HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2007-10-11, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2007. PAGE 5.Bonnie
Gropp
TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt
This Goliath always wins
English is a hungry language. That’s why
it goes out and pilfers other languages
at will.
More than half of English was stolen
directly from French and Latin. The rest is a
mongrel mix of words and concepts snatched
from tongues around the world.
We pick-pocketed the Arabs for ‘alcohol’,
‘macrame’ and ‘safari’.
Caboose? We lifted that from the Dutch.
‘Shampoo’? A Hindi word. ‘Winnipeg’?
‘Toronto’? ‘Ottawa’? Those we ripped off the
Natives – in exchange for a lifetime supply of
Bibles.
It’s true. I looked it up in Wikipedia. ‘Wiki’?
A Hawaiian word meaning ‘fast’.
That said, there’s a word we need to steal
from the Germans – schlimmbesserung.
I know it’s a mouthful but we have no
equivalent in English and we need one
desperately.
Schlimmbesserungs are multiplying like
rabbits (from Middle Dutch robbe) all around
us. A schlimmbesserung is basically…a lousy
improvement. Something fixed that wasn’t
broken.
For most of us, a 29-speed, titanium-framed,
microweight bicycle that disintegrates in the
first pothole it hits is a schlimmbesserung
compared to the old, indestructible CCM one-
speed we used to be able to buy.
Classic Coke was a schlimmbesserung, as
are aluminum hockey sticks and those stupid,
screaming, ‘sanitary’ washroom hand dryers
that leave you with a hearing impairment – and
wet hands.
What I find heartening is the fact that we –
some of us, anyway – are turning up our noses
at a few schlimmbesserungs and returning to
The Good Old Ways.
Clotheslines are back. And so are scythes.
We used scythes to cut our grass for a
thousand years, until lawnmowers came along.
Now, that’s beginning to look like a bad swap.
According to an EPA report, every gas
mower emits the same amount of emissions in
one hour as 40 new cars. Environment Canada
says nearly three million of us mow our lawns
every summer weekend.
If we used scythes, the air would be cleaner,
the noise level would improve dramatically –
and over a year, Canadians would save 40
million gallons of gas.
Plus we’d all be getting a pleasant upper
body workout for free.
And clotheslines – they make such eminent
sense it seems odd that they ever went away,
but they’ve been banned in thousands of
communities across North America.
Homeowners’associations have decided that
the sight of T-shirts, bedsheets, jeans and
mom’s dainties billowing in the breeze is a
visual blight not to be tolerated. Some
neighbourhoods actually mount ‘clothesline
patrols’ – station wagons manned by eagle-
eyed busybodies cruising the streets on the
lookout for backyard laundry infractions.
Seems absurd that the supermarket sells
packages of dryer sheets promising ‘fresh rain
fragrance’ when you can get the real thing for
free outside.
South of the border, a lot of folks are waking
up to the absurdity. Clothesline activists are
mounting a national Right to Dry movement.
Last month in la belle province a group of
protesters launched a campaign to stop Hydro-
Quebec from damming the Rupert River. They
argue that the province wouldn’t have to
drown an entire river ecosystem if people just
altered their energy-gobbling ways. Fittingly,
the campaign featured ads printed on T-shirts
and sheets hung on – you guessed it – a
clothesline. This one was 400 feet long.
Clotheslines over automatic dryers? No
contest, really. Dryers bang up your clothes,
howl like banshees and suck up insane
amounts of power. A clothesline gets you out
in the fresh air and makes your clothes last
longer and smell better.
When it comes to environmental awareness,
the tide is slowly turning, but there are still
some major reefs and shoals before us.
Like, for instance, Mary Peters.
Ms Peters is the current U.S. Secretary of
Transportation and just one of the many
talentless carpetbaggers and cronies appointed
by the Bush administration on the basis of
party loyalty rather than any demonstrated
competence. When asked what was
responsible for the collapse of that
Minneapolis bridge which caused the death of
13 motorists last summer, Ms Peters didn’t
hesitate.
She blamed bicycles.
And pedestrians. And museum goers and
people worried about crumbling lighthouses.
That’s where too much of the transportation
infrastructure money was going, she said,
adding that projects like bike paths and cycling
trails “are really not transportation.”
Someone once said: “Stupidity is more
difficult to control than evil”. In Mary Peters,
I fear, we may have a double-barreled threat.
Meanwhile I’m thinking of getting a bumper
sticker for my bike. It will read: NO IRAQIS
DIED TO FUEL THIS VEHICLE.
Arthur
Black
A look at why Tory blundered
Acouple cruises home down a quiet
country highway one evening.
Through the dark the path ahead is
clear.
Generally, it’s a relaxing drive. The quiet,
still evening, lights twinkling from stars
above and farmhouses below. Conversation is
minimal, thoughts full of the fulfilling day
spent.
Then a shadow looms and the driver, older,
wiser and ever wary of the probability of
dashing wildlife, hits the brakes and pulls
behind a slowly-moving obstacle.
A farm tractor, towing a grain bin is making
its way down the road, no lights, no reflectors.
It would have been a death trap for a more
inexperienced, less cautious driver. The
woman thought of her grandchildren who
often make their way home from after-school
jobs in the dark of night, and was heartsick
that someone could be so careless, so reckless
about other people’s safety.
Our rural roads have an abundance of farm
machinery, particularly during planting and
harvest seasons. They are a reality that must
be dealt with sensibly and with respect.
It seems foolish that police have to remind
us of the danger. But each year press releases
are issued cautioning drivers that farm
machinery is on the road and to be watchful.
Farmers too are reminded about the rules of
the road, the need for proper signage and
lighting. However, should either side neglect
to pay attention to the warnings, the bottom
line is only one side loses. David could never
best these Goliaths should confrontation
occur.
For that reason, the weight of responsibility
should be heavier on the operators of these
machines to guarantee they are visible and
that they take every precaution to ensure
public safety.
Which includes using their heads. The
woman’s story above reminded me of a time
that left me shaking at the side of the road a
few years ago. In this case it was a great day
for farming and driving. The sun was high,
the sky blue and anyone cruising or working
on the highway could see for miles.
I saw the large tractor and wagon in plenty
of time and slowed to a comfortable speed,
ready to gauge when it was safe to move
around, slow to a crawl, or stop if necessary.
Finally, certain of the clear path in the
oncoming lane, noting no signal or braking
from the equipment in front, I pulled around
the behemoth before me. And then, as I edged
alongside it, the driver, without a change of
speed or glance behind, turned left.
As I’m here to tell the tale I obviously was
able to avoid the collision. But had I not still
been picking up speed I can say with a
certainty that someone else would be filling
this space in the paper. A family would be
grieving, a life I’m rather fond of would be
lost, all because someone in charge of
thousands of pounds of machinery, drove like
an idiot.
A police officer once told me that if there
are two vehicles speeding, and one happens to
be a tractor trailer that’s the one he’s stopping.
The driver, he said, should know better.
Everyone should be cautious when driving.
We need to pay attention, we need to slow
down, we need to obey the rules of the road.
But those who have in their hands the
guaranteed power to destroy human life,
should be harshly penalized when they don’t
exercise extra caution.
Other Views Everything old is new again
T his is the only Ontario election in
memory in which a party with a
reasonable chance of winning threw it
away by introducing a policy voters found
totally unacceptable. The big question is why
it did it.
Political science junkies will be studying for
years why Progressive Conservative leader
John Tory, despite little pressure on him,
promised to provide funding to private, faith-
based schools.
Tory was only five per cent behind Premier
Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals at the time and a
few weeks later had fallen to 10 per cent
behind and said he would not go ahead with
his plan unless the public showed it wants it.
His miscalculation has given him a reputation
for poor judgment and weakened his claim to
be a leader.
No party has fallen as swiftly on a single
issue before. Conservative premier Ernie Eves
lost in 2003 because his party’s popularity had
been eroded steadily by the cuts in services
and confrontational style of his predecessor,
Mike Harris.
McGuinty failed in 1999 because Harris still
retained some appeal from his tax cuts.
New Democrat premier Bob Rae lost in
1995 because he ran up huge deficits and
abandoned key promises.
Liberal premier David Peterson was sent
packing because he called an election after
only two years and was viewed as more
concerned about Constitutional change than
bread and butter issues.
Conservative premier Frank Miller is being
cited as losing because his predecessor,
William Davis, extended funding to the end of
Roman Catholic high schools, but this is
stretching too far to find links to the past.
Miller was seen as too right wing, small
town and afraid to be compared when he
refused to debate opposition leaders on TV.
In earlier elections for the past half-century,
multiple issues rather than a single policy
killed parties’ chances.
Tory was running for the first time as leader,
but had worked in back rooms of a dozen
campaigns dating back to the 1970s. He had
the most experienced campaign manager in
Canada, John Laschinger, who has run more
than 20 at the federal, provincial and
municipal levels and would manage your bid
to be president of the local Rotary Club if you
paid him.
Tory has tried to sanitize his promise to fund
faith-based schools by saying he made it
because it was the right thing to do and as a
matter of principle. But his party took a poll to
see if it was safe and told news media it found
many more supporting funding than opposing
it.
Neither of the two major parties anyway
would announce a key policy on an issue that
had any controversy attached without polling
first. The NDP chooses many of its policies by
votes at conventions and they become known
without being screened first for public
reaction.
Tory also worked for and is a disciple of
Davis, who has been his key adviser on faith-
based schools and was noted for living by
polls.
The strict right-wingers who took over with
Harris sneered policy under Davis was set by
“four guys sifting through polls in a Toronto
hotel room.”
Tory’s poll would have asked, in the way
polls often are designed to elicit support for
those commissioning them, whether funding
already provided to Catholics should be
extended in fairness to other faith-based
schools. Most asked this question and
knowing little more about the issue would
have had difficulty disagreeing with widening
funding.
But their support evaporated when they
heard the other side of the argument, brought
out by McGuinty, civil rights activists and
others, that children of different faiths learn to
understand and respect each other when they
are educated together and should not be
further divided.
Tory’s Conservatives have lost any chance
of winning an election because they failed to
recognize voters may change their minds on
an issue when they have more information and
the rest of us have been given an extra reason
to be wary of polls.
Eric
Dowd
FFrroomm
QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk
If the only prayer you said in your whole
life was, “thank you,” that would suffice.
~Meister Eckhart
Final Thought