Rex Murphy: Canada’s two most powerful men, blinded by their entitlement
Rex Murphy #RexMurphy
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Go from Whistler snowboarding to leader of the country; simplest thing in the world. Jump from heading a corporation to being the finance minister of a great country. This is not the world of everyone else.
Everyone else doesn’t hop down to the private island of the Aga Khan. Everyone else doesn’t even know who the Aga Khan is.
Everyone else has never heard of a family vacation at a fulsomely plush resort in Kenya that produced an unpaid bill of $41,000.
Everyone else drops down to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and checks into the Far-From-The –Beach Motel, into the room next to the all-night grinding thunder of an ancient ice-machine ($80 a night and complimentary breakfast).
And $41,000? That’s the retirement fund of a lot of people. The number of people who can get out of a jam by scribbling their name on the bottom of a cheque for $41,000 is extremely scanty. Scarce as hen’s teeth is I believe the obliging measurement.
Real people worry about the end of the month. There are still people in this country who worry about the light bill, the heating bill, the phone bill — the monthly reminders of living close to the margin. They ration their phone calls, seek the bargain items in the supermarket, keep the thermostat low and practice a rigorous household economy.
So when people ask how our prime minister and his finance minister could have been so careless, the answer is simple: they had no idea they were being careless.
That’s what being exempt from the experiences of common life, the life of “everyone else,” leads to.
They were dealing within this special, secure and protected world of the well-off and powerful. And they were dealing with two others near their own class and standing, the celebrity brothers of WE, guests of Oprah, friends to the Clintons, the fraternal pied pipers of ME to WE.
Perhaps the question isn’t how could they have got into this mess? Rather, how could they not have? Entitlement is its own form of blindness.
National Post