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The Citizen, 2016-10-27, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2016. PAGE 5. Other Views Some guy by the name of Bob J first heard his voice cascading out of the speakers in front of Sam the Record Man's store on Yonge Street in Toronto. He didn't sound like all the other Bobs on the hit parade back then — Bobby Vee, Bobby Curtola, Bobby Vinton, Bobby Blue Bland... This Bob had a voice that sounded like pit -run gravel tumbling off a dump truck. A dump truck with swollen adenoids. My first reaction: "What the hell is THAT?" Something inside me twitched and flipped like a landed sunfish on a dock. I didn't have a clue what I was hearing but I sure as hell knew it was something. Bob Dylan is what it was. "The Masters of War", if memory serves. It was the early 1960s and a skinny kid from the Minnesota Iron Range was about to shake the world of popular music like a Jack Russell on a barn rat. Flash forward half a century or so. I'm pulling on my socks when the morning news comes on my radio and I hear the opening bars of "Mister Tambourine Man". My Inner Sunfish does another flip. "He's dead" I think Bob Dylan is dead. But no. Dylan's still alive, on the road somewhere. The news is that he's just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Arthur Black Not everyone was thrilled. When the Swedish Academy made the announcement in Stockholm there were disbelieving gasps from the audience. The Nobel is reserved for serious writers like Samuel Beckett and T.S. Eliot! Surely a guitar -plinking yodeller from the American hinterland couldn't possibly... There were complaints closer to home as well. In the Globe and Mail, columnist Russell Smith compared some Dylan lyrics to those of Tomas Transtromer, a poet who won the Nobel in 2011. Smith pronounced Transtromer's lyrics sublime; Dylan's lyrics "dumb". Sony, Russell...Tomas who? On CBC radio, the director of the Vancouver Writers' Festival opined that as Dylan was a multi -millionaire already, the Prize (and the prize money) should have gone to someone who needed the cash. Fortunately, obscurity and/or indigence are not criteria for winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. A lot of people thought Dylan was a splendid choice. President Obama tweeted congratulations "to one of my favourite poets". Salman Rushdie heartily approved as did Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison, herself a Nobel Laureate. What's Dylan think? Who knows? But the gnomic bard once wrote: "Half of the people can be part right all of the time Some of the people can be all right part of the time But all of the people can't be all right all of the time I think Abraham Lincoln said that. `I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours' I said that. Recently 3,206 people took to the website Goodreads to offer their critiques of another poet's work. A sample of their views: "The language is so outdated..." "This was absolute CRAP! ! ! !" .."overly dramatic"... "flat out stupid"... `Boring as hell"... "Too stupid for words" They weren't talking about Bob. They were ragging on a guy named Bill. Something he wrote called Othello. Coddling - not good at any age Jt doesn't take long for two people raising a child to start seeing the different parenting techniques that they were raised under. For Ashleigh and me, one of the first things I noticed was that I had an intense fear of coddling my daughter. Before anyone is concerned, we're not fighting over that, I just want to be sure that our daughter is independent and able to act responsibly without having someone standing with her at all times. Ashleigh feels the same way, we just both have different opinions on how to achieve that. I won't get into any details on that because, like Las Vegas, some things (okay, most things) that happen at home should probably stay at home, but I always find it funny when my professional life mirrors my personal life. Shortly after Ashleigh and I chatted about the importance of letting Mary Jane discover things on her own and how far we need to go to help her, I found myself sitting in a Morris-Turnbeny Council meeting where councillors were discussing the exact same thing. I don't think the word "coddling" ever came up in the discussion, but that is exactly what the councillors were talking about. Morris-Turnberry Councillor Sharen Zinn felt that any notifications from the municipality needed to be delivered in envelopes clearly marked with the municipality's seal and, furthermore, printed on the municipality's letterhead. What brought this on? Well, the municipality had advertised some meetings regarding official documents with a mailer that resembled a postcard. Zinn said that correspondence she received indicated the ratepayers either missed the mailer completely or looked at it and recycled it without knowing what it was about. Because of that, she felt that the municipality needed to make sure that every thing that was mailed out looked as if it were some kind of official correspondence, regardless of cost or the amount of time it would take to have a staff member stuff thousands of envelopes. I could go into how other councillors had been told how great the mailers were received Denny - Scott 1 . Denny's Den or talk about how much of a pain it is stuffing envelopes (just ask Ashleigh, she was a one-person mailing crew after our wedding and baby showers), but I think the more important thing to be aware of here is that people were complaining because they recycled an official piece of mail without reading it first. A lot of people may think that the toughest thing about going to a council meeting is having to sit through the minutia that fills it up hoping to find an interesting story, but it isn't. Most of that minutia is dealt with pretty quickly. The toughest thing is keeping my mouth shut. Okay, just because I know my mother may end up reading this, that's probably the toughest thing for me to do anywhere and at anytime, but it becomes doubly difficult at a council meeting. Beyond that if it's North Huron because it's my tax dollars being bandied about. When someone says something like the above, which I read as we need to account for people doing something irresponsible so we should spend time and money making it harder for them to be irresponsible, I really have to focus on not laughing out loud in the middle of what should be a somber municipal meeting. I can probably be quoted as complaining about the laissez faire attitude often expressed by those younger than I when it comes to being responsible for themselves, but now we're talking about people my age or older needing to have their hand held when they do something as common as getting the mail I'd like to say these are homeowners, ratepayers, taxpayers, fanners and business owners, but I don't know who made the complaints, only that they were made often enough that Zinn felt it was necessary to bring the issue up at the meeting. Regardless of their walk of life, the people complaining about it are complaining that they didn't look at their mail before they filed it away, either in a filing cabinet or the circular filing bin that needs to be emptied on a weekly basis. These people either went to their personal mailbox at the end of their laneway, visited their community mailbox somewhere near their home or went to their PO box like we do here in Blyth, grabbed this mailer, said, "This doesn't look important," and recycled it before giving it a second thought. At what point do we start holding people responsible for their actions and stop looking for ways to make their lives easier? Every day I go to the Blyth post office, leaf through my mail, decide what's going in the recycling, what's going to the office and what's going home and then go on with my day. It's not that difficult. If, however, I recycle something important, say a bill, a summons or some piece of municipal correspondence, it isn't on the person sending it, it's on me. It's my responsibility to look at the mail and see what needs to come home with me and that same responsibility falls to the people complaining they missed the mailer about Morris-Turnberry's meeting. We need to stop looking at issues such as this with an eye to make people less responsible and start telling people tough when they screw up. It isn't on Morris- Turnberry's staff, or anyone else, to try and account for people who don't pay the amount of attention necessary when doing something as simple as sorting their mail. The Morris-Turnberry tale was also mirrored in a story earlier this year when a Catholic high school for boys in Arkansas put a sign up encouraging parents to not drop off forgotten lunch, books, homework and anything else they may have left home without. Aside from the lunch (a kid has to eat, right?), I applaud the school. Teaching children to solve problems and teaching parents not to "helicopter" is exactly what this world needs. The onus is on people to be responsible, not on everyone else to cover for them. Shawn 17iii" Loughlin Shawn's Sense Moving Forward H Jn movies, they always say that the sequel is never as good as the original. In terms of my columns, I've written sequels before and, to be honest, I've never gone back to see if the same is true. Having said that, I wasn't quite done in last week's "Moving Forward". The topic of "Moving Forward" last week (head on back to the Oct. 20 issue if you haven't yet read it — I'll wait) was the pending demolition of the former Blyth Public School building. Sad to lose a building with history to be sure, but if there was ever a reason to do so, a $5 million, economy -driving educational facility would certainly be it. There has been some negative feedback to the decision after we published the story from some who likely lack scope on this issue. It just so happens that two weeks before The Citizen broke this story, I had cause to be in my hometown of Pickering with some time to kill, so I swung past St. Anthony Daniel Catholic School, where I was a student from Grade 1 to Grade 8 graduation. Despite Pickering's population of nearly 100,000, good of St. Anthony Daniel too was swallowed up by the same process that claimed Blyth Public School and others. Years after its closure, the St. Anthony Daniel building sits empty and emits a post - apocalyptic air. Its windows, the ones that aren't broken, are too cloudy to look in and the building's exterior walls and walkways are overgrown from years of neglect. And this was just the front facade of the building. There was a whole backside to the school where the soccer and baseball fields, basketball courts and portables used to sit. If the front of the school that faces a residential street looks the way it does, God knows what the back that faces no one looks like. Somewhere inside me, the young boy who became a young man inside those walls and in that school yard was hurt. It was there that I made lifelong friends, danced with my first girlfriend and learned to love reading, writing and sports from some great teachers. There will always be buildings that, to some, hold history. The Blyth Public School structure is one of those buildings. Built over 50 years ago, several generations have attended the school. This is a building that, while it may have personal history to a community, it has no heritage properties. It has been purchased by locals who want to give back to the community and, despite their best efforts, people will still find fault. Because the Sparling and Elliott families bought that building, Blyth has been given businesses like Blyth Cowbell Brewing Company and others, and now the village will have an education centre that will be the envy of the county. Perhaps to please these people who are against the school coming down the building should have been left to rot like my old public school. Blyth could have a nice urban jungle in the middle of the village with an empty, rapidly deteriorating (but historic, some might say) building at its centre. Blyth is a fortunate community filled with people who are willing to pay the cost for it to succeed. No, we can't preserve every building ever built in Blyth — not if we want to move forward. The building's heart was torn out when the school was taken. And yes, people should still be upset about it. But once that happened, the building's fate was sealed. If people want to wait around for the school board to return and put students back in the building, my advice is to pack a lunch — it might be a while.