OPINION WW” The éa Stl gar Sun WS PUBLISHER JON JARRETT SHARLENE IMHOFF DONNA JORY EDITOR ADVERTISING MANAGER JOHN SNELGROVE * CATHERINE ROSS PRODUCTION MANAGER ADVERTISING REP. DENISE GOLDSTONE ROBERT PROCTOR CIRCULATION MANAGER ADVERTISING REP. JIM ZEEBEN NICOLE BEETSTRA REPORTER PRODUCTION/OFFICE BRENDAN HALPER MARION ANDERSON REPORTER PRODUCTIONREPORTER Direct Department Phones General Office ...sssserveeees ssereees 65-5266 ce i 365-5266 365-7848 +010365-2278 365-5579 wer 65-7762 Cl d Ads Display Advertising ........ Fax .. | editorial comment Why wear a Poppy? Please a wear a poppy the lady said, and held one |. forth but I shook my head. Then I stopped and watched as she offered them there and her face was : old and lined with care. ; . But beneath the scars the years had made, there . remained a smile that refused to fade. A boy came ' whistling down the street, bounding along on care- : free feet. His smile was full of joy and fun. “Lady”, * said he, “May I have one?” As she pinned it on he turned to say, “Why do we wear a poppy today?” The lady smiled in her wistful way, and answered, “This is Remembrance Day.” . “And the poppy there is the symbol for, the gal- |. lant men who died in war. And because they did ; you and I are free. That’s why we wear a poppy : you see. “I had a boy about your size, with golden hair ‘i; and big blue eyes. He loved to play and jump and : shout. Free as a bird he’d race about. As the years went by he learned and grew, and became a man as you will too. He was fine and strong with a boy’s smile, but he seemed with us such a little while. - When the war. broke out and he went away, I still remember.his face.that day. When he smiled at-me and’said ‘good-bye’. ‘I’ll be back’soon mom}so |; please don’t cry.” “But the war went on and he had to stay. And all I could do was wait and pray. His letters told of the awful fight. I can see it in my dreams at night. With the tanks and guns and cruel barb wire, till at last :| the war was won.” The small boy turned as if to go, then said “Thanks lady, I’m glad to know.” “That sure did sound like an awful fight. But your son, did he come back all right?” A tear rolled down each faded cheek, she shook her head but didn’t speak. I slunk away in a sort of shame, and if you were me you'd have done the same. For our thanks in giving is oft’ delayed. Though our freedom was bought and thousands paid. So when we see a poppy wom, let us reflect on the burden bom. By those who gave their very all, when asked to answer their country's call, That we at home in peace might live, then wear a poppy. Remember and give. — Author unknown By Don Addis CONGRATULATIONS! You Took THIRD! 1S POLITICALLY INDEPENDENT AND A MEMBER OF THE STERLING NEWS SERVIC! Established November 28, 1990 § Second Class Malling Permit Pending Published by The Castlegar Sun E Weekly on Wednesdays 465.Columbia Ave., Castlegar, B.C. VIN 1G8 : Sree reer ere eh eer er te hearers A casual'encou th , } 10 “Ron | Jeffels ” ition, no minimal nod of the head, not even a casual lift of the hand in greeting. He docsn’t exist. ‘ You only think you do, ‘ Or sense the alienation — cven * Iotent — in any bank queue,' it the express check-out (forgive the It used to be known simply as “a casual encounter between strangers". But now that Sociologese has} become our lingua franca, I’d better go mod and recast that phrase. ~*"'" Make it “meaningful verbal an y ), in that to the 19th floor, along the twisting, uncharted alleys of the new medine- ‘ val city: the mall. Nobody speaks, Nobody laughs. The rest is silence, , ian silence. And there's no single explanation for that mutism. It's a mixture, an omnium-gotherum non-verbal modes of tion in random, unstructured, e2 tential encounters between members, of a peer group within the ambience’ i d, post-modem soci- ‘of vague di malaise ‘and inarticulate complaint. “How explain this world-weari- ness, this divine ennui, this sullen i 2 It can’t be the weather. of an P ety.” Sounds like the title of a doc- toral dissertation for the University , of East Albumbia. It is. i The principal theme in my psy- cho-socio treatise for East Albumbia U is that people seem to have tumed downright sullen, silent and unfriendly of late. Test my thesis Go for a slow walk beside a quic river, You meet another sentien| human being coming in the opposite, direction. Head down, eyes diverted, you pass in silence, preordained’ "This fall, October held pirate’s gold in its hand. The autumn woods were ‘soft, bright, beckoning. Overhead, near that quiet river of mine, a thou- sand Canada gecse mounted the west wind, formed fighter squadrons and barked defiance at the enemy: Winter. Even my misan- “thropic heart rose in joy to meet them. No, it’s not the weather. . » Let's see. Maybe it's the con- ‘tained fury of Megalopolis, with its slow acid sludge of cars, bruising ds and those little Islands of silence: no y grunt of? . silence. If Self where others are denied landing privileges, Can't be: Vancouver is still a village. Think of London, New York, Tokyo, Singapore, the rest. It could be the fawning obedience we pay to the omnipotent Machine these days: the phone, the fax, the box, the computer. . . the Great God Kompootor, in whose divine pres- ence every man now genuflects and maintains a chaste and humble it doesn't speak nter between strangers? Kong, The Gross and Swinish Tox does the opposite of what it’s sup- posed to do: it increases the national - debt, Those Cabinet appointees at 150 thou a year live on pheasant under glass but still get free turkeys at Christmas. So that silent dude at the oxymoronic express check-out may be contemplating such enormi- ties and wondering, vaguely, who the real turkeys are, where they roost and how he can stop them from breeding. He can't. ippery, we won't cate with it. Or maybe we're just tired of the sad, new lexicon: tired in blood and bone of words that have been worked, shaped, crafted, sanded, hed ished and polished We keep an alien mass murderer in jail for six years at my expense so that he won't suffer — cruelly and unusually, I also pay for his defence lawyer at— say — two thou a day, plus ing and GST, And his cell until they mean. . . nothing. After all, we've just come through that election. And there’s still Joc to go. Clark, I mean. Clark of the Consti- tution. . . alas, sigh, sob, lacknday and other terms of despair. No, it’s none of those. The new silence between us can be traced directly to that Niagara of disaster that pours — daily, minute by minute ~ from radio and television. That dark, polluted cascade engulfs us. We worry. We fret. We go silent.” You know what I mean. . . It cost’ me 300 thou to fly Brian to Hong mates play golf at one of our better country clubs, but only once a week, So that stranger on the path who won't speak to me wonders if some- one, somehow, has insulted the Goddess Justice, defiled her and broken her golden scales. But let's make a pact, friend. Next time we meet, we'll talk. And why not about that wise, gentle, gracious but blind old dame, .. and who mugged her? RR. Jeffels is a Richmond free- lance writer and former principal of The Open Learning Institute. Slings and arrows Towards bogeyman in Europe * As Rememibrance Day comes a little closer, if Seems a fitting... \ moment to.reflect upon our appar-, ent national anxiety to have a Euro-,:, pean enemy. - i ey | Nigel | Hannaford Syndicai Columnist ,,. - 5 years, there has “y cause to be cau- ed’ of Soviet inten- tions. Fromithe excesses of their occupation’ of eastern Europe, the Berlin blockade of 1948 and the var- ious events of 1956, 1967 and 1980 in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland - not to. mention the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan or the 1983 downing of a Korean Air Lines 747, of the re-united Germany, this MANY PEOPLE AYEAR ‘T NED CIGARETTES IN THE SHOP... T'S FRIGHTENING HOW Moke THOSE THINGS KILL” =~ are cranking out story after story about resurgent Nazi-ism and delighting to present pictures of crew-cut kids in leathers and heavy- metal t-shirts strutting around giv- ing straight-arm salutes. If this were tmuly representative - the Soviet Union has indulged in” * would be a salutary warning. isticly agg! behaviour. So we stayed in Europe, spent some money on the military and became used to the situation. This year, the USSR has ceased that nobody knows what will happen if the central government - what's left of it - loses control of the nuclear arsenal. However, the nightmare vision of twenty divisi i I don't believe it is, though and thus one is forced to ask why it’s happening. - Any fair-minded person who has c * dived in Germany, travelled in Ger- to be a threat in the same sense that ? many or met Germans in the last it used to be. It remains a threat in »: ten years will readily concede that * their abhorrence of the Nazi years is genuine. And you can forget that stereotype about stiff-necked Prus- : sian militarism. The Prussian state into Western Germany is gone. So what now? Suddenly, the spectre of Nazi Germany has been conjured up. Yes, as we get ready to mark the 46th Armistice Day since the end of the Second World War, the media was in 1946 and the Ger- man army has trade unions, long ) air and is:controlled by a civilian government so paranoid about seeming militaristic that they it not even stand by the allies during the recent war games in the Gulf. Dur- ing the sixties and seventies, they were considered the weak link in NATO - slobs, not to put too fine a point on it - which was of some concem since the Central Front fac- ing the Russkies was no place to have a weak link. Granted, the reported instances of harassment of foreigners scem to be coming more from that area of Germany which was until recently part of the communist empire. Authoritarianism would seem quite familiar to youngsters who grew up there. But it would be wrong to draw the conclusion that there is a deep reservoir of German fascism waiting to flood the country from the Neisse to the Rhine. All coun- tries have their fringe elements on both ends of the political spectrum and youngsters decked out to shock and outrage are as much part of our culture as Germany’s. In addition, there are striking dif- the situation in Germany today and that when Hitler came to power nearly 60 years ago. Germany is prosperous, not des- titute. There is no burden of resent- ment, comparable to that engen- dered by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and consequently no fer- tile ground for the kind of politics espoused by Hitler. Most important, Germany is locked into the new system. as part of the Common Market; next year, the bonds will be tightened as Europe moves towards unification. I cannot imagine what perverse way of thought would make a jour- nalist of the 1990's re-invent a Ger- man bogeyman to replace a Russian one, or who would encourage him to do it. What I can imagine is just how many men of the war genera- tion - from both sides - must be sad- dened and not a little angry to see such frivolous propagandizing. The urge to be remembered as ‘the far-sighted journalist who first saw the signs of resurgent Nazi- ism’ should be tempered with the thought that too much of that kind of writing might tum into a self-ful- filling prophecy. Why didn't Brian Back in the old “School of Hard Knocks” — P.E.I. didn't have a school of journalism — young reporters were taught the most impor- tant question they could answer for . readers was “why.” So in the interest of adding context, the “why” of sev- eral recent national events. ri taking courses to improve their skills. { Under the constitution education is a provincial responsibility, and a major initiative by Ottawa now would be branded an intrusion into fear their voters will blame them when they discover the truth about some of our provincial ed ii Mulroney answer the UN's call? roots support for change. itis a lot like convincing people to give up ing and drinking i in favor of a systems. For example: StatsCan found the P affairs, especially by Que- bec separatists. , : The separatists were given an Why didn’t Brian the UN? : And because George Bush, preoc- cupied with the Madrid peace.confer- ence, couldn’t’ work out a compromise scheme to keep the job for Mulroney. Why :did the government announce another study of Canada’s “competitiveness” instead of a plan to radically change training and edu- cation programs? Because while Canadians “know™ goto tion argument last week by the Eco- Mike Duffy Syndicated Columnist ‘'uhing the h ists yet another weapon in change is needed, g¢ polls show, we don't yet perceive it as an urgent issuc. Stats Can says more than a million “their fight to destroy Canada. 'o8- Why, aren't the other provinces “moving toward educational reform without $