HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2008-04-10, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, APRIL 10, 2008. PAGE 5.Bonnie
Gropp
TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt
Folks, this is scary
One Englishman is a story. Ten
Frenchmen is a story. One hundred
Germans is a story. One thousand
Indians is a story. Nothing ever happens in
Chile.
– Notice in London newsroom
This is an embarrassing admission to make
in the pages of a newspaper, but…I don’t
much follow the news anymore.
Well, correction: I don’t much follow the
electronic news – i.e. radio, TV. I still dip my
beak into the newspaper every day.
Why am I shunning news that comes over
the airwaves? Because listening to or watching
the news seems too much like sitting on a park
bench next to some flaming methamphetamine
addict who’s obsessed with disaster and won’t
stop jabbering about it.
Newscasts on my radio and TV strafe me
hour after hour and always on the hour with
late-breaking news of earthquakes, tsunamis,
fires, floods, insurrections and perturbations,
most of them occurring at least 5,000 miles
from my doorstep.
Yesterday, a news reader couldn’t wait to tell
me that an undisclosed number of unidentified
citizens had perished in the crash of a
passenger plane operated by a yet-to-be-
verified national airline at the airport in Osh,
Kyrgyzstan.
Here’s a news flash for the news announcer:
I’d be hard pressed to find Kyrgyzstan on the
world map, never mind the bustling metropolis
known as Osh.
Here’s another news flash: I don’t much care
about what happens there.
I don’t wish the paying customers of Air
Anonymous ill. It’s just that I can no longer
embrace in their entirety the misfortunes of
my planet. My arms won’t stretch that wide.
My compassion floppy disk is full.
Hell, even the local news is crammed with
house fires, holdups and homicides involving
strangers I don’t know and will never meet. All
of this might have greater relevance if I lived
in New Jersey – or even along the Jane-Finch
corridor.
But I live, as do most Canadians, in a rather
placid corner of a relatively Peaceable
Kingdom. It’s pretty quiet and unstrung where
I live – at least until someone turns on the
news.
I wonder, too, what profit there is in all the
bad news that’s foisted upon us? Not for the
purveyors of bad news – that’s obvious.
There’s an old saying in this business: ‘If it
bleeds, it leads.’ Conrad Black and Rupert
Murdoch didn’t make their bundles peddling
tales of rescued kittens and happy
Waltonesque homesteads.
But there’s a societal blowback to the All
Bad News All the Time phenomenon and
Robert Hawkins exemplifies it.
Hawkins? A forgettable loser. A druggie, a
school failure and a punk so lame he couldn’t
even hold down a job at a McDonald’s in
Omaha. Why, we wouldn’t know him at all if
he hadn’t put on that camouflage army
uniform, picked up an AK-47, strolled into
Westwood Mall in Omaha and blown away
eight shoppers he’d never even seen before.
It wasn’t his actions that made Robert
Hawkins a household name. It was the fact that
the media reported it. Hawkins may have been
dim, but he knew how to grab a headline. In
one of his last actions before he locked and
loaded he scrawled a suicide note which
concluded ‘Just think tho, I’m gonna be
___ing famous’
Sure enough. He started firing and the
camera crews and reporters were at the mall
before the blood was dry. Robert Hawkins
played those news pros like a ten penny
whistle. As one observer put it: “He knew he
could count on his enablers: The media.”
It didn’t have to be. Your lives and mine
were not enhanced by the sight of his face or
the reporting of his name on the six o’clock
news. Such details could have been withheld,
just as reporters routinely withhold the names
of rape victims or molested children.
Maybe such a voluntary action, opined
columnist Mona Charen, “would tell nuts and
loners they will no longer get the attention that
they crave through an act of mass murder.
Perhaps then we will deny oxygen to this
terrible fire.”
Maybe it would help snuff some other fires
too. A couple of years ago intelligence
authorities intercepted a letter from Ayman al-
Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s second-in-
command, addressed to the leader of al Qaida
in Iraq.
“Don’t forget,” wrote Zawahiri, “that half of
this battle is taking place in the battlefield of
the media.”
Put another way, the headlines generated by
pipe bombs and suicide bombers are worth
much more to terrorists than the paltry price of
the lives expended.
Back during the 60s, a seminal anti-war
poster became briefly famous. It was drawn by
a child and consisted of the words: ‘WHAT IF
THEY GAVE A WAR AND NOBODY
CAME?’
What would happen if a terrorist set off an
IED and nobody reported it?
Arthur
Black
Other Views Good news is no news
Unusual circumstances are combining
to give Premier Dalton McGuinty the
most comfortable ride of any Ontario
premier in three decades – sometimes he must
feel he is running the province from the back
seat of a Rolls Royce.
There also is not much sign of a bump in the
road or that the opposition parties will get the
same help they received from an unexpected
source the last time a premier was so
dominant.
McGuinty is able to relax, first, because the
main count against him. that he raised taxes
and broke promises, for which he was labeled
a “Fiberal,” has almost vanished since he won
a second majority government in October.
Other issues have taken over, particularly
McGuinty’s opposition in the election to
funding private faith-based schools, and this
slate is almost wiped clean.
Many are concerned at job losses, but the
Liberal premier has deflated this by investing
money to prop up some companies and
advising people not to panic. Big labour
unions in the public sector are not agitating,
because they have been given such huge pay
raises they almost are government allies.
McGuinty is winning a reputation for
standing up for Ontario against federal finance
minister Jim Flaherty on the complex issue of
which government has the more appropriate
tax polices, which many will simplify by
conceding the frail-looking McGuinty has
backbone.
McGuinty has been given a huge gift in the
Progressive Conservatives’ uncertainty over
leadership after John Tory led in the election
and failed to win a seat, which normally would
have sent a party scurrying for a successor.
The public has heard successful arguments
for keeping Tory, based more on faith than
reason, and opposing on the claim he is not up
to the job, none of which has exactly
weakened the Liberals.
The Conservatives for six months have had a
leader who has no seat in the legislature, the
only forum, apart from the TV debate between
leaders in elections, in which an opposition
leader can confront a premier face to face, ask
questions that embarrass, outshine by
comparison and be reported by news media
always watching.
The legislature is a theatre that inspires a
leader to do better and one deprived of it is like
an actor without a stage on which he can strut
his stuff.
Substitutes are not listened to as much and
one example is Conservative House leader
Bob Runciman, who made the best speech in
the legislature since the election, a useful
précis of Liberal defects. No newspaper in
Toronto published a word.
Tory is making statements outside the
legislature, but they basically have been
reactions to government, worth noting but not
introducing the new information media crave.
Conservative premier Mike Harris had
moments of almost unbridled power in the
1990s, but was always dogged by highly-vocal
groups, particularly unions, although when
asked if he noticed, he replied “I don’t do
unions.”
The last premier as comfortable as
McGuinty was Conservative William Davis in
the early 1970s, after he strolled to a huge
majority leading a party that already had been
in government three decades.
Some news media then declared they would
be the opposition and quickly unearthed cases
of ministers involved with land developments
that could have brought them huge profits and
government giving favours to businesses that
donated to the party and steering lucrative
contracts to its backroom advisers. This helped
prevent Davis winning majorities in his next
two elections.
The media can find such scandals now only
if they exist, of course, but they are nowhere
near as aggressive. The opposition parties
seemed to have a good issue going for them
with the discovery McGuinty lost $100
million investing in the U.S. sub-prime
mortgage fiasco, but most Toronto media
ignored it.
Two Toronto newspapers who normally
support the Conservatives now spend more
time sniping at Tory, because he is too
moderate, and the media do not appear about
to bring McGuinty’s bandwagon to an abrupt
stop.
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
‘A fter reading this e-mail, make a wish
and pass it on to five friends. Your
wish will come true today. You will
be amazed.’
Well, if my wish is to come true, then every
politician in this country will have a family
member in need of some form of health care
(nothing serious; it doesn’t need to be to get my
point across and I’m not quite that angry —
yet). We have all heard the horror stories of the
health care system in this province, believed
them and are genuinely concerned. But, let me
tell you, until you actually find yourself in the
middle of it you cannot truly fathom the morass
of frustration, fear, discomfort and confusion
that patients are forced to experience.
Easter Monday, my son broke his foot. Not a
great way to start a week, but he knows it’s not
the worst that life can throw either. He was
taken to hospital where he was tended to quckly,
but there was quite a wait to decide whether or
not he would need surgery. Add to this the fact
that we have raised a young man not
comfortable with pumping powerful
pharmaceuticals into his system, and this wait
was far from pleasant, despite excellent TLC
from staff.
Two days later and the orthopedic surgeon
had finally had a chance to look at his x-rays.
An appointment was scheduled for exactly one
week and a day after his mishap. His surgery
was set for the next afternoon.
That, of course, would be in a perfect world,
a place that most certainly doesn’t exist in a
modern health care facility. Emergency
surgeries backed everything up, but finally as
the evening approached, my son was next to go.
Until the doctor explained that he had to switch
him with another patient whose operation was
going to take considerably less time. It seems
they were not comfortable in OR with a room
being taken up for two hours.
Joshua had the option of going home and
coming back ‘sometime’or staying in the hopes
that there may still be an opportunity for the
surgery that night or that he could be first in the
morning. The carrot to be dangled in front of the
powers that be was that this fellow was taking
up a hospital bed so let’s get the surgery over
and move him out.
Keep in mind, of course, that in waiting for
this surgery there has also been no food or
drink. As well, family members have been
altering work and personal schedules to assist
and travelling back and forth only for nothing to
change.
It’s not the fault of doctors or nurses. They
are, despite the pressures, sympathetic and do
what they can to keep the mood light. The
doctor, in delivering his sorry update wore a
weary expression and seemed almost
embarrassed by the situation. But it doesn’t
alter the fact that this is scary. There are not
enough doctors, there are not enough nurses,
there are not enough beds. A nurse friend once
told me she has admitted patients to wards
where she knows there’s no staff working
because there’s nowhere else to put them.
Even day-to-day maintenance care is an issue.
I recently heard two stories from ‘orphan’
patients trying to get prescriptions for blood
pressure medication filled. There’s simply no
one to do it when they need it.
So it’s a mess alright. And folks, it’s only
going to get worse. We are an aging population.
Medical professionals are retiring at the same
time the majority of the population is going to
need more care. The health care situation may
be the biggest crisis out there and if
governments don’t see it that way and figure out
a way to fix it, well, I for one, am terrified.
McGuinty gets an easy ride
Don’t worry if a rival imitates you. As long
as he follows in your tracks he won’t pass
you.
– Unknown
Final Thought