JON JARRETT ADVERTISING MANAGER, DONNA JORY ADVERTISING REP. CATHERINE ROSS ADVERTISING REP. NICOLE BEETSTRA DENISE GOLDSTONE CLIFF. WOETENDEN CIRCULATION MANAGER PRODUC FRANK ISERNIA BRENDAN | HALPER REPO} \ REPORTER ! ! / -Direct Department Phones f General Office ....sssessereseerereseres SOE-5266 “Cl 365-5266 365-7848 165-2278 Classified Ads . Display Advertising Fax..... ‘editorial comment Playing with fire The recent incident at Stanley Humphries Senior Secondary School in which a 17-year-old girl received first degree flash burns to her face from an exploding butane lighter could have been a far larger tragedy than it was. “Fatal” was the word used by a Workers’ Com- pensation representative. The question is, why did it happen at all? | Three burnt-out lighters were found on the proper- .. ty of SHSS, so this was certainly not a one-time experimental incident. It must also be that the perp of this "accident" were senior secondary school stu- dents. Young adults that should have known better. While the incident in question would not have been ble under any the ages of those involved point to a serious problem somewhere in our school district. Not only a problem of discipline and Testriction, but, app of ion as well. Another frightening fact brought out by the inves- tigation of this story was that neither the school board offices or district trustees knew of the incident * more than 24 hours later. They were, in fact, informed by this newspaper. SHSS Vice-Principal Jack Closkey admitted that the. problem was not just at the senior school level, but in the elementary schools, too. There is a new, improved, modern education sys- tem in place these days. Children are encouraged to “express themselves”. No longer is the quasi-military system of educa- tion embraced. A system that at least allowed a teacher some control in his/her own classroom. Anyone of my era — and that was not so terribly long ago — who walks into the classroom of today is horrified by the lack of respect shown by students to not only their teachers, but to each other. The sad part is that the children lose out on an educational opportunity second to none. The scary part is contemplating how long it will be allowed to go on, and what will be allowed to happen, before adults start acting like adults again and take Le Little Knowledge 1) When was the American civil war? 2) Canadian history, the Duck Lake Massacre... where is Duck Lake? 3) Ethnically, what was Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile? “4) What does an paleontologist study? 5) What doés CSIS stand for? Answers 1) 1860-65! 2) Saskatchewan, near Batoche. 3) She was a Greek, of the line of the Ptolemies. 4) Fossils. 5) Canadian Security Intelligence Service. () CHERINES By Don Addis al ” a misnomer in this war Ron | Jeffels: B Syndicated H Columnist American kids! Yes, kids! At this moment of supreme peril for the world, over and over again on nation- al television that’s what George Bush calls his soldiers, sailors, marines and fighter pilots deployed in the Persian Gulf. I wish he wouldn't.’ If I were a 40-year-old colonel. commanding a fighter wing, with a long legend of ribbons on the left breast, or a physician and a woman in his medical corps wearing a captain’s insignia on my shoulders, I think I'd take that demeaning and degrading word kids as a violent affront to my rank, my mission and my dignity —, not to mention my maturity. Oh, we know what he's trying to say! He means that war, any war, har- vests the young, sometimes the very young: the ripening wheat of the nation, But they are not kids; they are men and women under arms sent ona desperate mission to a remote, an alien land. Truth is not the first casu- alty of war; language is. Listen to the language of wartime slogans — from the present, from the past — created by nations to conceal what is really meant. “We are fight- ing for the right to throw pop bottles at the Yankees” came from some- body’s heat-oppressed imagination in ‘WW IL If war isn’t a simple game — with a lot of Bush's straight-arming going on —at least the end of it allows a return to the sacred citadel of the sports arena, Can there be any greater reward fora youtg American? The British warmed us about the brooding inevitability of war in 1939 when they referred to it — gently, casually, in an Etonian voice — as the moment “when the balloon goes up”. , Ballcon meanizg what? An enemy. airship ying bombs and hi And the language of war is camou- flaged, too. Your armed and bloody aggressor is my freedom fighter or guerrilla or, better still, my member of a civilian irregular defence force. Not the same thing, is it? And war is not violent and guns, set course London, or just a quiet, drifting toy for kids rising Ian- guidly over a, village fair on a soft summer's day? And Canada had its own deceptive voice, though more strident and mar- tial: “The Canadian Army is a dagger pointed at the heart of Berlin”. Even those of us in uniform were not sure we wanted to be on the sharp, the steely end of that deadly probe. Camouflage is. one of the stratagems of war: make the tank or the gun or the aircraft or the troop carrier disappear softly into the back- ground so that it cannot be detected. HE CLUES ARE... AND PooR House. Abi, BANKRUPT, AHH, WHAT 1S INcome TAX : Slings and arrows Running the rounds of the odds-bodkin today A discussion of lawyers: “The story goes that there’s a fence that separates Heaven from Hell and that 4 Hannaford Syndicated Columnist fence was in need of repair. Hell sent a telegram to Heaven, which read, “We have it on advice of legal counsel that it’s your responsibility to repair the fence.” Heaven of course, telegrammed back, “Not having access to legal counsel, we accept responsibility.” a0 It's an age of paradox when we have mobile homes that don’t move, sports clothes for work, junk food that costs more than real food and sweat shirts that you wear for loafing.” ee A lady celebrating ber 102nd binth- day was asked what she most enjoyed about her advanced age. “The lack of peer pressure,” she replied. see Finally, from Washington, this item, A Lutheran parish has received a form. letter from the Chevy Chase credit card company acknowledging the fine financial credentials of Martin Luther and offering a credit line. The letter cites the “outstanding credit background” of the 16th-centu- ty German church reformer and asks for a reply “at your earliest conve- nience”. 900 aggression against a helpless enemy when it becomes a chaste, a noble, a cleansed, a purified. «» Holy War, Saddam Hossein says so. There have always been many gods with many creeds and many dis- ciples on Kipling's far-flung battle- field, Body count doesn’t mean that men and women have died: it’s simply an accurate and impartial statistical entry in the mainframe computer at bead- quarters. Megadeaths. perhaps sug- gests a fairly large number, but mega has slipped quietly and peacefully into the language and now means nothing. Canada is spending megabucks on conferences and com- missions, and I can now buy a mega- licious burger down the street at my favorite snack shack, There’s something gallant and heroic about a “search and destroy mission”. Nobody really dies. “Ground zero” is not the site where the H-bomb — clean bomb, of course — explodes. It's just a piece of Pentag- onian geometry. “Acceptable casual- ties” sounds like a banker's term: just the modest risk on a consumer's loan. Soldiers don’t attack and die any- more: they have simple “face-to-face confrontations” with the enemy. “Light up scattered action” means only a few are being killed this day: the modem equivalent of All Quiet on the Western Front. An H-bomb rated at one gigaton dropped'on the enemy sounds minuscule, Translated into real language it means the equivalent of one billion tons of TNT. All of which is MAD. MAD? Mis- use of capitals? No, A simple adjec- tive, you ask? Wrong. The name of that humor magazine? Wrong again. It’s an acronym out of the Pentagon meaning Mutually Assured Destruc- tion. That may be the best piece of camouflage yet. But the reality it con- ceals melts the flesh and bleaches the bones. , eu en RR, are is a Richmond ii $reblanice writer and former principal of The Open Learning Institute. EVEN AT THIS EARLY STAGE THERE SEEMS TO BEA. CONSENSUS EMERG ON HON TOSAVE TRE COUNTRY». NS Wednesday, February 20, 1994 ° + "The Castlegar Sun Letters to the. Edito LPN's seeking help to stay on at facility To the Editor: This letter concerns all in our community. We are’ all affected in one way or anther, It's regarding the occupants of Long Term care facili- ties whether it's a parent, child, aunt, uncle, sister, brother, friend, is increasing. How many and how will these facilities be staffed? There are 80 many, cut backs these days, always with good reason so we are told, What we all know to be the reason for these cut backs is $$$. One example of this in our own community is the new facility at the Castlegar and District Hospital. They bave made plans to hire Long Term Care Aides to care for the residents and no Licensed Practical Nurses. The Licensed Practical Nurses already em-ployed in the Extended Care Unit section of the hospital will no longer, effective March 31, 1991, be employed as licensed Practical Nursed in the new Extended Care Unit. The hospital plans to transfer the residents from the existing Extended Care Unit down to the new unit, but the Licensed Practi- Rate increase delayed by BC Hydro To the Editor: A determined response from Electric Plus users in British Columbia has convinced B.C, Hydro to delay its proposed rate increase for interruptible power untillater, Hydro has now agreed to address the concem of subscribers to the program who would have had difficulty achieving a return on their conversion investment with the previously proposed across-the-board rate increase on April 2, 1991. The B.C. utilities Commission has assured Electric Plus subscribers that they will be -notified should B.C. Hydro.apply to-change the rates. I would encourage all Electric Plus users to begin their home- work now, so that they will have figures showing when they expect their conversion investment to be paid back at the current rates, and when they would expect to get the pay back at another rate, up to 2/3 of regular B.C. Hydro rates. Only a comprehensive view of customers’ situations will allow the B.C. Utilities Commission to reach a fair decision when B.C. Hydro does apply for its rate increase in this category. Yours sincerely, Anne Edwards, M.L.A. - Koote- nay New Democrat Spokesman for Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources Reader takes exception to our Dr. Ruth To the Editor: Like most people in Castlegar, I welcomed the idea of having two pers in town. However I Some praised, others punished The newspaper headline read: “U.S. President congratulates Air Force on ‘fantastic flying.!”” It was'a story of how proud George Bush was of the job Ameri- can and allied. aviators were doing in the Gulf. ; Praise well warranted in my view. But here in Canada, the signs seem to point not to praise, but to a kind of unofficial punishment for our top fly-: ers in the. Gulf.’ :Col« Romeo Lalonde leads Cana- no longer, ‘a threat to ‘allied: bombers, : Canada ‘should ale, back its Canada leave the bomber am mis- sion to the Americans, so our planes could concentrate on flying “CAP” - Combat ‘Air Patrol - cover over the Canadian naval vessels in the Gulf. The words had barely escaped Lalonde’s lips, when back here at the “thought control center’ in Ottawa, the Chief of the Defence Staff, was shooting down Lalonde’s suggestion and some whisper, his career. - Lalonde is a'pro. He’s served as Base Commander at CFB Bagotville and has had plenty of experience with the media": | This is not a pilot who shoots first, and thinks later. * He knows that to speculate about © something as. political as the role of our forces is not wise. One retired officer.told me “‘such speculation tends to put one "s career on hold.” So what was Lalonde thinking. -when he suggested we gut back on ions? eee gas up, fly another three hours or so over Kuwait, and then make the long flight back South to Canada Dry One. Dry One. ‘Six hours in the cramped cockpit of an F-18, half of it over hostile terri- tory, is tough, tiring work. Add on the pre-flight briefings and the after- flight de-briefs and you have the makings of a long night's work. It was on such a run that two of our pilots sank an Iraqi missile-capa- ble patrol boat. Both Canadian fight- ers strafed the Iraqi. boat, and one Canadian pilot fired'a sparrow radar- guided air-to-air missile at the enemy. The Sparrow.missed but the. boat eventually sank anyway. ‘The word in the military commu- | nity here is, instead of being praised for their actions, the pilots, were pat, ; on the carpet. ‘They bad been wrong to make 50, many runs at the Iraqi boat; they had : needlessly endangered their aircraft, ‘cand their.own lives; and DND didn’t ‘like to see air-to-air missiles, which oa “cost over a quarter of-a' sation < Sol lars each wastad in eietwsieie ground combat for which the pilots had not been trained, Sounds to me like the pilots of ' “Gimli Glider.” _Instead of giving them a medal, on that abandoned runway in 2 Giza Manitoba a few years back, They had ~ performed a masterful flying job, landing the plane. without power and without serious injury. But because they had not spotted the error , which left them without fuel in the first place, they were disciplined.: It appears no formal discipline will be applied to Col. Lalonde or the two pilots who. put Canada into the’ front ) lines of the Gulf war... However. if the buzz around National Defence Headquarters is true, fine they il find their careers on hold when they come home. S _ It's ironic that the first Canadian ‘casualties of the currcat conflict may . be the beroes who were too “gung ho” or the CO who in speaking up for his tired pilots may have stepped.on that! lethal sailitary Saver Kalle the ‘was very discouraged to discover that the Castlegar Sun used the “Dr. - Ruth” column. The content and lan- guage is very sexually explicit and definitely inappropriate for a family newspaper. There are many other sources available for people who ‘want his kind of information. 1 like to encourage my children . to read the paper, but I certainly don’t. want them getting their sex education from Dr. Ruth. Please all concemed people call the Castlegar Sun and let them know that we want our choice of two local ‘papers that we can feel comfortable tering on te cote BES ‘ Dixie Penner [-..morletrs on a1] cal Nursed do not automatically. transfer down with the residents and conti ir cal Nurses at the Castlegar. and District Hospital new facility, Our as Licensed Practical Nurses. They may work as a Long Term Care Aide though. The wage difference between Long Term Care Aide and licensed Practical Nurses is less then a a a dallas per hour. ‘What will this wage difference really mean in the long mun? There: is a definite jective for. writing this article is to bring this situation to the com- munity’s attention. ‘We would appreciate your sup- port in our struggle to continue practicing as Licensed Practical Nursed in-our ity’s new if Letts to the Heitor are ‘elcome on any topic of local or ge interest. Letters should be double-spaced, typewritten, or legibly hand-. written, and no more than two pages if possible. Letters will be edited in’ the interests of brevity or taste if necessary. All Ietters must be signed, from publication for valid reason by the approval of the editor. Send |; letters to: The Castlegar Sun,''465 Columbia Ave., Castlegar, B.C. Hs VIN 1G8,' Sr drop them off at the office. i ‘with address and telephone number, although names may be witheld'|'! i Long Term Care facility. Forward your support to the Long Term Care Aides and Licensed Practical Nurses. Long Term Care Aides are training for approximately 16 weeks ‘and Licensed Nurses train for 10 months to 1 year. A nursing team requires the skills of many medial professionals and these pro- fessionals ALL have a place in.our Health Care System. As Licensed Practical Nurses, we feel there will be an important link missing out of the bealth care chain without the Licensed Practi- Reaching LPN C 612 Yew St., Castlegar, BC. VIN 2K1. LPN Comnittee . ic v. Abietkoff K. Berisoff R. Konkin J. Miscauitch E, Ladret S. Armstrong out to try | and touch someone To the Editor: Victoria is hosting their first Telephone Operators Re-Union ever and would appreciate it if you would put this announcement in with your worked in the Southem Vancou- ver Island area.” Ph, 388-8075. (This will cover Duncan and all areas south, including all the little towns in between that used to ments. Victoria’s first Telephone e-Union Ni 8th, 9th and 10th, 1991 is to cele- brate B.C. Telephones 100 year Centennial “Calling all operators who have a office) There will be more information following soon....... Thank you for your assistance. Val Berthiaume “My doctor approves of my losing 87-Ibs. 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