Wherein the Toronto Star makes me ashamed to read it

I was shocked, ashamed, and rather disgusted to see this article in the Toronto Star, where reporters staked out public figures' homes to see if they were participating in Earth Hour.

First of all, Earth Hour is arbitrary and symbolic. No one is hurting anything by failing to participate. (Yes, they are using a normal hour's worth of electricity. Our infrastructure can handle that, and that's within the scope of perfectly normal and customary human behaviour in our society.)

Second, all the people they were picking on were quietly sitting at home minding their own business. As I've blogged about before, the big problem with Earth Hour is that anyone who chooses to quietly sit out and go about their own business in the privacy of their own home is lit up like a beacon. That, in and of itself, is reason enough to question the ritual.

Third, the public figures whose homes they were visiting have not to my knowledge, within reach of my google-fu, or in any way cited in the article endorsed Earth Hour. Instead, they're people the Star thinks should be endorsing Earth Hour. This isn't a story of hypocrisy or anything, at best it's a story of quietly opting out.

Fourth, the public figures weren't even home! The people in the homes were their families (in at least some cases their minor children), who are private citizens and thereby fully entitled to sit quietly at home without participating in the public events of the day.

But, most crucially, this is the Toronto Star. It's a Toronto newspaper and it's a broadsheet newspaper, and by printing this story it has egregiously failed in its mandate as both. If we wanted busybodies constantly judging and shaming us for not living up to their arbitrary standards, we wouldn't have moved to the city. If we wanted sensationalized pearl-clutching finger-pointing, we'd be reading the Sun.

If their goal was to make their readers ashamed to be seen with a copy of the Star, they have succeeded.