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Do you remember the days when one encountered the word "entitled" only when discussing a book? When it referred to a title and not to a privilege? Weren't those innocent days?
Now it's so easy to characterize not just a person but a whole generation with this one word. Is it appropriate? Accurate? Or just a lazy journalist's way of slamming a whole group with one little word?
I disagree with the Australian billionaire who thinks young people could buy a house if they'd just stop ordering avocado toasts in their trendy restaurants. At $12 a pop.
As a determined home cook I can see that these young people are more in need of a home ec class than a dressing down from a billionaire. There are so many ways to go here.
First, you can make a glorious avocado toast at home for about Not much more than a dollar. But you need to be paying attention. First of all, you need to buy avocadoes. They'll be hard and inedible when you buy them.
Sidebar: In a grocery line recently DinoVino WineScribe was accosted in broken English by a very old woman shopper who pointed to the avocados in his basket and said angrily, "How you eat those? Hard! They hard! Bitter! How you eat them?" Dino explained that you take them home and wait for them to ripen. We hope she took his advice and thus learned the joys of avocados.
To return. You buy them. And then you wait. Gently press the stem end after a few days. If it gives slightly, you can slice and eat it. If you plan to mash it, as for guacamole, give it another day or two. If they're ripe on Thursday and you were planning to use them on Saturday, you can refrigerate them—BUT ONLY AFTER THEY HAVE REACHED OPTIMAL RIPENESS.
You'll want some good bread for toast. If you've been going out to trendy eating spots for your avocado toast, you surely know by now how and where to find good bread. If you live alone, slice or quarter that loaf as soon as you get home, then freeze it—carefully wrapped. This way you won't waste it.
But it isn't the avocado toasts alone that are keeping young people as renters instead of homeowners. Homes in cities like Toronto are out of reach. Period. You are asked to pay three quarters of a million and up. That's a lot of avocado toasts, and the billionaire seems to be unaware of this.
Oh, he says, they should move to another city. But surely they need to be where the jobs are? Surely the billionaire would be even more irate if they were to move to a cheaper city without jobs and ended up on welfare.
I'm better off sticking to the one little part of this topic that I know something about: the food part. For health and finances, all those young people would be better off eating at home instead of in restaurants. But really, today's apartments are deliberately small: 600 square feet or less. No room to entertain friends. So if you want to see your friends, you do it away from home—namely, in a bar or restaurant. And you eat. You drink. You spend all your disposable income before you have a chance to save it.
The matter is complicated by every sort of economic and social element. Let me say that anyone in this younger generation deserves our sympathy rather than the one-word definition "entitled."
On the other hand, please stop standing at the top of the subway steps, blocking the hand-rail, just because it's the easiest place you can get a signal on your phone. Your rude hogging of public space is giving you a bad reputation—namely, "entitled".
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com
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