THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc. DATE: SUNDAY, June 5, 1994 TAG: 9406030235 SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL SOURCE: Bill Reed DATELINE: 940605 LENGTH: Medium
Among them are signs welcoming tourists to Virginia Beach in French. They seem to irk some people in this multicultural community of ours.
{REST} Objectors are of the opinion that such public messages should include inscriptions in Spanish, Dutch, Chinese and/or Swahili. That way no one would be offended.
It may be that these folks don't have enough to occupy themselves, either at work or at play.
They must lie awake at night dreaming up ways to make themselves unhappy or imagining sinister plots in otherwise harmless gestures of goodwill.
Apparently it never occurred to them that the city erected those welcome signs in the early '70s as a greeting to a large contingent of French Canadians who visit the Virginia Beach oceanfront each summer in search of sun, sand and recreation.
Had those droves of visitors originated in Puerto Rico or Spain or the Netherlands, most likely those signs would have been inscribed in Spanish or Dutch.
And if that had been the case, the world being what it is today, there would still be some disgruntled soul who would bleat about the omission of French, German, Russian or some other foreign language wording.
Nothing, it would seem, is too petty to gripe about. Griping has become America's No. 1 pastime, far exceeding even baseball or medical malpractice suits.
Recently, objectors appeared before the city's Human Rights Commission to complain about French inscriptions on welcome signs. They said the city should either take down those signs or put up new ones that incorporate messages in languages not ordinarily spoken here.
Not to do so would be a slap in the face to every other ethnic group not represented on the signage, they argued.
Anybody who has been around this planet more than 20 or 30 years soon realizes that getting steamed over slights imagined or real can swiftly lead to the couch of a local shrink. Life becomes very long and tedious, what with all those slights bonking you between the eyes every day.
There would be little time to think about some real problems facing residents of the city these days, like:
Are the kids fed, dressed and ready for school on time?
Are they wearing matching socks and shoes?
Can we make the mortgage and car payments and have a little left over for a new washer and dryer to replace the ones that died.
Can I dodge another round of layoffs at the shipyard?
If not, can I wangle a slot on the night shift at the neighborhood convenience store?
If not, will my mother-in-law put me and my family up for a couple of weeks?
Now these are problems that could really occupy the chronic worrier. They would use up a lot of heavy wattage otherwise expended in spasms of moral outrage about foreign language highway signs.
It would take real horsepower to visualize yourself doing something positive, like helping to build homes for the poor, bringing meals to the house-bound elderly, volunteering to supervise playgrounds for underprivileged kids or tutoring these same kids after school.
Imagine the mental firepower generated by seeing that your own teenage son or daughter is prepared for high school, college and life thereafter. Consider the calories that could be burned off by helping them become useful, caring and contributing citizens.
Imagine those youngsters doing the same things for their children. It could happen - new generations of good citizens who are concerned about raising more generations of good citizens. But wait! It's possible that those good citizens wouldn't give a flying fig about welcome signs at the entrance to the Beach being worded in French.
It's also possible that they might consider their antecedents who are overly concerned about French welcome signs a little uptight and offer them this advice:
GET A LIFE!
by CNB