HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2009-11-19, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2009. PAGE 5.
Bonnie
Gropp
TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt
We might have known it would
eventually come to this. All that
furious, high-flown rhetoric about
carbon footprints, melting icecaps, clear-cut
rainforests, ozone-eating jet contrails, rising
oceans and falling aquifers – all that eco-
bombast had to, inevitably, shrink down to
something we could actually wrap our heads
around.
Or wrap around our heads. Toilet paper is
what I’m talking about, a commodity that
hasn’t been available to us for all that long.
Mention toilet paper 160 years ago and no
one would know what you were talking about.
But then in 1857 along came American Joseph
Gayetty offering ‘closet’ tissues sold in
separate sheets, 500 to a package.
He did not get rich. The public couldn’t see
the advantage over existing ‘tissue’ sources –
yesterday’s newspapers, old catalogues and
sundry flyers and posters which they could
hang in the outhouse for free.
Granted, they all contained printers’ ink
which smeared and stained but…who was
going to notice?
Twenty years later the Scott brothers from
New York opened a paper products factory in
Philadelphia. Business was okay, but the Scott
boys fantasized about a product that was both
indispensable and disposable – and utterly
unreusable.
You know where this is going, don’t you?
They came up with a product (actually they
ripped off a British inventor) that featured
flimsy, perforated sheets of paper dispensed on
a cardboard roll.
Toilet paper, aka Scott Tissue, was born.
Call me Marie Antoinette but I always
considered toilet paper to be one of the
pinnacles of modern civilization.
Not so, say the doomsayers. A task force of
U.S. environmental groups spearheaded by
Greenpeace is outing our use of toilet paper as
“a grave and gathering threat to life on Earth”.
They’re specifically taking aim at the
quilted, multi-ply, extra-soft stuff.
They claim that much-trumpeted ‘softness’
comes at the expense of the cream of our
Canadian forests. Apparently it’s extra-long
wood fibres in luxury toilet paper that gives it
that velvety feel – and those fibres, say the
environmentalists, are found almost
exclusively in our increasingly shrinking old
growth Canadian fir and spruce.
It’s time, they claim, for us to clench our
teeth and emulate the Europeans.
You’re familiar with European toilet paper?
Ah, I see by your winces and grimaces that
many of you are.
Euro TP varies greatly depending on exactly
where you are, but it’s never swell. In the
public loos of Britain it tends to be somewhat
greasy, distressingly tearable and occasionally
a touch preachy.
I remember staring at a piece of toilet paper
in the washroom of the British Museum. It
bore the legend:AND NOW, PLEASE
WASH YOUR HANDS.
It’s been a few years but when I was roaming
about over there decent toilet paper was a
subject of much discussion among tourists,
many of whom carried rolls of their own from
back home.
The best I ever found was in a hostel in
Copenhagen.
The worst: East Germany. I believe I still
carry the slivers.
Decent toilet paper was always a rarity in
Spain, France and Italy. In places like
Morocco and Egypt is was more than a rarity.
It was an unfounded rumour.
One thing to be said for lousy toilet paper:
it’s better than no paper at all.
Not surprisingly, the Greenpeace call for a
moratorium on super soft TP has been met
with howls of outrage from right wing
mossbacks south of the border.
“These are angry hippies,” snapped an
editorial writer in Investors Business Daily.
“They won’t be happy until they’ve dismantled
capitalist society and returned us all to the
Stone Age.”
Ah, yes … First they came for our
Charmin…
Who’d a thunk it could come to this – a
public firestorm over toilet paper? It’s pretty
hard to wax philosophic about something so
mundane, but Andy Rooney gave it a shot.
“I’ve noticed that Life is a lot like a roll of
toilet paper,” the 60 Minutes gnome once said.
“The closer you get to the end of it, the faster
it goes.”
That’s not bad, but my sweetie has a riddle
that’s better:
How many men does it take to change a roll
of toilet paper?
Nobody knows – it’s never happened.
Arthur
Black
Other Views
TP or not TP: that is the question
Premier Dalton McGuinty must be
wondering how he can recover from his
breathtaking plunge in the polls, but he
has a few things going for him.
The Liberal premier has fallen from seeming
assured of a third successive election victory
in 2011 to being in danger of losing
government, mainly because he failed to
prevent insiders living high on taxpayers’
money and will have an unprecedented deficit
this year of $24.7 billion.
He needs to switch voters’attention to other
issues and this will not be easy.
The abuse of public funds was so clear,
McGuinty would be wasting time trying to
convince voters he was not ultimately
responsible. The best he can hope for is those
who remember it will believe his new controls
will prevent it happening again.
He also will get a break, because all parties
when in government permitted such abuse,
although on a lesser scale, and many voters
have concluded this is what all politicians do.
McGuinty needs to continue insisting he is
not responsible for the economic recession,
which has some truth, because it is happening
elsewhere.
The big issue will be what he has done to
prevent it worsening and with luck he soon
may be able to point to examples where the
province’s investments saved jobs.
One issue with which McGuinty has to
come to grips is reducing the cost of the
public service and not merely promising to
review all its spending and consider forcing
civil servants to take days off without pay, as
New Democrat premier Bob Rae did in the
1990s.
The Liberal premier also may be able win
back some ground. He has had friendly
relations with public sector unions, because he
caved in to pay raises for them that were
generous on the eve of a recession.
The unions owe McGuinty and he would
score a coup if he could persuade them to give
back something substantial, and they might do
this, although it is a long shot, knowing the
alternative is an extreme-right Progressive
Conservative government that would not even
leave them with tea breaks.
McGuinty can promote himself also by
reminding of former Conservative premier
Mike Harris, who refused to speak to unions
and cut many public service jobs.
McGuinty barely needs to do this, because
Harris keeps returning to public view with his
support of the new, far-right Conservative
leader, Tim Hudak, and comments, and the
many letters in newspapers warning against
him.
McGuinty has been accused of dithering
when issues are contentious, but he could
counter this by pointing to his actions that
include refusing to fund more faith-based
schools, which offends many non-Christians,
and launching full-day kindergarten, despite
warnings it is too expensive.
McGuinty also has one topic on which he
can clearly differentiate himself from the
Conservatives. This is that he has brought in
far more laws to protect residents than any
other premier in history.
These include banning smoking in
workplaces, enclosed public places and cars in
which children are passengers, which will save
many lives.
McGuinty made Ontario the first province to
ban pitbulls and ordered elementary schools to
remove junk foods such as potato chips and
pop from vending machines and replace them
with healthier snacks.
He has required bars and liquor stores to
post signs warning pregnant women alcohol
can cause birth defects.
Students using school buses and infants in
car-seats are safer because of laws McGuinty
brought in and his latest bans drivers using
hand-held car phones except in emergencies.
McGuinty has never collected them in a
package and said this is what his party has
done that protects people, because he is
worried the Conservatives, who opposed
many, will accuse him of interfering in
people’s lives and creating a nanny state.
But the Liberal premier could fight an
election on the theme his party cares for
people and there might be a lot of grateful
votes out there for him.
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
Monday was not a great start to a week
in an already adolescent-angst-
riddled life.
Rather than a warm smile, it was a cold
shoulder she got from the cool dude who’d
flirted with her at the party on Saturday. She
forgot her English assignment, fell off the
pommel horse in gym in front of a group of
seniors, and discovered that her best friend
had been hanging out with her arch enemy.
Finally, the never-ending school day ended,
and she dashed home to closet herself in her
room with her true pal, the one in whom she
confided all her feelings, the one she could
trust to never willingly reveal her secrets, the
one who would never turn on her regardless of
how shocking or disturbing the stories she told.
It’s not an unusual day in the life of the
average teenage girl. In those confusing and
emotional years little dramas can take on
significant proportions. Every daughter feels it,
every mother remembers it.
And like the girl above, most young girls
find a way to get some of the frustration out, in
the pages of a journal.
Mine came to me when I was quite young.
Compact in size, vibrant in colour, my first
diary promised to hold my thoughts and deeds
in safe keeping, a small, not especially durable
lock and key, the guarantee.
The person who gave the gift to me, knew
me well enough to question how long my
dedication to this new hobby would last so
committed me to the one-year version.
However, what they didn’t know was that even
before, and for as long as I could remember,
writing had been my therapy, whether it was
scribbling banal poems, spewing vitriolic rants
or scrawling feelings into fiction.
So faithfully I filled my pages and the
following year was bequeathed a five-year
diary into which I jotted small missives,
dedicating the larger works to a notebook.
Those journals, while not to be so
melodramatic as to claim they saved my life,
certainly were therapeutic in those often
perplexing years.
I’m not sure when it stopped but I suspect the
reason was because I began writing for a
living. A friend bought me a journal a few
years ago, and the notion of going home and
laying out thoughts and words after doing it all
day had somehow lost its appeal.
But I have never lost my belief in the value
of keeping a journal. My younger daughter
filled dozens of them over her teenage years
and I took comfort in knowing there was a
place for her to unravel her thoughts and
emotions when she couldn’t share them with
anyone else.
I find solace between the pages of a book.
But I have also found comfort filling pages.
Writing about your opinions and feelings is an
outlet for your emotions. When you can’t find
satisfaction anywhere else, releasing them onto
paper provides an outlet for everything from
unrequited love to hostility.
All of the negativity simmering inside gets
out. There is no one to judge, no one to hear
and if you’d feel better, you can always burn it.
But while there are still those times, they are
fewer now I’m happy to say and as I’ve gotten
older there is a whole other value I see. It
brings to mind a friend, now gone, who kept a
journal throughout her entire life. It was a
resource and a memory keeper for dates and
details.
So I just may look again at that gift I
received. I can vent on this page. But there
have been some pretty special things in my
life, occasions and moments that I want not
just in the memory bank, but vivid. Describing
them in a journal will help me keep them that
way.
McGuinty seeks recover from plunge
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