Ordinary?

What makes someone an ordinary person? I've just finished reading Camus' novel The Outsider - a frustrating book about an ordinary man who can't fit in because of he's too honest about himself. Its a book about being normal and what that means. Its also about judging others and how we do it. I didn't like the book the first time I read it, but this time I got all riled up about ordinary. So please forgive me as I rant.

Two nights ago, our perspective leaders made their pitches before a national audience and if we didn't know any better, it would seem that they were all soley interested in the ordinary person. Each of them told us they had a monopoly on insight into the needs, wants, and dreams of the ordinary Canadian. I don't know if I'm that ordinary person they are talking about.
On an immediate level, I feel like I must be. Sure I might be a little taller than Joe average, but whenever I fill out forms about myself with little boxes to check (age 18 and under, 19 - 29, 30 - 49, 50 - 69, 70 and over) it seems I'm checking them right down the middle. And yet I'm no senior, and I'm not poor, and well I'm not any of the people our leaders listed as the ordinary Canadian. I guess they think, despite my very average stats, that I am special.

It strikes me as funny that I'm put off by being lumped in to a great big mass called ordinary and at the same time I'm annoyed when I'm excluded from that same big grey lump. Do we all want these two things: to be ordinary and to be extraordinary, to be normal and to be special? And that's the thing with lumping people into groups - we don't fit.

But who doesn't know what ordinary is? Even Gilles thinks he knows the average Canadian or at least he knows that they aren't like him. He believes that the average Quebecer is completely different form the average Canadian, and that is what gets me riled up. Not him so much. Sure, I think he is wrong. I don't think you can find that average Quebecer anymore than the average Canadian.

Would the average Quebecer be a man or a woman? Would they be from Montreal or Quebec City or from a small town? Would they be a smoker, a liberal, an athlete, an artist, a salesman, a plumber...Would any of these things define them? When you find this person, wouldn't they be as unique and complicated as anyone else? They would be far too slippery to label as the typical anything or anyone. In fact, I believe there is more difference between individual Quebecers than there is between provinces.

But what gets me going is how we depend on this notion that I belong to this group and you belong to that group. We depend on this mythical sense of the ordinary person, a willingness to redefine ourselves as ordinary, as well as a willingness to define 'the other' as a homogeneous mass.

For Duceppe, English Canada is just one big lump. But how different is that from saying things like 'there are no guys to date in Vancouver', as a friend of mine likes to lament. We do it all the time, but imagine a city the size of Vancouver being devoid of any available attractive men. A notion that seems hard to imagine. Any city this size is filled with ordinary people, each one extraordinary in their own right. We just can't stand back and see it.

Don't we all want to make ordinary people extraordinary and extraordinary people ordinary. I certainly do. But sometimes these notions of ours just come undone. Take last Sunday for example. In England, a semi-pro soccer team called Burton Albion played the internationally renowned extraordinary Manchester United. The game finished a 0-0 draw. A team of ordinary guys took on a team of superstars and they held them off for 90 minutes. So does that make them extraordinary? Or were they already an extraordinary and just waiting to be noticed.