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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2017-12-14, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, DECEMBER 14, 2017. PAGE 5. Other Views Don't confuse me with the facts The scene in a St. Thomas shopping mall last week could have been from a satirical movie if it hadn't been so serious. Mark Phillips got out of his car, saw a brown -skinned family and, yelling that they were terrorists, attacked them with a baseball bat. The people assaulted weren't terrorists. They weren't even Muslim. They were originally from Colombia but have been residents of Canada for 17 years. Fact -checking isn't big with people determined to hate. Before Jagmeet Singh won the leadership of the federal NDP, he was heckled at a public meeting by someone who accused him of wanting to impose Sharia law, an Islamic set of rules for religious and daily life based on the teachings of the Koran. Singh has brown skin and wears a turban as part of his practice of the Sikh religion, which has nothing to do with Islam or Sharia law. Of course we live in an era when facts don't matter. If we don't like a fact, we find "alternative facts" that support our own instincts rather than do a little research, find out we're mistaken and change our minds. Of course the most publicized man in the world these days would never even admit he could be mistaken and creates "facts" to support any argument he wants to put forward, no matter how bizarre. People seem willing to suspend any sort of logical thinking when they get caught up in paranoia. The craziest of these cases of believing what should be unbelievable was "Pizzagate", the wacky theory that made its way around the internet prior to last year's U.S. Presidential election. Believers, so caught up in their hatred of Hillary Clinton, somehow bought into a conspiracy theory that Clinton and her campaign chair John Podesta were Keith Roulston From the cluttered desk involved in a child sex trafficking scheme that was based in a popular pizza parlour in Washington, D.C. It went further than just madness caused by their distrust of Clinton. Believers saw a conspiracy that encompassed all of government, which was part of the New World Order and was teeming with pedophiles The craziness turned dangerous about a year ago when Edgar Maddison Welch became so disturbed by the allegations that he drove to Washington from North Carolina armed with two guns and fired shots inside the restaurant. Thankfully, no one was hurt. Welch's suspicions were fanned by a radio talk show host who finally apologized, but that failed to make the true believers reconsider. Even after all this they paraded in Washington wearing T-shirts proclaiming "Pizzagate is not fake news". Turning perception into truth is not confined to the lunatic fringe in the U.S. After the attack on the couple in St. Thomas last week, the London Free Press reached out to Barbara Perry of the Greater Toronto Area's University of Ontario Institute of Technology, a specialist in the study of hate crimes for comment. Perry said normalized hate isn't just an American phenomenon, but one evident in Canada as well. "We have our own history of hate and intolerance here," she said. "Specifically, Western Ontario — many of the communities down there have long been hotspots for right- wing extremism, in particular." Wait a minute! Wasn't Mark Phillips from Toronto and only came to Western Ontario to carry out his act of hate? I spent an hour or two last week crafting an e-mail reply to a Globe and Mail columnist who had made this kind of prejudice about rural people the basis of his column. He argued that the fact that rural ridings tend to have fewer constituents than urban ridings gave rural voters an undue influence. From this he extrapolated that made it difficult to get progressive legislation approved by Parliament because everybody knew that rural people are not progressive. I pointed out to the columnist that it was a rural riding, Grey County, that elected Agnes Mcphail to Parliament, the first woman MP, in Canada way back in 1921, barely a couple of years after women were allowed to vote. It was the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a farmer -backed government, that created the first free medical care system in Canada in Saskatchewan in 1947. I have no idea if my investment in time has done anything to make this urban columnist rethink his perceptions or perhaps dig a little deeper, since he never replied or even acknowledged receipt of the message. I'd almost have been more surprised if he had read and digested my e-mail than if he hadn't. People seem much more comfortable sticking to their perceptions than being forced to consider that they might be wrong. It's easy to believe that the current rejection of logic and facts is all about the current resident of the White House but he's simply the most highly profiled practitioner of this human trait. The Griswolds we definitely are not 0 ver the weekend, for the first time since moving into my home six years ago, Christmas lights ended up on the eaves at the front of my home. Every year I've given the same reason when my wife Ashleigh asks me to put the lights up there: it just isn't worth the risk. For those of you not familiar with my home, our property slopes downwards significantly from the back of our home to our frontage. As a result, the roof, which can be reached with a step -ladder on the back of the house, is fairly high up at the front of our home. Putting Christmas lights up would involve standing at the top of the ladder and, as my mother will tell you if you ask her, I don't belong on ladders or working at heights. Twice in my life I've fallen off ladders while working on roofs and I've fallen from heights a great many more times than that. So, having to both acquire and then use an extension ladder to put Christmas lights up on the edge of a 24 -foot -high eavestrough was not something I was about to do. Technically, it's still something I haven't done: my father, bless his heart, went up the ladder. This year, however, my wife put her foot down (which is pretty easy to do when you're not the one standing on the ladder or a sloped roof, but I'll leave the situational puns for now) and said that, for our daughter Mary Jane's sake, we needed Christmas lights across the front of the house instead of around the front stoop like we normally do. So, on Saturday morning, with my father standing far higher off the ground than man is intended to and me holding the ladder and begrudging whoever originally thought lights on a house was a good idea, we got a single string of lights across the front of the house. We won't be winning the Blyth Business Improvement Area's (BIA) annual house decorating contest, but at least we're contributing, right? I've never really understood the whole "outside Christmas decorating" phenomenon. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy those incredibly complex light shows where someone has figured out how to turn individual lights on in sequence to spell out `Merry Christmas' in Morse code as much as the next guy but it all seems kind of over the top. I don't have a problem with lights. I mean, if you're comfortable having your house visible from space and paying an electrical bill that's as high as your credit card bill for all your Christmas gifts, who am I to tell you that's wrong? I've just never seen the draw. I grew up watching the Griswolds and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation and laughing at the troubles that Christmas lights bring and now I see commercial after commercial capitalizing on it, but I just don't get it. My wife says I'm a Grinch because of this long -held belief, but I disagree. I love getting a big tree from the Londesborough Lions, tying it to the wall and decorating it with her (and now with Mary Jane) because it provides warmth to the home. Don't ask me why, but our dining room feels so much more homey with the Christmas tree in the corner and lights around the inside of the window. There is just something about the decorations, the tree and the smell that accompanies it that make it feel like Christmas. That's why I don't think I'm a Grinch. I love Christmas parades, Christmas concerts, decorating the interior of the home and I especially love the animatronic Christmas decorations that my wife has (and I used to have before they all went missing). From the vibrating reindeer that scoots across the floor singing a Christmas -themed pop song that makes Mary Jane laugh like a maniac to the reindeer in a rocking chair that sings "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer" while rocking back and forth, it's all great. Once upon a time I even had an animatronic snow man that sang a Christmas version of "Shake Your Groove Thing" called "Shake Your Snow Thing". From the themed Christmas mats at the door all the way to the angel on top of the tree, I am on board with Christmas decorations inside the house, I've just never understood the draw of those outside (especially if you're risking life and limb to get them up). My wife says I worry too much and, in her defence, my mind does often go to worst-case scenarios whenever I'm asked to do something. Call me a very "risk -versus - reward" kind of person, but I usually try to stay on the safer side of life. That wouldn't fly this year, however, and I found myself on Saturday praying that I didn't have to catch my father falling while he put lights up on the front of the house. So what do you think, loyal readers, is it only Christmas if you have the house decked out in flashing LED lights or can decorations and the tree inside the house suffice? Hit me up and let me know if you see me in the near future. Oh, and a P.S. to all my neighbours: don't expect me to be getting those lights down any time before the snow melts. Like I said, risk versus reward. Shawn Loughlin gab Shawn's Sense Get behind them The events of the past week should stand to remind us all just how fragile a relationship a community like North Huron has with its fire department. We are truly lucky and I think at times it's easy to take how lucky we are for granted. I grew up in the Greater Toronto Area – the land of full-time, well-paid firefighters. It is there that firefighters get paid, at times, to sleep. Now, I should say, I don't say that in a negative way, it's part of the structure of the job. However, it is a fact. I am a little more accepting of this than my father, a 33 -year veteran of the Toronto Police Service. He always thought firefighters were lazy. (I watched him communicate this opinion live, over the phone, on CityTV once. He was hung up on.) I do not think firefighters are lazy. I understand the good-natured ribbing between firefighters and police officers, but, in the end, I trust there is a mutual respect and admiration (and let's throw paramedics in there as well). Having said that, I was amazed when I moved to rural Ontario. It simply doesn't make financial sense to have a stable of full-time firefighters on call, so we have men and women who have volunteered their time to ensure that the very best in fire suppression is just a phone call away. That, to me, was impressive. It still is. To see these folks tear into a fire just minutes after they were sitting at a desk, towing a car, servicing a vehicle, etc., will never cease to amaze me. There has been some criticism online about what the Fire Department of North Huron has done, resigning en masse. Some have called the firefighters selfish and others have said it was reckless. There have been others who have been kind enough to "remind" us that these firefighters aren't actually volunteers, you know? They get paid, so that's hardly volunteering. How ungrateful. Seriously. That's the definition of ungrateful and it no doubt, like so much internet criticism like it, comes from someone who has never walked a mile in the shoes of the person in question. People should make their way into a burning building (I never have) and then decide if the meager compensation a volunteer firefighter receives would make them want to do it again. And as far as statements of selfishness and recklessness, know that our local firefighters have indeed responded when called since the mass resignation (there have been at least two calls) and there is also a mutual aid agreement in place and coverage arranged with neighbouring fire departments. No doubt this would result in heightened response times, but still, no one was left hung out to dry. Knowing these men and women, that would never be an option. Never. When it comes down to it, those in the bunker suits who arrive when your house is on fire are people. They have families and they have worries every time they get in the truck to go to a call. They know there are risks, such as cancer, to firefighting. And they know, as happened in Listowel just a few years ago, they could die in whatever building they're going into that day. If the firefighters have all resigned together, you have to know that it's been done for a good reason; a reason that's important to them and, by extension, the community. So, if you think your firefighters are being selfish, the next time you speak to one, ask him/her why they do it. Don't anticipate the topic of money coming up.