Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2000-03-22, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 22, 2000. PAGE 5. You short? No problem a-tall Well, I see that Short Guys are getting shafted again. Funny. Thanks to the current epidemic of Political Correctness it is an offence just this side of plane hijacking to make mock of anyone’s race, nationality, sexual orientation, political affiliation, or religion. But short guys? Hey. Sock ‘em with your best shot. A few years ago, the songwriter Randy Newman had a smash hit with an acidic little ditty entitled Short People. (Basic message - short people are insignificant). There’s an Elmore Leonard novel called Get Shorty which got turned into a Hollywood movie of the same name. The “Shorty” of the title was played by Danny De Vito. Who is ... guess what? Yep. Knee high to a fire hydrant. Bad enough that short guys get the short end of the stick in the humour department - now scientists are wading in with evidence that short guys are shortchanged in the romance department too. A study conducted by a team of Polish and British researchers has concluded that tall men I International Scene By Raymond Canon Religion and rehabilitation The church to which I belong donates money to, among other organizations, the Teen Challenge Farm just south-west of Lambeth. It is this farm which specializes in rehabilitating young people who have found themselves addicted to either drugs or alcohol or both. The success rate of this organization is considerably above the national average for such endeavours. It is hard to imagine such work being conducted in a vacuum and I have sometimes wondered if such a Christian- oriented approach was being practised elsewhere. It seems that is precisely the case and we have only to look south of the border to find proof of this. A Quaker organization in Trenton, New Jersey, administers to the poor and elderly and gets no less than 80 per cent of its funding from the government. This means that it has to be very careful how it mixes its work with any attempt to convert the recipients. In addition, the Quakers have decided to let their work speak for itself and not attempt to carry out any proselytising. The reason they get any money at all is that many governments in the U.S. have discovered that such “faith-based” groups are more successful than the state in fighting such things as drug addiction, illiteracy and poverty. Alternate systems built up over the past quarter of a century have, for the most part, experienced little but failure. Some groups go much farther than the Quakers. In a prison near Houston, Texas, prisoners are put into an InnerChange Freedom Initiative and undergo 16 hours of scripture­ reading, job training, family counselling and prayer in an effort to see that they do not end are sexually more attractive and have more children than short guys. “Absolute nonsense,” declares John Hemphill, a men’s wear salesman -in Toronto. “I’ve done alright for myself. In fact, I'd like to think short men have more sex appeal than tall men do.” Mister Hemphill is five-foot-two. “Total BS,” declares Scott Matalon. He claims all a guy needs is a resonant, confident voice to charm the ladies. “You have to keep talking and talking to get women’s attention. We make up for our height (or lack of it) with our personalities.” Mister Matalon is five-foot-three. Hey - as a guy who was five-foot-two until he was 16, I am not sneering, believe me. I grew up wincing under nicknames like ‘Shortstuff’ and ‘Shrimp’. I don’t know why I took shortness as an insult. Napoleon was five-foot-six. Nikita Kruschev was five-three. Queen Victoria? Empress of an Empire On Which The Sun Never Set? Five-feet even. John Keats? One of the greatest poets in the English language? Didn’t even hit the five-foot mark. Alas, facts seldom get in the way of a stereotype. A few years back, an American shrink wrote a book called Too Small, Too Tall.' It was an in-depth study of all the U.S. presidential elections between 1904 and 1984 - up back behind bars shortly after they get out. These prisoners are some of the most hardened criminals in the state and it is believed that if this initiative can get them to accept heavenly laws, it is more likely that they will be prepared to obey earthly ones. It is hard to argue with this approach since, in the three years that the program has been in effect, only 15 out of 120 “graduates” (12.5 per cent) have found themselves back in prison. The normal rate of return to crime is 50 per cent. If I told you that such programs were being embraced with alacrity, I would not be telling you the whole story. The fact is that the Americans United for Separation of Church and State (yes, there is such an organization) claim that it is unconstitutional for any government to finance organizations which hire workers based on their religious faith. There is also the claim that money going to Letters THE EDITOR, I found the letter to the editor from the Christian Heritage Party, Huron-Bruce Riding (Citizen, March 15) disturbing to say the least. I would like to correct what I see as misconceptions. Firstly, Canada wasn’t a Christian nation founded on religious principles and values. This country always has been and always will be a secular democracy founded on democratic principles of which one is church/state separation. Religion has been responsible for many things from the crusades to Northern Ireland. Religion is not a guide to morality, but more often an excuse for immorality. Religious focussing specifically on the height of the candidates. Conclusion: the taller candidate made it into the Oval Office more than 80 per cent of the time. Which is too bad. Think of some of the lanky boneheads that occupied that office. Best short-guy putdown I ever heard? From the lips of David Lloyd George, British prime minister and statesman. Once, as an after dinner speaker, he was introduced by an emcee this way: “I had expected to find Mister Lloyd George a big man in every sense, but you see for yourselves that he is quite small in stature.” Lloyd George came to the lectem, pulled himself up to his full five-foot-one, looked down at his introducer and purred: “Where I come from, we measure a man from his chin up. You, evidently, measure from his chin down”. Short, tall - who cares? There’s a famous old quote from Sophie Tucker that goes “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor - and rich is better.” Well, I’ve been short and I’ve been (relatively) tall - and I can tell you, aside from attitudes, it doesn’t matter a scrap. Sometimes I think that all the anti-short jokes are just jealousy. That fellow, Scott Matalon, I mentioned earlier — five-foot - three? His high school sweetheart was a six- foot model. Loved to slow dance. So did Scott. Think about it. projects like the two outlined above do little but divert money from secular social welfare agencies whose caseloads contain people who might prefer to have their addiction treated by non-faith workers. However, don’t forget this is an election year in the U.S. and at least two politicians, Al Gore and George Bush Jr. entered the picture on the religious side. Gore has called for a stronger social-services partnership between the government and religious groups while Bush has used such faith-based groups as an example of the “compassionate conservatism” that he has included in his platform. Legislation is now in the works that will expand the use of “charitable choice” in allowing faith-based groups to compete for government welfare contracts. It is highly likely that this legislation, if it passed, will be challenged in the courts. I, for one, will be watehing to see what happens. thought has fueled murderous insanity. Murder, theft, and torture have all been done in God’s name. This fundamentalist quick fix for the ills plaguing society is a red herring. Second, Canada is a multi-cultural society part of a much larger global village. For CHP to make policies based on principles drawn from Judeo Christian scriptures (the Bible) is, and I believe, racist. Ideas of equality and human rights did not come with religion. Thirdly, ones religion is not a manifestation of who we are or believe. It’s not really a voluntary choice. Human beings are bom with undeveloped brains. Parents provide milk and baby food to an infant without being consulted and with the best intentions, hoping that the infant will grow strong and healthy. Similarly, but with little awareness of the parents, the infant is receiving a kind of intellectual and emotional education which is shaping their referential system, growth of neurons, the number of synaptic connections, the expression and repression of genes, and the brain, in full evolutionary swing Continued on page 6 The Short of it By Bonnie Gropp Luck of the Irish Where’s your green? > It was the first question from the first person I saw after leaving my home last Friday, St. Patrick’s Day. A touch touchy in the morning, I almost retorted that the name is Gropp, the maiden name was Ott and I don’t even wear a dirndl during October. Why would I celebrate an Irish tradition? However, I do come from Listowel, home of Paddy fest, and it wasn’t all that long ago that I did dig out the green for March 17. After all, trying to make a little event out of nothing at the end of a long winter isn’t such a bad idea. It certainly wasn’t a crime to celebrate an Irish holiday, so I marked St. Patrick’s Day with, if not the exuberance of a true Irishman, at least the fun of riding along on a leprechaun’s coattails. The least I could do was plan my wardrobe so that I might sport something shamrock green. But eventually, I wondered why. St. Patrick was Ireland’s second bishop. For 30 years he travelled through the county converting pagans to Christianity. It is the anniversary of his death March 17, AD 471 that has been commemorated in Ireland. St. Patrick’s Day was brought to America in 1737. As their patron saint St. Patrick is significant to the people of Ireland and to the immigrants who came to the new country. But for the rest of us...? Perhaps, we are looking for some of the luck of the Irish to rub off on us, I pondered, until I began to consider the luck of the Irish. Since the 1500s, Ireland has been plagued by woes, man made and Heaven sent. King Henry VIII first sent Protestants to take control, then other English rulers continued to re-colonize. Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics have battled their way through the country’s history. Protestants in the 18th century passed penal laws, stripping Catholics of land, influence and civil rights. The poor, regardless of religion also suffered. Many had to sell land to pay rent. Nature’s hand, however had no favourites. The Irish Potato Famine hit everyone, though the poor Catholic farmers were hardest hit. For those who lived on potatoes, the blight of 1845 left them with no food. As it stretched on for years, the bitter irony was that those who starved to death in Ireland, need not have. There was plenty of food, but it went to the English. The hostility between Irish and English, Catholic and Protestant, continues today. Peace treaties over the years have failed and Northern Ireland has been a battlefield for decades. Ireland is a lovely country, lush, rolling hills, quaint villages. But it has experienced poverty and despair for centuries. And yet it’s people despite the adversity carry music in their voice and in their souls. Reading the books of Frank McCourt, you are introduced to their failings, yes, but also the faith, pride and colour that seems to typify the Irish. They take it as it comes, rise above and shine. From the lilt when they talk to the sparkle in their eyes, there is a sense that the spirit can’t be broken. Perhaps that is the luck of the Irish we would like to share.