April 6: ...three letters to the editor....

...three letters to the editor...each disputing furiously with the other - though each is really on a different topic. One is about the democratic nature of a sign law. One is about favoritism shown to francophones. One is about how francophones and anglophones shouldn't  really be words at all. That's what happens when you look to law as a cure-all..

You get a dozen views stirred up, none of them connected to any of the others, all attracting their own followerss, and all building hysteria with nobody on any side listening to anybody on any other side.

I favour bilingual signs all over Moncton. I favour business people who have the wit and courtesy to recognize the need for them.But I have never known a case where such a law on commercial signs has satsified either side - and has not generated hatred and hysteria. If you know of an example, I would be delighted to hear about it.

Today's editorial is really a sermon. Indeed, I suspect it may have been written by a clergyman, the type of clergyman who is full of the pious abstractions I listen to when I just cannot get to sleep any other way.

Notice the final paragraph. "True faith is found in action and how we live our lives as well as in words or holy texts.......Those who meet the challenges of and standards set by Christ know how much better the world could be."

I quite agree.

But can you imagine the irony of writing such a declaration in a column usually devoted to demeaning people like teachers and civil servants and minimum wage earners? To preaching hatred.? To telling bus drivers they aren't worth an extra buck or two an hour? To defending the behaviour of businessmen and politicians who spread poison, hog wealth, and ignore the needs of the rest of
us?

There are reasons why church attendance is dropping . And the blah piety reflected in that editorial is a major one of them.

If you want a religious message, you will find it more useful to go to Lynda MacGibbon, who understands that religion is a practical matter.She's on the op ed page.

The Moncton Times and Transcript and its owners and all the corporations who dominate this province and most of its politicians show no moral qualities of any religion I have ever heard of. That makes this sort of pious cant exceptionally distasteful in an editorial on Good Friday.

Louis Leger has a column in which he asks why we don't try downtown parking. The answer is we did try it for a long time - until fifty years ago. It didn't work. That's why we now have malls. I suppose the next  op ed piece will be on why we don't try converting main street to a dirt road for horses only.

The only important story is on C1, the report that the federal government knew about the escalating costs of the F-35 fighter even before the election - and that cabinet ministers and the prime minister withheld the information from the public - AND LIED TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ABOUT IT.

There was a  tradition, not long ago, that a parliamentarian (including a prime minister) who lied to the house was honour-bound to resign.

But that was then. This is now. Honour is out of style. Now, a prime minister can lie, rig elections - and not even have to blush. And he certainly won't  have to worry about being attacked in the editorial columns of the TandT. Not unless he decides to become a bus driver.

And the Moncton Times and Transcript can run pious hypocrisy in its editorial column.

On a note more in keeping with the true meaning of Easter in our society, a friend of mine tipped me off on the real identity of the Easter Bunny. He's chicken in disguise.

Well, it makes sense. Chickens have to deliver eggs. But who wants to look like a chicken with Easter dinner coming up?