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6 THE RURAL VOICE
Keith Roulston
Self-sacrifice not a forgotten idea
It's now a year since the tragic
death of three farm workers in a
manure tanker near Drayton when,
one after another, they went in to
rescue coworkers overcome by
manure gas. It was the second case
(there was a similar one out v. ea )
where people
died trying to
rescue others.
The word
senseless some-
times gets
attached to deaths
like these but
there's also some-
thing reassuring
about knowing
that people will
still risk their
lives to try to help
others. The
efforts of people
like the victims,
as tragic as they turned out to be,
prove we haven't totally turned into a
society where our own welfare is put
before others'.
Self-sacrifice isn't a big phrase in
the vocabulary of our society these
days. There are all kinds of seminars
and books and TV shows on how to
maximize your self-fulfillment. Our
swing to the right, including demands
for lower taxes, is about looking out
for number one.
Trying to find the balance
between a society that is too
concentrated on the benefit of the
group versus a society too focused on
the individual is a constant strain.
Too much emphasis on the whole
group can lead to injustices against
individuals within the group. Mob
violence is the worst example of this
kind of thinking, where the rights of
the majority can be taken out on one
or more individuals who can be
actually killed by the will of the
group. To a lesser extent, we've
created situations where our
government, to benefit the majority,
felt it could take away individual's
property or their freedom.
On the other hand are the ex-
tremes of the individual. Should the
rights of an Ernst Zundel allow him
to preach hatred against Jews? Do my
rights to do what I want on my
Some people
still wilting to
put others fust
property override your right to have
clean water next door? Do your rights
to smoke in a public place override
my right not to breathe in health -
endangering second-hand smoke?
While many people would contend
that we are more socialistic (group -
oriented) than at any time in history,
a look at our past, particularly in
rural areas, shows that we've always
realized we had something to gain by
sacrificing some individual freedoms
for the benefit of community. Living
in a harsh wilderness, our forefathers
knew they had to work together.
They got together to build schools
and churches, to help each other raise
Karns, to pitch in when someone
suffered a tragedy. Individual
farmers might have grouched quietly
that they were contributing more than
their neighbour but they lived with it.
They had fewer written laws, but
society imposed its will on the
individual through church and
societal mores that were far stricter
than our laws. No one worked, and
few even had much recreation, on
Sunday. A widow must follow a
precise regime of mourning before
even thinking of remarrying.
There's far more individual
freedom today to set our own bound-
aries. With our prosperity there's the
sense we don't need the safety net a
community or society provides.
I sometimes wonder if our country
was really in peril today, as it was
with the rise of Nazi Germany in
1939, if young men would willingly
risk their lives to fight for it as my
father's generation did. Right now
there seems to be so little that people
feel is worth fighting for so would
they really see Hitler as a big enough
danger to leave the good life behind
to fight a war?
But then individual stories of self-
sacrifice are told, like the Drayton
tragedy or cases where people go to
Third World countries to help the
poor, and we're reminded there are
those willing to put the needs of
others before their own. It's
comforting because after all, that's
what makes a country civilized.0
Keith Roulston is editor and
publisher of The Rural Voice. He
lives near Blyth, ON.