4 - Sunday, March 2, 1986 - North Shore News

Bob Hunter

® strictly personal e

er ee

| IT IS always fascinating -vatching the changes your
friends go through. No doubt you yourself provide them
with every bit as much amusement.

There is a difference between
friends and relatives, of course.
Relatives you are stuck with until
death do you part, and if nothing
else one of you will probably go
to the other’s funeral. In fact,
there is nothing ‘‘relative’’ about
family ties at all. They are quite
absolute.

Friends? Well, not all relation-
ships are meant to endure. Do
you really still want to hang
around with the guys you hung
around with when you were in
Scouts? In friendships there is
always an element of mutual
teaching. There is aiso a utilitari-
an factor.

QUESTION OF NEED

Often, it is simply a matter of
people not ‘‘needing’’ each other
any more. If you quit a job
where you have been ‘‘best
friends’’ with a certain gang of
people for years, maybe decades,
you find afterwards that about 90
per cent of the relationships
didn’t make the transition to
your new life.

Good grief, if you were in reg-
ular contact with all the people
you were ever friends with, there
wouldn’t be much time left for a

quict cup of tea, would there?

What prompted this bit of
rambling was the experience
recently of talk -
ing—separately—to two old
friends, neither of whom I nad
seen for some time.

CHANTING

They both used to be pretty far
to the political left, to say the
least. I have a vivid image of one
of them the first time I met him:
he was playing chess with a guy
identified as the leader of some
pro-Mao Marxist/Leninist fac-
tion who had achieved notoriety
by chanting hypnotically at
public rallies, trying to drown out
the speaker..

The two of them talked calmly
about revolution. | would say
this was some 15 years ago. It
was intriguing discussion, to be
sure, ang,handled with an air of
insider wisdom. Indeed, these
gentlemen sitting here, including
the one who would become my
friend, might someday be leader
of a provisional Communist gov-
ernment.

Fate pointed in another direc-
tion. Today, I am pleased to
report, my friend is living happily

ever after in West Van, is remar-
ried, has a fabulous kid, and
generally takes a quiet Tory posi-
tion on federal political matters.

He sounds genuinely cheerful,
thinks life is a gas, and seems to
be experiencing a quiet blissed
existence.

I had another old friend who
was also somewhat soft on
Commie shenanigans, favoring a
basically anti-American stance
while not thinking too much
about Afghanistan or the Gulag
of the Cuckoo’s West, which is
the control technique now in style
in the Soviet Union for handling
troublemakers.

SELF-EMPLOYMENT

But recently, this particular
friend got into business for
himself. Awesome, the changes!

When you are an entrepreneur,
he discovered to his horror, every
delay in the system costs you
money. Nobody pays you back
that money. Nobody gives you a
new opportunity to make up for
the one just fost thanks to a
semi-roboticized clerk in a rule
factory who has the right to go to

the bathroom for a half an hour,

while your urgent message gets
Jost in the shuffle.

Both these chaps, by the way,
now face the spectre of sending
their kids into the school system.
! wonder what THAT will do to
them?

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ES

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