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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 Write on 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.