My home town…

Yep, hate lives and breathes…and if I’m calling it out, I might as well start at home.  On May 21, 2010 a letter to the editor came in to the Star Phoenix from an individual claiming that he won’t be buying the new Roughrider license plates because they say PRIDE LIVES HERE. For all of you NOT in Canada that is what makes us Saskatchewanites BLEED green.  It’s our football team and it’s our biggest joy (well and pain most years) coming from Saskatchewan and we call this fanaticism Rider Pride.  His “logic” is that ‘the gays’ have stolen the word and made it mean something ugly.  Dear Lord I wish I was joking.  It was a short letter but there was a hasty response.  You see my little home town might just be a dot on the map.  We might be the brunt of many a joke, the punch line for many comedians but the one thing we do not do is suffer fools lightly.  Sure we have disproportionate number of trucks and Z28’s to the rest of the world and there is no doubt that drinking slurpees with rum at 7/11 is a right of passage.  Yep, we get that if our dog starts running we can watch it run away for hours.  We get it.  You may look at our crazy prairie winters and wonder why the hell anyone lives there.  But there is something about the heart of a person from Saskatchewan that fills me with such love.  The response to this bigoted, hate filled letter is exactly why I am proud to say “I’m from Saskatchewan”.

Funny I was JUST singing the praises of the Kirk’s Dad on Glee, how this seemingly guy’s guy had learned so much from his child.  How he no longer lived in ignorance and intolerance and he would not  allow it in his home.  Reading with sadness that the reality is there are still a lot of guys like this out there….shame on him.  I for one am damn happy that he won’t be buying the license plate because he doesn’t understand what being proud really means. Pride has many definitions two of which are: the best of a group, class, society, etc. or a dignified sense of what is due to oneself or one’s position or character. Funny because character is one thing this jackass doesn’t have.

But good on Saskatoon for showing him that his views are pathetic, hurtful and just plain wrong.  There were people like this one and this one, people who took the time to fill the entire Letter to the Editors section of today’s Star Phoenix to make sure the he realizes it. Do we have PRIDE?  Damn straight.