If the Good Old Days Were So Good
By Victor Epp
Of course, it’s a tad awkward to sit here at my computer and bellyache about all the new fangled ideas, ideologies and contraptions not being worth a tinker’s dam. It lends a certain air of hypocrisy to the argument. Well nothing could be further from the truth! If I had my druthers, I'd go looking for my old India ink well and nib pen, and write all this out in long hand just to prove it. The very thought sends shivers of excitement up my spine. Now don't get me started on that. I'll bet Annie Morison’s mother still hasn't forgiven me for all the ink stains she had to wash out of her daughter's pigtails, not to mention her tunic.
But that's another story. It wasn't the one I was going to talk about anyway. Come to think of it though while I'm on the topic, there's a point to be made about such activities - writing with pen and ink I mean. Here I am more than sixty years later remembering with picture perfect clarity. I usually had to pay a heavy price at the hands of this tomboy who had as much fun getting even as I did playing the prank. Why I'll bet if we met on the street somewhere, we'd be sure to recognize each other and pick up our friendship right where it left off, so to speak. Now that's got to be worth something.
See, that's what I'm talking about - something that means something. Now if you were to take pen and ink in hand for something more serious than to dunk Annie Morison’s pigtails into and sit yourself down to write somebody a letter or something; that would mean something. First thing you know; you'd be worried about spelling things right the first time because you can't rub ink out that easy. There's no pen nib I know that has a delete button on it. Then of course, you've got to write so that whoever has to read that stuff can actually make out what you scribbled. Before you know it, your pen and nib are just sailing along the paper, making little frills and curlicues in the letters that suit your personality and the mood of your missive. When you're done, you got something to be proud of. You'll have put a little piece of yourself on a sheet of paper that nobody else can duplicate. Whoever gets it will know exactly where it came from even before they read the return address. Let's see them computer geeks top that one!
Now there I go again, gumming on about the pen and ink thing. What I really want to talk about is these scientific dingbats running around their laboratories (or whatever it is they run around in) like kids in a candy store. They grab everything in sight 'cause they figure it's new and therefore has to be better and they want it before anybody else gets it. It doesn't even matter if it's got any use or not, as long as its new. Well, I've got news for these geniuses. Everything they can come up with to put on the market has a consequence - cause and effect you know.
Here's a perfect example. After the war - WWII that is, the push was on to electrify the country. Hydro dams and hydro lines were going up everywhere. Lakes were being flooded, rivers were being diverted and communities were displaced indiscriminately. Nothing mattered as long as we could develop hydroelectric power. Well, develop it we did until it got so big we couldn't manage it at a profit. So now it's being privatized and pretty soon nobody will be able to afford it.
Well, that's only half the equation. Here we are in the second largest country in the world with huge hydroelectric power resources, and nobody's living in it. The saying, “the lights are on but nobody's home” takes on a whole new meaning. On top of that after we pretty well decimated the Aboriginal population and wiped out a hundred thousand or more military types in the various wars, we've had to rely on immigration just to keep even. And now with all that terrorist activity going on, that looks pretty dicey too. Pretty soon were going to be a real good target for “Lebensraum” advocates. You still recall that one don't you? That's what got us into WWII in the first place.
Well, I can remember a fellow telling me once - he was a schoolteacher on an Indian Reserve in Northwest Ontario back in the early sixties - the minute they turned on the hydro, the birth rate on the reserve dropped by fifty percent. There you have it in a nutshell - cause and effect. Men have got no more time to cut firewood for the winter or clean the stovepipes or anything like that. Women have no more time to put up preserves and supplies in the root cellar. No, they're too busy watching television, or listening to the radio, or playing video games for that matter. They haven't even got time to sit down and write a letter in pen and ink for crying out loud! How anybody expects a person to have time for the serious business of nation building with the TV on or the radio blaring all the time, I'll never know!
Of course, these dam builders couldn't just turn off the lights and let the rivers and lakes go back to where they were meant to go anyway. Oh no, they couldn't ever do that! It seems that there's no going back once the die is cast on so called progress. What would the Americans think if they couldn't buy our hydropower? Well if they want it so all fired bad and we're the ones who’ve got it, why don't they just immigrate to Canada so they can have use of it? At least that way we'd be solving our nation building problem and not giving away our resources at bargain basement Canadian dollar prices.
And while I'm at talking about bargain basement Canadian dollar prices, what's all this yammering and jawing about this softwood lumber fooferrah about anyway? We've got to pay the American government twenty nine percent kickback to be able to sell our softwood lumber in discount Canadian dollars? Doesn't that one smell a whole lot like that airbus thing a few years back? Seems to me that a whole lot of people were doing a heap of apologizing over that one!
What I'm trying to get at here is that instead of playing the American payola game and making two by fours for California is we ought to be cutting firewood for us Canadians and just turn off the electricity. At ten cords per household, that ought to provide a few jobs in the lumber industry. If we're going to give the stuff away anyhow, why not give it to Canadians?
I don't think the environmentalists would have a leg to stand on of they started griping about air pollution and whatever else they tag on to it. Mother Nature has been doing the self-same thing for a whole lot longer than we've been making two by fours. We'd just be lending a hand that's all. In fact, if we picked the right kind of wood to burn, our forest fires wouldn't get so dad blamed out of control either. Heck, even the boys in the oil patch would turn out to be heroes. They'd have that much more crude oil to turn into fuel at reasonable prices. All we'd really need for our homes is a little bit of coal oil for our lamps and lanterns.
Too labor intensive, you say? Not at all, not at all, in fact it's labor saving if anything. Well, what do you think all them kids who seem to appear when there's no electricity are for? Finally there’s a legitimate excuse for the existence of these obnoxious little buggers again. You teach them how to swing an axe and haul water at an early age, and they get to do it all while you supervise. Why, the first thing you know there's no more youth problem. All them glue sniffing, pot-smoking hoodlums are all of a sudden too busy piling up cordwood for mischief while the parents are walking around like a pair of peacocks and giving orders. The trick is to start teaching them early. That way they'll never know there's anything different and they'll be wanting to grow up fast and have their own brood to supervise.
Well, I guess there might be a few disgruntled people like them high priced movie stars missing all that attention they get on the TV if we turned off the hydro. To listen to them go on about it though, their first love is the stage anyway. What an opportunity! On top of all that, you got another place to put all that softwood lumber - building stages! What in tarnation must we be thinking about with all this new fangled stuff anyway?
Now where was I? I haven't even found my ink well yet and already half the country's problems are solved before I even get to the point of this whole tirade.
Oh yeah, I was talking about whatever happened to the good old days and why aren't we still in them. It seems to me, if we're going to invent something new, we ought to be looking at a kind of hobble for some of them scientists and inventors. Now that might be something worth considering.
Now it's not all doom and gloom as you might think. There's always hope. You remember that Trudeau guy who kept whipping his opposition with his slogan of “a just society”. He was Prime Minister for just about as long as he felt like. A visionary, they called him. Well one of these days we’re going to get another visionary who's going to campaign on “the good old days”. He'll get elected too. See, the thing is, that he'll be able to campaign and get his hype across in time for everybody to vote for him just before he turns off the hydro.
