HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2015-11-26, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 2015. PAGE 5.
Ialways wondered about the coonskin cap.
Do you remember it – a fur pillbox
with a racoon tail dangling down the back?
It was pretty useless as hats go – not
waterproof and no brim to ward off the
sun or the rain. Plus it made the wearer look
transcendentally dopey. And hot! Who of
sound mind would willingly stick the carcass
of a dead furry quadruped on his head on a
summer afternoon?
Millions of North American adolescent
woodsman wannabes, that’s who. I was one of
them. Back in the 1950s enough pint-
sized coonskin caps were sold to cause a
world-wide shortage of raccoon pelts. We
craved coonskin hats because our heroes,
Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett, wore
coonskin caps.
Except they didn’t.
It was a myth, started by a Broadway actor
back in the 1830s when he portrayed a
hillbilly-turned-politician named ‘Captain
Nimrod Wildfire’ (in fact, a parody of
Crockett) on stage. The actor wore a coonskin
cap and the image stuck for all time.
As for Daniel Boone, he’s on record as
calling the hat ‘silly’. Boone preferred a
standard beaver hat.
The coonskin cap debunking goes into my
‘Now They Tell Me’ file. It’s my collection of
hoary homilies and erroneous adages that I
sucked up as a gullible greenhorn only to later
discover untrue.
I remember the time I was almost tackled
during a farm tour for the sin of wearing a red
T shirt. “Are you crazy, boy? If that Holstein
bull gets sight of you he’ll gore you to death!
Bulls HATE red!”
Except they don’t. Bulls are colour-blind.
That matadors’ capes are red is irrelevant. It’s
the movement that pisses the bull off.
Even if a bull was as blind as a bat...Oops,
another myth. Bats aren’t blind. They have
excellent vision. And fast – bats move like
lightning – which as we all know, never strikes
the same place twice.
Except it does, all the time. The Sears Tower
in Chicago was hit 10 times during a single
storm. The Empire State Building takes jolts at
least a 100 times each year.
All those ‘truths’ we grew up with – don’t
cross your eyes they’ll get stuck that way;
don’t snap your fingers, you’ll get arthritis;
don’t swim after eating, you’ll get stomach
cramps and drown....
Bogus.
And we’re still doing it – myth-making, I
mean. Michael Moore, the author/filmmaker
who wrote Dude, Where’s My Country also
produced the film Bowling for Columbine
wherein he waxed poetic about America’s
neighbours to the north (that’s us) who, he
said, “feel so safe most of them don’t lock their
doors, even in large cities.”
Dude, where’s your common sense? I don’t
know ANY homeowners in Vancouver,
Winnipeg or Toronto who don’t lock their
doors. As a matter of fact, Canadians actually
have a higher rate of property crime and theft
than Americans do. Inconveniently strange but
true.
One last bit of myth-busting: books aren’t
dead. It was predicted that ebooks would
overtake printed books by 2015. In fact the
sales of digital books actually fell by 10 per
cent during the first half of this year.
If printed books could talk they’d
probably paraphrase Mark Twain, who once
wrote in response to a printed obituary:
“Reports of my death have been greatly
exaggerated.”
Arthur
Black
Shawn
Loughlin
Shawn’s Sense
Whether it’s at the lowest tiers of
government or the upper echelons
in Ottawa, I think the decision to
help other people should be one for the
individual to make and not one that’s made for
them.
It happens at every level of government. It
can be a group hoping to raise money for a
charity and asking a municipality to waive a
rental fee or a situation like when the Huron
County Food Bank Distribution Centre
requested $60,000 from Huron County
Council last year, approximately $1 for each
individual in the county.
Those decisions should not be made by any
government, but by individuals.
I believe in giving. I donate to organizations
working on the grassroots level throughout
North Huron, Huron East, Ashfield-Colborne-
Wawanosh and Central Huron. I bid in silent
auctions, I buy raffle tickets, I buy pounds and
pounds of chicken to support local groups and
I do my best to help out. I’m not rich, but I
give when I can.
I’m not looking for any kind of recognition
for this, I’m simply pointing out that I’m not
against charity, I just think it should start, and
end, where those giving can make a choice
about what they give to whom.
The decision to donate to the food bank on
my behalf (even if it is only $1) should not be
one that is made by my elected representatives,
it’s one that should be made by me.
I know this might not be a popular opinion,
especially given how many organizations in
the area benefit from or rely on funds provided
by municipal, county, provincial or federal
governments. However I’m a strong believer
that charity is a personal act, not a political
one.
That same sentiment applies to what is going
on with the Syrian refugees right now. There
are many people willing to open their homes to
these refugees and help them out. Heck, Ian
Gillespie, a Vancouver real estate developer, is
offering to refurbish and furnish a 12-unit
property he owns to provide homes for a group
of refugees.
This shouldn’t be an issue that falls to the
government beyond the security of making
sure the refugees, are just that, refugees and
not sleeper cells for foreign terrorists.
Look to the news and you will see stories
about individuals reaching out to help the
refugees and that is fantastic. It shows that, as
a country, we can come together and offer to
make a difference for these people.
Note that I said as a country we come
together, not as a country we are bound by a
decision made by elected officials about
something that goes far beyond the policy-
setting mandate of any government, in my
humble opinion.
There are groups that I would say should try
and help the refugees, but those are groups
with which people choose to be involved.
Churches (or other religious organizations) for
example would be ideal because, hopefully,
helping refugees or raising money for food
banks or aiding their community in any way
reflects the values and desires of the church
and its parishioners.
Governments, however, should focus on
using the money they collect from us to make
sure the services its people need are there.
I’m sure there are enough people out there
pointing out that there are homeless veterans
that need help and we should focus on them
instead of refugees, so I won’t go into that.
What I will go into is that, as a reporter, I sit
every year and listen to local municipal
councils try to balance the books and keep
their spending low.
Every year decisions are made about which
roads should be maintained or upgraded,
which servicing projects should be tackled and
which social services should be offered
throughout local communities.
Those same kinds of decisions have to be
made by Huron County Council and I bet that
$60,000 would go a long way to some project
that might be deferred due to a lack of funding.
Tax dollars are finite. The old adage of
getting blood from a stone isn’t wrong. The
county or the municipality or the federal
government can only take so much before
there isn’t any more to give.
Keep in mind, however, that I’m talking
about foreign aid and refugees here. I’m not
talking about boots-on-the-ground, stopping-
the-bad-guys military action.
As a nation, we have (maybe had, and
regaining it is a job for the current
government) a reputation for helping, but that
doesn’t mean throwing money at a problem.
We have a responsibility, as citizens of the
world, to stop evil when it rears its head.
We also have a responsibility, as citizens of
Canada, to put a roof over our own heads, food
in our stomachs, asphalt on our roads, bridges
over rivers and eventually put together a
balanced budget instead of the $3 billion
deficit that was recently announced at the
federal level.
I’m in favour of helping the refugees and
if some local group or individual decides
to start some kind of fundraiser to help out,
I encourage them to seek me out for a
donation.
I’m not in the position to offer lodging or
food, but if I were, I would like to believe I
would open my home to them.
I’m more than happy to be involved in an
effort to help those less fortunate. I’m
frustrated, however, when the decision is made
for me. I’m also frustrated when the dollars
that I pay to maintain the services provided to
me and my fellow Canadians are used to
support other nations and other peoples when
our own people aren’t supported enough.
Since I haven’t done this in awhile, I’ll end
things off here with a tip-of-the-hat to Morris-
Turnberry Council. Consistently, the council
challenges its ratepayers and its own council
members to support initiatives that seek
financial support from them.
That is how these requests should be
handled. Taxes aren’t collected to be given
away, but to maintain the infrastructure and
services for which a government is
responsible.
Denny
Scott
Denny’s Den
Go big or go home
I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was refreshing
last week to sit in Huron County Council
chambers and hear, for once, that bigger
isn’t better. The topic was emergency medical
services (EMS) and the decision was to not
create a far-flung, amalgamated monstrosity
handling our emergency services.
This goes back to a column I wrote just a few
weeks ago. It was in the Oct. 29 issue called
“Distancing Ourselves”.
The column dealt with two ideas. The first
was proportional representation – a concept
that would rob small ridings like Huron-Bruce
of an actual, local representative and the
second was the proposed dropping of the ward
system in Huron East, which would no doubt
leave less-populated parts of the municipality
like Brussels and Grey out in the cold while
more populated communities like Seaforth
dominate our council tables and boards.
As I stated in that column, people in this part
of the world are constantly alienated by how
far they are from the people who run their
lives – whether it be government bodies out of
touch with rural Ontario or agencies like the
Municipal Properties Assessment Corporation
(MPAC) closing a local office to “serve Huron
residents better” from London or Kitchener,
truly “local” entities are few and far between in
this neck of the woods.
So it astonishes me when people try to
further that alienation. Why welcome it when
it’s already happening well enough on its own?
So it was with satisfaction that I heard Perth
County’s Linda Rockwood express so many of
those concerns – such as a perceived loss of
control and identity – as reasons to not
amalgamate the Huron and Perth EMS
departments.
In her presentation to Huron County
Council, Rockwood likened the proposal to
municipal amalgamation, which, in the long
run, has cost small communities more despite
upper tiers of government promising the
opposite.
Rockwood stated that it is important that
Huron County maintain an identity in Huron
County and that if local services were to be
absorbed by Perth County, Huron County
people would feel as though they’ve lost local
control. While there may be efforts to make
sure that isn’t so, Huron County residents will
feel as though they’ve lost local control of
something as important as EMS. And, in many
ways, with something like EMS, if there’s a
perception, it becomes reality.
While everyone you talk to, if you ask them
individually, thinks control, services, you
name it, moving further away is bad, there
always seems to be people willing to do it.
So to those who looked into the
amalgamation of the two EMS departments, I
thank you. It may have taken a lot of time and
a lot of research, but you achieved what most
seem to realize after the fact, but fail to see in
the beginning. Bigger is not always better and
now, at least in the case of our local EMS
departments, we have the documentation to
prove it.
The scary thing is, however, is that it seemed
to be the dollars and cents that scared people
off of amalgamation. It was going to cost more
and it was going to require hiring more people,
but down later in the story (burying the lede as
we say in this business) was information that
an amalgamation would likely lead to
negatives that don’t show up on a bottom line
like loss of control and no improvement in
services and care for residents.
If it would have been cheaper to
amalgamate, I wonder where we’d be now.
Other Views
Youthful mythinformation
Helping refugees should be a choice