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The Brussels Post, 1979-07-25, Page 2WEDNESDAY, JULY 25, 1979 1111UUL lS ONTARIO. 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 e A Subscriptions (in advance) Canada $10.00 a Year. Others $20.00 a Year. Single Copies 25 cents each. 111111MAKII/440 1072 Sugar and spice 4Brussels Post The jungle must go By Bill Smiley Enjoy, enjoy It's not every area that can boast such a viable form of entertainment as live theatre but residents of Huron County are fortunate enough to have three theatres within a close driving range. Two of the theatres, the Blyth Summer Festival and the Huron Country Playhouse in Grand Bend are right in Huron County and they provide different options of theatre. The Blyth Summer Festival is a showcase for talented Canadian writers to show what they can do and for talented Canadian actors to put life and meaning into those Canadian plays. The Huron Country Playhouse on the other hand gives one the opportunity to see well-known stage plays, some of which have been made into movies,and not even have to leave this county to do it. And then there's the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, not too far away in Perth county, for those who enjoy watching the plays of the Bard performed right in front of them. Having three live theatres so close at hand is a real treat, especially in a rural area, and one should be thankful that they are here and that people put so much work into making them go. The theatres are here for your entertainment and they deserve your support. Advertising is accepted on the condition that in the event of a typographical error the advertising space occupied by the erroneous item, together with reasonable allowance for signature, will not be charged for but the balance of the advertisement will be paid for at the applicable rate. While every effort will be made to insure they are handled with care, the publishers cannot be responsible for the return of unsolicited 'manuscripts or photos. For weeks I'd been telling her. I said, "The jungle is coming in on us. I'm not kidding. It's a bloody jungle out there, and it's going to get us," She thought I was hallucinating again. Jungle. Creeping in. Rubbish. And then I took her out and showed her. She hadn't taken a good tour of the estate for a couple of years. And what she saw shook her. "You're right. It is a jungle." A few years ago we had a kaleidoscope of colour out there. Now it's almost solid green, relentlessly creeping in from all sides. We had two rose beds. We had actually planted some roses in them, and some of the roses actually grew. Peace roses. Dypso- maniac roses. Red roses. As soon as they bloomed, I'd cut them, put them in a vase, and we'd sit around looking at them as though we'd borne children. I cut them back dutifully, piled dirt around, them in the fall, and a couple even bloomed the second year. The roses were planted cheek-by-jowl with a fine healthy row of peonies that produced almost obscenely. The second year of the roses, the peonies were a little sick. The third year they were definitely ailing.. This year that particular flower bed has produced two peonies, three rosebuds, two elm trees about eight feet high, a healthy young maple and enough hay to feed a herd of cows. The jungle. Our other rosebed was somewhat of a failure from the beginning, despite all the fertilizing and fussing. Therefore, when a couple of acorns the squirrels had missed sprouted, I thought, "Why not? It'll add a nice touch of green." Almost overnight it seems, those acorns have grown to sawlog dimensions. First few years here we had tiger lilies and all kinds of other exotics. This year we had tigers. You could see them sitting there in the jungle at night, peering with yellow eyes. Some people might say they were cats. I know they were tigers. A few years ago we had brown-eyed daisies galore. This year we had brown-eyed children galore, slashing and galloping through the jungle that once was brown- eyed4laisies. Even the woodpiles are cree ping closer. At first they were orderly woodpiles, in their place, ready to be thrown into the cellar, adding rather a quaint touch of rusticity to the backyard, as it once was. They we started piling fallen branches on top of them. Now they are horrible woodpiles, crooked and beckoning, fes- tooned by vines and other creeping green things. Used to be a fine young spruce growing near the garage. Top of it would have made a nice Christmas tree. It's grown so fast in fifteen years that it's a hazard to low-flying airplanes. We have squirrels so big and so bold they'll jump up on the picnic table and snatch the second half of your peanut-butter- and-honey sandwich without so much as a "Do you mind?" We have robins who pull out worms as big as rattlesnakes and then have to surrender ' them to grackles as big as seagulls, strutting about the clearing in the jungle in that ugly, pigeon-toed gait of their`. Bees as big as beavers buzz around our beer bottles. Huge black ants hoist themselves up the hair on my legs, spit in my eye, and waltz off to attack a starling. Every day we move our lawn chairs a little closer to the back door. Out front, our mighty oak grows ever greater, peers in windows, rubs his nose against panes, chuckles with amusement, gives the brick a smack with one of his huge hands, and goes back to waiting for the next north wind, so that he can drop a dead branch across our TV cable wire. Up the back of the house crawls a great green vine, with tentacles like those of a giant squid, slowly, carefully, and with super-human skill pulling bricks loose, one by one. Every so often it starts to die, and I watch with glee and hope. But no, fresh green tendrils sprout, every one of them a potential brick puller. We hack, we chop, we slash. To no avail. Everywhere the trees, the weeds, the vines, crawl toward and over the. house, insidious. malicious, whispering to each other their. eventual triumph. In this steady, frightening encroachment of jungle, there is only one bright spot, one thing that won't grow. That's the privet hedge bet ween the yard and the street, that gives us about as much privacy as a stripper at a medical convention. Planted at great expense, trimmed with decreasing regularity because there's noth- ing to trim, it looks like a kid who's been in a fight and had a couple of front teeth knocked out. That's the good part. Down at the other end, where the snowplow man dumps forty- eight tons a year, it resembles a pygmy with a bad case of malnutrition. That's the way we plan to go, when the jungle forces us to flee . Straight out through one of the ga ps in the hedge pushing the grand piano in front of us. Behind the scenes by Keith Roulston The good people of Canada They say there are two ways of looking at a half glass of water. The optimist will say it's half full. The pessimist will say it's half empty. Much the same analogy can apply these days to the Vietnamese boat people situation. You can take your choice whether you choose to see the good things about mankind that have been brought out by the crisis, or the bad. The good and bad start right here at home. A Toronto newspaper last week visited a small town northwest of the city and talked to people along main street about their feelings about the boat people situation and Canada's part in it all. The reaction to the call of some Canadians to put forward a tremendous rescue effort was almost totally negative. Some people said they weren't really refugees at all. Others said it was up to others, not us to do something. Nearly everyone was against the government's policy to bring as many of the boat people here as possible. They nearly all made the same claim: we should look after our own people first and now with unemployment so high was no time to be bleeding hearts. The exceptions, the people in favour of Canada doing something to help, were nearly all inimigrants themselves. People who have. found Canada a place to escape the inequities and terror Of other parts of the world. These people feel the oppor- tunities should be given to others in trouble. I'd like to think that our own towns here in Huron county are different than that town. Unfortunately, I'm sure that a visiting reporter could find plenty of negativism here too. And it isn't limited to small towns by any means. Perhaps the most startling commentary on the bigotry under the surface in Canada came in Toronto where a Liberal MP held a press conference to urge the government to increase its quota of refugees and received one congratulatory telegram, one abusive phone call and two death threats. When the government did announce it would up its quota of refugees a Conserv- ative MP in Toronto received 24 calls, all against the decision and many abusive and racist. One letter to the editor I read, suggested the whole boat people situation was just a plan by the Chinese and Vietnamese to spread oriental influence throughout the World. How very, very sad! But it's the positive side to the situation that I find more important. That is the tremendous response ordinary Canadians have made to helping save boat people. A Meeting was called by the Mayor of Ottawa for people interested in helping the boat people and more than 2000 people turned out. I'll bet it's a long time since there were that many people at any other meeting called by the mayor. Ottawa, Calgary, Vancouver have all been outdoing each other in pledging to take refugees. (Not Toronto you'll note.) People in small towns all over Canada have been organizing, raising money and bring- ing in refugee families. The churches have been in the forefront of the activity, proving they are still an important moral force in our society. (This though many of the staunchest opponents of the rescue effort have been churchgoers). Former prime minister Trudeau has criticized the government for adopting a matching policy whereby it will support one refugee family for every one on a private sponsorship. He says the whole thing should be done by the government. I think the government is right. Canadians need the challenge. Far better to have this rescue mission led by the ordinary people than just another government program. There will be more support for the refugees if the strength of the grassroots, not the top. And at a time when Canadians had become frighteningly self-centred, 'it 'has been ,a relief to see the hearty response by so many. The good and bad of course is evident elsewhere. The bad inherent in mankind is shown by the Vietnamese authorities who, though they claimed to be the persecuted during the long Vietnamese war, now are anxious to persecute others. But the will of mankind to survive, the bravery of a people is shown by the willingness of the boat people to risk their lives against-all odds to take the little boats and sail away from their homeland hoping to find a new life. The goodness of the people is also shown by the fact that the boat people who have come here have worked so hard to quickly be self sufficient. And the goodness has been shown in the number of people who have come to Canada in the last 30 years who quietly went out and sponsored a family, not to be heroic but simply to repay the debt they felt they had for finding a new life here. My own regard for American singer Joan Baez has grown tremendously through all this. She was an early opponent of the U:S. involvement, in Vietnam, long before it became fashionable to protest the war. But now she has come out strongly against the Vietnamese government for its inhuman actions while many of the others of the protest years are still so hung up in their left-Wing politics that they call her a traitor. They are the traitors to mankind just as the bigots who don't want Canada to get involved are traitors to their own religion and the spirit of their country, Joan Baez is symbol of the good, like the thousands of Canadians working to save the boat people. Thank God for the good.