You don’t have to live in Toronto proper to know who Rob Ford is. That my family does live near Toronto, coupled with the fact that we own a television and speak a recognized human language, means even my teenager knows who Rob Ford is, and worse, what he’s done. His performance as a politician and husband are legitimately up for debate, and you can make valid points for his immediate termination of public office, but there’s one thing he’s great at—one area where he excels beyond any other current public figure—and that is that he makes a fantastic example of what NOT to aspire to. Sure, Justin Bieber is currently acting like a hormone-fuelled asshole with keys to the liquor cabinet and the Porsche, but he’s nineteen years old and so I’m cutting him a teeny-tiny bit of slack. Rob Ford? Notsomuch.
My daughter asks how Ford can still be the mayor of a large urban centre when he’s admitted he has used crack. Don’t adults face repercussions and face consequences like kids do? Like Bieber will? I have no explanation to offer her other than to invoke complicated political terms in a half-hearted attempt to explain how bureaucratic red tape means his dismissal isn’t a given, despite his breaking the law. What can I tell her? The “celebrity” of Rob Ford is concerning, and this is where I start the discussion about “Ford vs. What’s Fair” with my daughter. Seeing that Rob Ford has repeatedly conducted himself in the manner bereft of impulse control, he makes a great reference for discussions with teens about addiction, drug and alcohol use, and how the internet doesn’t forget, folks. Teenagers aren’t the only ones who get caught acting like assholes on Vine or Instagram, and we need to stop acting like they’ve got a moratorium on momentary stupidity. Explaining to your teen how even adults conduct themselves like idiots is uncomfortable at best, especially when you’ve got a jaded kid like I do. So far, she’s made no major indiscretions with technology (that I’m aware of), and so Rob Ford’s latest drunken escapades captured on video while he dined at Toronto-area restaurant, Steak Queen, was great for me as a springboard. What it did was allow me (another) in to talk about how anything you say and anything you do now has the potential to be recorded and captured forever.
I’ve taken screen shots of racy tweets I’ve seen in my own timeline to demonstrate how even after the author deletes them—even after they think they are *gone*—they are still there. Ford’s drunken rant at Steak Queen isn’t shocking in itself. Who hasn’t spoken out of turn in a fast-food restaurant after a few too many? I point towards my own experience, going way back to the blissfully ignorant days of July 1992, to what is now known in my circle of friends as The Great Olive Incident. It happened in a Mr. Submarine restaurant after a night of vodka-lubricated debauchery, and all I can say is thank God no one had the balls (or the urge) to lug around an eight pound VHS video recorder in those days. The other difference is that before Steak Queen, Rob Ford made a huge show of saying he’d never drink again. He said it—and it was recorded. (I never made such a claim, but I can almost guarantee I won’t make a Mr. Sub clerk cry again.) We can play Ford’s impassioned speech back to him—we can roll back that footage. Privacy, whether deserved or not by public figures or private citizens, is a thing of the past, and trying to teach that to a teenager, when we adults are learning how to navigate a digital world ourselves, is difficult.
And yet, despite his shortcomings and failures in both private and public spheres, Rob Ford is not a joke. He has real, serious, potentially fatal flaws and I will not make excuses for him. But I care more about my child than I do him, and so I will use him as an example.
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