Editorial

A job well done


Congratulations to the Rotary rink rats of Slave Lake. This band of volunteer community builders spent the weekend building a new skating rink in Hilda Eben Park, showing what can be done with a bit of willpower and organization.
The result is a shiny new set of rink boards, complete with wire mesh all around, plus players’ boxes and bleachers.
A year in the making, the rink project involved a fair amount of fundraising, organizing partnerships (such as the one with the Boys & Girls Club of Slave Lake that resulted in a hefty grant), selling of the concept in the right quarters, constant publicity and when it came down to it, sufficient elbow grease.
Who are these people who would give up so much of their personal time to make Slave Lake a better place? It seems on the face of it that they’re just ordinary men and women, not much different than you and me. On the other hand, maybe they’re not so ordinary. When they could have been out making money, playing golf, fishing, or improving their own properties, they were fixing up a public facility that they may never use themselves.
People like this give public service a good name, and definitely make Slave Lake a more attractive place to live, work and play.

Growing pains
Here in ‘Mini-Mac’, otherwise known as the boomtown of Slave Lake, there’s plenty to be happy about and also plenty to complain about. Some of the complaints one hears have to do with the difficulty rural people have in conforming to the demands of urban lifestyle.
Living in close quarters with large numbers of other human beings requires a certain refinement of habits, so as to avoid giving offense. Things that were okay down on the farm, or out in the bush, just don’t work so well in an urban situation. Some of Slave Lake’s citizens are slow to pick up on this.
For example: tossing your unwanted furniture, appliances and construction material out of sight up the handiest cutline. This is a standard backwoods solution that works well enough when nobody sees it, because if nobody sees it, nobody cares. But around a town the size of Slave Lake, everybody sees it and is offended by it. Therefore, it is wrong.
Then there’s the petty litter problem in town. Rural people who grew up consuming things largely without packaging were accustomed to just chucking things out. Nature had its way and most of it disappeared within a season or two. Not so in our modern plastic society. To litter is to more or less permanently deface the landscape.
This brings us to the issue of dog crap. Rural people laugh about this one. Anyone who grew up on a farm or an acreage knows that manure on the boots is as much a part of life as spring mud following winter snow. Slave Lake is apparently full of folks who grew up with exactly this attitude.
But unfortunately (or fortunately) where there are concentrations of humans, different standards have to apply. Walking through local parks and dodging doggie doo doo is not fun. Finding it buried in the sand in playgrounds isn’t quite acceptable either. People with dogs should know better and do better.
Finally, the rules of the road. Courtesy. Respect. These are distinctly lacking in a fair proportion of drivers – of regular vehicles and perhaps especially of off-highway vehicles in and around town.
These people act very much as if they out in the bush where nobody gives a rip how you behave, because it affects nobody but yourself.
There’s behaviour appropriate for the countryside and behaviour appropriate for urban living, and it’s high time we figured out the difference.