I took my four-year-old to Lakeview Park the Friday before Canada Day and again
on the holiday Tuesday. I came away thoroughly disgusted. In the parking lot at
midday there was a tailgate party going on with the usual rough crowd drinking beer.
Wanna-be tough guys strut their pit bulls, forcing family pedestrians to swing wide
or risk being bitten. On the beach the sand was infested with cigarette butts and
beer bottle caps, it was like setting my daughter out to play in a giant ashtray.
Foul language is pretty much a staple along the walkway, where amongst some groups
almost every sentence uttered contains a profanity. The playground area is hardly
any better. It seems that virtually no one shares my concern with setting a mature
example for children, my own as well as other people's, in the play area at least.
Their too colourful vocabulary, crude manners and chain smoking seem no more out
of place than would in a tavern.
Surprisingly, the one thing I was not offended by was the epidemic of toplessness
local politicians had warned me to expect. I couldn't be offended because I didn't
see an example either day. If they were there brazenly flaunting their chests, they
were doing it discretely. Had I seen them however, I doubt I would have been any
more offended by it than I was by other things I saw and heard. After all, despite
what some people contend, breasts are not genitals.
The connotations of being topless relaxing on the beach, are the not the same as
they are between a man and woman in more private moments. If you insist on interchanging
different contexts, you had better ban bare legs, too. Mothers nursing babies should
be put in jail and massage therapy should be outlawed as licentious.
If council is worried that the Oshawa beach is not a family-oriented place, I applaud
their new-found concern. Better late than never. If they think raising a fuss about
the occasional woman sunbathing topless is the solution, they don't understand the
problem.
Linda Pascoe, Oshawa