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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2000-05-03, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, MAY 3, 2000. PAGE 5. Other Views Earth to prudes: let’s lighten up Marshall McLuhan once said something to the effect that no goldfish ever was aware that it lived in a goldfish bowl - point being that none of us can know what or who we are until we manage to step outside our environment and look back at it. That’s why that famous space photo of Planet Earth - all blue and green and white and swirling - was so electrifying. We’d never seen ourselves from outside our global fishbowl. It makes me wonder if people of the Victorian Age ever realized that they were, well, Victorian. Prudish. Uptight. Laughably hypersensitive about sex and mores. Makes me wonder if anybody realizes we’re doing it again. We're getting pretty silly, folks. Cynthia Stewart, a Cleveland housewife, may well be on her way to the slammer. Her crime? Well, she’d taken a roll of film into her local drug store for development. A photo clerk there took one look at some of the shots on the roll, and called the cops. The cops moved in and charged Mrs. Stewart with “pandering sexually oriented material involving a minor”. Sure enough, on the film are shots of an eight-year-old female rinsing off after a bath using a detachable shower spray. One ‘minor’ thing about the minor - she is Cynthia Stewart’s daughter. “Throughout her life I have taken pictures of her to record the growth of her body and moments of silliness and play” Ms. Stewart testified. She has been suspended without pay from her job as a school bus driver and faces up to 16 years in prison if convicted. Italian sons stay close to Mom Over the years as I have worked or studied in various countries, I have tried to take a close look at social structures within the country and see how they compare with those to be found elsewhere. One that I have found particularly intriguing over the years has been the role of the family in Italy. Actually you don’t have to live in Italy to notice this since it crops up all the time in both books and films concerning that country, not to mention the lives of families of Italian origin who live in Canada. Many years ago (back in the 1960s to be exact) there was a book published called simply The Italians by Luigi Barzini which is still an excellent reference if you are interested in knowing something about the country. There is one section I recently came across which describes the Italian family as catering like a restaurant, offering shelter like a hotel and healing like a hospital. Almost 40 years later it still seems like an appropriate description. All this came to mind as I was looking at an Italian family with which I am acquainted and which seemed to be to have retained these qualities even though the entire family has been located in Canada for several decades. Hard on the heels of my observation came a European study which surveyed, among other things, what percentage of young adults still live with their parents in Italy and for how long. You will perhaps be as surprised at the results as I was. No less than 70 per cent of all unmarried Italian men aged up to 30 still live at home, well above the average in any other European I am reminded of that Coppertone ad - you know the one, where a mutt on the beach is pulling down a little waif’s bathing suit bottom of a waif and the (gasp!) cleft of her bum is showing? Sure hope they nail the Madison Avenue pervert responsible for that one. The folks railroading Ms Stewart would feel right at home in the town of Fall River, Nova Scotia. Authorities there recently suspended three grade schoolers for the heinous crime of ‘snowing’. Snowing is when kids ... run around in the snow and push each other into snowbanks. It is also known as ‘fun’. Except at George P. Vanier Junior High School in Fall River. That’s where a teacher last winter noted ‘suspicious’ signs of snow on a young girl’s jacket and reported her 'to the principal. Yes, the kid admitted, they (three girls and a boy - all close friends) had been frolicking in the snow. At George P., that qualifies as ‘aggressive behaviour’. No one had been hurt. None of the kids had complained. They were all suspended. Does it get stupider than this? Actually, yes. A Nebraska seventh-grader was kicked out of school for showing up with a pair of blunt- edged safety scissors. In Kansas, a 13-year-old was suspended for ‘racial harassment’ after he sketched a Confederate flag on a piece of paper. At an elementary school in Gimli, Manitoba, kids can be turfed out for hugging. The numbnuts faculty of the school calls that “inappropriate touching”. Raymond Cannon The International Scene country. What is even more remarkable is that this number if somewhat higher than a decade ago. Furthermore, even if they do leave home to get married, almost half of them still live within a single kilometre of their mother’s abode and 15 per cent live in the same building. Three quarters of all those who do not actually live at home manage to see their mother at least once a week. Fifty-eight per cent of married sons and 65 per cent of married daughters see her every day. Now I know why there are so many songs in Italian about mother. The composer probably saw her every day and was dependent on her for a number of things. Having family not far away means that the mother can be looked after more closely as she grows older. This is important since Italy, like North America and most of Europe, has an aging population. In fact, Italy’s population is aging more rapidly than most. Another aspect is the fact that young mothers, also like elsewhere, are more likely to go out to work and it helps to have a babysitter in the vicinity. What grandparent does not like to have access to grandchildren. Ours have Score one for our side though - after long and thorough soul searching the City Council of Birmingham - England’s second largest city - has decided that the nursery rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep ... is not racist. Perhaps it was the black mother who stood up at a city council debate and pointed out “The rhyme is about black sheep, not black people.” I wonder how you say ‘Duh!’ in Birminghamese? One is tempted to laugh at all this Pecksniffian stupidity. One would be wrong. Zach Jones thought it would be a good laugh to write a column in his student newspaper on a subject that affects every human being and about which many people - children and adults - spend an inordinate amount of time chuckling over: flatulence. Maybe Zach’s column wasn’t Pulitzer Prize material, but it was a long way from Mein Kamf — although you wouldn’t know it from the way authorities reacted. The high school principal took all 1,200 copies of the student newspaper containing the column and locked them in a safe. Zach was relieved of his column. The teacher who helped Zach was fired. The district school superintendent thundered on to the battlefield, declaring the column to be ‘obscene’. “If that column’s obscene, then I deserve the death penalty for some of the things I’ve written about,” commented an observer. An observer by the name of Dave Barry, who just happens to have won the Pulitzer Prize for humour. He shakes his head about the silliness, but he’s not surprised. “There are always going to be people in positions of power who don’t have a sense of humour,” he says. Okay, no sense of humour. But how about two brain cells to rub together? been a great joy to my wife and me and we have continued to have an excellent relationship with them as they have grown up. Pensions in Italy are among the highest in Europe, indeed some would say too high for what the country can afford. Nevertheless there is a lot of buying power there which can be directed towards the grandchildren and their whims. On the other side of the coin, if any of the children find themselves unemployed, part of this same pension money can be used as a sort of familial unemployment insurance fund. Owning a home is important in Italy and again parents come to the rescue with money to make that first down payment. Finally, if you are in Italy you cannot help but notice the number of mobile phones (more than in any other European country). The Italians, who can never by any stretch of the imagination be described as taciturn, use these phones to call, you guessed it, la mamma. Seventy per cent of those who do not live at home call her at least once a day. On balance family life in Italy seems to have taken on new strength. If Barzini were alive today and were updating his book, he would probably have something to add to what he said above. What, you may ask, would the Italians do without their mother? Final Thought Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out. - Robert Collier Bonnie Gropp The short of it In the eye of the storm There have been a lot of things, said about home. It’s where the heart is. It’s where you lay your hat. And it’s sweet. Now when I think of home in this context, I am lulled by images of my house. It is my haven, my comfort zone, my retreat. Certainly, it’s not that my place is so wonderful, there is nothing pretentious, nothing remarkable about it. But to me it is a blanket on a cold, harsh day, the soothing sense of a child’s soft hand in mine, the kiss of man’s best friend when you’re blue. A new movie has the lead character returning to his home at the end of a long day to be met by his wife, who asks him what it was like out there. “Cold,” he says, as he reaches out to embrace her. This simple scene says it all. When the work day ends I am anxious to be home, to be with those who have no expectations and manage to love me anyway. I am not particularly kind if 9-5 somehow insinuates itself into my home life, and I do my best, though sometimes it’s a struggle to leave work at work. There is no more valuable time to me then that spent at my house. Home is safe, home is where I still have some control. Or at least I thought I did. This past weekend the testosterone troop was rallied by my hubby to do some around-the- house work. This group consists of some nephews and friends who are at their manly ‘best’ (?) when the pack mentality takes over and with tool belts and cold beer they attack some good old-fashioned guy chores. It’s a time of ribald comments, belching, sweating and other less charming traits of the male animal. And buying into this whole machismo (after all, I am not so enamoured with equality that I won’t use my femininity to avoid hard, heavy labour), my sole purpose in this scenario is to see that food is on the table when the hungry men are ready. This seems a relatively light load to carry, especially for someone who actually enjoys feeding people. However, when a group of boisterous males, who have been working far too hard to worry about decorum, bring all that, let’s call it energy, into the house, any sense I may have had about having control, was pretty much blown out the window. Like a Kansas twister they swirled into my home, my haven, disrupting the calm with their rambunctious camaraderie, then departing with the same sudden turmoil as they arrived, leaving in their wake a path of, well, - a big mess. Don’t misunderstand. I fully appreciated their presence that day, making a labourious effort much more entertaining for my husband, who typically has to endure these menial jobs solo. I didn’t have any problem playing 1950’s housewife for a day. But, to paraphrase Tim Allen, everywhere men go they make a house dirty. And with 10 of them in high spirits the mayhem that remains is almost beyond compare. Actually, my experience has shown that it’s not so much dirt as demolition. Without really touching anything there was a sense that they had altered everything. I guess we could say, a home that had been calm was suddenly in the eye of the storm.