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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Huron Expositor, 1984-11-07, Page 2OPINION Huron si Otor SINCE 1880, SERVING THE COMMUNITY FIRST a Incorporating Brussels Post 10 Main Street 527-0240 Published In SEAFORTH, ONTARIO Every Wednesday morning JOCELYN A. SHRIER, Publisher RON WASSINK, Editor JANET L. MacDONALD, Advertising .Manager Member Canadian Community Newspaper Assoc. Ontario Community Newspaper Aasoclatlon Ontario Press Council Commonwealth Press Union Internallonel Pleas Ipatltute SubscrlptIon ratea: Canada $18.75 a year (In advance) Outside Canada $55.00 a year (In advance) Single Copies -50 cents each SEAFORTH, ONTARIO, WENESDAY, NVEO!!E!:;ER 7, 1984 Second class mall registration Number 0696 Let's be partners Partners in Preventing Crime is the theme" of National Crime Prevention Week this week. The reason for such a week is to focus public attention. on the need to prevent and reduce crime. Crime Prevention Week was first started last year and the success of it proves that Canadians are willing to take more responsibility for reducing crime in their communities. Earlier this year a planning workshop was�hel//d to share ideas for Crime Prevention Week. Some of these ideas induct -0'a self protection program for customers who shop late at night in convenience stores as well as for store employees; for senior citizens who live alone; anti -robbery projects; anti -vandalism projects; Block Parents, anti -car theft and anti -shoplifting campaigns. We can all be part of preventing crime. Seaforth has a Block Parent Association. And with the recent child murders, this association will surely grow. We can all help store owners by informing them of shopliftingand we can help senior citizens by calling on them occasionally. And we can help our police department by giving them tips and leads if we were witness to a crime. Join in! Let's be partners in our community. - R.W. No secrets, please At least three Ontario -Progressive Conservatives have announced they will be leadership candidates in the upcoming leadership convention. And it's probable that more will join the race for the premier's job. President of the Conservative party, David McFadden, recently announced that leadership candjdates will be trequired to reveal total, contributions, names of contributors and total amount spent on the campaign. But the amount contributed by each person will be kept secret. That's fine, but no limits have been Imposed as to how much a candidate will be allowed to spend. And because there are no restrictions, such campaigns could disadvantage some candidates. A candidate with unlimited funds could, in a sense, buy his way to the leadership position. For example, Agriculture Minister Dennis,;Timbrell has more than $230,000 in his campaign wary chest. Attorney -General Roy McMurtry, by comparison, had only about $28,000 in his riding association at the end of last year. A blind man can see which man has the advantage. A ceiling should be placed on campaign expenditures. After all, we want every man and woman to have a fair chance at the job. - R.W. Please sign A reminder to our readers: While we welcome your letters, all letters to the editor, even those submitted on behalf of organizations, must bear the signature of the author before they can be published. This is the only means by which we are able to verify the authenticity of such letters. Remember why they fought t ' COUNTRY CORNER by Larry Dillon 'Ch1 earliest thing that 1 can remember is watching my mother and brother jumping up and down and singing "The war is over! The war is over!" it was a great time for our nation. it was a time of happiness and rejoicing. The price paid for that day was high. Thousands of Canadian lives were lost in that war. Young, men, barely out of school risked their lives so that we could remain a free nation. Too many of them paid the ultimate price. They died defending the freedom they believed in. Since those men gave their lives we have made a few changes in our country. We now have a legal system where police can shoot and kill an innocent man while he is sleeping in his bed. The court in Sherbrooke Que. decided that police detectives did not violate the law when they killed one innocent man and wounded another, Their actions were inexcuseable,'but apparently legal. Our world famous police force, the RCMP, has • aid mass murderer Clifford Olsen S 100, I t I because he helped them in their investigation. Mr. Olsen tilled innocent people. Then he sold evidence of his atrocities to the police. It's as if he was on the government payroll while he killed the people. Police officers, who are exempt from the provincial seatbelt laws, wear guns and bullet proof vests while they patrol our highways. They diligently search for and charge motorists who do not obey the very law that the officers can disregard. Our country has a select corps of "metric police" that swoop down on and charge merchants that use the dreaded illegal Imperial measuring system. An entirely new form of discriminating against people has been invented by the government. it is called "affirmative ac- tion". Selected employers are now being required to fulfill hiringquotas of certain minority groups. A quaified applicant can now be rejected because he is not a woman, or because he belongs to the wrong racial category. This is the result of the laws to prevent discrimination on the basis of race or sex. We have a censorship board which decides what magazines and movies people will be allowed to see. Their standards are imposed upon the people. One by one we are throwing away the rights and freedoms that our soldiers died for. Yes it was politicians that passed the laws. but we let them de it. On Remembrance Day we will all be proud of them. We will be thankful that they made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. One question bothers me. If they could see us now, how would they feel about what we have done with their country? Rernernbrance, Day BILLTREMEER When t think of Remembrance Day...11 reminds me of the battlefields, of the men who sacrificed themselves for us. It was a good Idea that they decided not to givee,,,us a holiday from sphool because we wer-an't using Remembrance Day as Remembrance Day - Just a' holiday. means -. HEATHER McGAVIN When I think of -Remembrance Day....1 think of people dying and ofgune and bombs, and treoches with' bageof seed around them. MICHAEL MILLER When I think of Remembrance Day.,.1 think of all the:soldiers that died.I think of the poppy and of all the men who sacrificed themselves for country and home. "On the Beach" SENSE AND NONSENSE by Ron Wassink Many people look forward to Sunday morninge because it means they can sleep in. When they finally do drag themselves out of bed, it's that time when it's in between breakfast and lunch; church is almost over, And the day is almost shot because it takes another couple of hours to shake the fuzziness out of their heads and move from neutral to low. That's what many ,will be doing this Sunday. And if Nov. 11 is like other Remembrance Days in previous years, it will either be snowing, raining. blowing, or' all three. It's a darn cold day, but it's a day veterans of the two great wars remember. Let's face it --these guys are getting older. But even the aging World War 1 veteran still participates, marching from the Legion to the cenotaph-,. to the church and back to the Legion. And the average age of the first war vets is over 80. And I'm usually there too. And to be truthful about Remembrance Day, I'm no remembering, recalling,goodand bad times of war as the vets do. I'm there for two reasons, to witness the laying of the wreaths, snap a few photos of old soldiers staring straight ahead as the Last Post plays and be thankful that they did serve their country. I'd hate to hazard a guess as to how we'd be living if such men and women didn't go to battle. Heck, we might not even be here to talk about it. All this talk about Remembrance Day reminded me of the book i recently read by Neville Shute (for the second time). it's called On the Beach. It was written in 1959, just after the Korean Conflict. But the second world war must still have been fresh in the writers mind. Especially the end of the war when the dreaded H-bomb wai dropped on Hiroshima. That's what the book is about. Mr. Shute relates the experiences of an Australian family -- the husband is a navy man. and of a lone American submarine commander who is stranded in Australia. The book is prophetic as the writer tells oft the experiences Australians faced after not one, but thousands of radioactive bombs were dropped on all parts of the Northern Hemisphere. There's nothing left -- people that is. The world is Australia. Everyone died because of radiation poisoning. And it's only a matter of time for the Aussies. They too will die. And what upsets them is they didn't fight, they had no enemies, -- they didn't even drop such a bomb. But they too would suffer the - consequences of global war. It's ironic that we are now faced with the same predicament. Missiles with their radio- active war heads have been deployed. Our worry may not be American or Russian missiles, but that the third world countries also have such arms. Mr. Shute writes that it was the smaller countries that set off the war and that one of the largest countries released their missiles by mistake. The end was inevitable. That's what 1 think about on Remembrance Day. 1 hope that the last wars were not in vain -- that if there's another, that we'll still be around to talk about it....and remember. Feeling sorry a useless waste of time BEHIND THE SCENES by Keith Roulston While one of the signs of civilization in a modem country is the enshrinement and protection of human rights. for us as Individuals these days too many rights can make it wrong. We've been hung up on rights, at least since the 1960's (and maybe before, but my memory is getting bad). We got worried about the rights of the blacks in the U.S. first and quickly moved on to other disadvantaged groups closer to home. We worried about the rights of the French inside and outside Quebec, the rights of native people, the rights of visible minorities, the rights of women, the rights of children, the rights of consumers, the rights of citizens against harassment from police, and recently, the rights of policemen from harassment by citizens. While each of these causes is just in itself, after two decades we seem to have ingrained the rights issue so deeply in our conscious- ness that people seem to eo around with their antennae constantly out looking for some- thing that violates "their rights". "Gimme my rights dammrt or i'll bash you in the nose" seems to be a growing unstated code for our population. We're reverting to our childhood, really. Ask a child to do something and he'll likely say, "that's not fair, how come I've always got to do the work around here. How come she gets to watch television so much? And on and on. We can, all of us, see people who earn more than us for doing a job that isn't that much more difficult. We can see people who cheat on taxes and get away with it. We can see people who get preferential treatment from the boss or some government agency. We can see people who seem to be leaches on society getting along seemingly better than we are. We can see businesses we're sure are cheating us. We've got two choices. We can whimper and complain about it and pull back into our shells, or we can push the worries about things that really don't have to affect our lives aside and get on with things. Long ago, when as a child, i faced several months in bed convalescing from an illness, my mother gave me this choice: "You can look around and see all the people who are better off than you and feel sorry for yourself, or you can look around and see the people who are worse off than you and be thankful for what you've got." Feeling sorry for yourself is probably the most useless waste of energy in the world. We all fall into it at times, but the successful people in the world work hard to beat it back and get on with their lives. Too many people today seem to be • concentrating on their problems instead of their blessings. Too many people are saying "What's.the use? The government's against me, big business is against me, the rules are all stacked against me. What's the use of trying?" Their's is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you don't try, you won't succeed. Even in the midst of the bad times. we have more blessings than nearly anyone else in the world. Feeling sorry for ourselves, worrying too much about our "rights" for more, is a cri me. Always there ut never in SUGAR AND SPICE by Bill Smiley Let's see. What's new today? Ah. College teachers going on strike. Librarians coming off strike. Auto workers going on strike. U.S. won't help with acid rain. Police demand return of capital punishment. Russians accuse U.S. of non-cooperation in their new "peace" overtures. Man stabs woman 48 times and is sentenced to three months. Well. the magnificence of the world is unfolding in its accustomed manner. But all is not lost. A black bishop from South Africa has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Eugene Whelan has not been sent to Italy. (Not because he couldn't speak Italian. which he couldn't, not to mention English, but because he was a Liberal.) it must be giving Joe Clark, who has been stabbed in the back so often it's become a minor irritation. and has had his heart cut out and thrown to the wolves. a great deal of satisfaction to be the ropeman on the guillotine. (reel some pity for poor old Eugene, and pone old Bryce Mackasey, who didn't get to go to that villa in Portugal. One of two things happened. Either they had too much pride to scuttle into a judgeship or the Senate. or they were too greedy to settle for something to small and so sordid. Your guess. You may, believably, wonder what all that leads to. We shall see. it's extremely difficult today to be an alert, aware, compassionate person when police- men are shot like rabbits, there is war all over the world. children are starving, men beat up their women, and you haven't even got your leaves raked. As a sad. sad result. we are inclined to turn in upon ourselves, to blot out the horror and the violence and the brutality of society, and to lock ourselves into a little cupboard composed of money and "things and "relations."hoping the nasties will go away. They won't. Perhaps our wincing and flinching are an example of the human spirit trying to stay alive in a time when the brutishness of the Middle Ages looks like a Sunday School picnic. in comparison. Perhaps it's something older than that: a retreat to the family. the cave. the tribe, when the eatth shook and the great beasts howled their final agony. And man whimpered. Hey, that's pretty good. eh? Don t worry. I'm not going to go on like a guru. I'm just trying to establish the fact. which every reader knows. that our own affairs become more important than a train wreck in Italy. a flood in India, or an outbreak of the dire rear in Hayfork Centre. To get to the point, the Mulrooneys are after me. Not Brian and Mita, bless their hearts. They can take a joke. They wouldn't try to rub me out. f don't think. No. it's the double oo Mulrooneys Mr are upset. 1 made an unfortunate remark in a column about "Mulrooney" sounding as though it was the other side of the tracks. ft was about as funny as an old rubber boot. But I did applaud the lady Mita. for many aspects of her character, Now this. In my old paper, where 1 was editor, appears this scurrilous bit: "Re Bill Smiley's column So far as Mile Mulroney and a 'name sounding from the wrong side of the tracks' is served up by 'Mr. Constant Mouth, 1944, Bill Smiley (ex-naxi war camp nightmare)'; "A Mulrooney myself, 1 ponder "constant - mouth's deeds of heroism or heroism -/not. Ana ao not make sport of his torture. nor judge his (imprisoned utterings) he now sings: "fell well" or "He that cannot praise." it is signed: ''Barbara Mulroon • Clan Mulrooney• 3-dimensional writer •poet,•art ist humanitarian." What in the name of whatever is a three-dimensional writer? Anyway, there were a lot of...and....'s in the published letter, suggesting it was originally libellous or worse. Just don't plant a bomb in my bathroom, or i'll have the whole lot of the Smileys down on yiz Mulrooneys and we lived on the other side of the tracks. too. When we felt like it. But closer to home. somebody hates me. it's sort of nice. I'm sick of being a good, gentle, kind man like Bill Davis, Prime Minister of Ontario, who was also described as shifty, ambiguous. slippery. ruthless, and so on. Media tripe. A man from a neighbouring township, wrote me a hate letter this fall. It was supposed to be witty. but devolved into sheer malice. it was an attack on teachers. i'll quote only bits. Most of it is libel. "Willy, you remind me of the provincial handle on the thundermug—always there but never in....You, along with that effete corps of over -rated and over -paid so-called teach- ers, are always articulating some complaint about municipal. provincial and federal legislature." i won't bore you with the rest of it, because it is boring. it suggests that none of us has the guts to tackle the establishment. or run for office. Robert S. O'Neill, 1 was a town councillor when you were wetting your Pampers. i have been challenging the Establishment for years, in this column and face to face. i have been president of a large tourist associaiton. President of a publishers' association, Treasurer of the local Red Cross; Member of the Library Board. Member of the church board. i am tired. Of you and the Mulrooneys. Get stuffed, both of you.