4 — Sunday, November 4, 1990 - North Shore News

Price of oil doesn’t |

justify cost of lives

BEING A Canadian, I
don’t actually hate many
people, if any.

That is almost understandable,
if a bit Polivanna. But you'd
think by now ['d have learned
hatred just from looking at what
is going on in the rest of the
world. Cambodia. Afghanistan.
Angola. Kuwait. South Africa.
Israel. India. Tibet. Et Salvador.

Racial hatred is on display on
the 6 o'clock news every night
from some Mashpoint or other.
Tribes are still doing it to cach
other in distant jungles, armed
now with Stinger missiles and ar-
mored vehicles.

And if it is not racial hatred, it
is religious hatred: stones against
Uzis, a reminder of how deadly
even the most primitive weapons
still are. Try bare hands and
sticks; that’s what they are doing
to each other in Romania, thanks
to cultural and linguistic hatred.

We should all be experts on
hatred. The world seems to be
breaking apart ina tide of it,
from besieged Moscow to
pulverized Beirut.

But it hasn’t rubbed off.

Watching wars and atrocities on
television beamed by satellite from
the other side of an ocean is just
no decent substitute for real-life
personal suffering.

And in my lifetime, in Canada,
the real-life suffering level has
been about as close to zero as it
has likely ever been for any people
at any point in history.

I appreciate the fact that in the
past half-century in Canada we
have only been involved in one
world war, a ‘police action” in
Korea, and other Cold War and
UN peacekeeping adventures, with
merely one apprehended insurrec-
tion and one shoot-out on an In-
dian reserve at home.

There have been no major mas-
sacres of unemployed, only one
mass round-up of minorities, and
only two breakdowns of

DISTRICT
NORTH VANCOUVER

Bob
Hunter

ECOLOGIC

democracy (both involving the
War Measures Act.) Best of all,
the shooting war stuff was over
before ! was old enough to march,
so I lucked out in timing, too.

But location was the big factor.

I was fortunate enough to be
born in Winnipeg. It wits 1944.
Hitler was astride Europe. Lon-
don was aflame. One could hardiy
be born anywhere on the planet
and be further removed from The
War.

We were only half a day’s drive
from the physical and dead centre
of North America, a windswept
bluff in the badlands of North
Dakota.

True, my Dad was one of the
many who helped train The Few.
He taught mechanics at Com-
monwealth Air Training Program
bases scattered across the Prairies.
But he never actually went
overseas. Neither did any of his
three brothers.

On my mother’s side, there
were four brothers altogether, as
well. With luck — and mainly
because of having the brains to
volunteer quickly for the air force
before being drafted into the army
— my uncles managed to avoid
going overseas too.

As a veteran Alderman,
Craig Clark has the
experience, know-how,
sound judgement and
youthful enthusiasm
to be an outstanding Mayor.

Craig Clark CAN!
do the job and
that’s a promise!

“Craig Clark Information Line’

ALLE

Thanks to this lack of fanaticai
urge to die for King and Country
on the part of my Dad and uncles,
tha snever had the experience of
anybody in my family being killed
by anyone. Not even a remote
cousin, so far as 1 know, has died
at the hands of any member of
any particular racial, linguistic,
cultural or religious group.

And now along comes Joe
Clark, jabbering excitedly about
war with traq, about Canadian
boys and girls coming home in
body bags.

The Savage Rabbit (as Canada
is known among its NATO allies)
is suddenly snarting as though it
had picked up rabies. There is this
bad guy over there, Saddam
What's-his-name. He is our
enemy. We must hate him, Kill!

Hold on, Joe. What's going on?
Aren't you forgetting how
unbloodthirsty your fellow citizens
have become over the years?

When Ottawa last sent Canucks
to war, it was in Korea, at the
height of the Cold War, with the
fate of the worid trembling ona
nuclear trip-wire if conventional
force failed to stem the Red tide.

Inthe Mideast right now, Ca-
nadian forces have been deployed
to prevent an fraqi takeover of ait
fields, so that the industrialized
countries can continue to
squander fossil fuels with reckless
abandon, ignoring the global at-
mospheric effects of all the subse-
quent pollution.

It is not the same situation at
all. Maybe itis just that ( have led
too peaceful, too lucky a life.
Maybe I’m soft.

But f do not see a need to crank
up enough of a hatred for traqis,
given the history of che region and
how Kuwait came into being in
the first place, to want to fling
Canada's armed might at them, so
that the body-bag manufacturers
can have a bumper year.

Not over oil, for God's sake,
Joe.
a ]

ROYAL LePAGE
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Wolo

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