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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1999-04-14, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 14, 1999. PAGE 5. Arthur Black E-nough with the e-mail! There was a snotty little editorial in The Globe and Mail recently aimed at everyone’s least favourite Crown corporation - Canada Post. The editorial was an 11-paragraph galloping sneer at the post office's attempt to remain relevant in the age of e-mail. Canada Post has unleashed an advertising campaign urging Canadians to stick to writing good old-fashioned letters - pen and paper, envelopes, stamps - the works. The Globe and Mail thinks the very concept is a hoot. "You can send and receive e-mail any time," trills the G&M editorialist, "Bye-bye postman. You can do it from anywhere you have access to a computer. Bye-bye mailbox. E-mail is generally received within seconds or minutes of being sent. You don't have to buy stamps or envelopes.” ""The e-mail service never goes on strike. Bye-bye postal system. The system makes a copy of the letter so that if it goes astray you don't have to write another one from scratch. You can ask the person on the other end to message you back instantly when they receive it." All of which made me wonder if the planet The Globe and Mail lives on issues visas for aliens. I'd like to visit. The e-mail system they’re talking about Land claims I have been following with a considerable amount of interest the various land claims made by the native people of Canada and how much validity they have. It is all very well, for example, if the Ogopongo tribe or some other makes a claim on a piece of land which may or may not include urban areas but I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of Canadians have no idea at all what justification there is pn which to base such a claim. There is another point which has, to my knowledge, been raised. My study of Canadian history tells me, among other things, that Indians fought Indians. What happens if the tribe making the claim has taken the land from another tribe? Does this give the first tribe the right to make a claim against the second tribe? Maybe some of my native friends can clarify this for me since such a claim seems to have just as much importance as any one against the federal government. At any rate, I got to thinking if the principle of land claims were applied to Europe, what a horrible mess the whole continent would be in. I can start with East Germany. If you owned a house in that part of the country in 1939 and decided, as a result of the doesn’t sound much like the treacherous, unpredictable and thoroughly malevolent cyberpestilence I grapple with every day. Let me address the Globe's argument one point at a time. You can send and receive e-mail any time. Not on my computer you can’t. You can type your e-mail at any time, but when you press the send button, all manner of nightmare scenarios are waiting to bushwhack you. Your computer may inform you that your server is "busy". Or that it "cannot find" your server. Or (my favourite) "Eudora is tired of waiting for your server to respond”. Tired, are we? Would a beer bottle through your display monitor screen energize you, do you think? You can do it from anywhere you have access to a computer. True - but so what? I've got a computer at work and a computer at home and that's It for accessible computers in my life. I daresay that in a given day most of us walk by more friendly, waiting, mailboxes than friendly, humming computers. E-mail is generally received within seconds or minutes of being sent. Maybe, maybe not. You'll never know. All you know is that you lobbed it into the ether. What happens after that is known only to God and Bill Gates. You don't have to buy stamps and envelopes. True. Instead, you have to buy a hard drive, a monitor, a keyboard, an operating system, a box of floppy disks and a library of manuals to figure out how it all works. Then you'll need to purchase an internet account which will run you about 300 bucks By Raymond Canon communist takeover, to move to West Germany, under what conditions can you now get your old home back? What if you discovered it had been tom down and a new house put on it, better than the one you owned, or, horror of horrors, worse than yours? I think it would take Solomon to sort that one out and, if I am not mistaken, the German government is still looking for a Teutonic version of that ancient sage. But let's look at another example. The Celtic people were firmly settled in what we know as Great Britain when the Germanic tribes. Jutes, Angles and Saxons arrived and proceeded to take their land away from them. Today, Celtic speakers are' located in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Can they, as descendents of the original people, make land claims against the British government? While we are at it, can the Celts currently living in the French province of Brittany do the same thing against Paris? Nobody knows where the Basques came from but they have been in southern France and northern Spain as long as anybody can remember. They would like more autonomy, including perhaps independence but Paris has chosen to ignore them. The Spanish government in Madrid is considering the possibility of more autonomy but balks at giving the Basques outright independence. What rights do they have? per annum. You’ll be lucky to get it all for less than $2,000. Know how many stamps and envelopes you get for two grand? The e-mail service never goes on strike. Perhaps not. But it does go AWOL. And it does fail to deliver. Not to worry though. It always explains its failure with a message that begins, "the following addresses had permanent fatal errors." And then helpfully explains with: "500Mnjones@thezone.net.Happy.Valley.Goo se.Bay ... User unknownReporting-MTA: dns; ndcx.tor.cbc.caReceived-From-MTA: DNS; [1.35.29.240]" Uh, thanks, Eudora. Everything's clear now. The system makes a copy of the letter so that if it goes astray - Wait a minute, Globe and Mail - you're admitting that letters go astray in the e-mail system? Funny. I've been sending and receiving traditional, stamped-envelope mail for 40 years and to the best of my knowledge, not a single letter - providing it was properly addressed - has ever gone astray. Oh, I know that e-mail is here to stay. It's handy, it's fast and it can be convenient - but it is also temperamental, superficial and unreliable - not to mention exceedingly impersonal. I know when somebody takes pen to paper to write me a letter, they're actually thinking about me. With e-mail I'm just a URL on a list of subscribers. That's how I feel'. If you don't agree, that's cool. But if you feel you have to argue, make it official. Send me a letter. A real letter. How about the German minorities in northern Italy near the Austrian border or a similar minority living in Alsace-Lorraine in eastern France close to the German border? Another case is the Hungarians located in northern Romania. We need go no further than the Albanians living in what used to be Yugoslavia and are now being oppressed in Kosovo. The list is almost endless and we haven't looked at the rest of the world. Finally, what about financial support? One question which poses itself is whether there should be a relationship between the amount of independence and financial support. The more independence a minority has, could the financial support be reduced? I think you can see by now that what we have in Canada is not solely a domestic problem; it has ramifications in other parts of the world as well. Each case may have its differences but they all have a common cause. I---- ' i A Final Thought When you want to test the depth of a stream don't use both feet. Chinese Proverb The Short of it By Bonnie Gropp Try not to worry To worry or not to worry — usually there should be no question. In the past decade or so I seem to be in an ever-increasing inner struggle to not let this world's little headaches be a pain. While interestingly enough this time frame coincides with my tenure at this newspaper I suspect it has more to do with my personality. Though the development of a thick skin would be an asset in my job, an admitted tendency to obsessive behaviour transforms the most insignificant into the colossal-at home and at work. The next day's schedules, for example, can lead to insomnia as I plan the routines for my blissfully sleeping family. It takes plenty of concentration to relax and put the worries to bed. Dilemmas and hassles I must constantly remind myself, are not going to stop the rising sun. Life goes on and these too shall pass are accurate cliches but not in the moment do they seem tantamount to the problem. But, as I mentioned, in retrospect, I don't believe this has been a lifelong trait. I can't recall worry and stress being much a part of my younger life. Or if they did exist, being given much importance. Problems of youth and early adulthood didn't stress me long. When I reflect on my high school years, generally the biggest question facing myself and my peers was what we'd do for fun on the weekend. And even for the more conscientious, concerns were pretty much restricted to improving grades or meeting assignment deadlines. Also, a Grade 12 education could guarantee you honourable employment. This isn't the story today. When I look at the many stressed-out teens and 20-somethings in the 1990s I have tremendous sympathy. Today's teenagers know that their best chance for a secure future is university or college, but they must have the money and marks to get there. They work to find work so they will have the funds, but then have less time to dedicate to their studies. After spending the money for a high price education, very few walk into a career worthy of them. In low-paying jobs, for which they are over educated, they struggle to balance budgets with today's high cost of living and their student loan debts. One 20-something I know, after graduating from college, found her options so limited she decided to return to school. Now she works full-time, often over 50 hours a week, afternoon, nights and weekends, while attending college full-time. Another university graduate juggles part­ timejobs, wondering if he has enough to make it from paycheque to paycheque, while yet another is facing uncertainty with a contract term ending and no prospects in sight. As a child and as a young adult my life actually had more dark moments than it has in recent years. But they were there, fought through and gone. There was not a constant struggle for clarity, teasing moments of dim light shimmering through only to disappear swiftly when another uncertainty clouds everything over. But, every life, every generation comes with its worries. The trick is to not let it get you down. Let the challenges strengthen you and keep faith your time will come.