or Stephen Lewis, nor, by the way, do you embody any of their exemplary traits. 

As a side note, I’m sure these people, if some of them were still alive, would acknowledge that there are limits to freedom, necessary limits to protect the freedom of all as opposed to the freedom of one. For instance, free speech – a principle and right I obviously strongly believe in – is not absolute. That’s why we have hate speech laws and libel laws. To think free speech or any other ‘right’ for that matter is always absolute requires the intellectualism of an infant, rather than that of a young adult.  

On a final note – and I don’t want any of this to come off as sanctimonious because I am far from perfect – people my age seem to always bemoan the fact, as we see it, that nobody listens to us, adults don’t care what we have to say. Can you really blame them? Go out and find a career, not a job, pull up your pants, stop complaining about how things are unfair (life’s not fair by the way), realize that the default ‘it’s my right’ position doesn’t negate personal responsibility and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be entitled to the respect you’re deserving of and even more importantly, by not f---ing with people’s sh--, you’ll stop giving the hard-working members of your age group a bad rap.