For years, I’ve listened to business gurus, neo-con fogies and those who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, drone on about the “entitlement mentality” of Canadians.

They hold their nose and choke on the phrase.

They deplore our dependence on government.

Follow up:

Society is for freebooters – a survival of the fittest.

As one neo-con conman once said: Canadians suffer a bad case of “homogovernmentitis.”

The past few years have exposed the softness of that argument.

The freebooters in the U.S. financial institutions nearly ruined the free world economy. Bald cupidity was given free rein.

Do Canadians have an entitlement mentality? You’re damn right we do.

And it’s way past time we started exercising it.

First of all, government really isn’t government – it’s you and me, the collective us.

Even non-government agencies, NGOs, are part of an all-for-one attitude.

Governments build the roads and run the schools and operate the hospitals and keep the water clean and collect the taxes so we can live a decent life.

Sometimes they fail and we throw them out.

Hey, that’s what democracy is all about, right?

Horror in Haiti

In Haiti there is no homogovernmentitis. There is no functioning government. There is only corruption and freebooters and violence and inequality and dog eat dog. There’s exploitation and a lot of I, me, mine.

The people don’t care enough about themselves to demand good government.

It’s cultural. It’s conditional. It’s chaos.

It’s a voodoo world of Papa Docs. It’s a world that we can’t even imagine.

So the earth shakes, the buildings fall down, thousands die, and the whole corrupt mess is exposed, unearthed, and laid bare.

Sporting heroes?

Now I’m thinking about our sports heroes – not just the so-called heroes, but their worshippers: the fan clubs, the groupies, and the overweight chip-eating beer swillers who like to glory in the glamorous world of celebrity and get their jollies by sticking a piece of paper in front of a 22-year-old know-nothing athlete so they can ask or beg him or her for an autograph.

I’m thinking about Tiger Woods too, a byproduct of this system, a monstrous mutation – the golfing cyborg.

I can see him sitting on his aptly named 200-foot yacht ‘Privacy’ these days, shunning the world, perhaps blaming the media for his fall, and maybe even luxuriating in the fact that he’s still considered “The Chosen One” by millions.

After all, he’s the first sports “hero” to crack the billion-dollar mark in earnings.

He’s the first golfer who has a chance of beating Jack Nicklaus’ all-time record for major tournament wins.

He was manufacturered to be the best striker of the ball on the planet.

His father Earl, the ex-marine, once said Tiger would someday rival Mandela and Gandhi in influence.

He was a god, a doyen, and a cultural icon – the next coming.

Heck, his accomplishments are almost biblical.

And we bought it. We bought it all.

The press deified him.

Sponsored bellied up to the bar. Fans got goosebumps in his presence.

We all believe this focused fanatic could balance his duties as a father/husband/and endorsement machine and still be golf’s greatest player and ambassador.

If Bobby Jones was the Father of golf and Jack Nicklaus was the Son, then Woods was the Holy Ghost.

Some were troubled by his conduct, the way he dissed people, his child-like petulance on the course. It seems unseemly to me the way Woods or his posse shoo the flock away as if they were a swarm of flies.

But as I watched the horrible goings on in Haiti this month, I couldn’t help but think about Tiger.

How could I not think about Tiger?

He’d hogged the headlines before the Haitian earthquake. His serial philandering became the butt of jokes. His fall from grace was swift and the stuff of tragicomedy.

Now, I thought, both he and Haiti had suffered the same fate.

Tiger’s fake world had imploded overnight. His fake image had been flatted. The walls of his endorsement empire came tumbling down. The real Tiger had been exposed, unearthed, and laid bare.

When his long-suffering wife Elin supposedly buried a 3-iron in his famous face, his toothy grin was wiped away.

You might say, the damaged Escalade that he’d plowed into a tree on his posh Orlando property was symbolic of his damaged life, a miniaturized version of what had happened in Haiti.

Tiger was entitled to his riches because he – like the big investment bankers – was bigger than us, bigger than golf, bigger than his marriage, bigger than his family. He could luxuriate in his vices because he was the Chosen One, and ironically, chosen ones really don’t have to choose. They can have it all – multi-million dollar yachts, trophy wives, perfect kids, never-ending endorsement money, and cocktail waitresses by the handful.

The Real Heroes

Now I’m thinking about my father, my tough as nails father. He fought in WW2 and was hard at it for four years. He patrolled from Italy to Holland to Germany, scrambling from foxhole to foxhole. He wasted his best years chasing after an enemy that threatened to destroy our world.

He wasn’t pampered, fussed over, told things to stroke his ego, or credited with anything. He did his duty and came home broke and got a lousy low-paying job and raised four kids and put down a grubstake and bought a little house with three bedrooms and no basement or hot water and built it over the years by doing without – which is something the phenoms, the Tigers of the world, never had to do.

The war and its aftermath were the character-building years – in sharp relief to the narcissistic nothingness years of some of the overpaid jocks of today.

My dad never signed an endorsement deal, and nobody ever asked him for his autograph.

Now I’m thinking about the rescue workers in Haiti.

They believe in the collective us.

They believe the world is a very small place and that governments (we the people) can work wonders and save lives if we all just pull together.

They’re the real chosen ones because they’ve chosen to give back to the world, not drain it of all its riches.

They came from Canada and the U.S. because both are politically stable and we have always stepped to the plate – whether it’s a world war or a world disaster.

These volunteers don’t ask for multi-million dollar endorsement deals.

They don’t need their hologrammed images on the next collection of Upper Deck cards.

They help the victims because… well, just because – it’s all part of being real.

Broken heroes

Tiger Woods is a hero to many. But he’s a broken one – trapped in the rubble of his own making.

We all suffer earthquakes and after shocks in our lives, and most of us will rise from it because we can count on others to help – friends, family, and even government agencies and NGOs.

Tiger is very much alone these days – allowed his privacy on the ‘Privacy.’

He’s also the ‘Silent One,’ happy to let others talk for and about him.

The Chosen One has aptly chosen his plush yacht as the place to lick his wounds and recover from his personal earthquake.

The poor souls in Haiti don’t have that option, which brings both worlds into stark contrast.

Both recoveries will take a long time, but Tiger’s could be shortened by pouring some of his mega-wealth into the life-and-death relief effort now taking place in Haiti.

I hope for his sake he does – and reports are that he has pumped a fraction of his money into the cleanup.

Maybe, for the very first time, this selfish product of a selfish age, will begin to act like the rest of “us.”

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