HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Brussels Post, 1979-04-16, Page 2SNUCK LS
ONTARIO
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18, 1979
Serving Brussels and the surrounding community.
Published each Wednesday afternoon at. Brussels, Ontario
By McLean Bros. Publishers Limited
Evelyn Kennedy - Editor Pat Langlois - Advertising
Member Canadian Community Newspaper Association and
Ontario Weekly Newspaper Association
Subscriptions (in advance) Canada $10.00 a Yesr.
Others $20.00 a Year. Single Copies 25 cents each,
e4A
Here's our chance!
So, Brussels Ontario is getting some visitors from its sister city
Brussels, Belgium. What an opportunity for Brussels, Ontario to
promote itself I
While Brussels has been promoting itself as the prettiest village in
Ontario and the friendliest in Huron County this might provide an
excellent opportunity to prove it, as well as promoting international
relations.
The people from Brussels, Belgium will be taking back a piece of
Ontario history with them and we will be left with some information
about the place Brussels, Ontario was named after.
This is an excellent opportunity to exchange international views and
ideas and to show people just how friendly Brussels, Ontario can be.
Unique opportunites like this only come along once in a awhile and
give Bruseels the chance to prove that it is what it has been promoted
as:the prettiest and the friendliest.
Brussels, Ontario should make the most of that opportunity. Let's
show the people from Brussels, Belgium when they come just how
friendly we can be.
To the editor:
All tickets sold
The Wingham and District
Association for the Mentally
Retarded is pleased to an-
nounce that all 300 tickets of
their upcoming Travel Lot-
tery have been sold. The
fund-raising Committee
would like to thank everyone
who purchased a ticket, and
wish them the luck of the
draw. The first draw will be
held on Friday, April 27th at
12:00 noon at CKNX.
The proceeds of the lottery
will her used to start a fund
for the building of a new
workshop for handicapped
adults in the Wingham
District.
Wm. Stephenson
Fund-raising Chairman
Wingham, Ontario
Belgians will visit
Belgium celebrates this year the thousand
anniversary of its existence and the
Belgian Radio intends to associate your
town, Brussels, Ontario to the celebration
with a program supposed to be on the air in
(Continued on Page 19)
Numnrommain rommammomm ap Sugar and spice
Brussels Post By Bill Smiley
The cruellest month
"April is the cruellest month." So said
T,S. Eliot, a transplanted American who
spent most of his adult life working in a
bank and writing poetry in England.
As far as England goes, he was full of
baloney. April in England is delightful. It
rains only every second day, and the
countryside is green with grass and as
colourful as a patchwork quilt with flowers.
Now, if he'd been writing about Canada,
I'd agree. April is no bargain in these
parts. It's one of those nothing months,
like November.
You have staggered through the last of
the March blizzards. Barely. And suddenly
in theory, it's spring. In reality, it's the
dirty bottom end of winter, and the
weakest possible whisper of a hope for
summer.
April is mud, treacherous, piercing
winds that give you that racking cough you
avoided all winter, rusted fenders, chang-
ing snow tires, and surveying your
property and all the detritus deposited on it
and around it by the recent winter.
Just checked mine today. On the side
lawn there is a dirty brown hump that
resembles something from the pale olithic
age, eyeless, 'shapeless, but somehow
menacing. It is made up of one part ice,
two parts sand, and one part salt, all
courtesy of the snowplowing department.
This lump will have melted entirely by the
fourth of July and will leave a 30 square
foot patch of pure Sahara.
Scattered about the back porch are bits
and pieces and whole shingles, removed,
without charge, from the roof when the
man was knocking off the ice at the end of
January.
Mingling with the shingles are portions
of brick, knocked out of the wall by the man
who removed some of the shingles while he
was removing the ice.
Lying on the back porch itself is a pile of
glass, shattered from a storm window that
didn't quite get put on last November, and
was leaned carefully against the house to
wait for a nice day for installation. A
December wind caught that one.
Leaning limply is the storm door, which
will no longer close, because the ice got in
around it, and it was forced shut so many
times it lost its shape and all desire to keep
out the weather, and the mosquitoes, a
month from now, when it becomes a screen
door.
Lying in the back yard, leaning on one
elbow, is one of the great old cedar chairs,
looking as though it had just been mugged
in a back alley by a particularly vicious
gang of punks. Beside it stands the picnic
table, practically sway-backed from the
load of snow and ice it carried all winter.
But all is not drab. There's a nice touch
of color here and there. A green wine bottle
tossed over the fence by some passing
contributor. Here, frozen into the ice, a
newspaper wrapped in yellow cellophaie.
Over there, another paper, wrapped in
blue, emerges from its winter retreat. Both
bear December dates,
There's a frisky grey squirrel, scuttling
up the dead vines on the house, looking for
a soft spot to gnaw through and deposit her
kits in the attic . Chasing her is a dog,
probably the same one who left his calling
cards all over the back yard during the
winter, which are now melding nicely with
the mud and the stench of dead earth
coming back to life.
And the clothes-line is sagging like an
ancient stripper. The back stoop is just
that. Stooped from the ice falling off the
roof onto it.
All this is normal enough, a typical April
scene, and I'm not complaining. But
wouldn't it be nice if you got through one
April without your tail-pipe and muffler
suddenly starting to sound like a bull
breaking wind?
It's enough to break a man, were he not
a sturdy Canadian, who has been through
the same performance in the same arena
year after year.
But this April is going to be the one that
broke many a man stronger than I. On top
of all the usual crud of April, will be piled
the even cruddier crud of an election
campaign.
It won't be so bad for the kids, who
don 't mind April at all, as it gives them a
chance to get soaked to the knees and
covered in mud with some excuse. They
don't care about politicians.
Nor will it be too tough for the elderly,
who greet April with a kind of jaunty,
triumphant grin, because they've made it
through another bone-buster of a winter.
And they are perfectly aware that politic-
ians are pernicious, whatever their outer
coloring.
But for the honest, decent, middle-aged
Canadian, who sees no more difference
between the parties and their promises
than he does between his left hand and his
right, it's just too much.
April by itself is bad enough. But to go
through 30 days of it huddling under a
barrage of political poop is the utmost pits.
I agree with the poet. This April will indeed
be "the cruellest month."
Behind the scenes
by Keith Rouiston The seeds of destruction
They could hardly have foreseen it, I
guess, all those men of power of the young
a.- nation as they sat in Ottawa in 1873.
F-; ow could John A. MacDonald and his
cronies know that in an insignficant
skirmish in the new teritory they had
bought from the Hudson's Bay Company
thousands of miles away they were seeing
the seeds planted of future destruction for
their country.
The timing of C.B.C.`s major production
Riel could hardly have been better. The
two night drama about the happenings in
Manitoba in 1873 and Saskatchewan in
1885 has shown us that you can't turn your
back on history. It lives on, festering inside
people to re-emerge decades later with
saddening consequences.
There may have been trouble between
the French and English factions in Canada
anyway, but the roots of the current split
between the two sides can be traced to the
Riel rebellions and the consequences. As
Sir John says in the first episode of the Riel
programs, RieI and. Thomas Scott'(the man
be sentenced to death for treason) had
become symbols and symbols have a way
of living on long after people.
It is ironic that Sir J01113 A. MacDonald,
the man who dreamed of a nation from sea
to sea and who fought all the odds to bring
that dream about should also be respon.
sible for beginning us down the long road
that someday soon may see the destruction
of that land from sea to sea, If MacDonald
had been able to handle the crisis better,
perhaps we wouldn't be facing stieh a crisis
Way. If he had understood Rid better,
had realized he was right, our history
might have been changed.
The Riel rebellion shows the beginnings
of two of our greatest problems in Canada
today. On one hand, there was the French
versus English problem. Riel, Gabriel
Dumont and the rest of the Metis
population were part Indian but spoke
French. To the Quebecois they were
brothers and symbols of what the English
would do to French Canadians. To man in
English Canada they were a hindrance to
settling the West, a danger that another
Quebec could rise in the West to plague
them as the French province had in the
east.
But Riel in Manitoba was fighting not as
French against English but as a Westerner
fighting for a fair deal from easterners.
Riel and his people were simply ignored by
the new Canadian government in Ottawa
after the Hudson's Bay company sold the
territory. It was as if they didn't exist.
Their land was being given away to new
settlers from the east. A government
thousands of miles away simply couldn't
comprehend their problems. That too was
to become a famliar refrain throughout
Canadian history.
The tragedy, of course, is that we should
still be cursed by this happening of nearly a
centur .y ago. On one side we have the
Orange movement in Ontario which
insisted on vengeance for Seottwhom they
considered had been murdered. On the
other side nationalists in Quebec, fed by
the church, kept alive the ill feeling bred by
the treatment of Riel. It helped keep the
church in an important place in Quebec
society to be possessor of the nationalist
cause in Quebec. The one outlet for bright
young men in Quebec was the church and
so the young agressive nationalists turned
the church into a place where distrust of
the English, not love of one's brothers, was
fostered.
Meanwhile, across the border in Ontario
distrust of anything French or Catholic was
fostered by the Orange Order, a group that
for violence, disorder and bigotry could
only be compared to the Kitt Klux Klan in
the U.S. The Orangemen of the day were
not the rather tame Orangemen of our
lifetime but people who influenced elect-
ions through threats and very real violence.
They were powerful in Ambers and a foe
that a politician like MacDonald didn't
want to cross.
Times have changed. The power of the
Church in Quebec is no longer as
important, yet the distrust and the
nationalism the church promoted has
grown more powerful now in the hands of a
new generation of young activists. The
(Editor's Note: The following letter from
Brussels, Belgium was received by Reeve
Cal Krauter, Would anyone of Belgian
origin please contact Mr. Krauter?)
Dear Sir,
As you certainly know, the capital of
power of the Orange movement in the rest
of Canada has faded, but not the hate and
mistrust they instilled in a good portion of
the population.
Through it all comes the other great
tragedy of Canadian history: our lack of
cultural sovereignty. For most of the first
century of Canada's existence we ignored
our history, because we didn't promote
Canadian books and movies and television.
If we had had the Riel story told fairly to a
wide audience 50 years ago, perhaps
things would now be different,
The power of mass media to promote
understanding is great. We have seen that
in the U.S. with the Roots series. Hopefully
Riel will do that in Canada. Yet we have
waited for 100 years before people realized
that it is essential that we use that power to
try to promote understanding in this vast
country, to override the petty hatreds of
petty men isolated from the rest of the
country in little pockets here and there.
Now we have finally discovered the power
of the media for good, but it may be too late
to save the country.
To the editor: