Taxes and Civility

I’ve just spent an hour searching for last year’s tax assessment as my accountant always asks for that when she prepares my taxes.  I searched, and searched, and searched all the while not understanding why I had not put it in my folder as I usually do.  At the end of the search the form was lying on my desk with “2011” written on it so i therefore ignored it because my brain was not computing that 2011 was actually the current assessment.  I just hate it when I am not with-it.

       Which brings me to this year’s tax ads.  Is it just me or commercials getting more crude with each passing year?  I was taken aback a few years ago when I first heard the ads for colonoscopies “we’re behind your behind”.  While that isn’t crude in the extreme it is a little bit risqué in nature.  This year’s tax ads allude to being screwed in the butt with their tax pain in the behind.  Calgary also has a new campaign for distracted driving which says “crotches kill”.  There was a whole series of surveys on whether that one was going to be effective to which I respond loudly “no, of course not”.  The only thing that is going to get those particular idiots’ attention is losing their license for 3 months.  Meanwhile the rest of us must endure yet another crude campaign.

       My concern is not stemming from prudishness but from concern that we are becoming an increasingly callous society.  Last week we had a distressing example of just how callous we have become when an older woman, in a crosswalk, was run down by 2 hit-and-run drivers as well as having 2 other vehicles drive around the body and just leave it there.  Furthermore, the only person who came to her aid was a woman who heard the accident from inside her house.  Meanwhile, there were apparently onlookers at a bus stop who stood and did nothing.  All of this happened around 7:45 a.m. therefore it was no longer dark outside.  On the surface, it is incomprehensible that such a thing could happen in Calgary but when you look a little closer at how people conduct themselves out on the street perhaps it isn’t that surprising after all.  For example, have you noticed how people expect you to have ESP and notice when the person sitting beside you on the bus or train rises and needs to get passed you.  There is no one who says “excuse me, this is my stop” because that would mean you would have to expend some breath on communicating with the stranger sitting beside you despite the fact that you’ve shared your personal history while talking on a cellphone for 25 minutes.  Gosh, how silly of me to expect communication from such a moron.  People seldom speak to other human beings whether they know you or not so heaven forbid that someone should come to the aid of a poor 52 year old woman who has been knocked to the ground by one car and then dragged some 25 feet by another vehicle.  Because we wouldn’t want to show compassion to a woman who obviously was asking for it – by crossing the street at a designated crosswalk in broad daylight.

       Civility, that is something that happened in a bygone age where ankles were not revealed and no one had a crotch. 

Now I will deal with my taxes which is so much more soothing than having to deal with the moronic population I am forced to live amongst.  Now, that’s irony.