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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Brussels Post, 1978-06-21, Page 211111145f (*TARN) WEDNESDAY, JUNE 21, 1978 Serving Brussels and the surrounding community. PUblished each Wednesday afternoon at Brussels, Ontario by McLean Bros. Publishers Limited. Evelyn Kennedy - Editor Member Canadian Community Newspaper Association and. Ontario Weekly Newspaper Association Subscriptions (in advance). Canada $9.00 a Year. it C N A Others $17.00 a Year, Single Copies 20 cents each. co..14 0,01 A N COMMON, Iq wPsfelAspi :CC°Ot4'91.1‘°‘4':. 4iChIA Sugar and Spice by Bill Smiley Good people IlleTIMOMED Brussels Post On sincerity "Sincerity is always subject to proof." John F. Kennedy said in the address he gave at . his inauguration as President of the U.S.A. Was Kennedy being just a little cynical about sincerity? Or was he being realistic, saying that we should be suspicious of declarations of sincerity and appearances of sincerity? He had learned, as we all learn, that sincerity is an ambiguous notion, that an image of sincerity is not a guarantee of honesty and integrity. Most of us have had the experience of being conned by slickers who exude sincerity like after-shave lotion. The late Lord Thomson, the Canadian who became a press lord in Britain, once said this, with a twinkle in his eye: "I'm frank, brutally frank. And when I'm not frank, I look frank." What would you make of that? A man being sincere about his own occasional insincerity? As the popular saying_has it, "Whether you mean it or not, be sincere!" Some expressions of sincerity are calculatingly deceptive. And sincerity also has other popular aberrations. There is the sincerity, the quite,genuine sincerity, of the fanatic. There is the .sometimes dangerOus sincerity of the person who believes that he, along with those who think as he does, has a monopoly in some significant segment of truth and wisdom: he may be intolerant, bigoted, hating those who disagree with him and sometimes cruel toward them, but you've got to give him credit for complete sincerity. We must not, of course, fall into the easy cynicism which assumes that all appearances of sincerity are deceptive. But we do need tote aware that sincerity, no matter how genuine it, may be is not in itself a guarantee of truth, never a substitute for knowledge, never an excuse for unnecessary incompetence. (Unchurched Editorials) Behind the ,scenes Despite my fairly often encounters with snarly misanthropes who seem bent on convincing me that the human race is a nasty lot, I keep coming' back to the good, warm feeling that, 'ort theswhole, people area pretty good lot, as far as they go. They are kind and ,cencerned, despite the evidence to the contrary. When I wrote something about my wife's insomnia and how she dreads our up-coming trip to Europe- trying - tiying to sleep on boats, buses and a strange bed every night--a lady reader sent me a long • letter filled with ideas on how to cope with the situation. One time, in a real cri do coeur, I mentioned that our daughter was 'very ill, and asked readers to say a prayer. We received dozens of letters and phone calls, from friends and strangers, assuring us that they -would do just that. , An elderly lady from Alberta wrote me a long and involved letter offering a solution; when I 'once complained Of arthritic agony in this space. I'm going to take her up on it one of these days. I've tried wearing a phony bracelet and carrying a potato around in my hip pocket, and they were slightly less than successful:Turned to write something on the blackboard a few weeks ago, my old. friend Arthur nailed me in the hip, and I almost fell down in front of the class. Headline: English Department Head Drunk On Duty; Angry Parents Demand Dismissal. Wrote a column recently asking for someone, somewhere, to give my daughter a job. It was written in jest. But any day now, I expect an old friend, or a complete stranger, to give me a call and offer her a job as a chicken plucker or a go-go dancer or a cosmetician in a mortuary, or something equally exotic. Years ago, I had to go off to the San, with a shadow on my lung. I left behind a young, pregnant, bewildered, and scared wife. My friends, young and supposedly callous, spent their scanty money on visits to me, and supported and solaced my bride, without ever hying to take a pass at her, to my astonishment and enlightenment, for they were a pretty unscrupulous crowd, and she was a raving beauty, and human nature being what it is... Just recently a colleague died of leukemia, atter a comparatively short Hines's. He was in his prime, a nice guy, generally' liked, full of life. And he died bravely, without any whimpering, still making plans for next year. A couple of days later, one of his mates was •••••••• around with a piece of paper, looking for signatures for work parties at Paul's place. He and his wife owned a summer resort, into which they'd poured "a lot of money and energy, planning for his retirement. They had neglected the place, naturally, during his last illness. The weeds and grass had grown, and they had to open soon for the summer season. There was' no lack of signatures, and we all piled in, every the old decrepits like mg, who usually leave the 'menial labour for the kid next door, to clean up the place. During the war, I found the same kindness and concern among the• enemy. A young German paratrooper who had watched coldly while some older German chaps kicked me about rather badly for something naughty I'd done, came into the boxcar in which I was tied 4) that evening, bloody and well-bowed, threw his camouflage cape over me--it was . October--and talked to me in halting French. I sorely needed both the cape and the company. A few weeks later, with.other prisoners, I was sitting out an air raid (ours) in the basement of a German railway station. We were half-frozen and hungry as hell. Some middle-aged German ladies came down with a huge basin of hot coffee (ersatz) and motherly looks (real) in the middle of that air raid. I blessed their good hearts, and hoped my mother would do the same, in the same situation. Arrived at my first prison camp, I couldn't believe it when the inhabitants, Australians and New Zealanders, captured at Crete three years earlier, gave us a hot meal from their own meagre rations. We were cold, exhausted and half-starved. If anything gave me a faith in the innate decency of the human race, it was that. Those are clear cut examples, but there are hundreds of others, less easy to describe.. The neighbour who slips over with a jar of hot; homemade soup when your wife is away. The other neighbour who feeds our cat when you're off on a trip, or who fixes your shutters or your plumbing and forgets to send a bill. The doctor Who calls, after an.ungodly long day, to check on the state of your sick child. The quiet concern in the eyes of your students. when they know you are really too ill to be up there teaching. It's a cynical age, and it's an easy age to be a cynic, but don't let it get to you. When the chips are down, when there's fire or flood or famine, blizzard or blast or bats in the attic, people will respond with a kindness that will blind you with tears. By Keith Roulston Consumers' movement loses respect Well, the price of beef has been up for about two months now and already the damour has started. I'm not surprised, of course, and neither I'm sure are the majority of. Canadian farmers. We all knew that it was coming. I have little 'respect for the consumer movement in Canada anymore. It's sad, because the consumer mOvervent can do so much good, but in Canada the movement has lost all its credibility, for me at least, through its endless yarnmerings about food prices over the years. The latest calls for action against the price of beef such as increasing imports are just the latest in a long, inglorious record for the consumers association when it comes to food. It is the consumer movement, after all, that has been so strongly against tnarketitig boards for farmers, one ofl the few defences, imperfect as they are, that . farmers have in the jungle of modern business. Consumer activist Spokespersons such as Beryl Flumptre, !Barbara Shand or whoever else is president of the asSoCiation at the time, have argued that Marketing boards artifieially inflate the price of food And Stipport inefficient producers. TheY*ve made mountains out of Mole- hills whenever something went Wrong in a marketing board such as the rotten egg mess a couple of years ago, and use these as arguments that the whole concept of the marketing board is wrong. They've scoffed at arguments from farmers that marketing boards don't really make that Much difference in food prices, that what they do most is even out the peaks and lows by stabilizing prices at a rate both farmer and consumer can live with, 'One of the few areas where the consumer groups have not had a chance to scream has been in beef. Beef producers have fought vehemently against a marketing board in their business preferring to stick it out in the bad times and recoup during the good. The past four years have been those bad times, so bad that many farmers went broke, Or switched to some other kind of farming instead of beef production, The result. is a shortage of beef and the prices have soared, Now maybe I missed it, but I don't recall reading one word, hearing one speech from aconsumer spokeSperSon calling for action to help the beef farmers through their hard years. Consumer groups just went along their merry way eating cheap beef (though Oven then I'll bet they grumbled about the cost) and never thinking why the beef was cheap or that it had to end. Now, when the good times the beef men patiently waited for have finally arrived, the consumer groups are calling for the government to take action to get the prices down again. Leaders of the consumer movement are either' stupid, or downright dishonest and either way, I can't have the least respect from them. They could be stupid, I suppose, not realizing how hypocritcal they are, on one hand being outraged by marketing boards but on the other not being willing to live with both the ups and the downs of the open market system. They could be that ignorant of the farm situation that they continue to make such idiotic demands. If so, they are too stupid for the elevated positions 'they hold They do not deserve the national attention they get when they get up and make one of their speeches, The other alternative' is that they are dishonest, that they know what is really going on in agriculture and they ignore it because the truth would not sit well with the rank and file membership of the gretip, In such case they should be turfed out for dishonesty just as dishonest politicians should be turfed out. Beyond the leadership, however, is the ignorance of consumers in general who still apparently believe that there is a free lunch. A couple of years ago people were going around with the idea that we could all demand more money whether in wages or profits, without somehow having to pay the price for it. Our current economic situation have shown that we had to pay the price for that greed, that suddenly nobody else in the world can afford to buy the goods we produed because they are too expensive. Today on the other end of the scale. we have people thinking that they can forever get food at below the cost of production Because farmers lost money for four years and the price of beef remained low, consumers expect it ever to be thus. They fail to see that if fanners are losing money they aren't going to produce and if they don't produce there is a food shortage that -Will inevitably bring higher prices. You can't force farmers to be slaves, to produce food forever at below what it costs then]. to buy and feed those animals, It is astounding thatthis self-evident fact hasn't become known to the average Canadian consumer or is it just that she doesn't really want to know.