It’s A Tim Hortons Thing. You Wouldn’t Understand.

Watching the 5^th of 6 CP24 mayoral debates last night, Tweeting my impressions of the proceedings, I noted a certain lack of rigour, let’s call it, from the Ford supporters who were being asked to weigh in on location from a café in Scarborough. It was all bite size chunks of grievance and protest about the shenanigans going on at City Hall that might as well have come directly from the mouth of Rob Ford. In fact, I’m sure it has. Relentlessly and unwaveringly since he joined the campaign.

One person in particular drew my ire, rambling from talking point to talking point and somehow equating the cost of riding the TTC to Adam Giambrone’s taxi receipts he submitted while conducting his dirty personal business. “Enough with the illogically ill-informed,” I demanded. We get enough of that from the candidates running for office. Or words to that effect.

To which I received this response from someone going by the moniker of RegulusdeLeo: “@cityslikr Disgusted by the vulgar Tim Horton drinking voters?”

Ahh, yes. When asked to elevate the discourse with a little bit of reason and rationality, class warfare and resentment is unsheathed. Us haughty downtown elitists, looking down our noses at those who have to scrape together the pennies needed to buy themselves a medium double-double at Timmies while we fling $9 at the baristas at Starbucks for our skinny, veni, vedi, vici chai lattes. We have no idea about the problems they face, the anger they feel because we’re lapping it up on the Gravy Train.

Now you should know, @RegulusdeLeo is a rabid pro-Ford entity from Vaughan who fancies him/herself a speaker of “Truth to (Liberal) Power”. RegulusdeLeo clogs the Twitter-sphere with spam-like empty sloganeering. More like chants, really, championing the simple-minded Rob Ford doctrine of anti-government/anti-taxes. In between these bouts of cheerleading, @RegulusdeLeo tosses out the odd bit of cultural divisiveness such as, “Prefers READING the Quran to burning it. Of course I use a nice strip of crispy bacon as a bookmark!”

Yet, such a defender of the faith as @RegulusdeLeo, when asked to elaborate on and explain in more detail those political views resorts to, what I think patrons of Tim Hortons who love their hockey fights call, ‘turtling’. Covering up, hurling baseless invective, while waiting for their opponents to either tire of the confrontation or for the referee to step in and come to their rescue. You can’t engage in a discussion with those who don’t want to engage.

Which is the problem when confronting the beast that is the Rob Ford phenomenon. If you disagree it isn’t because you see flaws in their candidate’s ideas and platforms. You’re an out-of-touch elitist, unable to understand the struggles of the average Joes. Eye Weekly editor, Edward Keenan, pointed out an interesting comment to the story he wrote last week about a Rob Ford mayoralty. …You do not represent what those that work and pay tax want, he was castigated by a reader. As if those who haven’t embraced Rob Ford don’t work, don’t pay taxes.

We are all just dirty hippies, living down here in the core, sucking from the teat of big, bad government, dancing naked around the maypole and having immoral, unprotected sex with each other. Living high off the hog and mocking those who pay our way. What do we understand about working for a living, struggling to pay our bills, raising children?

It is a societal breach, manufactured at the behest of self-interested privilege and manned by those unwilling to put the effort into truly understanding the intricacies of governance. An elite that transcends geography or coffee shop chains and made up of those refusing to move beyond willful ignorance. You’re not the downtrodden, my friends. You’re the hearts and minds that make real change impossible and keep us locked into an ill-fitting assembly that benefits far fewer of us than we are capable of.

— unapologetically submitted by Cityslikr