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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Brussels Post, 1980-07-30, Page 2rimaii—opw WEDNESDAY, JULY 30, 1980 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. ,,„.0•No o and when? BLUE RIBBON AIARD 1979 The old Brussels Continuation School 1=170.0Z r.,0,0112.10.0, 0,000,4,010,064 Sugar and spice By Bill Smiley How can we celebrate the beaver and the flag. While the rest of you were winging , mum_ ..ne country, smashing up and down the highways, belting about in a boat, or whining because you hadn't got the Monday off instead of the Tuesday, I, like a good citizen, stayed home and had sober thoughts on Dominion Day, Canada Day, or—the Firsts July, as we called it when I was a kid, I even put them down on paper. It's difficult to write something succinct, sincere, and sentimental when you have a lump in your eyes and tears in your throat. But I tried. Like most moribund Canadians, I -didn't run into the back yard and run the whatever-it-is up the flagpole. We don't have a flagpole. The nearest we come is a cedar post that holds one end of the, clothes-line, the other end of which is attached to a cedar tree. Nor did I' set off any fireworks. We have those practically every day around our house, and they don't cost a penny. What I did was slump before the slob machine and listen to a flood of flatulence from a posse of politicians who doggedly dragged out every old chestnut that had already been opened and exposed as wormy. Not only hope but anticipation of the future/My anticipations are a huge heating bill, higher taxes and worse arthritis. Our immense size. The Incredible Hulk? Our vast riches. Mostly owned by foreign companies. Our confidence in the future. Of the Canadian dollar? Our unity in by Keith Roulston The dog days of summer they call it. It's the time when the people in the news business tear their hair out when they look at a front page to be filled with interesting news or a 15 minute air time to be filled on television. There are days of the year when it's hard to decide just which of many news items should get top billing in the paper or on the radio or television news spots, but those times aren't in mid summer. The problem this time of the years is that whether the news is happening or not the newspapers must still publish and the every-hour-on- the-hour newscasts still get beamed out through the air. If nothing important is happening then something must be found to fill the space and time. The media cannot have a vac until. Unlike the entertainment side of the television that goes into reruns for the summer the news business can do reruns. It has to have fresh material and if it can't find something that deserves page one treatment, then something normally scheduled for page 10 will have to be elevated to the top spot and treated just like it was real news. Most of us get smart in the summer. We know there isn't much on during the entertainment hours of a television evening so we turn off the set and go to the garden or the beach or a drive-in movie. But when the news' hour comes around we still tune in, determined to keep up with the world, diversity. Albertans letting us freeze and Quebecois letting us do it in the dark? And so on and on and on. It was so moving that 'I had to go to the bathroom.- Especially when the• CBC types involved in reporting the whole dump job kept telling us that it was just peachy- dandy that we now had an official national anthem, 0 Canada. When I heard this, I felt a real surge of something. I can't describe it in a family journal. What do they think the organ has been playing at hockey games for years, while the players slouched around at the blue line, scratched their jocks, chewed gum, and looked bored. What do they think the kids in my classroom have done every morning for the past few years, just before the principal's announcements that we - beat Hayfork Centre yesterday in basketball, and that 'the Christian:Moslem Fellowship Group is meeting at 4:05 beneath any cars left in the parking lot, and then says, "Please rise for our national anthem ." ? I'll tell you what happens. A doleful dirge which even the' kids know is 0 Canada comes over the P.A. system. We all respond. I stand like a guardsman, chin in, chest out, 'ollow back, thumbs aligned with the seams of my trousers. Encouraged by my stance, the kids also eagerly respond to the stirring tune and inspired lyrics that fill them with pride, hope, confidence and such. even if in the summer the world is barely turning. Frankly, I think we'd be wise these days if we-ignored the news side of things the way. we do the entertainment. There are some weird things happening these days that we'd be better either not listening,to at all, or taking with a large grain of salt. One of the big news happening these days of course is the Olympic games in Moscow. We're boycotting the games of course but that hasn't stopped our newsmen from going there. We're getting daily reports about how had things are. The government organizers, we're told, aren't allowing the ordinary people of the Soviet Union to see things like the Olympic flags being raised in place of national flags by many countries as a protest against the Ruisian invasion of Afghanistan. The government is doing this and doing that all in the name of propaganda. I'm sure the Soviet government is pushing as much propaganda as it can at its own people and visitors during the Olympics. But propaganda can come from more than one side: Every time some' of our sporting teams go to Moscow they come back talking abput rooms being bugged and poor living conditions and a hundred other complaints. These remarks always get played up in our media here in North America as evidence of how horrible life is One knocks her entire math set to the floor, stoops to pick it up, and is aided by classmates who kick calculator, set squares and compass in all directions. Another, lost in a world of his own, sits silently until the 4th bar, then leaps to his feet and begins to disco. A third rises with the speed of an anaconda emerging from a deep freeze, leans on the window-sill and watches the dog across the street doing his business. A fourth is back down at her desk and scratching obscenities on it before we hit the second, "We, stand on guard . " For. at least: a decade, our Olympic athletes have stood, hand on heart, listening to what they thought was our national anthem. Tears have flowed freely over that repetitive song, written about a hundred years ago by a couple of guys nobody ever heard of, but who weren't Rodgers and Hammerstein. Now, by an act of parliament, to which all parties‘agreed, because it didn't involve the building of a new post office, the ' paving of some highways, the funding of some losing industry, or the' cutting down of some trees to make' a new national parking lot, we have an Official National Anthem. It figures. We don't move too fast in Canada, but we move. It took us only 100 years to beget a national flag. It is a maple leaf, a piece of foliage remarkable by its absence in about 95 per cent of the country. Our national emblem is the beaver, a in the Communist world and how lucky Nye are to live'in North America. Well I'm happy to live in North America and dislike the Soviet way of doing things but I'm not too darned sure what to believe when I read it anymore. I mean whenever people travel in a foreign country they will find things that are diffIrent than they ate used to. It's easy to jump to conclusions, especially when you aren't enamoured. of the government of that country in the first place. But how accurate 'are those con- -elusions? I'm afraid I don't put much stock in all the talk coming from the media about the Moscow games. I just keep thinking about what drivel the Soviet people are being fed about us in their media these days and thinking, that if they can be getting a false picture so may we. Closer to home we have the American political scene, one of the few really newsworthy events ,happening in the dog days of July. Soon the American people will be having to make a choice on who will lead the country in the next four years, a choice that because of the power of the U.S. in the world, will effect all of us everywhere. That choice should be made on fact but what chance is there that it will be. For people to make a wise decision they must have all the necessary information. But in large rat which specializes in cutting down trees, building dams. , which flood farmers' fields, and doing nothing whatever for anybody except other beavers. Don't get me' wrong. I'm not being cynical. I think the beaver is a fine animal, if yowlike fat rats. Some of my best friends are beavers. I love our flag, too.. Every time I see a • Canadian flag that has been out; in the weather for a week, something sweeps thiough me—like a desire to mop up the kitchen counter. And I love that song. I must admit I had a certain leaning toward the other old one—the Maypull Lee, .that we all learned' in public school. The second line goes: , "Fouremblumdeer." But it's long gone and I doubt if there are many Canadians '- ,who would remember,- or dare, to sing, "Wolfe, the dauntless hero came... " What the heck. We can always depend on our money. I just checked my wallet. Sure enough, there was the Queen, looking not a day over twenty. But what's this? Horrors? On a ten dollar bill was John A., looking as though he'd never had anything but a Canada Dry in his life. Even worse, on a fiver was Sir Wilfrid. Laurier, looking like Pierre Trudeau without been through Margaret. And the whole wallet would have bought me a box of strawberries, a quart of rye, and a gallon of maple syrup. Oh Canada! the U.S. at present there seems to be a lot of opinion and very little information. The media speculates. about Ronald Reagan's age Can he last a term? How about his past right-wing activities? How about his _ record in California when he was governor? We get opinions everywhere the camera turns, not real facts. On the other side we see the ridiculous side show of the investigation into the activities of Billy Carter, the President's idiot brother. We hear that people in the Democratic party are thinking of a "dump Carter" movement at the Democratic convention. We hear people comparing the incident with Watergate. You don't know whether to laugh or cry. In a democracy the media has one of the most important roles. It must provide the information the public needs to make the right decisions. Just as we must have a good education system to provide people with the basic knowledge -they need to function in democracy, we murst have a good communication system to keep up•the on going education of the populace. Unfortunately, too often the communica- tion. we get is distorted. It's like looking in one of those fun-house mirrors that makes tall thin people look short and fat: it may be good for a laugh but you wouldn't want to order a suit tosed on the picture the mirror gives you. Behind the scenes The news througA a fun house mirror