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The Citizen, 1991-02-20, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 1991. PAGE 5. Americans guard right to kill Remember Jim Brady? Probably not. He had his 15 minutes of fame 10 years ago on the steps of the Washington Hilton. You knew who he was then. Remember the day a love-struck loonie by the name of John Hinckley tried to blow away U.S. President Ronald Reagan? Jim Brady was the guy still lying on the sidewalk after the smoke had cleared. He was President Reagan’s press secretary. He’d taken one of Hinckley’s bullets in the brain and wasn't expected to live. But he fooled us all. Jim Brady is alive today, if not kicking. He can’t. He’s in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, thanks to a tiny slug of lead fired from a concealed weapon by a deranged person who should never have been able to buy it. But if he can’t kick, Jim Brady can still fight, and one of the things he’s fighting for right now is passage of the so-called “Brady Bill’’ - a piece of legislation modest to the point of pathos, that would require people buying handguns to wait for I The International Scene Can you trust trusts? BY RAYMOND CANON It isn’t too often that the name of one of the towns whose newspaper takes my column pops out of a book I am reading but that happened recently and, in so doing, gave me the idea for this week’s column. One of Canada’s best known writers on mystery and legal matters is Jack Batten and, since he has written no less than 19 books, one of them gets included now and again in the collection I take home from the library. Thus it was that 1 was spending a pleasant evening reading him when the name ‘Strathroy, Ont.’ featured in the story. It seems a fictitious trust company Cayuga & Granark had been founded in that town and from there had gone on to bigger and better things in Toronto. One of the less illustrious members of the family was still running the branch and it was free from any taint of scandal; that was more than could be said for the head office in Toronto. However, to find out what it was all about, ask your local library for Jack Batten’s “Riviera Blues.’’ If there was a spot of scandal at a Canadian trust company, albeit a fictitious one, it was nothing compared with what has been going on in the same industry in the United States. In that country the trust companies go under the heading of “Savings and Loan” corporations or “Thrifts” as they are sometimes called. As in Canada with the trust companies and credit unions, they compete in a consider­ able number of fields with the chartered banks. The fly in the ointment is that the federal government in Washington guarantees the deposits of customers of the Thrifts and this fact of life seems to have made the executive officers of many of the Thrifts lose their collective heads. Over the past decade they have gone out with the money that trusting customers deposited and made all sorts of dubious loans. All might have been well if the negative nature of the transactions had turned out, in a booming economy, to be repayable but such was not the case. When red ink began spilling all over many of the Thrifts’ books, Washing­ ton got into the act since, as I indicated above, the federal government had guar­ anteed their money. Arthur Black seven days before picking up their pur­ chases. The idea is that a week would give the cops time to find out if the would-be gun owner is a Mafia hit man, a Libyan terrorist or a John Hinckley wannabe. Meanwhile, the American love affair with the gun blazes merrily on. The National Rifle Association, which is the chief opponent of the Brady Bill, is currently trying to encourage Congress to make it legal for every American to own and operate as many machine guns as he or she wants. The principal of an elementary school in Monrovia, Indiana has received permission from his school board to pack a pistol to and from the office and to keep it in his desk during working hours. It’s hard to say just how much the average American loves his right to bear arms. You can’t measure that sort of thing on a graph or a chart. We do however have sorpe hard data on the results of the love affair. Here in Canada, where we have no constitutional right to bear arms, handguns killed eight people in one year - 1988. In the same year in America, 8,915 people were killed by handguns. And so far this winter six New Yorkers have been shot and killed for their coats. That’s right - for their coats. It’s the largest rage in Gotham. If you plan to visit the Big Apple this winter it would be a good idea to lean towards the shabbiest In short order it boiled down to the question of who was responsible for what stupidity. Naturally the industry had and apparently still has pretty powerful friends in Washington and so the assessment of blame was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a cut and dried affair. Perhaps the best example of what went on can be shown in a short description of the “Keating affair.” Mr. Keating is the owner of one of the Thrifts that failed in such a spectacular fashion that it was to cost Washington, i.e. American taxpayers, no less than $2 billion. He also got thrown in jail on fraud charges. However, while he was still riding high, he made substantial campaign donations to a number of senators, five of whom took it upon themselves to approach the regulators of the savings and loan industry to ask them to accord Mr. Keating “Favourable treatment.” You are probably not well versed on the names of American senators but one you should know. It is none other than Sen. John Glenn of Ohio. Mr. Glenn is the one of American space fame and he has had by In praise of editors THE EDITOR, Did many readers of last week’s Citizen miss reading the column on page 5 entitled, “It takes getting sick to appre­ ciate health”. When it was mentioned to one sub­ scriber friend that Keith Roulston had had a bout of flu and subsequent pain which necessitated tests in Clinton hospital, she was totally surprised and hurried to read it. Readers might like to peruse Keith’s column again to count the 7 or 8 realities about “flu bugs” and hospital tests, that he has experienced and the in-depth manner in which he treats each, and I might add in every piece he writes, Quote “This morning they watched pictures of my inside on T.V. through ultra sound. Then it was on to x-ray where I felt like a character on Startrek as the huge machine lifted and whirred around me, even picking me up and laying me on my back at one point.” When you have the paper, you’ll enjoy Arthur Black’s essay on page 5 also. It is outerwear in your closet - polyester and plaid if you can manage it. You especially want to avoid mink, sheepskin or those trendy leather jackets with the number 8 embossed on the sleeves and a big red stop sign emblazoned on the back. Apparently New York thieves are using those stop signs for target practice. There seems to be an unusually high number of people being killed for their coats mused a New York police spokes­ man, “but in the past we’ve had people killed for their sneakers or gold chains.’’ Ah, but New York wouldn’t be New York if it didn’t respond to this latest Kill for Clothes fad. It has. A Manhattan company called Guardian Group International has come out with an all-new line of designer T-shirts, vests, jackets and coats. What’s different about the Guardian product line is that all the clothes are bulletproof. And they’re all for children. Yep, American parents can now send their toddlers off to school in sassy, trend-setting body armour, secure in the knowledge that their kids have a better- than-average chance of surviving an en­ counter with a fellow citizen exercising his constitutional right to bear arms. How are sales? Swell, thanks - even ‘though kiddie Kevlar clothes are only a sideline for the firm. Guardian Group’s main business is helping people acquire gun permits. / and large a rather illustrious career so far. He was not implicated nearly as much as some of the other five but there is no doubt that he has not done his reputation any good and polls taken in his state indicate that his political career is over. Some humour even managed to creep into the hearings although not intentional. Mr. Keating, the above mentioned thrift owner, had donated some money to the work being carried on by Mother Teresa and Sen. Dennis DeConcini even managed in his defence, to quote the good Mother to show that Mr. Keating was really a very nice guy. It was natural, said the Senator, to do business with such people. Mr. keating also added, albeit uninten­ tionally, to this humour. When he was asked if he thought that his donations to the five senators’ campaign costs had bought their services, he replied, "I certainly hope so.” Whether the hearings will get at the root of the problem is problematical. After all the hearings on Oliver North and the Iran-Contra affair, there are still a lot of unanswered questions including how much Ronald Reagan knew. about February, “a month named after a chunk of goat hide.” Whether it be describing the damaging effects recently of the flu microbes, composing a drama (at least two have been staged in Huron), reporting an accident, judging young people’s accomplishments taking a picture, editing a newspaper for Brussels, Blyth and many other villages and hamlets, Roulston is tops in each field, and his staff is right with him also. It is reported that Jill Roulston, Keith’s wife, during the last 2-3 weeks, has been a power of strength, not only in front office but also in every department. The part each staff member played during Keith’s illness is all the more significant because “I have virtually never missed a day’s work to sickness in more than five years since we started The Citizen”. Your many readers wish you a speedy recovery, Keith Roulston. Best wishes to you and staff. MELDA McELROY BLYTH. Letter from the editor Short memories lead to discontent BY KEITH ROULSTON We’ve become such a nation of discon­ tented whiners these days and partly, I think, because we’ve got such short memories. Short memories give us a lack of perspective into our own lives and that of our country. We can see all the things that are wrong with our lives but don’t appreciate all the good things. We can’t remember, for instance, what life was like for our parents so we can’t appreciate what a comfortable life we lead with our microwave ovens, automatic washers and dryers and colour televisions with VCRs. We grumble incessantly about our taxes and some of us, in the name of government fiscal responsibility, are ready to get nd of some of the government programs our parents worked hard for decades to get. As I mentioned last week 1 had to spend a couple of days in hospital. It wasn’t a fun time, of course. I had time on my hands to worry about how people back at the office were getting along without me, time to think about what was wrong with me and had lots of trouble sleeping in the noisy atmosphere on a narrow, hard bed. One thing that I didn’t have to worry about was how I was going to pay the bill because I had the comfort, living in Ontario, of knowing our OH1P would pick up the tab. For my parents’ generation this just wasn’t so. Prior to the late 1960’s when government sponsored health care came in under the government of Lester Pearson, any prolonged stay in the hospital could jeopardize the financial future of a family. Just having a baby could set a family back for years as they tried to pay the doctor and hospital bills. This was my first stay in hospital since I was born, though it hardly meant I’d had perfect health. 1 spent two months in bed as a youngster recovering from rheumatic fever. I was just as glad, personally, that we didn’t have hospitalization insurance in those days. If we had, our family doctor would have put me in hospital to recover from the illness but since we couldn’t afford that, my mother set out to look after me at home. Being a quiet country kid, the idea of spending all that time in hospital was terrifying, far worse than the idea of being sick. So for weeks my mother was nurse and teacher, helping look after my physical needs and taking time to keep me up with my homework. Periodically the doctor would visit, plunging up the lane in snow to his knees (we hadn’t discovered snow­ blowers back then either). I’ve never asked my parents how long it took to pay off that doctor’s bill but I’m sure, given their circumstances on the farm at the time, it must have hung over their heads for a long time. 1 wonder how many doctors who complain today about the constraints of government medicine can get their own perspective by remembering what it was like to have to make house calls and wait for months or years to get paid by poor customers. We were lucky. We had a wonderful doctor who treated people without money just the same as he would people with money, except he’d make extra work for himself by treating people at home who couldn’t afford to go to hospital. Not everybody in those pre-OHIP days was so lucky. There was one medicine for the rich and another for the poor for many people. When 1 hear people complaining about the expense of government medicine, when I hear people suggesting there should be user fees or the universality should be tampered with, I wish we could slip them back to those days before we had this wonderful system so they could see for themselves what it was like. There may be problems with health care today but anyone who could get the perspective of looking back to what it was really like would realize that things have never been so good.