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The Citizen, 1990-06-06, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 6, 1990. PAGE 5. Arthur gets his revenge on drinking driver Isn’t it funny how accidents often seem to happen in slow motion? This one unfolded in front of me like a Hockey Night in Canada instant replay — except that the main actor wasn’t a defenceman or a forward, it was a 1982 Chevy. I’d been following its tail lights through the suburbs of Toronto for a few minutes -- nothing sinister, we both just happened to be going in the same direction -- when suddenly the Chevy gently ambled over to the shoulder, off the road and up an enbankment. The car ran a kind of lazy buttonhook pattern, nosing to the top of the embankment then turning and coming back towards the road. It came to rest facing backwards, in the direction it had come from. The whole incident took just a few seconds and was so un-violent, so bucolic-looking that I almost drove right by as if something perfectly natural had occurred. But no. There was the slew of tire tracks through the snow and the remains of a fledgling spruce dangling from the front bumper and the moon faces of passengers staring out the car windshield. No, this was an accident alright. I stopped, ran to the The International Scene A prescription from the witch doctor BY RAYMOND CANON When I was a little boy and managed to save up enough money to go off to the local “revolver kitchen”, (Swiss slang for Saturday afternoon movies), I used to be quite fascinated by the arrival on the scene of the film’s medicine man. He seemed to be held in great respect by the natives who did all sorts of reverent movements to keep in his good graces. He was always something of a heavy who eventually got his come-uppance in the movie and it was not hard to get the impression that he was just something of a big joke, a caricature of someone in darkest Africa who looked after the needs of the local tribe’s health, albeit in a very primitive fashion. Now that I am much older and a little wiser, I realize from my contacts with that continent that there are not only a great many medicine men still in existence but that they are for the most part held in great esteem by the locals. The reason for this is simple; a great many Africans still believe strongly in spirits and that, whenever they have a disease or two, the roots are spiritual in nature. If you want to be cured, the best route to follow is to get in touch with someone who has contact with the spiritual world. Sometimes these witch doctors or medi­ ums are called upon to do things in fields other than health. It was not long ago that an example of this surfaced where one of these more mundane witches was called upon by a football team to cast a spell on the opposing team. Yet another witch advised the Zimbabwean army football team to jinx the opposing team by urinating on the latter’s goal posts. Although it is against the law in the same country, husbands are sometimes urged to divorce their wife for being a witch. Obviously the same men had never watched North American T.V. where wives also known as witches are considered to be Arthur Black car, yanked open the driver’s door ... And all but passed out. The car reeked of booze. The driver was glassy-eyed and oblivious. A lout in the back seat had a half-dead case of 24 between his feet. He looked up at me rheumy-eyed, slurring “Hey man, help us hide the beer inna trunk before the cops come, mannnnn!’’ Drinking and driving. It’s practically a sport in Canada. And a blood sport at that. The experts estimate that over 50 per cent of the traffic accidents that occur on Canadian streets and highways every year involve booze in one way or another. Which puts us right up there proportionally with the USA. The War in Vietnam claimed 58,000 American lives. Booze-related traf­ fic accidents knock off that many Ameri­ cans every year. As I say, we have no reason to feel holier than thou up here in Canada. We still treat drinking and driving as an Aw-shucks- boys-will-be-boys kind of offense. Police­ men tend to err on the side of generosity, if not look the other way. Judges, as often as not, let drunk drivers off with a slap on the wrist and a caution. Except in Prince Edward Island. They don’t fool around with drunk drivers in Canada’s tiniest province. In the past four years, almost 3,500 drivers in Prince Edward Island have been convicted of driving while impaired, and you know what? Every one of them went to jail. They didn’t get lectures of gory films or a few hundred hours of community work or suspended licences. They did time. Behind bars. They were fingerprinted and photo­ graphed and strip-searched just like rapists lucky; at least the husbands seem to have everything on their minds but divorce. However back to Zimbabwe. So preva­ lent are the witch doctors in that country that the national association of such healers outnumbers the health ministry’s nurses, health workers and doctors by a ratio of two to one. Most of these witch doctors live in villages as do most of the population, unlike the doctors who tend to congregate in the large towns or cities. Small wonder that many people still make appointments to see the witch doctor; they are far more accessible! One area where the witch doctors can compete with modem medicine is in the field of psychiatry. In treating a patient for psychosomatic illnesses they take the time to discuss each patient’s fears and worries; a guilty conscience is frequently found to be the cause of illness and a good confession helps the patient in his or her first steps along the road to good health. The witch doctors would like traditional doctors to take more seriously the use of herbal remedies and even the World Health Organization has expressed the belief that modern medicine could benefit from a study of traditional plants used by The world as viewed from Mabel’s Grill Continued from page 4 “Yes,” said Ward, “and if you get caught at least you won’t have to worry about keeping a roof over your head for a few year.” WEDNESDAY: Ward was chuckling over the “secret strategy” leaked in Toronto that suggested David Peterson make the premiers who are against Meech Lake look “erratic” and “unpredictable”. “I don’t know if they accomplished that but they sure made Peterson look stupid”, he said. THURSDAY: Julia said she can under­ stand how President Gorbachev would like to get away from his troubles back home by visiting North America but he must be pretty brave to leave when there are lots people who would love to see him never come back. Yes, said Tim, if Prime Minister and bank robbers and murderers. They got themselves a record. And some of these drunk drivers were very important people. Some were tourists. Others were first offenders. Still others were ... “well, judge I was out with the boys and maybe I had one too many but there was no harm done ...” Eight hundred dollars fine and four days in jail was the usual PEI punishment for the first offence -- and God have mercy on anyone nailed a second time. Any mercy would have to be God’-s. It wouldn’t come from the provincial court judges. There are only three of them on the island and they all feel the same about bozos who booze and get behind the wheel. “Everyone is treated the same” says Nancy Orr, PEI lawyer, “ -- young, old, pregnant women, the rich, tourists - it’s real simple. If you’re guilty, you’re going to jail.” Does it work? Impaired driving charges have dropped by 31 per cent in PEI since they started throwing drunk drivers in the slammer. I didn’t know about the crackdown in PEI when the Chevy went off the road in front of me, but I knew I was sick of reading about the blood spilled and misery caused by Canada’s most common crime. “C’mon, mannn!” The kid in the back seat was trying to get out of the car, the beer case in his lap. “Help us hide the beer inna trunk!” I pushed him back in the car, not gently, the beer bottles clanking and skittering all over the floor. “Go to hell,” I said. And we waited for the cops. 1 the witch doctors. One witch doctor who specializes in herbs has claimed that he was the wherewithal to cure AIDS, provided, he pointed out, that it had not yet struck the patient’s kidneys. If that is true, he should be the most popular witch doctor in Africa for a look at the statistics reveals that it is this continent that has the most serious problem with regards to this spreading illness. In connection with AIDS, it should be pointed out that last year one of the governments conducted a workshop with the witch doctors at which the latter were persuaded not to use the same razor blade twice in order to make incisions on different patients’ skin. Some of the witch doctors have learned a bit about modern law, it seems. There has been an increasing demand that they be able to patent their secret herbs before western pharmaceutical companies dis­ cover how valuable they are. Even at that it may be a mite too late. One such doctor claims that American drug companies send representatives to Africa armed with trinkets which they attempt to trade for exotic herbal remedies employed by the witch doctors. Enter the witch lawyer! Mulroney left the country about now he might find a whole lot of Canadians blocking the runway so his plane couldn’t land when he came back. FRIDAY: Billie says he can’t understand how the Supreme Court can say it’s legal for women to sell their bodies but it’s not legal for them to solicit customers in public. “What a two-faced law,” he said. “They can do it but they can’t advertise it.” Sort of the same thing as they’ve been doing for years with cigarettes, Hank said. “I don’t know about they’re not being able to advertise,” Tim said. “From what I’ve seen of them on the streets of Toronto, they’ll still be advertising. It’ll be just sort of like watching a television commercial with the sound turned down.” Letter from the editor What happened to respect for age? BY KEITH ROULSTON Maybe it’s because I’m feeling older these days but all this talk about Jean Chretien beihg unsuitable as leader of the Liberal Party because he’s “yesterday’s man” is getting to me. The theory, put forward by Paul Martin Jr. (he’s not really much junior to Mr. Chretien) and Sheila Copps and the others who find themselves hopeless behind Chretien, is that because Chretien has been around for years and was in politics he is somehow suspect as leadership material. Whether or not Chretien is the right person for the job, it’s this business of being too old or too experienced that bothers me. It seems to me an illustration of how little respect we have for age. In most societies in history, age has been a reversed thing, not something to look down on. Elders were people whose opinions were sought. They had, after all, lived through so much that respectful younger people figured they had some unique insights the younger generation couldn’t have. But somewhere along the way things changed. Maybe it was because of the change from getting knowledge through experience to getting knowledge through formal training. We have gone through several successive generations of immense changes. The information we get in a week would have been more than people living in pre-radio and television days would have gotten in months or years. Over the years schooling has increased. Parents who a century ago didn’t got past fourth of fifth grade saw their children finish elementary school. The children of those parents in turn went on to high school, perhaps not graduating but getting more schooling than their parents. The next generation got more schooling again. Finally young people were routinely finish­ ing high school and the children of that generation went off to colleges and universities. Perhaps it’s that we have grown used to young people having more education than their parents that has brought us to revere the young and new, versus the old and experienced. Certainly the way the world has been changing, the world an 80-year- old experienced is greatly different in many ways from that facing a young person today. And yet those who don’t listen to seniors are missing a lot. The specifics of living today may be a lot different than the specifics of living more than half a century ago but there are many similarities in the basic way people behave. “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it” the old expression goes and if we don’t listen to the elders of our community and our country then we deserve to make the mistakes we’ll make from our ignor­ ance, and ignorance they might perhaps have helped us overcome. Sure we can get a lot of information about the past by reading in books or watching films and television but nothing matches the personal perspective talking to someone can have. But instead, we tend to ignore people once they’ve got past a certain age. Even in their last working years we often tend to be very condescend­ ing. “Old Jones is living in the past,” we’ll say. “What can he possibly know about how things work today.” Once people have quit work we send them off on permanent vacations until it’s time to put them into a home. What people like Mr. Martin and Ms. Copps had better remember is that someday soon they’ll have enough experi­ ence that they can be called “yesterday’s people” too. All of us who once were of the generation that never trusted anyone over 30 are quickly hurtling toward the age when, because of our age and experience, nobody will listen to them again.