Book Hippo

Sunday, July 19, 2015

Crimes Of Averages

Now, I have a question to ask. What is average? What is an average person? Does that notion play out in reality? You often hear, when people talk of someone who's done something out-of-the-ordinary, that's they're 'not your average person'. Well, what does that mean, I ask again? Who's really average? If there is a tribe where every man is six foot and all the women five foot, the average height is five foot six inches. Yet, no one in the tribe is five foot six inches. Or how about that 2.2 kids that the 'average' Canadian is supposed to have. I have never seen or even heard of (other than in averages) a .2 kid. What you be if you were .2 of a person? Only an arm? I'm just saying that the idea of average is only good for pretending. One middle-class family my make $10,000 dollars a month. Another may make $4000. So which is average when they're not even the same? Of a family may have three kids. Another two. But the fathers and mothers have the same job. So the four person family can afford more 'goodies' with their wages while the five person family may have to hitch in their belts to make ends meet. Or how about someone who's job changes because of some government law that comes into force. A good example is man I know who sold pesticides in Ontario. The government of Ontario passed a law prohibiting pesticides. Overnight, his job was gone. Is that average? Did that happen to the 'average' Canadian? Yet he had about a 50,000 dollar per year job. (Just as an aside, he moved to BC and now landscapes out there. Happy ending) So what about this 'law of averages'? To me, it's just so much blah, blah, blah. Let's be real about people and in that way, we can be fair to the reality of people's lives.

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