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The Brussels Post, 1979-10-10, Page 2MUSK L 010.411100 WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 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 Year Others $20.00 a Year. Single Copies 25 cents each. BLUE RIBBON AWARD 1979 0":re 4Brussels Post Thanks for your co-operation A lot of the news that you see in your weekly paper is the result of community participation, That means that without your help this newspaper can't function, Operating a weekly newspaper means getting the local readership involved in what goes into that paper. Recently the. Brussels Post asked readers to phone in about any improvements they were making or had made to their homes. The idea behind that was to get a home improvement supplement to the paper that would have a local angle to it and hopefully in that way make the supplement more appealing to the reader. Two people from Brussels phoned in to tell the paper what they had been doing to their homes. The Post really appreciates help like this from its readers as it appreciates hearing about other news that you know about. Now the paper is asking for its readers' help once again in the preparation of a special Christmas cookbook and there could be more opportunities in the futUre for readers to participate in things like this, People have sometimes said there isn't enough Brussels (or other areas) news in the Post and that's where the responsibility of the reader comes in. If you know of somebody who has accomplished something noteworthy or if you know of somebody you think would make a good feature story for the paper, phone the Post. Recently the Post staff have noticed an increase in co-operation from readers and a better understanding of what the paper and its reporters and photographers can or can't do. We at the Brussels Post appreciate this and hope that the spirit of reader participation and co-operation will continue. Behind the scenes by Keith Roulston The most precious commodity Sugar and spice By Bill Smiley Rolling with the punches Some people, like me, believe in rolling with the punches, rather than sticking out our chins to show how many we can absorb. I have found that, in general, if I avoid trouble, trouble avoids me. If I know that some pain in the arm has been trying to get me on the phone, I also know immediately that he or she wants me to do something that I don't want to do. Therefore, I take the phone off the hook and leave it off until the pain has found some other sucker. Another invention of mine to stay out of trouble is patented as Nega-Prod. This is short for Negative Production. The theory is simple. The more you produce, the more problems you have, whether it is children, manufactured goods or farm products. The more children you have, the more emotional and economic problems you create for yourself. The more goods you produce, the more you have to hustle to find customers and meet payrolls. The more farm stuff you raise, whether it's beef or beans, the greater your chance of being caught in a glut on the market. Our great national railways caught on to this years ago. When they had lots of passengers, they had lots of problems. People wanted comfort, cleanliness, decent meals, and some assurance that they would get where they were going on time. There was much more money to be made, and fewer problems, by transporting wheat and lumber and cattle. So the railways began treating people like cattle. Passenger trains became un- comfortable and dirty. Quality of the food dropped like a stone. And they never arrived on time. Presto. End of prcblems. No more passengers. So the railways were able to cut off non-paying passenger lines, get rid of all those superfluous things like station agents and telegraphers and train conduct- ors, and concentrate on taking from one point to another things that paid their wa.3 and didn't talk back: newsprint, coal, oil, wheat. Perhaps this is the answer for our provincial governments, which are quickly and quietly building massive mountains of debt for future taxpayers. Perhaps they should just stop building highways, and repairing those already in existence. We'd all be sore as hell for a while, but as the roads got worse and worse, most of us would stop driving our cars. The governments would save millions of dollats now spent on highways, and they could fire two-thirds of the highway cops. I don't quite see how the governments could use Nega-Ptod to get out of the liquor business, which Certainly produces plenty of problems. The booze trade is so profitable that asking government to abandon it would be like asking a millionaire to forsake his country estate for a run-down farm. Perhaps if they had a Free Booze Day, once a week, every week, say on a Saturday, it would solve a number of problems. It would certainly reduce the surplus population. This, in turn, would cut down, drastically, the unemployment fig- ures. Should the provincial governments find that Nega-Prod is all I've suggested, some of it might spill over into the federal government, usually the last to catch on to what the country really needs. Instead of the manna and honey flowing from Ottawa in the form of baby bonuses and pensions, we might get some terse manifestoes: "People who have more than one and a half children will be sent to jail for foul years. Note: separate jails." "Persons who plan to live past 65 anc claim a pension will be subject to an oper. season each year, from October 1 tc Thanksgiving Day. Shotguns and bicycle chains only." "All veterans of all wars may claim participation by reason of insanity, and may apply to Ottawa for immediate euthenisation." These might seem slightly Draconian measures, but they sure would put an end to a lot of our problems and troubles. Think of what they would do for such sinful activities as sex, growing old, and hanging around the Legion Hall, playing checkers. But we must also think of the economic benefits. With a plug put into that river of paper money flowing from Ottawa, taxes would drop, inflation would vanish and undoubtedly, separatism would wither on the vine. People would be lined up six deep at the U.S. border trying to get across, and that would solve, in one swell foop, our unemployment difficulties. We could go back to being hewers of water and carriers of wood, which was our manifest destiny before the politicians got into the act. Fishermen or lumberjacks, in short, which most of the rest of the world thinks we are anyway. Nega-Prod may seem a bit lofty and abstract at first glance, but it works, I know from personal experience, Every time I try to make something, or fix something, it costs me a lot of money, and I get into a lot of trouble. So, I have a policy of never trying to fix something or make something, It's a lot less trouble to put up signs: "Beware of falling bricks; Not resporiiible for Slivers on picnic table." And so On. The price of gold has been setting record high prices lately but there is one commodity even more precious that's virtually ignored these days. It's called wisdom. Have you ever stopped to think you just don't hear much about wisdom any more? When was the last time you heard someone referred to as a wise man? A person might be called smart or he might be called well-educated but the word wise has virtually passed from our vocabulary. But wisdom is something quite different than intelligence. It is something that isn't as easily gained as education. Over the years I've met many intelligent people, people who could learn quickly, who could tell you how a computer worked or speak several languages but who were not wise. I've met many people with college educations who were anything but wise. Wisdom is something that many be obtained by someone without a high degree of education. Usually a wise person is intelligent but an intelligent person isn't necessarily wise. Perhaps there are several reasons for wisdom being almost ignored in our time. One reason is perhaps that wisdom is traditionally associated with life experience. Wise men (or women) have generally been thoughtof as old men. Wisdom came from taking a detached view of what was going on around you, of being able to see beyond ther particular to the general. Some people had this ability to see things over the long term better than others and as they grew older and experienced more, they became wiser. They knew that the problems of today were just part of a larger pattern. But today of course the emphasis is on youth, not age. We're concerned with chance with "progress". Old people aren't people to be held in high regard because of their accumulated knowledge of living. They are instead people with old fashioned ideas, people caught in a time warp, still living in an age before the latest technological changes. They're obsolete human beings. Similarly we don't hear much about wisdom because We're in a Scientific age. We like to be able to measure everything and you just can't measure vvisdom. It isn't an absolute, You can't teach wisdom in a university course and grade your students on how much they have learned, You can't have a specialist in wisdom with fancy degres and a guarantee he'll have a good income for the rest of his life by sharing his wisdom with others. Probably the downgrading of religion also has a lot to do With the fact wisdoni is seldom mentioned these days. Nearly all religions have a layge dose of wisdom involved. The Christian religion is based on long centuries of accumulated wisdom of both Christians and Jews.iThe far Eastern religions of India and China also depend on the musings of wise old men. They give an overview of life, life not bogge d down in the problems of day to day existence. Yet one of the greatest gaps in modern life is the lack of wisdom and the lack of respect for wisdom. We're assaulted with information on every subject under the sun. No generation of mankind has ever has access to as much knowledge. But what is knowledge in itself. Knowledge is only the raw material for us to make decision s and confronted with so much information, how do we choose? Well there are plenty of people willing to tell us. If we have more information than ever before, we also have more "experts" than ever before, In the newspaper or on television we have columnists ready to tell us how they think we should interpret the news. We have experts to tell us how to choose a house, how to decorate a house how to fix the plumbing, how to fix a car how to cook marvellous food even how to jazz up our sex lives. We have experts telling us this food is safe to eat only to heart some other expert telling us that it isn't. We have people telling us that we must make the water and air purer only to hear others tell us that if we do we'll have to take a reduction in our living standard, We have experts on everything. And in case all these experts just get you more mixed up, you can go to an expert psychiatrist to get you straightened out. But what we really need in this confusing world is not more information but more wisdom. Wel need wisdom to make sense out of our complicated modern world. We need people who can look beyond the day to day Worries and realize that iii 50 years from now most of our "problems" will only be trivia of history. We need people who can show us that the problems we are having are part of the eternal struggles of the human race. We need people to remind us that things run in cycles and that if we're Worried for instance abet too much freedom in sex today then likely 50 years from now the pendulum will likely go the opposite way to too much repression no matter what the "experts" try to tell us. We need wisdom to put all things in perspective. We need to restore wisdom to our vocabulary and venerate the Wise person again. It would add se Muth peace to our lives if we did,