HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2008-01-17, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, JANUARY 17, 2008. PAGE 5.
Bonnie
Gropp
TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt
Guided by the past
The year was 1967. The setting: a small
town in the Atlas Mountains of
Morocco. I was a young Canadian
hitchhiker and I was broke. Very.
I had a couple of travellers’ cheques in my
jeans but the villagers wouldn’t know a
traveler’s cheque from a hockey puck and the
Fast of Ramadan was on. The only bank in
town had been closed for three days and
looked to stay shut for at least another 24
hours.
I was down to my last Moroccan dirham,
which meant I didn’t have enough cash to
make a phone call, much less order a proper
meal.
Oh yeah…I was also hungry. Very.
I tracked down the cheapest, nastiest hole-
in-the-wall café I could find, ascertained that I
had just enough money for a bowl of the soup
of the day, then joined a chain of ragged,
slightly sinister-looking Arabs, all clad in
djellabahs.
I arrived at the soup cauldron at exactly the
same moment as another customer, a hooded
Moroccan of whose face all I could see was a
pair of glowering eyes over a hawk nose over
a bushy moustache.
Unaccountably (for I was very hungry and
not given to excessive displays of politeness) I
gestured for him to go ahead of me. Without a
word of thanks or acknowledgement he swept
in front of The Infidel, got his bowl of soup,
paid and disappeared out the door.
After I was served I reached into my pocket
to pay with my last bit of cash. The server
waved me off. “C’est bon,” he said. My soup
had been paid for.
By the surly, uncommunicative, sinister-
looking Moroccan stranger who I never saw
again.
It was only a passing gesture worth maybe
15 or 20 cents, but I haven’t forgotten it in 40
years. I like to think that random act of
kindness mellowed me some, perhaps even
made me a bit less of a jerk than I might have
turned out to be.
Random acts of kindness are like that – sort
of spiritual Canada Savings Bonds that pay off
premiums, unexpected and surprisingly rich,
‘way down the road.
Let’s face it: you and I personally are not
going to solve global warming, eradicate
AIDS, or set up a peace dove shuttle service
between Israel and Palestine.The world is full
of huge, intractable problems that bedevil far
finer minds than ours.
But it is also speckled with moments,
openings and opportunities to make some
small improvement in someone else’s life.
Take the Coffee Angel.
This is a woman, a divorced mother of two,
who lives in Toronto and likes her coffee
double-double with milk, not cream.
That is all we know about her. That is about
as much as we will ever know.
But one day, should you happen to be in a
Tim Hortons Drive-Thru, you might cruise up
to the take out window, pick up your order, and
be told by the Tim Horton’s cashier “That’s
okay, it’s been paid for.”
By the Coffee Angel.
It’s what she does. She drives up to the take-
out window, places her order for a double-
double with milk, motions with her head to the
vehicle behind her and tells the cashier quietly
“I’ll pay for whatever they’re having too.”
And she does. Whether it’s just coffee, a
sandwich, a bowl of soup or all three. Then she
drives away.
She repeats the exercise at irregular intervals
at Tim Hortons Drive-Thrus throughout the
city.
An enterprising Globe and Mail reporter
tracked her down and asked her why.
“Because it feels so good,” she says, “to do
something nice for someone else.”
Does she think it makes a difference?
“Hopefully it shocks them,” she says.
“Hopefully it injects some positive energy into
their day so they can feel better about
themselves. I know my kids and I sure do.”
Not surprisingly, they love her at Tim
Hortons.
“She brightens all our days,” says one
employee. “Sometimes she even starts a chain
reaction, with as many as five cars buying in
succession for all the people behind them.”
Does she make a difference? Reminds me of
the story of the cynic who came across a
simple soul, wandering along the seashore,
throwing starfish stranded by the outgoing tide
back into the water. The cynic snorted. Oil
slicks, sewage outfalls, unchecked pollution
from a thousand different sources and here is
one man on one beach in the whole world,
saving starfish one at a time.
“Do you think,” he sneered at the simple
soul, “that what you’re doing makes any
difference?”
And the simple soul replied: “It does to the
starfish.”
Arthur
Black
Ihave but one lamp by which my feet are
guided and that is the lamp of experience. I
know no way of judging of the future, but
by my past.
— Patrick Henry
If we have one advantage with age, it’s the
benefit of life’s education. The school of hard
knocks is one of the easiest to get into and it’s
definitely in each student’s best interests to pay
attention and learn from each experience.
I’ve just finished reading Eric Clapton’s
autobiography with mixed feelings. The
guitarist’s struggles with drug and alcohol
addiction are certainly no secret. But the abuse
he put his body through is shocking when laid
out in black and white.
He speaks irreverently of his failings, from
the arrogance with which he approached both
his career and his personal life to the callous
disregard he had for the feelings of others if
they stood in the way of that arrogance.
The story is one of extremes, simultaneously
depressing and inspirational. Clapton doesn’t
feign modesty about his talent, but does at
times approach the topic with a good deal of
self-deprecation. Though he seemed to want
only to settle down, he couldn’t find peace and
contentment on any level with any one thing.
“Bad choices were my specialty, and if
something honest and decent came along, I
would shun it or run the other way.”
At his worst, ‘Slowhand’ falls from music’s
godly status, to a feeling of worthlessness. On
more than one occasion he contemplated
taking his own life, and the only thing that
stopped him was the realization that if he were
dead, he wouldn’t be able to drink anymore.
Finally recognizing he was in serious trouble
he entered rehab for a second time in the 1980s
and found the spiritual and physical
contentment for which he’d been searching.
Clapton now sober is enjoying life with his
family and believing that he has more to do in
this life.
Facing our past can be difficult. Though
nothing like Clapton’s I know mine had its
moments. I made my share of mistakes and
caused a lot of unnecessary misery to people I
loved. I took chances that could have proved
costly and I did wrong things for all the wrong
reasons.
My only excuse can be that I was young.
And with that, burdened by a foolhardly
arrogance and naive cockiness.
The fact that the most impressionable time in
my life was marred by an extremely negative
occurrence, and that I experienced the loss of a
number of several strong influences in my life
during the already traumatic teens, can perhaps
be put down as some defence you’d think.
But in the years since, I’ve recognized that
there’s really no excuse for bad behaviour. The
reality is that there are people who survive
overwhelming hardship without turning it back
on society or themselves. They shovel through
the crap until the path is clear enough for them
to move on. It’s up to each person to respond
to a situation, to make the choice to win or
lose. If you choose the latter the only saving
grace is that you learn from the experience.
I know I did. Since my mid-20s I’ve become
a rather boring individual. I’m just your typical
law-abiding, straight arrow, who looks back on
a year of teenage rebellion for what it was,
stupid, but not pointless. While a part of me
would prefer to forget the me I was then,
another part is grateful for the experiences
because I wouldn’t be the me I am without
them.
Other Views Making a difference, a starfish at a time
It is not every day a government loses $100
million of taxpayers’money and says don’t
worry, it could be worse. But the Ontario
Liberals are doing this and getting away with
it.
Premier Dalton McGuinty and his
administration were revealed just before
Christmas to have lost the money because like
many others they invested in risky sub-prime
mortgages.
These were mortgages foisted by initially
low interest rates and high pressure selling on
house buyers in the United States, who could
not afford to keep them. They lost value when
house prices plunged.
The province’s loss has been one of the most
under-reported stories in years. Toronto
newspapers barely noted it, and then only on
their financial pages. But all residents will
have to pay for the loss.
It also is a sharp reminder that politicians
who boast of their prudence, and their
financial advisers, sometimes can be no
smarter than the average punter buying a few
penny stocks.
The government has never volunteered a
word about its loss. Banks, brokerages and
other institutions had been reporting huge
losses for several months and a reporter
naturally asked Finance Minister Dwight
Duncan if the province had lost.
Duncan then acknowledged Ontario would
be forced to “write down” the value of its
investment in the mortgages, a more palatable
term for admitting a loss, but had not yet
determined how much.
He shrugged it off, saying this would not
have a substantive impact on the province’s
finances.
The Progressive Conservative leader in the
legislature, Bob Runciman, asked next day
what the loss will be and Duncan insisted it
would be “under $100 million” and the
province invested “less than 10 per cent
of our cash holdings,” attempting to downplay
it.
To questions over several days the finance
minister said many private institutions,
including most of the big banks, had lost more.
When the Conservatives accused the province
of investing in little more than a lottery, he
retorted the former Conservative government
made similar investments.
The New Democrats had the affrontery to
ask if he had a plan to avoid losing on future
investments and Duncan exploded that the
NDP government between 1990-95 ran up
annual $10 billion spending deficits and
prompted several cuts in the province’s credit
rating. He said he would compare his party’s
record in managing money to the New
Democrats’ any day.
The minister offered no words of penitence
and his main theme seemed to be that the
province should be congratulating itself its
loss was not bigger.
McGuinty when questioned also took the
tack that hundreds and probably thousands of
companies who invested lost money. He said
the government’s experts on investing had
recommended other investments that were
profitable and in this case “did use good
judgment, but something happened they didn’t
anticipate.”
McGuinty at least offered a sort of apology,
although no specific new safeguards to
prevent future losses, by saying “we will do
our very best to ensure it does not happen
again.”
Both refused to order an investigation by the
auditor general, who has shown some
independence in assessing government
spending.
The government has not answered some key
concerns. A government should not be placing
hard-earned taxpayers’ money in risky
investments, although some private investors
are willing to take large risks in hopes of
windfall gains.
A steep decline in U.S. house prices had
been predicted in Canadian news media for at
least a year and no-one needed to have been a
financial expert to expect this.
The Ontario government should have sold
up and got out and let the private investors
hang in if they wanted.
Many senior executives in banks and other
financial institutions in the U.S. and Canada
also have been fired from their jobs because
they failed to protect investors from sub-prime
losses.
But those responsible for the loss to Ontario
taxpayers still sit in their cozy offices
around the legislature contemplating where
they will next misdirect taxpayers’ money.
Shouldn’t someone be made to pay a
penalty?
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
Liberals say what’s $100 million?
Final Thought
“Empty pockets never held anyone back.
Only empty heads and empty hearts can do
that.”
– Norman Vincent Peale