4 - Sunday, March 30, 1986 -

CaS ae

THERE IS a

North Shore News

to hand over cash.

Bob Hunter

@ strictly personai ©

—

lot of talk about violence, but hardly

anyone ever talks about HITTING.

Hitting is one of the fundamental
forms of violence, as witnessed
by the wife of our ambassador to
the United States who recently
bashed an assistant so hard the
poor woman's earring was
knocked off.

I have to admit that at a gut
level, I felt nothing but sympathy
for Sondra Gottlieb.

Maybe every diplamat's wife
shculd get to punch somebody
out once in a career. /fter all the
grovelling and hypocrisy and
repression of honest hostile im-
pulses, it should be written into

their contract.

§ Hitting is one of those experi-
ences — like being hit — which is
compleiely universal. | would say
it is almost as important as you-
know-what.

Soones or later, nearly
everyone gets bashed in Western
§ society. (In Japan, I understand,
boys are never hit. Just girls.)
And 1 frankly don't believe 1
have ever met anyone who has
NEVER felt an urge to hammer
some nerd-pie as hard as they
could.

Hitting is obviously a
fascinating idea, otherwise
movies like Rocky XXVII would
never score such a bundle at the
box office. What would happen
to most television fare if hitting
were banned.

What would happen, indeed,
to the movies?

I don’t know about you, but I
think I remember every single
time I was ever hit. And I can
count the number of times | ever
hit anyone. In retrospect, it was
often funny. Like a clown getting
a pie in the face. ;

Once, when I was a teenager, a
| slightly older person of aggressive

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homosexual persuasion made a
lewd proposal to me, and ! haul-
ed off and punched him on the
nose. To my utter astonishment,
he hauled off and punched me
back. Only harder. I learned
something — I just haven't fig-
ured out quite what.

Another time, on the other side
of the planet, if, indeed, it was
the same planet (I’m taiking
about Australia), my delicate
flower of a wife lept on the back
of a male who was in the process
of beating a fair damsel up, and
bashed the hell out of him. There
was no other men around at the
time. It was a glorious day for
sisterhood.

The fact. was, my wife’s grand-
father used to lift tractors on his
back, and her father used to
routinely snap wrists during
friendly arm-wrestling contests.
It runs in the family.

Still, it was inspiring to learn
that if worse came to worse my
wife could always come to my
rescue in a bar just as I was
about to take on the local motor-
cycle gang.

Afterwards, I should add, my
poor wife’s hand wzs bruised on
the side of the fist, where she had
been pounding the bad guy's
skull.

It’s easy enough to imagine
what the OUTSIDE of his head
looked like, but since he was an
Australian bloke, try to imagine
what the INSIDE of his head was
like afterwards.

When the episode was over,
my wife remarked: ‘‘] never real-
ized how good it felt to hit
somebody!’’

Ah ha! Now we're getting
down to it, aren’t we? A dark
side of human nature that mostly

NORTH VAN COURTS:

Young Hoon Cha, 501-1355
Pendrell St., Vancouver, (over .08,
$500), Maurice Frank Bennett,
3360 Fromme Road, North Van-
couver, (over .08, 14
days),Gwendolyn Violet Scribner,
416-145 West Keith Road, North

& scratches

we'd like to forget about.Yet
there it is. At heart, we are still
mostly brutes, I fear. .

When my oldest son was but a
mere tad and I was but a mere
young tad father, I subscribed to
a school of child-rearing wherein
the act of actually smacking a kid
was considered something like
mortal sin.

With my youngest sun, the tac-
tic is different. 1 vowed to clob-
ber him if he ever got out of line
from Day One. And have never
had to lay a hand on him — ex-
cept once, when he insisted on |
playing in the traffic. And after
the trauma of me laying a hand
on him, he has never gone back
near the road.

This is not to suggest for a
moment that hitting, per se,
shouldn't: be discouraged as
much as possible, since it has the
unfortunate side effect of hurting
the recipient.

Granted that while there is a
fraction of a fraction of the pop-
ulation that likes this sort of
thing, most of the rest of us, I
am sure, would just as soon
forego the pleasure of bashing
someone in exchange for not be- |
ing bashed ourselves — Golden
Rule kind of stuff.

Except — I worry. What about
the gene pool? What about the
cid one-tiger-to-a-hill stuff?

More to the point, what about
the future of Canadian
diplomacy?

Let’s face it. Things have never
been better. It used to be, Lester
Pearson would go to see LBJ and
get picked up by his ears and
shaken around for doing some-
thing dumb, like complaining
about the Vietnamese war. Now
Mrs. Gottlieb knocks her:
American secretary’s earrings
off.

Admit it. It feels good.

Vancouver, (impaired and refused
a breathylizer, 21 days), Ilan Rod
Soutar, 490 Bayview Road, North
Vancouver, (over .08, $300),
Michael Robert Sato, 2831
Willoughley Avenue, Burnaby,
{over .08, $500), Enrique Sanchez,
1552 Rupert St., (impaired, $500.)

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879 Marine Dr. .

A SENIORS’ group at North Shore Neighbourhood House
(NSNH) says management at the house is pressuring the
group io hand over about! $800 in the seniors’ bank account.

Members of the Seniors’ Club
argue they have the right to
autonomy from NSNH, and will
not transfer money they have rais-
ed, through bazaars and raffles, to
management.

But NSNH board president John
Lakes said the issue is a misunder-
standing between the Seniors’ Club
and management.

“The fight started two years
ago,”* he said.

“At that time our auditors told

us anyone under the (NSNH) um-
brella must have ali money go
through NSNH central (accoun-
ting.)

“This is required for all groups
in order for them to have in-
surance coverage. Unfortunately
they (the seniors) can't accept

See Seniors :
Pago 9