Please tell the Prime Minister to turn off his Play-Station
by Kate Zimmerman
As our children march back to school for another year’s investment in their future glory, it’s disconcerting to us parents to realize that our old dreams for them have been revised. A report released recently contained the startling news that most adults no longer want their children to grow up to be Prime Minister of Canada.
My parents were obviously ahead of their time. Even 40-odd years ago, they never expressed any such desire for me. Though I grew up in Ottawa, I was neither groomed to head the country, nor encouraged to do so. Nothing would have horrified Mum and Dad more than the idea that some day their freckle-faced chatterbox would be put in charge of anything. The country’s treasury would be especially at risk, given my habit of stealing coins and spiriting them out of the house lodged in the slots of my penny loafers.
I don’t think my parents’ limited ambitions had anything to do with my being a girl, even though in the 1960s and 70s the idea of a female Prime Minister seemed laughably remote. It was just impossible for them to see beyond the blank expression and poorly cleaned dental retainer and picture someone with Napoleonic vision. I was too tall, for one thing.
Our teachers never gave up the hope that one of their obnoxious charges would rise to the top, however. I remember a grade school expedition to the Parliament Buildings. For some reason, our class got to penetrate the sanctum sanctorum, P.M. John Diefenbaker’s office, where the wobble-jowled leader was actually on duty. “Dief” posed a question of some sort to the class and a boy called Tommy Bell answered it correctly. “Some day, that boy will be Prime Minister!” Diefenbaker thundered, which prompted Master Bell to blush, and the rest of us to sink under the weight of our crushed dreams.
We were certainly not prepared to duke it out with Tommy Bell for the highest office in the land — it looked pretty boring in there, what with the desk and so on. Naturally, though, every one of us non-Prime-Ministerial losers taunted little Tommy mercilessly all the way back to school. It dawned on me later that the old Conservative probably predicted the same fate for one kid in every class that visited him. Nevertheless, I see it as a satisfying sign of his ineptitude that so far there has been no Prime Minister Tommy Bell.
There must have been parents whose pulse would have trebled if Diefenbaker — or any other P.M. — had anointed their child. Not mine.
It wasn’t because we were so remote from the reality of the office. For one thing, former Prime Minister Lester Pearson was a relative. As kids, my siblings and I got invited over to play with our cousins in the basement of 24 Sussex at Christmas-time. Nobody suggested as they cleaned up my spilled cola that this might be my house some day.
I guess, though, the parents who did plan for their kids to be prime minister were the ones whose offspring had never shoplifted, thrown heavy rubber mallets at their brother’s head or spent their spare time drawing naked pictures of their teachers. I’d imagine that it was the avid piano players and mathematicians whose parents held such lofty dreams for them, the kids who would burst into hot tears every time they got back a test that didn’t sport an “A++.”
I knew a few of those types; none of them has made it to 24 Sussex, either. They must have found something else to aspire to — I wonder what? Tommy Bell, where are you?
Prime Minister is just one job that parents reportedly no longer urge on their kids. I read an article a few years ago that said the stereotypical immigrant dream of “my son (or daughter), the doctor” had given way to fantasies of other professions because the job was so stressful that it was no longer seen as the ultimate sign of success. Even “my son, the lawyer” was no longer worth boasting about.
Although the University of Haifa and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have embarked on a joint program that allows for a dual degree in law and medicine, these days it’s more desirable for many of us to speak of “my son, the not-yet-ruined dot-com millionaire,” “my son, the extremely popular Bikram yoga instructor” or “my son, the heirloom tomato farmer.”
I don’t know what jobs I’d like for my children — not that it’s up to me. Something stimulating, yet not consuming. Something challenging, but not too tense. Something useful.
A job meeting all these criteria may not exist. So, in a pinch, I suppose Prime Minister will do.
Writing > Humour
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