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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Brussels Post, 1980-09-10, Page 2Serving Brussels and the surrounding community. Published each Wednesday afternoon at Brussels, Ontario By McLean Bros. Publishers. Limited Evelyn Kednedy - Editor Pat Langlois - Advertising Member Canadian Community Newspaper. Association and Ontario Weekly Newspaper Atsociation • PERS. ASSO Behind the scenes .. by Keith Ro OsIan The power. of .religion A lesson in Terry Canadian premiers struggling over changes in _Canada's Constitution could learn a lot about pulling this country together from Terry Fox. With his strength and determination to raise funds for cancer research, he started a cross'-country marathon which made people come closer together to help in his fight. At the same time, Terry's courage has provided Canadians with a real hero and now that he is in the hospital with that same old enemy of his, Canadians are pulling together as never before. Why should power-hungry premiers immediately .put up a fight against proposed changes in the Constitution. Nowhere and at no time in this country, no matter what the Constitution says, will all provinces be equal. Why should the different provinces threaten to separate from the country when Terry Fox has shown what it takes to get this country together? It takes determination (like this hero has) and a goqd cause, like the Canadian Cancer Society. Short Shots bi Evelyn Kennedy cautious about revealing their intentions , until they feel sure they are not talking to people who will be shocked. They may appeal to young p-:!ople, those who are fed up with menial jobs, no jobs and other dissidents. They insist "they want to preserve tradition and moral values" but their creed of white supremacy is anything but moral and their activities have no value when it leads to-the loss of human rights. The police at this time can do nothing to curb their activfties.X is luplo} decent right-think- ing Canadians to fail their attempts to corrupt others, for they are peddlers of racism and bigotry. The Wolf Cubs will start on Tuesday, September 16 at 7:00 p.m. in Brussels Public School. Boys between the ages of 8 to 11 are eligible to join this very worthwhile group. Next perhaps to the hydrogen bomb, there is no more powerful force in this world than religion. People believing in the power of their god have tremendous power in themselves. We've seen a recent example of that kind of power with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran last year by people doing the bidding of a religious leader who called on them to act in the name of Allah. People rose in, the millions to stand in front of the guns of the Shah with little but their faith to protect them. More recently we've seen the strikers in Poland carry pictures of Pope John-Paul as signs of their faith when they defied the military power of their country and the ominous power of the Soviet Union just across the border. The power of religion can be stirring and it can be frightening. 'The' Jonestown massacre in Guyana made all of us question just how people can be so brainwashed by someone as to take the lives of their children and themselves at 'the bidding of one man. • Religion can be a power for good or evil depending on the motive of those who use it. Ordinary people can be led by religious leaders to make the world a better place or bring a little of hell to earth. On one hand we see the Ayottolah Khomeini using the name of his god to hold power in just as dictatorial a way as the man he brought down. Those who disagree with his reign are likely to face a court run' by his followers where they will get a quick trial and be shot by a firing squad. And to this point anyway, the people of Iran are willing to believe this man is acting, on behalf of their god. • ANOTHER SIDE Yet there is another side to what religion can do. As an example of the , power of faith to make the world a better place there could be none better than Mother Theresa, the tiny woman who last year won , the Nobel Peace Prize. Here's the kind of determination and single-mindedness that could have been abused to provide a religious zealot. She went as a young nun from Europe to India, then, frustrated by the misery she saw in' the streets of Calcutta, left the relative comfort of the religious establishment and went out to help the poor of India. It would have been easy for her to throw up her hands and wonder just what one individual could do in the face of the thousands of people dying of disease and hunger. All of us face that same kind of helpless feelings looking at the prohleins of the world , today. But Mother Theresa decided to take things one step at a time. She couldn't try to help everyone but could help just one of these masses of poor and then go to help another, and so on and so on. Led by her faith and example, others followed. Today Mother Theresa attracts • people from around the world to work with her. Her one-woman crusade now is a large organization running orphanages and schools, providing food and medicine to the poor of the streets and giving people hope that they can not only live,,but live a better life. She, gives this help not as a way of buying the conversion of the people she serves but as ,an eximple of the love God has for man. She is no, weakling, even in her old age. A recent television documentary showed her as a woman of iron will. When 'a priest in charge of using some of the money she had received with her Nobel award showed her the houses, she told him to not make the houses so fancy so that more people could have some kind of habitation rather than a few having a really nice house. Many will likely find her a difficult person to work with. This kind of drive and stubborness could easily have ',been misdirected to build a personal empire but this tiny woman has little for herself. She had only her nun's habit and sleeps wherever there is a bed. There is a rebirth of relgion underway in North America these days. Unfortudately much of it seems to be directed by men and women who haven't been content to take their rewards in heaven for their work but want to live like movie stars here on earth. Huge empires have been built by these people who build Adagnificant churches, live in lavish mansions and travel around the world on• private jets. How much better it would be for the world and for common people themselves if they would take' as .their .example the people in the churches such as Mother Theresa. There are many such people in all denominations, people who work quietly and diligently to show the' love of their God, not pile up treasures on earth. How much power for good religion could have if we could put the millions of people to work supporting people like Mother Theresa. We saw over the weekend how a single individual, Terry Fox, •could bring out the best in people for a common cause. Would that others would follow the example. Sugar and spice Some reading material to enjoy ,By Bill Smiley Had time to do some reading this summer, though precious little, in between losing my wallet, entertaining my grandboys, being almost torn limb from limb by mosquitoes at a lake up north, and being thoroughly whipped at golf by some old guys who should be in nursing homes but can still hit the pill right up the middle. Highly recemmended is Farley Mowat's account of his personal World War II. Its title alone would have 'made me read it. It's called And No Birds Sang, borrowed with a light change from Keat's ballad. La Belle Dame Sans Merci. First part of the book is typical Mowat, very readable but merely an account of the training and bumbling experienced by the average Canadian soldier, and sprinkled with a few highly improbable incidents. But when Mowat gets his feet into the real war, the invasion of Sicily, the brutal fighting up through "sunny" Italy, where the men were half-frozen most of the time, he hits his stride, and I don't think he's ever written anything better. No one could have written this book who was not there. He conveys with chilling accuracy the exhaustion, the bitterness, the dogged courage, and, yes, the wry humor of the real fighting men in a campaign that had little of the drama and dash of the invasion of France. Just tough, bloody fighting over range after range of mountains against some of the toughest and best troops in the German army. ' Mowat seems to have put himself back into the mind and emotions of the young Canadian lieutenant he was then. He drops his posturing, and eloquently and movingly reveals the anger, the bewilderment, the savagery and the suffering of the Poor Bloody Infantry. Narrowly missing death himielf a number of times, he makes no effort to put himself in the hero's role, and indeed deprecates his own ineqtitude in many situation. Rather, he writes with an admiriration that is almost love, of his friends and fellow-soldiers and sufferers. He flares with rage at the in copetence and stupidity of senior officers, and in a couple of paragraphs strips all the silt form that pompous little idiot, darling of the newspapers, General Montgomery. It's an honest book, and a good read. It had a little special interest for me, because one of his friends, Major Alex Campbell, was in his unit, and died just as he would have wanted to, in a mad single-handed, hopeless charge against a German position. It could only be the same Alex Campbell I knew. We grew up in the same town, Perth, Ontario. Alex's father had been killed in the first World War. From the time he was a nipper, he wanted revenge. He joined the militia as soon as he was old enough, and by the time l was in high school, he had a commission. Alex used to help train our high school cadet corps, ferociously but with an underly- ing decency. A few years before, he had been a tiger on the line of the football team, a vast man'with great strength and no fear of anything or anyone. I'll .bet he was the happiest man in the country when Canada declared war on Germany: And he died exactly as he would ,have withed, hurling his bulk against machine-guns instead of op- posing linesmen. Another author, I discovered this summer was Leo Simpson. He lives in the village of Madoc. Ontario, and I knew of him, but hadn't read his novels, probably due to the incredible ineqtitude of Canadian publishers when it comes to promoting good books. He is an excellent writer. much more literate than the famous Farley Mowat, who knows how to promote his own books and keep his name alive in the papers with various stunts and burning causes. I managed to grab two of Simpson's novels and read them straight through. They were The Peacock Papers and Kowalski's Last Chance. Buy them or borrow them or steal them. They're great. Simpson came to Canada from Ireland, but you'd swear, from his novels, that he'd lived in a small Canadian town or city all his life. He knows the vernacular, he knows the petty little gypocrisies, and he knows the often peculiar attitude toward life of Canad- ians. In The Peacock Papers, he explores, with wit and irony and pity, a decent, middle- aged, successful Canadian businessman who starts to come apart at the seams, as so may of us do. . In Kowalski's LaSt ,Chance, he peek -off layer after layer of the social strata in a small city and dabbles with leprechauns until you are convinced the next short guy you talk to might be one. Both bOoks are very funny, but a great deal more than that. And, my book, you ask? Well, it's going swimmingly. One night, in • a rage about nothing, my wife cleaned all the copies of myh columns our of various drawers, top of my desk, vegetable bin, and other likely spots, bundled them into a green garbage bag and threw them into the attic. This produced some complications. Sitting around the living-room are about eight shoe boxes. They are labled: Politics, Weather. Celebrations, Family, Sex, and so on. I sit in my easy chair, reach into the green gargage bag, procluce"a column, scan it; and hurl it toward the appropriate box. The one marked Miscellaneous is overflow- ing. The one marked Family is full, The one marked Sex is virginal. And the floor looks just as the backyard does in October, when the oaks shed. • But we're getting there. By Christmas I reckon I'll be halfway down that big green bag.