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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1995-07-19, Page 5Arthur Black International Scene aymorK1 Cano THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JULY 19, 1995. PAGE 5. Apologizing for America "I'm apologizing for America. This shouldn't happen when you come here." Those were the words of a New York paramedic to a German tourist shot in the shoulder during a boat tour around Manhattan. There was no attempt at robbery. The shots hadn't even come from the boat. They'd come from the gun barrel of some shorebound anonymous crazy, who saw the boat going by and decided to fire a few rounds into it. Don't get me wrong - I'm not against guns. I rather like them, as a matter of fact. But I can't explain the insane relationship between millions of Americans and their firearms. And neither can anyone else, as far as I can see. Europeans and Asians are baffled by the almost hysterical attachment American gun lovers display. They find it incredible that every school day morning, 300 Los Angeles police officers are diverted from normal duties in order to frisk students for concealed weapons at the entrances of high schools. And the numbers are frightening. In just one year - 1991 - 38,317 American were shot to death. That's more than 100 people a day. And more dead Americans than the East meets West There was an event which changed my concept of history for ever. I was still relatively young at the time and it took place when the first German pilots walked in a meeting room at an air force base in Canada. The pilots were all former members of the Luftwaffe in World War II and wore medals for having shot down a number of allied planes. On the other side of the table were officers of the RCAF, also wearing medals earned during the same war for having shot down German planes. The occasion was the arrival of the first German pilots to take part in the NATO Air Training Program being held in Canada. As the only German speaking person among the Canadians, I greeted them politely and formally in German then retired to the sidelines to let the wartime pilots do their thing. During World War H Canadians had been constantly reminded that the Germans were the enemy and thus all Germans were considered as a lesser form of life. Now here they were part of NATO and the common enemy was none other than our erstwhile allies, the Russians. How quickly history could change and with it my concept! I must confess to not having been quite so conditioned. Before my stint with NATO I had gone to school in Germany for a year and, although I took every chance to get back to Switzerland, living in a dormitory meant that I got to know the German students closely. We had all been too young for the war but we were able to compare our thoughts on it as objectively as possible. It became for all of us just an unfortunate event in our early lives. Now history is in the process of being made again but this time it is in Germany, or Korean War produced. The Canadian government is doing its best to see the nightmare stops at the border. Ottawa's solution is to clamp down on gun ownership - make Canadians register every piece of weaponry from Howitzers to BB guns. Understandable, but I think misguided. Guns aren't the problem. Human behaviour is. Consider Switzerland. The Swiss base their national defence policy on a citizens militia which can mobilized in 48 hours. This means the Swiss government hands out fully automatic assault rifles and ammunition to every able-bodied male. They take them home and keep them there. Yet the Swiss don't go around blowing each other away. And look at Israel. You see 'Israelis going shopping with Kalashnikovs slung casually over their shoulders. Handguns are as common as yarmulkes. But Israelis don't usually settle traffic disputes or lover's quarrels with a burst of machine gun fire. In the U.K., the Police Federation has just held a vote among the police officers it represents. Four out of five officers voted against carrying guns on a regular basis. Thousands of them indicated they would resign rather than carry arms on patrol. They're not opposed to using guns in extreme situations. They just don't want to make a habit of it, the way Americans do. It ain't the hardware. It's the people handling the hardware. more precisely what used to be communist East Germany. A little bit of background information is in order here to set the stage for what is going on. When the two Germanies were reunited, the question arose regarding what to do with the East German Air Force. For the most, part it was disbanded with the vast majority of the planes scrapped. However, there was one exception. The Russians had turned out an excellent single- seat fighter, the Mig-29 and it was decided to keep a squadron of them and integrate them into the German air base and some of the pilots were kept. At the same time a number of pilots were transferred from the west of Germany to fill out the squadron and there arose a situation very much like the one I described at the beginning of the article. The only difference was that everybody spoke German. However, not so long ago the pilots in the squadron, who had come from the former East German Air Force, had been taught to think of the West German pilots as their enemies. As one of the East German pilots put it, the biggest changes were ideological. He had to come to terms with the fact that his own system and ideology had collapsed and with that the economic and political systems. As millions of people in Eastern Europe can attest, switching from a dictatorship to a democracy is not as easy as it seems. Some of the West German pilots arrived at their new squadron with a "know-it-all" attitude which, if maintained, found them transferred out in a big hurry. Even though the plane used was an East German one, some of the western Germans figured they could fly it better than the eastern Germans who had been flying it for years. They, too, found themselves elsewhere although the easterners feel that this superior attitude is still around to a certain extent. Take Japan, a country that crams a citizenry equal to 48 per cent of the U.S. population into an area just slightly larger than our Maritime provinces. Based on the American experience, the Japanese should be like starving rats in a cage. Here are the numbers. The U.S. has 20 times as many murders as Japan, 70 times more cases of arson and eight times more thefts and robberies. As a matter of fact, it you want to steal money in Japan, the easiest place to do it is the police station. Anyone can walk into a police station and borrow as much as $30 for bus or train fare home. The cops won't even ask to see any ID. They trust'you to repay it when you can - to the police station nearest you. And death by firearms? Last year an average of 44 Americans were gunned down every day. Last year 38 people were shot to death in Japan - all year. The Japanese must look at America and see a world gone mad. The parents of Yoshihiro Hattori certainly must. He was a 16-year-old exchange student spending a year in Louisiana. On Halloween night in 1992 he rang the wrong doorbell, looking for a friend's party. The owner levelled a .357 at him and yelled 'Freeze'." "Pardon?" said the student. "Boom!" went the gun. Shot him dead. The kid's Oriental appearance had 'startled' the idiot. To paraphrase a New York paramedic: We apologize for America. This shouldn't happen when you go there. All that aside, even training methods are different. Communist pilots had found themselves being controlled at every turn by ground controllers; now they have to learn to think a great deal more for themselves. In the long run this new thinking will pay off, but for the present it is hard to adjust. I think I know a little better now how those Germans, who sat opposite the Canadians, felt. Letter to the editor Continued from page 4 of waste could cost millions to remove. Leachate problems may not be the only reason for decommis-sioning the dump. A future thinking person can foresee the day, when, due to environmental concerns, all dumps will be dug up and incinerated. To build a dump at this time in history, is to save money today, and placing the debt on the backs of our children and their children. A dump will need to be monitored for leachate for 40 plus years, by expensive consultants. We are presently crunching numbers to come up cost for an incinerator to turn waste into energy, but perhaps this will suffice for the time; London's waste to energy incinerator at today's price would cost $29,000,000. This facility is five times larger than what Huron needs. We leave it to this, with the $13 to $25 million that the county is prepared to spend for a dump, why don't we just use the same money to do it right by building an incinerator? We suggest that you ask your reeve what he/she thinks about incineration and more specifically, ask if he/she is one of the people wasting money on impact studies for a dump when the rest of the world is moving toward incineration. Rob McQueen, Dungannon, ON. The short of it By Bonnie Gropp Back to your roots We must get together sometime soon. Boy, those words seem to be as common among society today as disgust for Paul Bernardo. The worst part of uttering that phrase is that 90 per cent of the tin-te, we never follow through. Everyone is so busy that usually out of sight is out of mind and when we do have time to refresh and think about those we'd like to see we're either too tired or they're busy. Even with families it's not as easy to get together as it once was. As a youngster, going to visit grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles meant a quick trip on my bicycle or at worst a 10 minute drive in the car. Now, however, with modern transportation, and education and job opportunities taking many people further afield, it isn't always as easy to touch base with the people we grew up with. My first hint that those I loved might not always be as easy to reach out and touch as they had always been, came with the marriage of my sister. As the wife of an OPP officer we knew that she wasn't going to be living in the neighbourhood, but it was still a bit of a shock when they began talking about moving to places that would take days to reach by car. But, I was young then. In the years since I have come to accept the distance that separates my sister and I,. yet a part of me still often wishes she was just across town. There is something about family that roots us, that lets us be ourselves and presents us with a cover and protection that makes us feel secure. This past Sunday, I attended a family reunion on my husband's side. Unlike some gatherings of this type, where the branches of the tree have extended a long way from the roots, this is a close-knit, though large cluster of siblings, their children and grandchildren. They share tradition and memories. Now, I am admittedly not fond of large social events. The more people in attendance the more uncomfortable, more reserved I become. Yet, being just a splice in this family tree, having joined it through marriage, it was interesting to sit back and watch the interplay. There were the ones drawn immediately to each, glad to be together after such a long time, while others congregated with the familiar faces they do see on a regular basis. Too, there were those who, even in this family that works so hard to keep the ties tight, were more restrained in their conversations, more formal, covering the safe and easy topics of work and weather. Irregardless of how they got along, though, it was obvious there is something solid about being around family. No matter how old we are, or how often they might drive us crazy, family is security. As I watched the older generation there on Sunday, I thought about how values had changed since they were younger. Church, morals, law and order and even family seem threatened these days. For most of us though, the latter has always been and still is the protection from what is wrong with this world and therefore should be worthy in turn of our protection. It is not always easy, when we are so tired and so busy, to make the effort to keep in touch with the ones who taught us the value of family. But once in awhile we should try, for our own benefit, to get back to our roots, to remind ourselves from whence we came and how it helped us grow.