April 25: "Renovated Dieppe liquor store reopens"

Wow! Stop the presses. The liquor store is a front page story. Lesser stories begin on p.2. "Medical society to sue province". Well, it's only our health system that's involved. That's not nearly as important as a renovated liquor store.

The medical society is charging that a cap the government is imposing on medicare fees is in violation of a legal agreement. Shame on the doctors. We know that if the government were to impose a cap on Mr. Irving's profits or to ask him to help us through these hard times with taxes on some of his record profits, he would immediately accept the decision with a smile.

There's nothing else in Section A. ...no mention of the strong protests in the US against a pipeline full of oilsands gas running across farms, towns and rivers in six states to be delivered to a state already awash in oil - Texas. So why deliver it?  Because an oil billionaire has a refinery designed to refine very dirty oil, and Texas doesn't have any. Well, gee. We wouldn't want to put a cap on his earnings.

Anyway, we know it's perfectly safe because this province  has been importing that same, dirty oil at thousands of barrels a day on a badly maintained railway. And nothing has happened.  Yet.

There's no mention of why buildings are going up on contaminated land at Highfield Square...no mention of spectacular shale gas out-of-court settlements in the US for accidents that we're told aren't happenning, anyway...nothing on expensive events centres that have been economic disasters...nothing on how moving Moncton High fits into the city development plan....
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NewsToday has another story on the Boston bombing that uses columns of loaded language to tell us nothing. A university Vice-President is quoted from a  speech in which he refers to the bombers as "two twisted, perverted, cowardly knockoff jihadis". Makes y' stop and think, don't it? Nuthing like a real great orator to make a point. 

I mean, where would those brothers get the idea it was okay to fill metal containers with explosive and metal scraps to cause an explosion that would kill a few, and maim hundreds over a wide area?

Well, they might have got it from the United States Air Force. It uses bomb cases to hold a hundred or more bomblets similar to the ones used in Boston. When the bomb case, called a cluster bomb, is dropped, the bomblets spread to cover a huge area  where they explode to kill 50 or 60, and to maim thousands. Over the last 30 or forty years, the US has dopped almost three hundred million bombs like the ones used n Boston. And, yes, some of those would certainly be eight -year old girls.

And some, many, don't explode right away. There are some millions of unexploded ones lying in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq and Afghanistan, waiting for children to come across them in their play. The Red Cross reports thousands of such deaths still happening just in Laos. Over a hundred countries have signed an agreement not to use these terrible weapons. The US refuses to sign.

Now, if those brothers had just been wearing USAF uniforms, and dropping their bombs over innocent civilians in wherever the USAF is currently bombing, they wouldn't be "two twisted, perverted, cowardly knockoff jihadis", would they.  No. They'd be heroes getting medals and shaking hands with President Obama.
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Both Norbert Cunninghan and Alec Bruce make attempts to figure out what is meant by getting at the roots of such a problem as terrorism. Both are certainly worth reading. But consider this.
Both say (or imply) "we" are good and "they" are bad. Well, once you say that, then there's no escaping the conclusion that the roots of the problem must lie with "them".

Perhaps that sort of thinking comes out of our reading (and misunderstanding) of religious thought. What is good about the West which has been conquering and plundering everybody else  for the last 500 years? What's bad about "they" when they shoot back at us?

But we're not dealing with good and bad people - just with people. It's amazing how we avoid facing that.

Many Canadian readers of this blog are descended from Americans who fled the terrorism inflicted by radical, extremist terrorists who called themselves "The Sons of Liberty". Sixty thousand refugees from that terror came to Canada. At least another sixty thousand fled to the Caribbean or Britain. It ended when those terrorists united behind a radical extremist named George Washington who was, I suppose,  a "twisted, perverted, cowardly knockoff..."

When these extremists came to power, they invaded Canada in 1812, murdering and pillaging our ancestors.  But our thinking is so twisted that we can't recognize any of that. Check your high school history texts.

According to the texts, our ancestors didn't flee the US because of persecution by terrorists. No. They fled because they were United Empire Loyalists. (Isn't that a neat way to dodge the issue?) And did the US invade and murder Canadians in 1812? Well, they was just funnin'. Heck, we've just completed a year of actually celebrating that invasion. The message of the celebration? Well, the war happened; but not really. Hyuck, hyuck.

We use loaded words. We twist them. We don't see what we don't want to see. And we have dreadfully simple, almost cartoon, images of what us humans are like.

And that makes it hard for us to see the root of any problem.
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On the op ed page, the place of serious analysis, we get another glimpse into the fascinating life of Rod Allen, revealed to us with that flashing wit of a master raconteur. I laugh helplessly every week when he refers to his children as The Brats, and the eldest as Brat No. 1.  There is just no end to the wit.
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Beth Lyons uses her "Equality Time" column to better and more intelligent effect. She looks at a beauty advertising campaign to see what it says about itself. Then she does what a good columnist can do. She sees what is really there.