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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2009-03-05, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, MARCH 5, 2009. PAGE 5. Bonnie Gropp TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt The best for them Here’s a fun experiment: draw a human face. Nothing fancy – just take a pencil and draw a circle on a piece of paper. Now add two dots for the eyes. Draw a smaller blob below them for the nose. Doesn’t tell you much of anything so far, right? Your subject could be loon-like hysterical or wrist-slashing suicidal. Ticked off or blissed out. There are no clues in that half-finished face. Now take your pencil and draw a line for the mouth. Presto, you’ve got attitude. If you draw the mouth like a hammock with the corners riding high, you’ve got a happy camper. Invert it and you’ve created Gloomy Gus. All with one simple line. At about this point you are saying approximately, “Yeah, so? It’s a dumb cartoon. What’s this got to do with real life?” Everything. You want to elevate your mood and feel better – right this minute? Forget pills. Forget the double Drambuie. You don’t need a hit from The Comedy Network. All you have to do is lift the corners of your mouth and smile. Fake it if you have to. Take that pencil you drew the face with and stick it crossways in your mouth. It works. In 1983, researchers at the University of Washington instructed half a dozen subjects to jam a pencil between their teeth, then showed them a series of cartoons. They showed the same cartoons to six subjects who weren’t required to ‘smile’. The pencil-clenchers rated the cartoons ‘significantly funnier’ than the control group did. It’s powerful medicine, the smile. So powerful that it’s common to cultures around the world, primitive and sophisticated alike. People everywhere smile when they’re happy and frown when they’re not. Charles Darwin, on his voyages aboard the Beagle, remarked on this cross-cultural phenomenon nearly 200 years ago. Best of all, The Smile is aide de camp to The Laugh, which is even more powerful medicine. Researchers at the University of Maryland Medical Centre have been analyzing the therapeutic clout of simple laughter. They came to the conclusion that laughing: • increases blood flow through the arteries; • lowers blood sugar levels among diabetics, • eases pain (because it relaxes muscles); • regulates the immune system and… • even burns calories. Wait a minute. You can lose weight by laughing? Absolutely. Researchers at Vanderbilt University calculate that 15 minutes of hearty laughter burns about 40 calories. Do it every day and you’ll drop four pounds over the next year. And you thought watching the Parliamentary Channel was a waste of time. Is there a downside to laughter? Not really. “A tranquilizer with no side effects” Arnold Glasow called it. Laughter is also an unparalleled tool of diplomacy. It is very hard to be angry with someone while you’re laughing at them. At the same time it’s an incredibly powerful skewering device to wield against your enemies. Adversaries can steel themselves for sneers, curses, growls, snarls, slanders, and all manner of verbal abuse. But someone laughing at them? There’s no defence against that. And it starts with a smile. A simple flex of the lip muscles. Smile enough and your enemies will melt away before you have to bring out the heavy ordinance. At worst, you’ll confound them for life. Or even longer. Lisa Gherardini’s smile has been confounding viewers for more than 500 years. Lisa Gherardini? Wife of a 16th century Florentine silk merchant. We’d never have heard of her if her smile hadn’t caught the eye of an artist named da Vinci about the time another young Italian named Columbus was setting sail from Spain to see what was over the horizon.. So smile. Worked for Mona Lisa. It’ll work for you. Arthur Black Other Views Smile! It is good for you! Aby-election in cottage country northeast of Toronto a decade and a half ago started a revival of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Party that quickly put it in government. Could another there on Thursday (March 5) do the same? The influential by-election was in 1994 in a riding then called Victoria-Haliburton. Mike Harris had been Conservative leader for four years, but still was little known. Harris had begun promoting policies with an underlying theme of cutting government and taxes under the title, The Common Sense Revolution, but had not caught much public attention. The competing opposition party, the Liberals under Lyn McLeod, held a substantial lead in polls. The New Democrats, who had won government and the riding in the 1990 general election, were not in the race, particularly because they had piled up $10 billion-a-year annual deficits that were held against them. The Conservatives, who had not emerged as quite the aggressive, far right party they were to become under Harris, took the offensive by saying their own first priority was to create jobs, while the Liberals’ was to provide gay and lesbian couples with the same family benefits as heterosexual couples. This was a distortion, because McLeod had supported extending family and survivor benefits to same-sex couples, but placed this nowhere near the top of her professed goals and spent incomparably more time discussing jobs. Harris also declared Ontario had “too many from other countries coming here for a free ride” which also bent the truth, because immigrants generally have been as willing to work as those born here. Harris added, if he became premier, welfare recipients who “choose to stay at home and do nothing will get nothing,” which appealed to many who had to scratch out a living in a riding that lacks industries that provide reasonable incomes. The by-election was the most bitter in memory and the Conservatives won it comfortably, in terms of votes. It put Harris on the map, where he had not been before. A year later, Harris went on to sweep the province, particularly because of his promise to cut government and taxes, which most residents had been waiting to hear. He was helped, particularly among small-c conservatives, by his refusal to support spousal benefits for same-sex couples, which went along with his refusal to recognize same- sex marriages. Harris also won votes because he promised to force welfare recipients to work, which many felt logical, although it is less easily put into practice. The legislature’s best phrase-maker, Liberal Sean Conway, who had shied from attempts to persuade him to run for leader of his party, announced “the politics of prejudice” had taken hold and later he would run for Liberal leader solely to eliminate Harris, although he did not follow through. Not much of what Harris campaigned on is of help to Conservative leader John Tory, if he wins the by-election in approximately the same riding, now re-named Haliburton- Kawartha Lakes-Brock. Same-sex benefits are no longer an issue. The courts have ruled that refusing to recognize same-sex marriage and provide benefits are discriminatory and Tory and his current party have gone along with this. Mainstream parties today would not single out immigrants as unwilling to work or argue many are on welfare because they choose to stay home, although they might press for policies to get more welfare recipients in jobs. Tory or whoever is Conservative leader will have to produce policies that appeal, but will be helped by the rapid deterioration of the economy and tendency to blame Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty for it or at least failing to act sooner. Tory would have to avoid the trap of advocating policies that hurt him, such as proposing to fund more faith-based schools, which destroyed any chance he had in the 2007 election. But for the Conservatives even to have a leader in the legislature at a time when a government is struggling would help make them a more acceptable alternative. Eric Dowd FFrroomm QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk They were the newsmakers in The Post and The Standard, their names gracing the pages week after week. Now for more than 20 years it has been their children and their grandchildren whose stories have found their way into the news published in The Citizen. They were and are the young people of our communities. And if there was ever a core group of our readership making repeated visits onto our pages it would be them. This struck me recently while perusing the archives for fodder for the weekly Looking Back. Happening upon a photo of one of my kids, I realized how often a school-aged youngster gets photographed for, or written about in, the local newspaper. They are there as members of sports teams, Guides or Scouts, public speaking winners, debaters and assorted other varied achievements. Then with high school taking them further afield we are less able to discover, or acknowledge their accomplishments, so their profile in the public eye tends to lessen. And it was this realization that came to mind as I sat in on the recent Accommodation Review Committee meeting. The concept being discussed by the ARC is to amalgamate Blyth, East Wawanosh, Turnberry and Wingham students under the roof of one ‘educational centre of excellence’. With the probability that at least one of these schools is destined for closure, proponents for the new facility are hoping that the Avon Maitland District School Boards in June will agree this is the best solution. Having been to the meetings and heard concerns and arguments, both pros and cons, I have a good understanding of the situation and the rationale behind the concept. Yet, having no child directly affected, my view is more of interested bystander. However, it has dawned on me that should the trustees agree with the committee’s idea, it will impact this newspaper. For instance, if we go back to the first discussions of amalgamation for our municipalities, there was a tongue-in-cheek hope from editorial staff that those in our readership area (Blyth, Brussels, Hullett, McKillop, Grey, Morris, East and West Wawanosh) would come together for our convenience. Such was not the case, of course as our convenience really didn’t, and shouldn’t count in the big picture. But we now find ourselves not only unable to cover all the councils that would take in our readership area, but attending meetings where discussion often has little to do with ‘local’ issues. Similarily, we currently try to cover the activities of five ‘local’ elementary schools, which includes Blyth and East Wawanosh, as well as Hullett, Brussels and Grey. We do not cover the events or activities at Wingham or Turnberry schools. Yet, should the school be built, we could hardly exclude those children from photos we take. Distance is going to play a factor as well. Unless the proposed school was built in Blyth, having our pulse on what is going on will be difficult, just as it happens with high schools. Also, when we find ourselves looking for that last minute front page picture on a busy Monday, we will no longer have the advantage of running a couple of blocks to get it. Obviously, like amalgamation before, this has nothing to do with the big picture. The board rightly so will be considering what is best for the students, for their education and their future. And should that be a new school, our best for them will be to see that those students continue to be our community’s newsmakers. By-election could influence again 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. I’ve never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is only a temporary situation. – Mike Todd Final Thought