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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2009-08-20, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 2009. PAGE 5. Bonnie Gropp TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt Iwas young, I was dumb. I was strolling down a dusty back lane in a small Spanish town and suddenly there it was before me – the perfect photo op. A Spanish campesino – a peasant – trundling toward me in an ancient cart with wooden wheels pulled by a burro. The driver, too, was ancient, stooped and ropey, with a face by Goya, baked by the Mediterranean sun to the colour of burnished mahogany. I raised my Nikon to focus… And he raised a calloused forefinger, waving it back and forth. I spoke no Spanish and he spoke no English, but the message was unmistakeable: No, tourist dork, you may not take my photograph. And I didn’t, because he was absolutely correct. The thrusting snout of my camera was a grotesque intrusion into his personal space and I had no right to impose it on him. I was thinking about that moment the other day as I sat at a sidewalk café, watching a Toyota sedan roll down the street with a huge tripod on its roof. The tripod carried a camera that slowly but constantly swivelled 360 degrees photographing everything in sight. Nobody complained. Nobody waved a cautionary forefinger. Hardly anybody noticed. Perhaps because it was old news by then. The media had been full of stories of how Google was engaged in a world-wide program to photograph and archive every street and byway of every major city on the planet. Idea being that eventually you and I can go to the Google Street View website and zero in on any address in the civilized world. Google cameras will take us to the city, the street, the address, the front door… …and anybody who should happen to be going in or out of that front door. Shouldn’t we be a little concerned about our privacy here? Google says tut-tut and pish. The company automatically blurs peoples’ faces and the licence plates of cars. Fine. But if your parole officer, knocking on your front door, happens to weigh 350 pounds, walk on a peg leg and drive an orange Ferrari, blurred faces and plates aren’t going to make recognition much of a chore. Michael Vaughan of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association thinks we ought to be very concerned. “You’re catching people coming out of abortion clinics and mental health clinics” he told a Times-Colonist reporter. “Someone who knows you could still identify you.” The British House of Lords thinks there’s cause for alarm too. Its peers recently released a report concluding that, thanks largely to the terrorism bogeyman, Britons now live under one of the most extensive and sophisticated surveillance systems in the world. Indeed. The U.K. has a government sanctioned snooping system that must make the Moscow Kremlin and the Chinese Politburo gnash their fangs in envy. There are some four million closed circuit TV cameras scanning the British populace around the clock. The House of Lords report warns that “pervasive and routine” electronic surveillance and the collection of personal information are almost taken for granted. And it’s a threat that’s most definitely new. The committee report calls the surveillance practices “one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the Second World War.” But you don’t have to go to Great Britain to earn space in the Facebook of The Man. I might as well be saying “cheese” when I line up to make a deposit at my bank because there’s a camera mounted on the wall behind every teller and they’re all aimed at me. Cameras also record my presence when I’m sitting in the hospital waiting room, strolling through a shopping mall, going to a hockey game, buying a tank of gas or just driving through an intersection. And nobody – including me – ever seems to object or complain. Not one of us raises an admonishing index finger. Maybe that’s why it happens. Because we no longer possess the simple courage of a Spanish peasant demanding to be treated with dignity by strangers. Away back in 1967 a writer by the name of Harry Kalven Jr. made a prediction. “By the year 2000,” wrote Kalven, “man’s technical inventiveness may, in terms of privacy, have turned the whole nation into the equivalent of an army barracks.” By the year 2000? Mister Kalven was jumping the gun a little. But not necessarily wrong. Arthur Black Other Views Big smile for big brother People tend to remember the old days as good, but praising Ontario’s longest- serving premier of recent decades, William Davis, on his 80th birthday as if he was Mother Theresa is a bit too forgiving. Davis was Progressive Conservative premier from 1971-85. Anyone surviving to such a ripe age deserves congratulations and even critics of Davis will recognize he had some worthwhile policies and qualities. But Davis is being described particularly as boldly introducing programs, being decent and civil even toward opponents and showing a sense of humour not seen much among current, more belligerent politicians. Only some of this is true. This reporter remembers interviewing Davis in 1970 when he was education minister. He pretended to have no idea premier John Robarts planned to announce his retirement next day and had no thought of running to succeed him. Both of us knew this reporter’s newspaper was already printing the news and Davis had spent years assembling a huge team to help him run. But his white lie was acceptable, because aspirants to succeed are seen as pushy if they talk openly of running before a premier declares he is leaving. Davis’s programs included far-sighted expansions of schools, universities and community colleges and extending provincial funding to the end of Roman Catholic high schools and he was praised for these. Davis also talked to union leaders, in contrast to some recent Conservatives, and required employers to deduct union dues from pay cheques and banned professional strikebreakers. But Davis often moved only after he lost majority government, which he did twice. A typical example was forcing seatbelts be worn in cars, which he announced before the 1975 election, put off after protests and revived only when the opposition parties were able to insist on it. The praise of Davis for extending funding to the end of Catholic high schools also did not did tell the whole story, which showed a tricky, even unscrupulous Davis. Before the 1971 election the Catholic hierarchy publicly asked the three major parties to support extending funding and the Liberals and New Democrats agreed. Davis waited until a few days before he called the election and announced he would not extend funding and Conservative strategists maintained privately this became the biggest issue in helping them win. Thirteen years later, as he was about to retire, Davis reversed and agreed to extend funding, mainly to repay Catholic leaders, who had kept their patience and continued to woo him. There were many occasions on which Davis was not as gentlemanly as he is now portrayed. One was when he won an election in the 1980s by labeling then Liberal leader, Stuart Smith, a psychiatrist, as “Dr. Negative,” because he suggested the Conservatives had allowed the Ontario economy to fall behind other provinces. This hit Davis where it hurt most, because his party’s proudest boast was it alone knew how to manage the economy, but most of Smith’s claims turned out to be accurate. Davis manipulated TV debates between leaders in elections, which voters grew to expect. In one, he refused to debate the leaders of the other parties at the same time, which has now become the normal format, fearing they would gang up on him. In another, Davis announced he had accepted an invitation to debate from a network run by a friendly Conservative, who then refused to produce programs jointly with rival networks, so no debate was held. Davis has become an immensely popular speaker at party events, particularly because he adds a touch of levity current Conservatives, weighed down by losing two successive elections, cannot muster. The former premier brings smiles with such one-liners as “A lot of people told me I wasn’t the world’s greatest lawyer – that’s why I went into politics.” And “If I had known how popular I was, I would have stayed on another 10 years.” But you would be jolly if you could get away with so much. Eric Dowd FFrroomm QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk Awareness comes slowly, a gradual easy return to reality and to the already awakened world around. The gentle dawning reveals sunlight sparkling through a space between drapery and wall. The soft stillness is broken not by the early bird’s melodic morning chorus, but by a sunup staccato rhythm of chirrups. The beautiful day has arrived, made more beautiful because it has done so without the irritating scream of an alarm. Eyelids have lifted only as the logical conclusion to a complete and satisfying night’s rest. There’s no magic number for the amount of sleep required by each person to feel on top of one’s game. But, of course, in life nothing is that simple. Studies suggest that healthy adults have a basal sleep need (the amount of sleep our bodies need on a regular basis for optimal performance) of seven to eight hours every night. What complicates this according to some experts is when you consider sleep debt, the lost hours accumulated over time. It seems that even if a person got that needed eight hours several nights, an unresolved sleep debt could be detrimental. My sleep debt must be huge. And I am among the increasing ranks of the working weary. An estimated 3.3 million Canadians are not getting enough sleep for a variety of reasons. Years of practice have shown me two things about my sleep needs. One I’m no early bird. My sleeps, as demonstrated during my vacation, are perfect if I hit the hay late and leave the worm to the other guys. However, the second point is that between down and out and rise and shine I must sleep eight hours. The effect otherwise isn’t pretty — a bleary-eyed, dragging bottom, fuzzy minded state of existence I struggle through armed with a strong black java. Sadly, it seems, with most days locked into a morning routine this is my state of being. Week mornings begin with an overwhelming desire to sleep. From feet to mind progress is ploddy as I work through a haze that’s hard to shake off. After progressing through the fog for the majority of the day, I finally start to feel myself revive in the early evening, just in time to wish I wouldn’t. The end result of all of this, obviously is that by the time I must lay me down to sleep, I am instead ready to rock and roll. Which I do for some time before finally dropping off. Through the night wakefulness will often plague me, either in fitful, restless sleep, or with a dreadful pre-dawn form of torture, where a flitting mind is too powerful for heavy lids and weary soul. If my recent vacation underlined any one clear factor about me as an individual, it’s that the 9-5 grind is not in sync with my personal time clock. Away from home without responsibility to anyone but myself, bedtime arrived when I was tired, typically much later than I crawl under covers in my normal routine. And only after at least a normally unimagined, typically impossible to achieve eight hours of complete sleep did I even think of crawling out the next morning. The wakefulness, all but disappeared. So it’s lovely on those days when I know no persistent shrilling will awaken me before I want to be. Sadly, they are few and far between, so guess it’s not likely I’ll be paying off that debt anytime soon. This icon not that perfect A debt to pay Letters Policy The Citizen welcomes letters to the editor. Letters must be signed and should include a daytime telephone number for the purpose of verification only. Letters that are not signed will not be printed. Submissions may be edited for length, clarity and content, using fair comment as our guideline. The Citizen reserves the right to refuse any letter on the basis of unfair bias, prejudice or inaccurate information. As well, letters can only be printed as space allows. Please keep your letters brief and concise.