Hyena Road

I must share with you an experience my wife and I had the other evening.  We were invited, by our local Member of Parliament, to a screening of a new Canadian movie called Hyena Road.  It is a drama about the Canadian participation in the Afghan War.  I was written and produced by the Canadian actor Paul Gross who also starred in the movie.  You will remember that Mr. Gross also made the movie Passchendaele a few years ago. He was also at the screening and answered questions after the movie was over.  He assured us that all of the incidents shown in the movie were related by actual soldiers in the war.  This gives the movie some sense of legitimacy.

As for the movie itself, it is very graphic, but is probably one of the most realistic depictions of war that you will see.  Most war movies show some sort of hero doing incredible deeds and coming out triumphant.  It is frequently softened by some sort of love story from the home front as a contrast to the war.  There is none of that in this movie. It shows both male and female soldiers operating together.  But mostly it shows the brutality of war, along with the suffering and confusion of the battlefield.  There is a story there that holds the movie together and some interesting characters to give the movie a human face.  But over it all is the war; a war that seems to have no winners and no end. A war that Canada was involved with longer than our involvement in World War 1 and 2 and Korea combined (2002 to 2015).

“ . . . fighting often continues long past the point where a ‘rational’ calculation would indicate that the war should be ended.”

From “Every War Must End” by Fred Ikle as quoted in “My American Journey” by Colin L. Powell, General (Rtd) US Army.

I bring all this to your attention because you can get a chance to watch this movie this Sunday evening at 8 PM on CBC television commercial free.  It would be a worthwhile investment of your time to see this excellent movie to end the Remembrance Day weekend.

“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.”

Jeannette Rankin

Unsung Heroes

You know, they could be all around you.  They may live on your street or in your neighborhood.  There are two on our street and two more who were once part of the group.  You may run into them in the grocery store or the gym.  They may be sitting next to you in the beauty parlour or the bus.  Who are these strange creatures?

They are military spouses, that’s who.  And in many ways they are the ones who also need remembering on Remembrance Day.  They are the real heroines and heroes behind so many of our military personnel and veterans.  I say spouses whereas some years ago I would almost exclusively have spoken of wives.  But today there are military women who are supported by their husbands.  But whatever the gender, they all must be remembered and honoured.

We see, of course, the Silver Cross Mother every year at the Remembrance Day ceremonies, representing mothers who have lost children to war.  But we never see a Silver Cross Wife.  Most people have no idea what it is like to lose a spouse in their young years, often with a family to raise and explain why Mom or Dad is not coming home. 

But the real story is with the day by day and year by year experiences of these spouses who see a service member through an entire military career.  They start the life with optimism and enthusiasm.  Unlike the military member, there is no basic training for the spouses in their new life.  They are not told how to withstand the long absences.  They are not told how to react when they hear of death or disaster; how to tell the children why Dad or Mom can’t be there for their school graduation; how to understand what often sound like inane or stupid orders from their spouse’s senior officer; how to give birth without their husband; how to support other military spouses when they need help; how to uproot their homes every couple of years because their spouse has just received a new posting.  And they don’t tell you that you will have to do this year after year for as long as your spouse chooses to stay in their military career.      

“The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.”
  - Calvin Trillin

But the really amazing thing is that so many military spouses do all that and more.  They run the household. They cook the meals. They manage the household budget.  They pay the bills and do the shopping.  They get the kids off to school every morning and get them to bed every night.  They don’t complain (much) when the biggest snow fall of the year arrives two days after their soldier or sailor deploys for the winter or for a year.  They referee the sibling arguments.  They get everything ready for the next move and then unpack everything at the other end.  They attend the parent teacher interviews that you can’t.  They keep the small, daily disasters a secret from you when you’re away.  They don’t turn to you for help when the furnace breaks down because they know exactly what to do, or know someone who does.  They do this all by themselves because you are busy fighting terrorists or pirates or helping out in a natural disaster; because you are doing your job. And for some of them, the day comes when they have to tend to your damaged body or mind, or they have to arrange to have you buried.  They truly are heroines or heroes.  They deserve our praise because they allow your soldiers, sailors and airmen to protect your country.  So when you shake the hand of a person in military uniform, give their spouse a big hug too.

So here’s to Mary and Barb, Lynne and Verna and Pat and Monica and Bev and Marlene and Alice and Sue and Denee and John.  God bless them all and so many more.

“If the Navy had wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued one.”

Numerous Navy Chief Petty Officers when I was a young officer

Energy Nowhere

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.
  - Bertrand Russell

TransCanada Pipelines cancelled the Energy East pipeline project this week and the environmentalists cheered at what they considered a great victory to their cause.  But I don’t understand why they would do that.  Why would they cheer the demise of the safest and most reliable way of moving crude oil?  What did they expect would happen next?

They surely wouldn’t think that this would stop the use of oil based products any time soon.  Although there are solutions that show promise of making oil burning machinery, primarily automobiles, more efficient they won’t stop the use of gasoline or diesel fuel.  The utopia of a world with only electric cars is still a long way off. And you still have to generate the electricity. There are still things that will not be rendered oil fuel free for a long time.  There is, for example, no realistic means being considered to make electric-only driven ships.  Aircraft engines will still require some form of fossil fuel for a long time.  Heating oil, oil based lubricants and synthetic fabrics are all products of crude oil. 

 

So as long as there is going to be a need for oil there is going to be a need to move it since oil has the nasty habit of not being where you want to use it.  So, without pipelines, how do we do that?  The next best bulk carriers are ships. They are fine as long as you are moving the stuff from one port to another, and of course a great deal of the world’s oil is moved by ship.  But as we have seen, ships have accidents.  Do we remember the Exxon Valdez? Crude oil for the one major refinery in Atlantic Canada is shipped in from Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.  And, of course, ships burn fuel to propel them along.  But our problem in Canada is to move oil from one part of the country to another.  Water transport is a practical impossibility for most of Canada.  So the next choices are rail or road.  Rail is the more efficient of the two, but again trains derail, crash and find other ways of self-destructing usually resulting in large spills or worse.  Who can forget Lac Megantic?   Trucks are even worse.  It takes a great deal of them to move even a train’s worth.  And they are, undoubtedly the worst when it comes to accidents.  Read the stories of truck accidents on Highway 401. So, not one other mode of transport is as efficient and safe as pipelines.  Every other mode of transport uses significant amounts of fuel to get oil from place to place.  Properly built and maintained pipelines using modern technology for monitoring must be considered the safest, most efficient and most environmentally friendly means of transporting crude oil.

So think about it.  Are the environmentalists right or wrong in fighting against pipelines?  You make up your mind, but remember the alternatives.

The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.
  - Edith Sitwell

Two Spoiled Brats

Example 1:  For all intents he is a hereditary monarch having been handed the crown when his father died, just as his father inherited it when the grandfather died.  He has never known anything but power and privilege.  There is no opposition to his rule, at least none that are still alive.  Now 33 years old, he was literally given the keys to the kingdom when he was 27. He consolidated his power by having people killed, probably including his older brother. He has at his command one of the largest militaries in the world including missiles and nuclear weapons.  His sole aim is the stay in power.

Example 2: He is much older, but is nonetheless the product of a privileged upbringing.  He started life rich and built on that as a speculator and developer.  He knew “the art of the deal”. He made himself a media star by firing people.  He has ego and now has power.  He manipulates the truth to his advantage.  And now he has under his control the most powerful military in the world including the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.  His sole aim is?

Now these two men are arguing like children.  Each thinks he can bully the other as they have bullied so many in the past. Like most bullies, neither man wants to talk to the other to find a way out of the disagreement. And neither one cares what the rest of us might think or that we could be those harmed.  With both ego and power, neither seems likely to back down.  It leaves us in an oh so dangerous situation.  You see, if, or when, one of them decides to take more overt action, like using some of those nuclear weapons, the two of them will not be killed, but millions of others will be.

So what is behind this disagreement?  Well it started when one of them started doing missile tests.  The fact that the other side fires missiles of every type almost every day did not seem to matter.  And then the first side tested nuclear weapons a thing the second side did for over twenty years, even to destroying a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean.  But it didn’t matter, the second side took umbrage.  And so we have come to this impasse.

Perhaps a few observations are in order.  North Korea has fired a handful of long range missiles, some of which have failed.  How many can they make and how fast they can make them has never been answered?  Given the complexity of such weapons, they may only have a very few in their arsenal.  The same goes for nuclear weapons.  None so far has been proven to be a hydrogen bomb: enhanced atomic maybe.  Again, how many do they actually have that are deployable and how fast can they make them?  The recent picture of Kim Jong Un standing beside what was purported to be a hydrogen bomb was most certainly nothing more than a hollow sample which may or may not be able to house one of their weapons.  But if it was an actual nuclear weapon, he would certainly not be standing so close to it for fear of nuclear radiation.  This is not to say that North Korea could not raise havoc, particularly in South Korea and Japan, and perhaps, just perhaps, in North America.  But it would most certainly destroy North Korea and Kim’s dreams.  In the process, millions of innocent people would lose their lives.  And for what?

Two spoiled brats threatening each other with their toys.  How schoolyard-ish.

But I do have something to say

“Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.”
  - George Bernard Shaw

For those who actually read and enjoy this blog, I apologize for the delay in writing anything new.  First of all, I must blame a bad summer.  My wife and I spent two months nursing our very sick dog, Only.  In the end we lost her.  After that there were a couple of weeks of emotional release while we mourned her. After a short get-away, we returned home to get on with life.  At that point I wanted to start new blogs.  I had ideas, but something kept stopping me from getting started on any of them.  I kept thinking that I had nothing worthwhile to say.

As I thought about this, it suddenly dawned on me that what was stopping me was a form of self-censorship.  I was afraid to write things because they may be sensitive or contradict someone else.  Those of us, the majority I would think, who occupy the middle ground in thought and beliefs have been cowed by the writers of the far left and right.  Writing has become a polarizing effort.  But I do have something, actually many things, to say.  In many cases they seem to be things that nobody wants to come right out and say for fear of incurring the wrath of one fringe group or another.  Why is this?

“If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one - if he had the power - would be justified in silencing mankind.”
  - John Stuart Mill

It is this way because the middle thinking group have let this happen.  We are afraid to express ourselves and our beliefs because we have become afraid of the response from the far left or right.  The fringe groups have set the agendas.  They are the ones who have chosen the subjects that we are supposed to be concerned about and have raised those subjects to a level of hysteria where no moderate response is tolerated.  They have polarized any subject with a ‘with us or against’ attitude. 

Ask about the plight of the indigenous people in this country and you are called a racist or are made to feel guilty because you didn’t do anything about residential schools.  Most of us were not even around when the residential school system was going on.

Ask about religion and you’re considered a religious fanatic. Say that you are a Christian and you’re labeled as anti-Muslim.  Speak out in support of Muslims and you’re your accused of wanting to destroy our “culture”. 

Ask about free speech and you’re seen as a supporter of hate speech.  Speak about limiting free speech and you’re (rightly) accused of impinging on people’s rights.  The only place where it seems to be okay to limit free speech is in universities.  Bring in a controversial speaker and you will be howled down and accused of ruining young minds.  And yet universities are the one place where different ideas should be welcomed and discussed, even controversial ones.  George Orwell in his book 1984 introduced the idea of thought police as a warning to future generations, but today too many people and groups think that that is their role in society. 

“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
  - George Orwell

 Try and have a discussion on almost any subject these days and someone will take exception to your point of view.  Honest discourse should be encouraged and welcomed.  But too often you will be shouted down and accused of something heinous. It is no wonder that we have let the loudest shouters usurp the conversation.  Hence the state of intercourse in this country that is now so polarized and poisonous.  We are being yelled into submission.  But it has to end.  Those of us who believe that we should listen thoughtfully to opposing views, that compromise is possible and that ideas are precious and must be nurtured must start to speak up and bring some sense to so many conversations whether written or spoken.  Don’t let our entire society become so polarized that we are not allowed to think any more.  Speak up!  Express your views on this or any other topic.  Don't become self-censored.

“There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.”

  - P. J. O'Rourke