HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1993-07-14, Page 5International Scene
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THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JULY 14, 1993. PAGE 5.
We live in
perilous
times
We live in perilous times. Nowadays, the
simple act of reading your newspaper can be
dangerous to your health.
The other day for instance, I read in my
newspaper that Japanese boffins are working
on a project to put a nuclear power station on
the moon.
The same edition of the newspaper
informs me that Russian scientists have
already managed to launch a mirror into
space that can be used to reflect the sun's
rays to "turn night into day" here on earth.
I have only one response to these Brave
New technological breakthroughs:
Are we nuts?
Has mankind, long the looniest of earthly
critters, finally come completely unhinged?
Chemobyl and Three Mile Island weren't
big enough toxic playgrounds? Now we
have to go galactic with our meltdowns?
Truth to tell, I'm not really worried about
the Japanese plan yet. It's still at the blue sky
stage (ironic cliche, that). That Japanese
Science and Technology Agency is merely
Argentina
on the
way back
It seems ages ago that the Argentinian
government, egged on by their powerful
military leaders, decided that the Falkland
Islands (which they called Malvinas) really
did belong to them and chose, by invading it,
to prove that possession was, indeed 9/10's
of the law. They counted heavily on the fact
that no country so far away as Great Britain,
and one led by a woman, was going to make
any serious effort to get it back. They failed
to take into consideration that there is some
truth in the old saying that the female of the
species is deadlier than the male and
Margaret Thatcher showed them how wrong
they were.
Since the British drove the Argentinians
off the islands, little attention has been paid
to the South American country. The media
has, after all, a very short attention span
when it comes to such events and soon about
the only thing that made any headlines was
the antics of Diego Maradona, the
Argentinian soccer star, as he played
(perhaps played around would be a better
word) either with an Italian team or on the
Argentinian national team in the World Cup.
What has happened to Argentina in the
decade since the abortive attempt to take
over the Malvinias? As a matter of fact, a
great deal and not all of it has been good.
There was, understandably, a backlash
against the military since the population had
been assured that retention of the Malvinias
was the Spanish version of "a piece of cake."
In view of the humiliating defeat, the
soldiers came in for their share of lumps and
setting up a five-year project to study the
feasibility of their interplanetary reactor
brainwave. A lot of things can happen in five
years. Including common sense.
No, it's the Russian mirror-in-space
initiative that really gets my goat.
Because they've already done it. One night
last month while you and I slept snug in our
beds, an unmanned Russian spacecraft
winging around earth deployed a very thin
plastic mirror about 65 feet wide. The mirror
was angled to pick up the sun's rays and
deflect them down to the darkened European
continent below.
It worked. That night across Europe,
something happened that has never occurred
in the history of the planet.
There was sunlight in the middle of the
night.
Not a whole lot of it, and not for very
long. It was more like a two-mile-wide
flashlight beam that skipped across France,
Germany, Austria and what used to be
Yugoslavia for a grand total of about six
minutes.
Still, it was an historical occasion, and it
must have been something to see from the
ground. An insomniac in Lyons described
the flashing strobe that emanated from the
satellite as looking like "luminous diamonds
following one another across the sky." And
it apparently lit up the earth like a
photographer's flash.
Nevertheless, I repeat my earlier question:
are we nuts?
over 10 years later the armed forces have
still not returned to the strength they were on
the eve of the British arrival off the
Falklands.
However, there is something you should
know about Argentina. In terms of natural
resources, it must be considered as one of
the most blessed in all of Spanish America.
Along with this blessing goes a concomitant
curse; it has had, since the days of Juan and
Evita Peron, about the most destructive
political leadership that one can imagine.
Only about six years ago its poor citizens
were subjected to inflation of no less than
4,000 per cent a year. To Canadians who, for
almost all of their lives, have experienced
nothing more than a mild form double digit
inflation, it may be hard to imagine such a
hardship, but it is not hard to translate this
into something we can understand.
Just assume that, on the first of January
you went to the nearest grocery store and
bought a loaf of bread for $1.50. By the end
of the year that same loaf had cost a
whopping $6,000. That would not be so bad
if your income had gone up by the same
4,000 per cent, but for most people in
Argentina it did not. To make ends meet you
had to take a second or even third job. In
short, moonlighting became a way of life.
To break this vicious cycle, some
enlightened political leadership was required
and it appears that, at long last, Argentinians
have that in the form of their current
president, Carlos Menem. The son of a
Syrian immigrant, he belonged to the
Peronist party but, seeing how damaging the
party's policies were, he threw them out and
resorted to establishing as much as possible
a market economy. State industries were
sold off, tariffs were cut, foreign capital was
welcomed and, above all, the creation of
new money was dramatically controlled so
that, the last time I looked, inflation was
under 20 per cent. Compare that with 4,000
The theory behind the space mirror rests
on the same guiding principle that drives our
approach to all things agricultural — namely,
how can we milk a little more juice out of
this sucker? We pump our cattle full of
steroids to fatten em up; we pump our wheat
fields full of fertilizer and pesticides to
accomplish the same thing.
The space mirror, once perfected, will
mean we can put our farmlands on unpaid
overtime — extend harvest and planting
periods, resulting in bigger, more frequent
harvests.
Oh yes, and it would save electricity too.
By turning dawn and dusk into more hours
of daylight, billions of dollars in electric
lighting would be saved.
So by extending daylight we would save
on electric light. Which was created to
extend daylight.
Truth is, we don't know what we're
meddling with. The earth and all the
creatures on it have marched to an unseen
biological rhythm since life began. Fool with
the cadence of life itself and who knows
what Frankensteinian consequences you
unleash?
But we will fool with it. We're human and
we can conveniently label it 'progress'. That
guarantees that we will fool with it.
And some day I imagine we'll have the
planet wired up just like a corner
convenience store — floodlit, open 24 hours.
Personally, I prefer going out in the ink-
black night to look for the Big Dipper.
The
short
of it
By Bonnie Gropp
even do it without cutting part of the subject
out of the shot. Some can actually take
some pretty good pictures, yet only a select
few can manage an excellent shot almost all
the time. The rest of us just get lucky once in
a while.
That's what happens in this business. The
idea of taking pictures for a community
newspaper is to try to get that ''one of a
kind" image, the kind that catches your
attention and actually tells a story at a
glance. It could be the expression on a face
or the emotion, that captured on film will be
the photo a reporter has waited for.
Though there's a good deal goes into
getting that great shot and it's not as easy as
it may first appear, it often comes down to
being in the right place at the right time.
However, sometimes opportunity falls into
your lap, as on one occasion this weekend.
And I missed it!
As a Brusselsite, I usually opt to work the
weekend of FunFest because I'm going to be
attending most of the goings-on anyway.
With so many activities happening
throughout the event I kind of hoped that the
rest of our area would be relatively quiet.
Unfortunately, that was not entirely the case
this time so I found myself running hither
and yon.
I've noticed lately, that it doesn't take as
much to tucker me out so by Sunday I was
done in. After a tasty breakfast cooked up
by our local firefighters, some of my family
and I retired to the backyard for a brief
break. I knew I had plenty of time before the
next contest, the bed races.
However, I had the wrong time. My
daughter came back just as I was preparing
to leave chuckling over a mishap that caught
the entire town's attention.
The story goes like this. Apparently, only
one bed entered the race, so a series of time
trials were done with different competitors.
During the third run, the racer, who happens
to be a certain ad sales rep for this particular
paper, came to an abrupt finish after veering
left into the side of a parked CKNX car, then
collapsing into three pieces.
Obviously, this person has had to be a
good sport because of the unavoidable
ribbing. However, it has been pointed out to
me that the fact that she is a woman has
made her a target for some stereotypical digs
that when you look at the big picture are
really quite unjustified.
Let's begin by noting what witnesses have
described to me as a faulty steering
mechanism on this "man"- made racer.
Secondly, the craft was being powered by
three burly guys, one of which was the
driver's husband. One can't help wondering
why they didn't have the muscle to stop this.
Witnesses again say that as the bed careened
out of control towards the car, only one of
these burly guys, and it wasn't the driver's
husband, made any attempt to stop it. A
reliable source has stated, "The other two
actually kept pushing." Guess that's what
happens when you put men in power, right
gals?
Anyway, you won't be seeing the picture
on the front page of this week's paper, nor in
future FunFest special issues. It has nothing
to do with the fact that I did not want to
humiliate a friend; I have no problem with
that, really; it's just that quite simply I blew
it.
However, you should have been able to
catch it on the evening news. CKNX was
definitely on the spot.
Arthur Black
per cent and you will see what an
improvement that is.
Furthermore the economy is growing at
about six per cent a year or twice what the
Canadian economy is expected to do this
year. Blessed with abundant natural
resources, as I pointed out at the beginning
of the article, President Menem is looking to
foreign markets to further increase the
country's standard of living.
In this regard it may come as something of
a surprise to learn that he has been looking
carefully at the North American Free Trade
Agreement and considers it a distinct
possibility that Argentina takes steps to join
at some time in the future. If it shows one
thing, it is that the Argentinian president is
not willing to sit still. He also believes that,
as the population sees the improvement that
has come from the implementation of a
market economy, there will be little or no
desire to go back on any of the reforms.
It is surprising what good leadership will
do in even a long-suffering country such as
Argentina.
Letter to
the editor
Continued from page 4
much more) of labour in constructing theirs
or other Habitat families' homes.
Habitat believes that families should own
their homes. Generally, people who own
homes take better care of their investment.
Should problems occur with the care or
upkeep of a Habitat home, the affiliates
Family Nurture Committee helps the family
resolve problems. Habitat's goodwill from
the community is essential for our work.
If there are any questions, do not hesitate
to contact me.
Allan Dettweller
Habitat for Humanity - Huron.
Catching on-
the-spot news
not always ea ity
Most people can e a picture. any can