The late Karl Menninger said in his book, The Crime of Punishment “The great secret, the deeply buried mystery of the apparent public apathy to crime and to proposals for better controlling crime, lies in the persistent wish for vengeance.” He recognized that we all have that natural desire to hurt back but that in our society, it simply isn't done openly.
When the reformers sold society their concepts of prison reform through rehabilitation of criminals, society went for it---only to later learn that rehabilitation in prison was a joke. When violent offenders and murderers were released because parole authorities presumed that they had been rehabilitated, and these same felons re-entered society again to maim and kill again and again, society lashed out at the reformers, calling them sob sisters and buffoons.
Imprisonment serves two useful purposes---the protection of society and as a deterrence; both general and specific. Punishment isn't meted out where the purpose of imprisonment alone is the protection of society. To do so, would be cruel. For example, if a person kills another as a direct result of mental illness, we may incarcerate him for life in order to protect society but we wouldn’t incarcerate him as a punishment notwithstanding being incarcerated is a form of punishment.
You cannot deter criminals without inflicting punishment. Incarceration by itself as a penalty is punishment which is awarded to wrongdoers and yet, mere incarceration alone is not a deterrent. I am speaking of losers who have no job, no family to support, no house to upkeep and no future. Their friends are for the most part, lowlife like themselves who don't care one iota for their fellow humans. These are the people to whom incarceration means three meals a day, a roof over their heads, a warm bed and friends of their own ilk to keep them company. If they serve one or ten years in prison, they have learned nothing from it because it costs them nothing. They had nothing when they went into prison and they have nothing when they re-enter society. To them, being sent to prison means little or nothing to them. They simply don't fear imprisonment; hence they commit more violent crimes. I remember meeting a middle-aged man who had spent years in prison and when he was released he immediately committed another burglary. When I asked him why, he said that it being winter, it was cold and he had no where to go and he was glad to be back into prison again. He is the kind of person we refer to as being institutionalized.
What about the 38-year-old woman in Toronto who was the victim of three teenage thugs who had nothing better to do? These thugs walked down the busy streets at the early hours of the morning, banging on the doors of cars that stopped at stop lights and assaulting anyone who protested. The 38-year-old woman who left her car to protest was stabbed by a 16-year-old punk in her abdomen and shoulder. The trial judge gave the 16-year-old youth a mere 18 months in a youth facility. With good time, he could be out in three months.
Can we expect a judge to give a slap on the wrist of the Toronto 16-year-old punk who stabbed a man who came to the assistance of this mother because his mother objected to drugs being sold in her neighbourhood? What penalty will some soft-hearted, soft-headed judge give to the criminal, who in the company of 20 youths, beat and stabbed a Rexdale man in the lobby of his own apartment building in the middle of the day after he had already given them his money?
Will the judge be anything like acting Justice Renee White in New York City, who after hearing evidence that an 18-year- old slashed a film actress across her cheek and ear for no apparent reason, promised the criminal who did it, that he wouldn't get any prison time if he behaved himself for a year? Is that what we call deterrence?
What is frightening is that a Canadian federal corrections report stated that 61% of all penitentiary inmates in Canada are psychopaths. Since such characteristics are formed in early life, it follows that young offender statistics are probably the same. A psychopath is anyone who has no feelings for anyone or anything and is incapable of really understanding the feelings of others. As an example of psychopathic behaviour, consider the two pre-teens in Toronto who poked the eyes out of a live kitten and then set the kitten on fire. It is these kinds of criminals that are in prison and young offender facilities for violent crimes and it is these kinds of criminals that eventually return to society with a vengeance. Admittedly, we have incarcerated them to protect ourselves from these beasts of prey but that protection is generally quite short in duration. The beasts are set free even while the victims continue to suffer.
What we need to do is to instill fear in the minds of violent criminals so that they know that if they commit an act of violence, they will pay not only the penalty involving their loss of freedom but also they will pay for their crimes with the pain of punishment.
Whipping went by the way years ago as a punishment for violent offenders (and rightly so because it was counter productive) so we are left with the only alternative suitable punishment that is acceptable---and that is, hard labour.
One thinks of the Gulag and Mississippi chain gangs when thinking of hard labour. That is hard labour in the extreme. What I envision as hard labour is a highly restrictive regimen of freedom and work in which the work hours are long and tedious.
I envision a section of each prison or young offender facility being set aside for violent offenders who are sentenced to hard labour. Such a section of each institution is a prison within a prison. Visits from family members are restricted to one two-hour visits per month. The prisoner (if over 15) works six days a week with one day being set aside (Sunday) as a day of rest and recreation. Smoking is absolutely forbidden---which in the long run, will be a blessing to the prisoner.
Each work day begins at five in the morning. The prisoner has one hour to get up, get washed and have breakfast. By six, he is at work. Between six and twelve noon, he has two 15-minute breaks. Between twelve and one, he has his lunch and a rest until one in the afternoon. Then he's back at work. He quits work at five with two 15-minute breaks in between. Between five and six, he has his supper and rest. At six, he is back to work again until eight. Between eight and nine, he has a shower, reads or writes and at nine, the lights go out.
The work is not light work. It entails loading and unloading heavy sacks of sand (the weight of each sack is dependant on the size of the offender which means that each sack can be half the weight of the offender) or digging holes, wheel-barrowing the dirt to another site and then returning to the original pile and filling the wheel barrows again. The work is monotonous and is not varied. The accomplishments are meaningless. The idea is to instill a hatred for their crime by instilling in them a hatred for the hard labour they are doing. It will certainly make legitimate work look like an outing in the summer.
For those who do their work without any trouble, they are given the privilege of enjoying their Sundays to the fullest. On Sundays, there will be TV to watch, a film, a concert by visiting performers and four-hour visits. They can play sports in the yards or simply lie in their beds. It's their day.
If they don't toe the line, they will spend their Sundays in solitary confinement with no privileges for that day. If they refuse to work, they will serve their time in solitary confinement with no books, no radio or TV. They will have no communication with anyone other than guards or by correspondence and their two meals a day will be so bland and repetitious that the desire to eat simply won’t be there other than to break the monotony. They will sleep on two blankets on the floor with a third blanket to cover them or use as a pillow when rolled up.
There are many who will say that young offenders should be taught a trade instead of doing meaningless hard labour. I disagree. Teaching violent offenders a trade isn't going to change their attitudes about committing violent crimes against innocent citizens. Many violent criminals learned a trade in prison and upon their release; they still committed violent crimes. If they are to be taught a trade, let them be taught a trade when they are on parole while living in a halfway house.
I am suggesting this kind of punishment for periods of between one year (for young offenders) and three years (for adult offenders) as an alternative to sending violent offenders to prison for periods of three to six years of ordinary imprisonment. The purpose is two-fold. The first being that this short and hard imprisonment will deter violent criminals far more than long and soft imprisonment ever will. Secondly, the cost of keeping a prisoner in a federal penitentiary for two years for example, is only $100,000 whereas keeping him in prison for six years is three times as much.
This proposal is not in my opinion, cruel and unusual punishment. If imprisonment is to be effective, it must deter and there is nothing like hard labour that will deter a violent offender. When violent punks serve between one and three years in a correctional institution at hard labour for wounding by shooting, slashing or kicking innocent victims who refuse to hand over their purses or shoes, the next time they see a victim with a purse or something they want for themselves, they will think of the thousands upon thousands of gunnysacks of sand they hoisted over their shoulders, or the tons of dirt they moved across the yard, hour after hour, day after day, month after month until the thought of pulling a gun or knife or using their boots on a prospective victim, will make them want to vomit.
I am so sick of reading about violent offenders who attack anyone that is still breathing and then getting either a slap or a kiss from a soft-hearted, soft-headed judge who has no idea whatsoever as to what it is really like to suffer pain and injury at the hands of a violent offender, an offender who doesn’t give a damn what he or she does to other people.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
SHEP: The story of a dog
What follows is a true story. Years ago, my wife and I visited the grave of this incredible dog in Fort Benton, Montana and I was so fascinated at what I head about this famous dog, I subsequently wrote this story for an animal’s rights organization.
Fort Benton, Montana, straddles Highway 87, that lonely road which runs between Havre to the north and Great Falls to the south. Some will say, perhaps with tongue in cheek, that although Fort Benton is nevertheless a mere speck on the map of Montana; it does have an interesting past. It was on this site that the famed explorers, Lewis and Clark passed in June 1805 on their way to the Pacific. This town established in 1864, was an important river port on the Missouri River and the head of navigation for the westbound steamboats coming from St. Louis, right up to the middle of the Twentieth Century. These facts alone would not give Fort Benton world recognition, but something did. It was the dog.
From 1937 until 1942, a collie called Shep; put this small town in the world news, not because of his beauty; which he didn't possess in any case-nor because of some spectacular act of bravery, but rather because of his faithfulness to his master and friend. If perhaps you feel that faithfulness in a dog hardly merits world recognition, then read on and form your own opinion as to the virtue of faithfulness of animals.
Shep was owned by a sheepherder who had moved into Montana from the eastern seaboard to raise sheep. Shep and his master became fast and firm friends because there is a bond between a sheepherder and his dog. Both depend on each other for their livelihood and for companionship in the lonely hills. It was never discovered just how their friendship began but many a friendship, long, loyal and self-sacrificing, between a man and his dog, originate from an utterance of a kind word or the giving of a morsel of food to a hungry dog.
Then in August 1936, that bond between the two was forever severed. One of them died. Shep survived his master. He watched with sadness, the body of his friend being placed in a pine box and then trotted behind the vehicle that conveyed it to the train station. He stood by, heaviness in heart as he watched the men place the box into the baggage car. Shortly after the baggage car door was closed, the train slowly pulled out of the station, its whistle blowing mournfully like a dirge at a funeral. Shep raced along side the train until the pain in his heart could take no more. Then he returned to Fort Benton, perhaps to ponder his future.
Before the next train had arrived, from the direction the last one had proceeded. Shep was on the station platform awaiting its arrival. He was waiting for his friend to return. The dog had no way of knowing that his friend was on his way east to be buried by his family. However, when the train stopped, it didn't take long for Shep to realize that his friend wasn't on the train. As each day passed, he faithfully waited for each train's arrival so that he would be the first to greet his friend on his return to Fort Benton. The days went into weeks and the weeks went into months. Not a train slipped into Fort Benton that the dog wasn't there to greet it.
At first, no one really paid attention to the dog and when the station personnel finally did take notice, they threw stones at it to shoo it away. It is odd indeed when you realize that once a dog recognizes kindness from a human being, it takes more than stones to chase him away from others who resemble the one who originally showed him kindness.
As the months passed and the leaves of autumn changed their colours, Shep grew gaunt, his fur; a mere covering of skin and bones. Most if not all dogs can fare on their own but there has to be a motive to survive other than just staving off hunger alone. Shep managed to forage around the backs of restaurants and among the garbage bins but the eating of rotten meat is hardly suitable for a dog's diet. Besides, he needed to spend practically all of his time at the train station and that gave him little time for anything else.
The winters in the eastern half of Montana are not kind to men or beast, least of all to a homeless dog on the verge of starvation. Thousands of cattle die under the ‘big skies’ of Montana when the death winds carrying the freezing sleet begin blowing across the unprotected Great Plains of North America, of which Montana is a part.
Shep wasn't a dumb animal. He knew that he needed some protection from the freezing blasts of winter so he dug out a spot for himself under the station platform to ward off the freezing winds of winter. His diggings weren't really warm as warmth goes, but with what fur he still had covering his lean body, his meagre shelter under the platform kept him alive.
Throughout the cold and winter months, the dog waited for the arrival of each train as it pulled into the station. He would leave his shelter and stand on the platform; his body shaking from both the cold and the anticipation of greeting his long-absent friend---his eyes opened wide, to encompass the entire platform as the passengers got off the train. With the realization that his friend was not on the train, he would return to his shelter, or in the alternative, forage for more food. If it was the need for food that took him away from the diggings, his absence was short for he wouldn't take any chance of missing the one train that would carry his friend home.
By the time the warm breezes of spring caressed the area of Fort Benton, the townspeople and the station personnel had become gradually apprised of what the dog was doing there at their train station. Many of the townspeople admired Shep and recognized the dog's vigil for what it was. They, along with fifty sheepherders from around the country, wanted to adopt Shep and care for him. Dog homes in a couple of states offered to give him a home and a life he so richly deserved. The station master and his staff---who unofficially adopted Shep by this time, gently refused the kind offers of the many that wrote or came personally to make their requests.
Word spread of the lonely vigil from community to community and then from newspaper to newspaper until Shep's name and his vigil became a household name. Many who had collies, named their dogs Shep in hope that having that name would instill in their pets, that virtue that was instilled in the dog at Fort Benton.
Many of those wishing to adopt Shep didn't realize that when one adopts a dog, that person not only must except the responsibility of nurturing and caring for the animal, one must also be prepared to conform, to some extent, to the dog's will. To conform to Shep's will would be to recognize that the train station was not only a home to him---humble as it was---but it was also a post to which he could not leave lest he miss the one thing that was most important to him---to his existence---the meeting of his friend when he steps off the train.
As the story of his vigil spread, many of the passengers on the great Northern trains passing through Fort Benton, would get off and pet and caress the dog. Dining car stewards would bring him the choicest meats from their larders. During the cold nights of the winters that followed, he always had a warm room in the station for the asking. Hundreds driving through the area would make a side trip so they could get a glimpse of the most famous and loved dog in the country.
As the years progressed out of the depression and drought, it became clear to those who knew Shep; that he was leading the life he really wanted. Although his vigil was unfulfilled, he had more friends than a dog could ever have, he ate well and as to a place to stay, his home was satisfactory. And more importantly, at least to Shep, he was in the right place to meet his friend when he finally returned home.
None of the people who visited the dog really fathomed the feeling of gradual hopelessness that developed within the dog. One can be surrounded by a multitude of friends and still feel the agony of loneliness of the loss of a loved one for that loss can not be forgotten by accepting the caresses of many who wish to replace the one who is lost. Shep knew and understood the feelings of those around him for he had experienced these feelings before when he was with his friend but those feelings were not the same. To understand the loneliness of the living, one must go within and feel the beating of the heart. A faithful dog may not understand virtue because it may not understand its significance within its own being. It is only its outward behaviour which it displays that makes us aware of the existence of its virtue.
Understanding the needs of that lonely dog was important but this understanding only became fruitful when it was sustained by the sympathetic feeling of joy and sorrow---joy because the dog was surrounded by his many friends who loved and cared for him, and sorrow, because the purpose of his vigil had become apparent to all except Shep; that his vigil would be without fulfillment.
Many of those who visited that lonely dog recognized, as the rest of us do, that we receive love and devotion from a dog as well as others of our own kind; not just in proportion to our demands, sacrifices or needs, but also in proportion to our capacity to recognize the demands, sacrifices of the needs of the dog and others. Despite the kindness shown to Shep and the opportunities to lead a comfortable life in the surroundings of friends who loved him, he was prepared to forfeit it all in order that he would not forsake his friend. None could replace his friend and yet, had he given up his vigil, he might very well have found another friend he could attach himself to. But that was not to be his choice. Shep had learned the hard way, as most of us do, that true and loyal friendship is like life; the value of it is seldom appreciated until it is lost.
The war years emerged and engulfed the world into darkness. Perhaps the darkness of gloom which falls upon us at the highest state of adversity can be dissipated by that minute flicker of light that represents hope, valour, or simply the caring of one being for another. Any light in a void is many times better than no light at all.
Shep's story, which by now was told and retold around the world, was that flicker of light so many yearned for. Many who knew of Shep's plight made their own problems easier to bear. Human nature is such; that the spectacle of another being's suffering awakens even in the best of us, a subliminal feeling of pleasure which contains along with the sincerest pity, an almost imperceptible appreciation that it is not we that are suffering the agony of that other being. For this reason, many were drawn to Shep.
Adversity not only draws people together, it also brings out that warmth in all of us, melting away the coldness we tend on occasion to show others, not unlike the early sun melting away last night's frost which has gathered on our window panes. Many of those who got to know Shep developed not only a friendship with the dog but also with others who shared their friendship with Shep.
For five and a half years, Shep kept his vigil. Not one train had passed that he hadn't personally greeted in the faint hope that at long last; he would finally meet the man who was the purpose of his vigil. Alas, the lonely vigil, along with his age---he was old when his friend passed away---had taken its toll. He was no longer agile and his hearing and eyesight had grown faint with his age.
On January 12, 1942, Shep saw the approaching train and dashed across the tracks so that he could be on the platform when it pulled in. The people smiled at each other as they watched the dog approaching them. They all knew who he was waiting for. Suddenly their faces turned to expressions of horror. Shep had stopped suddenly as train number 235 was bearing down on him. Perhaps he didn't hear the whistle or perhaps he didn't see the engine. His paws slipped on the icy cold rails. As he tried to regain his footing, the wheels of the engine crossed his body. body.
Hundreds of townspeople attended Shep's funeral. He was laid to rest on top of the small bluff overlooking the train station. There on the top of that bluff, he could wait for the trains, till the end of time. The Great Northern train employees erected a profile monument of their friend along with a concrete marker. The station personnel installed a spotlight on the station which when turned on, lit the grave site so that the passengers on the night trains can see the monument.
Often many people die believing that the Ages will pass by and no one will ever look upon their existence as being one of beauty or nobility. It is a strange anomaly of humans to ignore the admirable traits of the living and yet, later, praise the dead. Despite this strange quirk in our character, exceptions are made and Shep proved to be one of those exceptions. Those of his time may not have looked upon the dog as an object of beauty but no one missed the reality of his nobleness. The memory of Shep was not ignored by his friends nor has he been forgotten by those in the generations that followed.
His death occurred at a time when humanity was seen as being devoid of dignity and significance, seen as trivial and mean, having sunk to the depths of dreary hopelessness. Despite this, his death brought home to thousands around the world, the belief that if a dog could possess the admirable traits sought in humans, there was hope for all who recognized those traits in a dog.
I have heard it said that animals do not have a place in Heaven but I for one cannot fathom Heaven without animals who possess faithfulness and loyalty. If Shep did go to Heaven; I like to think that when he got there, he was greeted by his long-lost friend, who just like Shep, patiently waited for that eventful and beautiful meeting.
Fort Benton, Montana, straddles Highway 87, that lonely road which runs between Havre to the north and Great Falls to the south. Some will say, perhaps with tongue in cheek, that although Fort Benton is nevertheless a mere speck on the map of Montana; it does have an interesting past. It was on this site that the famed explorers, Lewis and Clark passed in June 1805 on their way to the Pacific. This town established in 1864, was an important river port on the Missouri River and the head of navigation for the westbound steamboats coming from St. Louis, right up to the middle of the Twentieth Century. These facts alone would not give Fort Benton world recognition, but something did. It was the dog.
From 1937 until 1942, a collie called Shep; put this small town in the world news, not because of his beauty; which he didn't possess in any case-nor because of some spectacular act of bravery, but rather because of his faithfulness to his master and friend. If perhaps you feel that faithfulness in a dog hardly merits world recognition, then read on and form your own opinion as to the virtue of faithfulness of animals.
Shep was owned by a sheepherder who had moved into Montana from the eastern seaboard to raise sheep. Shep and his master became fast and firm friends because there is a bond between a sheepherder and his dog. Both depend on each other for their livelihood and for companionship in the lonely hills. It was never discovered just how their friendship began but many a friendship, long, loyal and self-sacrificing, between a man and his dog, originate from an utterance of a kind word or the giving of a morsel of food to a hungry dog.
Then in August 1936, that bond between the two was forever severed. One of them died. Shep survived his master. He watched with sadness, the body of his friend being placed in a pine box and then trotted behind the vehicle that conveyed it to the train station. He stood by, heaviness in heart as he watched the men place the box into the baggage car. Shortly after the baggage car door was closed, the train slowly pulled out of the station, its whistle blowing mournfully like a dirge at a funeral. Shep raced along side the train until the pain in his heart could take no more. Then he returned to Fort Benton, perhaps to ponder his future.
Before the next train had arrived, from the direction the last one had proceeded. Shep was on the station platform awaiting its arrival. He was waiting for his friend to return. The dog had no way of knowing that his friend was on his way east to be buried by his family. However, when the train stopped, it didn't take long for Shep to realize that his friend wasn't on the train. As each day passed, he faithfully waited for each train's arrival so that he would be the first to greet his friend on his return to Fort Benton. The days went into weeks and the weeks went into months. Not a train slipped into Fort Benton that the dog wasn't there to greet it.
At first, no one really paid attention to the dog and when the station personnel finally did take notice, they threw stones at it to shoo it away. It is odd indeed when you realize that once a dog recognizes kindness from a human being, it takes more than stones to chase him away from others who resemble the one who originally showed him kindness.
As the months passed and the leaves of autumn changed their colours, Shep grew gaunt, his fur; a mere covering of skin and bones. Most if not all dogs can fare on their own but there has to be a motive to survive other than just staving off hunger alone. Shep managed to forage around the backs of restaurants and among the garbage bins but the eating of rotten meat is hardly suitable for a dog's diet. Besides, he needed to spend practically all of his time at the train station and that gave him little time for anything else.
The winters in the eastern half of Montana are not kind to men or beast, least of all to a homeless dog on the verge of starvation. Thousands of cattle die under the ‘big skies’ of Montana when the death winds carrying the freezing sleet begin blowing across the unprotected Great Plains of North America, of which Montana is a part.
Shep wasn't a dumb animal. He knew that he needed some protection from the freezing blasts of winter so he dug out a spot for himself under the station platform to ward off the freezing winds of winter. His diggings weren't really warm as warmth goes, but with what fur he still had covering his lean body, his meagre shelter under the platform kept him alive.
Throughout the cold and winter months, the dog waited for the arrival of each train as it pulled into the station. He would leave his shelter and stand on the platform; his body shaking from both the cold and the anticipation of greeting his long-absent friend---his eyes opened wide, to encompass the entire platform as the passengers got off the train. With the realization that his friend was not on the train, he would return to his shelter, or in the alternative, forage for more food. If it was the need for food that took him away from the diggings, his absence was short for he wouldn't take any chance of missing the one train that would carry his friend home.
By the time the warm breezes of spring caressed the area of Fort Benton, the townspeople and the station personnel had become gradually apprised of what the dog was doing there at their train station. Many of the townspeople admired Shep and recognized the dog's vigil for what it was. They, along with fifty sheepherders from around the country, wanted to adopt Shep and care for him. Dog homes in a couple of states offered to give him a home and a life he so richly deserved. The station master and his staff---who unofficially adopted Shep by this time, gently refused the kind offers of the many that wrote or came personally to make their requests.
Word spread of the lonely vigil from community to community and then from newspaper to newspaper until Shep's name and his vigil became a household name. Many who had collies, named their dogs Shep in hope that having that name would instill in their pets, that virtue that was instilled in the dog at Fort Benton.
Many of those wishing to adopt Shep didn't realize that when one adopts a dog, that person not only must except the responsibility of nurturing and caring for the animal, one must also be prepared to conform, to some extent, to the dog's will. To conform to Shep's will would be to recognize that the train station was not only a home to him---humble as it was---but it was also a post to which he could not leave lest he miss the one thing that was most important to him---to his existence---the meeting of his friend when he steps off the train.
As the story of his vigil spread, many of the passengers on the great Northern trains passing through Fort Benton, would get off and pet and caress the dog. Dining car stewards would bring him the choicest meats from their larders. During the cold nights of the winters that followed, he always had a warm room in the station for the asking. Hundreds driving through the area would make a side trip so they could get a glimpse of the most famous and loved dog in the country.
As the years progressed out of the depression and drought, it became clear to those who knew Shep; that he was leading the life he really wanted. Although his vigil was unfulfilled, he had more friends than a dog could ever have, he ate well and as to a place to stay, his home was satisfactory. And more importantly, at least to Shep, he was in the right place to meet his friend when he finally returned home.
None of the people who visited the dog really fathomed the feeling of gradual hopelessness that developed within the dog. One can be surrounded by a multitude of friends and still feel the agony of loneliness of the loss of a loved one for that loss can not be forgotten by accepting the caresses of many who wish to replace the one who is lost. Shep knew and understood the feelings of those around him for he had experienced these feelings before when he was with his friend but those feelings were not the same. To understand the loneliness of the living, one must go within and feel the beating of the heart. A faithful dog may not understand virtue because it may not understand its significance within its own being. It is only its outward behaviour which it displays that makes us aware of the existence of its virtue.
Understanding the needs of that lonely dog was important but this understanding only became fruitful when it was sustained by the sympathetic feeling of joy and sorrow---joy because the dog was surrounded by his many friends who loved and cared for him, and sorrow, because the purpose of his vigil had become apparent to all except Shep; that his vigil would be without fulfillment.
Many of those who visited that lonely dog recognized, as the rest of us do, that we receive love and devotion from a dog as well as others of our own kind; not just in proportion to our demands, sacrifices or needs, but also in proportion to our capacity to recognize the demands, sacrifices of the needs of the dog and others. Despite the kindness shown to Shep and the opportunities to lead a comfortable life in the surroundings of friends who loved him, he was prepared to forfeit it all in order that he would not forsake his friend. None could replace his friend and yet, had he given up his vigil, he might very well have found another friend he could attach himself to. But that was not to be his choice. Shep had learned the hard way, as most of us do, that true and loyal friendship is like life; the value of it is seldom appreciated until it is lost.
The war years emerged and engulfed the world into darkness. Perhaps the darkness of gloom which falls upon us at the highest state of adversity can be dissipated by that minute flicker of light that represents hope, valour, or simply the caring of one being for another. Any light in a void is many times better than no light at all.
Shep's story, which by now was told and retold around the world, was that flicker of light so many yearned for. Many who knew of Shep's plight made their own problems easier to bear. Human nature is such; that the spectacle of another being's suffering awakens even in the best of us, a subliminal feeling of pleasure which contains along with the sincerest pity, an almost imperceptible appreciation that it is not we that are suffering the agony of that other being. For this reason, many were drawn to Shep.
Adversity not only draws people together, it also brings out that warmth in all of us, melting away the coldness we tend on occasion to show others, not unlike the early sun melting away last night's frost which has gathered on our window panes. Many of those who got to know Shep developed not only a friendship with the dog but also with others who shared their friendship with Shep.
For five and a half years, Shep kept his vigil. Not one train had passed that he hadn't personally greeted in the faint hope that at long last; he would finally meet the man who was the purpose of his vigil. Alas, the lonely vigil, along with his age---he was old when his friend passed away---had taken its toll. He was no longer agile and his hearing and eyesight had grown faint with his age.
On January 12, 1942, Shep saw the approaching train and dashed across the tracks so that he could be on the platform when it pulled in. The people smiled at each other as they watched the dog approaching them. They all knew who he was waiting for. Suddenly their faces turned to expressions of horror. Shep had stopped suddenly as train number 235 was bearing down on him. Perhaps he didn't hear the whistle or perhaps he didn't see the engine. His paws slipped on the icy cold rails. As he tried to regain his footing, the wheels of the engine crossed his body. body.
Hundreds of townspeople attended Shep's funeral. He was laid to rest on top of the small bluff overlooking the train station. There on the top of that bluff, he could wait for the trains, till the end of time. The Great Northern train employees erected a profile monument of their friend along with a concrete marker. The station personnel installed a spotlight on the station which when turned on, lit the grave site so that the passengers on the night trains can see the monument.
Often many people die believing that the Ages will pass by and no one will ever look upon their existence as being one of beauty or nobility. It is a strange anomaly of humans to ignore the admirable traits of the living and yet, later, praise the dead. Despite this strange quirk in our character, exceptions are made and Shep proved to be one of those exceptions. Those of his time may not have looked upon the dog as an object of beauty but no one missed the reality of his nobleness. The memory of Shep was not ignored by his friends nor has he been forgotten by those in the generations that followed.
His death occurred at a time when humanity was seen as being devoid of dignity and significance, seen as trivial and mean, having sunk to the depths of dreary hopelessness. Despite this, his death brought home to thousands around the world, the belief that if a dog could possess the admirable traits sought in humans, there was hope for all who recognized those traits in a dog.
I have heard it said that animals do not have a place in Heaven but I for one cannot fathom Heaven without animals who possess faithfulness and loyalty. If Shep did go to Heaven; I like to think that when he got there, he was greeted by his long-lost friend, who just like Shep, patiently waited for that eventful and beautiful meeting.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Women and Crime (Part 1)
What follows is an article that I wrote forty years ago for a police magazine. Alas, much hasn’t changed since then with respect to women criminals. WARNING: This article is not for those who are squeamish.
In October 1989, Ameenah Abdus-Salaam, a 32-year-old mother of two, pushed her 6-year old daughter and her 3-year-old son out of the window of their tenth-floor New York City apartment. Her daughter was killed and her son was critically wounded. Her motive? The mother was heard crying out to her children as they plunged downwards to the street below; "God is waiting for you."
Maria King, a Miami 32-year-old woman, the mother of four children-two girls and two boys, stabbed her two daughters, 4 and 3 years, to death, then she ordered her 8-year-old son to stab her to death which the unfortunate boy finally did. Her motive? She was angry with the girls.
In 1984, Shiela Smith, 26, and her lover, Ricky Irby, 29, both of Illinois, held their three-month-old son's nose closed and then poured sulfuric acid down the helpless baby's throat--something akin to shoving a red-hot poker down its throat. After suffering horribly, the baby died. Their motive? They wanted to sue a baby food company for product liability.
In October 1989, a Gulfport, Mississippi mother, Sylvia Payton, mixed ground glass with dry cereal and fed it to her 8-month-old daughter. Her motive? To lure her estranged husband back to their home.
I apologize to my readers for opening this article with these four heart-wrenching tales but I couldn't think of a more explicit way in which to bring to the attention of my readers, what they have just read, is an all too common occurrence in our present day and age. For the most part, it is mothers who kill their children rather than their fathers. It is not my intention however to explain why mothers kill their children in this particular article. Fortunately the killing of children by their mothers represents a small segment of crimes committed by women.
There has been a steady increase in female crime in the past twenty-five years. Women offenders doubled from seven percent to fourteen percent of all persons charged with Canadian Criminal Code offences. In 1965, forty-five percent of all charges against women were for property offences and by 1985; this proportion had increased to sixty percent. More than half of all women charged with Criminal Code offences in Canada were charged with theft and fraud.
The ratio between women and men offenders in 1985 for committing crimes of theft and fraud is as follows; theft by women, 40.4%, theft by men, 16.3%; fraud by women, 13.1%, fraud by men, 6.1%: It is only these two offences where the women exceed in numbers of offences over that of the men.
A typical theft charge is not unlike that which has been perpetrated by the 'Catwoman' of Atlanta. Since 1979 to 1989, this elusive Canadian was suspected of breaking into 50 homes of Atlanta through unlocked windows and doors and stealing as much as one million dollars worth of goods.
Another typical crime of theft is when a couple of women knock on someone's door and ask to use the phone or use the bathroom. While the owner is watching one of the visitors use the phone, or watching the other one waiting downstairs, the unwatched visitor is stealing jewelry etc.
Shoplifting is of course a very common offence committed by women who for the most part, are petty pilferers, and who on the spur of the moment, will slip something unseen into their large bags. There is quite a gap between them and the professional boosters who wear special clothes to conceal the stolen items as they walk from store to store.
Fraud is for the most part, a female crime and there are basically three kinds of fraud committed by women. The first kind is indeed the most insidious. I am speaking of female employees who are placed in positions of trust. A typical fraud by a female employee is similar to that of the middle-aged woman in Chicago who in 1972, was arrested and charged with embezzling $122,000 from her employers in a complicated scheme which involved phony bank accounts, non-existent vendor companies and never-made deliveries. She was an assistant purchasing agent with a large equipment supply firm and she made a decent salary at the time but she felt that she deserved more and since her requests for a raise were denied, she decided to give herself an increase in pay. I remember assisting a lawyer in Ontario who was defending a woman who was charged with embezzlement. After repeatedly being rebuffed when asking for a raise, she simply increased her pay anyhow and since she was the bookkeeper in charge of payroll, she got away with it for six months. She also got six months in jail for her crime.
Another kind of fraud involves the uttering of bad cheques. The women open bank accounts and then with little or no money in their accounts, they begin purchasing what they want with their worthless cheques.
And of course, there is the fortune teller kind of fraud perpetrated on uneducated and highly superstitious victims, such as the case of 19-year-old Samantha Demitro of Toronto who attempted to con a man out of $4,600 by telling him that he was under an evil curse and that it could be removed when he brought the money in a glass jar filled with water.
Women also have an aptitude for violence. There is no getting away from that fact. Women do not commit the large numbers of violent crimes that are committed by men but despite this, there is an increase in the number of violent crimes by women. In 1965, there were 1,176 Canadian women charged with violent crimes, in 1975, as many as 3,455 were charged and in 1985, the numbers jumped to 6,891.
In 1965, there were 22 women charged with murder or manslaughter. In 1975, the number dramatically jumped to 71 and in 1985, the number increased to 81. In 1965, as many as 1,006 women were charged with attempted murder, wounding or grievous assault. In 1975, the number had jumped to 2,942 and in 1985, the number made a dramatic leap to 6,168. It should be kept in mind that these figures are related to only three years in the twenty-year period. If the mean numbers were applied to each year and multiplied by twenty years, it could conceivably mean that as many as (3372 times 20 years) 67,440 Canadian women have been charged with murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, wounding or grievous bodily assault.
Often those women who commit the crimes of murder, manslaughter or attempted murderer, have themselves been victims of the very men they are charged with killing or attempting to kill. There have been incidences however where women have killed other women in a fit of jealousy such as the case of Kim Blinkhorn, 28, of Waterloo, Ontario who was charged with the murder of her 21-year-old rival who lived with their mutual boyfriend. Blinkhorn stabbed her rival 70 times while the victim's three-year-old daughter watched helplessly. Some, as previously noted, have killed their children in a fit of revenge and on several occasions, some have even killed their robbery victims.
It is no surprise to anyone that there are women who commit multiple murders. In September 1989, a 56-year-old woman in Burlington, North Carolina was arrested as a suspect in the deaths by arsenic poisoning, of as many as eight people. The victims include her former husband, boyfriends, a mother-in-law and her father. Of course, there has been no woman in recorded history that can match the murderous record of Countess Elizabeth Bathroy. It has been said that she had as many as 650 peasant girls murdered so that she could have her daily bath in their blood.
Some women of today are committing kinky murders, such as the four Australian lesbians in their early 20s, who in October 1989, lured a 47-year-old man to his death. They drank animal blood and then, while three of them held him down, the fourth stabbed him 14 times. In June, 1989, three Milwaukee women in their 20s were charged with the attempted axe murder of a 25-year-old man they lured to an apartment. They planned to dismember him and eat his kidneys.
Two lesbian nurse's aides, Gwendolyn Graham, 25 and Mary Wood, 27, of Walter, Michigan, were arrested in September 1989 for the murder of five patients in a nursing home. They smothered their victims to death in order to cement their lesbian relationship.
In December 1989, Lilianne Sella St. Couer, 33, of Montreal was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for smothering her 11-year-old daughter to death and trying to murder her other daughter and her husband.
Robbery by women is on the increase. In 1965, there were only 125 women charged with robbery, and the number jumped to 474 in 1985. This means that in the twenty-year period, there were conceivably as many as (333 times 20 years) 6660 robberies committed by women in the twenty-year period between 1965 and 1985. Of course, many of these women would have been working alongside their male counterparts but recently, there have been gangs of women committing muggings, purse snatching and other robberies on their own.
A number of mothers have been convicted of rape in the sense that they have permitted men to rape their children. In Allegan, Michigan, two mothers, Annette Sanford, 34 and Carolyn Wilson, 42, forced their six young children to have sex with various men over a three-year-period. One boy told the court that his mother forced him to have sex with six different men in one day alone. In Toronto, in 1989, three women lured a young man into a van and then at gunpoint, sexually assaulted him.
This kind of sexual deviancy is not rare in Canada when you consider that in 1985, as many as 168 women were convicted of rape and sexual assault. Admittedly, these figures pale when you consider that in the same year, as many as 7,120 men were convicted of the same offences but nevertheless, 168 is very high when you look at the figures for twenty years earlier. In 1965, only 23 women were convicted of those crimes.
Drunk driving charges are on the increase. In 1985, as many as 10,000 women were charged with impaired driving.
The criminality of so many women may be explained as a symptom of a sense of futility with a desperate life situation, such as poverty, homelessness and abuse. Further, in the past, crimes by women were less likely to be reported by police than crimes by men, and criminal justice officials, who were predominantly male, gave preferential treatment to women who came in contact with the law. But now, women are treated as equals (or at least they should be) and those who have a propensity to commit crimes, are finding themselves having to do time. This was brought out in a July 1, 1975 Globe and Mail story which was headlined, "Equality equals equal jail for pregnant woman."
A 1977 federal report brought this possibility to the fore when it said in part; "With the pressure for equality for the sexes, is coming reduced paternalism on the part of the police and the judiciary. This could lead to increased charges against women and longer sentences if convicted." It certainly has led to an attitude of police, prosecutors and judges alike that implies that if 'equality is what they want, then equality is what they'll get' even to the extent of giving them, equal time for equal crime. Of course, crimes by men are also on the upsweep.
With the police increasing their level of competence, it follows that more female criminals are being detected in their acts of criminality than before.
There is a belief by some, that as a result of women's lib, its impact has been felt by women offenders who are now being punished for their supposed acts of liberation. In August 7, 1975, the Toronto Star even went so far as to headline a story with, "Women's Lib linked to soaring crime." Others believe that the upsweep in female crime is the direct result of premenstrual syndrome, pregnancy, post partum depression and menopause. Others believe that many female criminals lack 'female' qualities and that the 'masculinization' of many women is the cause of the increase in female crime. In April 12, 1978, the Daily Mail in London, England, began a story with "A tough new breed of criminal is emerging---young women whose behaviour is increasingly masculine." Many years ago, I was invited to visit a woman’s prison and I was amazed at how many of the women prisoners were ‘butches’. (masculine lesbians) I don’t know if this was because judges were prone to sending them to prison more than non lesbian women.
Adolescent female crime is on the increase also. In the past, both teenage boys and girls were involved in minor criminal activity more or less equally, and yet the girls were less likely to be charged with criminal acts. The Young Offenders Act in Canada now makes it possible for the authorities to treat all youthful offenders equally. The prime reason is because under the previous Juvenile Delinquency Act, the young offenders were treated more or less as persons in need of help (Status Offenders) whereas the Young Offenders Act has the protection of society as one of its main aims. (Criminal Code Offenders)
Women are changing. They no longer expect to be treated as subservient beings to male masters and rightly so. Medical, educational, economic, political and technological advances have freed women from unwanted pregnancies, provided them with male occupational skills and proven to them that they have the ability to govern. Is it any wonder that when women learned to accept male responsibilities, they should strive for status in the criminal world as well? The question that we are forced to ask is not why women are surging so readily into crimes once dominated only by males, but rather, what has taken them so long to start? Crimes such as mugging, robbery, extortion, loan sharking, kidnapping, murder and especially terrorism, once the sole domain of males, are now being committed my women also.
Society must not look upon criminal women as mere wayward waifs who have gone astray. Many of these women are vicious killers who kill out of the need for power, revenge or for satanic purposes. Others are women who think nothing of sneaking into the homes of elderly people and hammering them unconscious while robbing them.
We, as a society, must accept the fact that female criminality is here to stay and if we want protection from female predators, then we must treat them no differently then we treat men who sink to the same levels of criminality. They must be treated just as harshly as their male compatriots in crime. Consider what the fate of Carletha Stewart, 22, should have been, who after being fired by a Big Boy restaurant in Los Angeles, planned the robbery of the restaurant which resulted in four patrons and staff being murdered during the robbery. Consider the fate of Priscilla Ford, a former school teacher who deliberately ran down 29 persons on a sidewalk in Reno, Nevada, killing six of them. Consider the fate of Christine Falling, of Perry, Florida who not only murdered 3 children, she was also suspected of murdering her employer for his money.
Although women have inhabited the earth as long as men, benign and despotic paternalisms have made them something of a stranger to themselves. But like rivers diverted by dams and dykes from their original beds, the flood of liberation has carried them over the walls of servitude and into the male dominated plains of financial security and wellbeing. They are imitating men's roles because identification is the most expedient way to learn and to many of them, crime is the easiest lesson of all.
In October 1989, Ameenah Abdus-Salaam, a 32-year-old mother of two, pushed her 6-year old daughter and her 3-year-old son out of the window of their tenth-floor New York City apartment. Her daughter was killed and her son was critically wounded. Her motive? The mother was heard crying out to her children as they plunged downwards to the street below; "God is waiting for you."
Maria King, a Miami 32-year-old woman, the mother of four children-two girls and two boys, stabbed her two daughters, 4 and 3 years, to death, then she ordered her 8-year-old son to stab her to death which the unfortunate boy finally did. Her motive? She was angry with the girls.
In 1984, Shiela Smith, 26, and her lover, Ricky Irby, 29, both of Illinois, held their three-month-old son's nose closed and then poured sulfuric acid down the helpless baby's throat--something akin to shoving a red-hot poker down its throat. After suffering horribly, the baby died. Their motive? They wanted to sue a baby food company for product liability.
In October 1989, a Gulfport, Mississippi mother, Sylvia Payton, mixed ground glass with dry cereal and fed it to her 8-month-old daughter. Her motive? To lure her estranged husband back to their home.
I apologize to my readers for opening this article with these four heart-wrenching tales but I couldn't think of a more explicit way in which to bring to the attention of my readers, what they have just read, is an all too common occurrence in our present day and age. For the most part, it is mothers who kill their children rather than their fathers. It is not my intention however to explain why mothers kill their children in this particular article. Fortunately the killing of children by their mothers represents a small segment of crimes committed by women.
There has been a steady increase in female crime in the past twenty-five years. Women offenders doubled from seven percent to fourteen percent of all persons charged with Canadian Criminal Code offences. In 1965, forty-five percent of all charges against women were for property offences and by 1985; this proportion had increased to sixty percent. More than half of all women charged with Criminal Code offences in Canada were charged with theft and fraud.
The ratio between women and men offenders in 1985 for committing crimes of theft and fraud is as follows; theft by women, 40.4%, theft by men, 16.3%; fraud by women, 13.1%, fraud by men, 6.1%: It is only these two offences where the women exceed in numbers of offences over that of the men.
A typical theft charge is not unlike that which has been perpetrated by the 'Catwoman' of Atlanta. Since 1979 to 1989, this elusive Canadian was suspected of breaking into 50 homes of Atlanta through unlocked windows and doors and stealing as much as one million dollars worth of goods.
Another typical crime of theft is when a couple of women knock on someone's door and ask to use the phone or use the bathroom. While the owner is watching one of the visitors use the phone, or watching the other one waiting downstairs, the unwatched visitor is stealing jewelry etc.
Shoplifting is of course a very common offence committed by women who for the most part, are petty pilferers, and who on the spur of the moment, will slip something unseen into their large bags. There is quite a gap between them and the professional boosters who wear special clothes to conceal the stolen items as they walk from store to store.
Fraud is for the most part, a female crime and there are basically three kinds of fraud committed by women. The first kind is indeed the most insidious. I am speaking of female employees who are placed in positions of trust. A typical fraud by a female employee is similar to that of the middle-aged woman in Chicago who in 1972, was arrested and charged with embezzling $122,000 from her employers in a complicated scheme which involved phony bank accounts, non-existent vendor companies and never-made deliveries. She was an assistant purchasing agent with a large equipment supply firm and she made a decent salary at the time but she felt that she deserved more and since her requests for a raise were denied, she decided to give herself an increase in pay. I remember assisting a lawyer in Ontario who was defending a woman who was charged with embezzlement. After repeatedly being rebuffed when asking for a raise, she simply increased her pay anyhow and since she was the bookkeeper in charge of payroll, she got away with it for six months. She also got six months in jail for her crime.
Another kind of fraud involves the uttering of bad cheques. The women open bank accounts and then with little or no money in their accounts, they begin purchasing what they want with their worthless cheques.
And of course, there is the fortune teller kind of fraud perpetrated on uneducated and highly superstitious victims, such as the case of 19-year-old Samantha Demitro of Toronto who attempted to con a man out of $4,600 by telling him that he was under an evil curse and that it could be removed when he brought the money in a glass jar filled with water.
Women also have an aptitude for violence. There is no getting away from that fact. Women do not commit the large numbers of violent crimes that are committed by men but despite this, there is an increase in the number of violent crimes by women. In 1965, there were 1,176 Canadian women charged with violent crimes, in 1975, as many as 3,455 were charged and in 1985, the numbers jumped to 6,891.
In 1965, there were 22 women charged with murder or manslaughter. In 1975, the number dramatically jumped to 71 and in 1985, the number increased to 81. In 1965, as many as 1,006 women were charged with attempted murder, wounding or grievous assault. In 1975, the number had jumped to 2,942 and in 1985, the number made a dramatic leap to 6,168. It should be kept in mind that these figures are related to only three years in the twenty-year period. If the mean numbers were applied to each year and multiplied by twenty years, it could conceivably mean that as many as (3372 times 20 years) 67,440 Canadian women have been charged with murder, manslaughter, attempted murder, wounding or grievous bodily assault.
Often those women who commit the crimes of murder, manslaughter or attempted murderer, have themselves been victims of the very men they are charged with killing or attempting to kill. There have been incidences however where women have killed other women in a fit of jealousy such as the case of Kim Blinkhorn, 28, of Waterloo, Ontario who was charged with the murder of her 21-year-old rival who lived with their mutual boyfriend. Blinkhorn stabbed her rival 70 times while the victim's three-year-old daughter watched helplessly. Some, as previously noted, have killed their children in a fit of revenge and on several occasions, some have even killed their robbery victims.
It is no surprise to anyone that there are women who commit multiple murders. In September 1989, a 56-year-old woman in Burlington, North Carolina was arrested as a suspect in the deaths by arsenic poisoning, of as many as eight people. The victims include her former husband, boyfriends, a mother-in-law and her father. Of course, there has been no woman in recorded history that can match the murderous record of Countess Elizabeth Bathroy. It has been said that she had as many as 650 peasant girls murdered so that she could have her daily bath in their blood.
Some women of today are committing kinky murders, such as the four Australian lesbians in their early 20s, who in October 1989, lured a 47-year-old man to his death. They drank animal blood and then, while three of them held him down, the fourth stabbed him 14 times. In June, 1989, three Milwaukee women in their 20s were charged with the attempted axe murder of a 25-year-old man they lured to an apartment. They planned to dismember him and eat his kidneys.
Two lesbian nurse's aides, Gwendolyn Graham, 25 and Mary Wood, 27, of Walter, Michigan, were arrested in September 1989 for the murder of five patients in a nursing home. They smothered their victims to death in order to cement their lesbian relationship.
In December 1989, Lilianne Sella St. Couer, 33, of Montreal was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment for smothering her 11-year-old daughter to death and trying to murder her other daughter and her husband.
Robbery by women is on the increase. In 1965, there were only 125 women charged with robbery, and the number jumped to 474 in 1985. This means that in the twenty-year period, there were conceivably as many as (333 times 20 years) 6660 robberies committed by women in the twenty-year period between 1965 and 1985. Of course, many of these women would have been working alongside their male counterparts but recently, there have been gangs of women committing muggings, purse snatching and other robberies on their own.
A number of mothers have been convicted of rape in the sense that they have permitted men to rape their children. In Allegan, Michigan, two mothers, Annette Sanford, 34 and Carolyn Wilson, 42, forced their six young children to have sex with various men over a three-year-period. One boy told the court that his mother forced him to have sex with six different men in one day alone. In Toronto, in 1989, three women lured a young man into a van and then at gunpoint, sexually assaulted him.
This kind of sexual deviancy is not rare in Canada when you consider that in 1985, as many as 168 women were convicted of rape and sexual assault. Admittedly, these figures pale when you consider that in the same year, as many as 7,120 men were convicted of the same offences but nevertheless, 168 is very high when you look at the figures for twenty years earlier. In 1965, only 23 women were convicted of those crimes.
Drunk driving charges are on the increase. In 1985, as many as 10,000 women were charged with impaired driving.
The criminality of so many women may be explained as a symptom of a sense of futility with a desperate life situation, such as poverty, homelessness and abuse. Further, in the past, crimes by women were less likely to be reported by police than crimes by men, and criminal justice officials, who were predominantly male, gave preferential treatment to women who came in contact with the law. But now, women are treated as equals (or at least they should be) and those who have a propensity to commit crimes, are finding themselves having to do time. This was brought out in a July 1, 1975 Globe and Mail story which was headlined, "Equality equals equal jail for pregnant woman."
A 1977 federal report brought this possibility to the fore when it said in part; "With the pressure for equality for the sexes, is coming reduced paternalism on the part of the police and the judiciary. This could lead to increased charges against women and longer sentences if convicted." It certainly has led to an attitude of police, prosecutors and judges alike that implies that if 'equality is what they want, then equality is what they'll get' even to the extent of giving them, equal time for equal crime. Of course, crimes by men are also on the upsweep.
With the police increasing their level of competence, it follows that more female criminals are being detected in their acts of criminality than before.
There is a belief by some, that as a result of women's lib, its impact has been felt by women offenders who are now being punished for their supposed acts of liberation. In August 7, 1975, the Toronto Star even went so far as to headline a story with, "Women's Lib linked to soaring crime." Others believe that the upsweep in female crime is the direct result of premenstrual syndrome, pregnancy, post partum depression and menopause. Others believe that many female criminals lack 'female' qualities and that the 'masculinization' of many women is the cause of the increase in female crime. In April 12, 1978, the Daily Mail in London, England, began a story with "A tough new breed of criminal is emerging---young women whose behaviour is increasingly masculine." Many years ago, I was invited to visit a woman’s prison and I was amazed at how many of the women prisoners were ‘butches’. (masculine lesbians) I don’t know if this was because judges were prone to sending them to prison more than non lesbian women.
Adolescent female crime is on the increase also. In the past, both teenage boys and girls were involved in minor criminal activity more or less equally, and yet the girls were less likely to be charged with criminal acts. The Young Offenders Act in Canada now makes it possible for the authorities to treat all youthful offenders equally. The prime reason is because under the previous Juvenile Delinquency Act, the young offenders were treated more or less as persons in need of help (Status Offenders) whereas the Young Offenders Act has the protection of society as one of its main aims. (Criminal Code Offenders)
Women are changing. They no longer expect to be treated as subservient beings to male masters and rightly so. Medical, educational, economic, political and technological advances have freed women from unwanted pregnancies, provided them with male occupational skills and proven to them that they have the ability to govern. Is it any wonder that when women learned to accept male responsibilities, they should strive for status in the criminal world as well? The question that we are forced to ask is not why women are surging so readily into crimes once dominated only by males, but rather, what has taken them so long to start? Crimes such as mugging, robbery, extortion, loan sharking, kidnapping, murder and especially terrorism, once the sole domain of males, are now being committed my women also.
Society must not look upon criminal women as mere wayward waifs who have gone astray. Many of these women are vicious killers who kill out of the need for power, revenge or for satanic purposes. Others are women who think nothing of sneaking into the homes of elderly people and hammering them unconscious while robbing them.
We, as a society, must accept the fact that female criminality is here to stay and if we want protection from female predators, then we must treat them no differently then we treat men who sink to the same levels of criminality. They must be treated just as harshly as their male compatriots in crime. Consider what the fate of Carletha Stewart, 22, should have been, who after being fired by a Big Boy restaurant in Los Angeles, planned the robbery of the restaurant which resulted in four patrons and staff being murdered during the robbery. Consider the fate of Priscilla Ford, a former school teacher who deliberately ran down 29 persons on a sidewalk in Reno, Nevada, killing six of them. Consider the fate of Christine Falling, of Perry, Florida who not only murdered 3 children, she was also suspected of murdering her employer for his money.
Although women have inhabited the earth as long as men, benign and despotic paternalisms have made them something of a stranger to themselves. But like rivers diverted by dams and dykes from their original beds, the flood of liberation has carried them over the walls of servitude and into the male dominated plains of financial security and wellbeing. They are imitating men's roles because identification is the most expedient way to learn and to many of them, crime is the easiest lesson of all.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
DEATH: Our last rights
The fact that funerals are for the living and not the deceased, is infinite proof that we often cared more for the deceased when they were gone, then we ever did when they were still with us. A monument of great beauty has often been placed at the grave site as a testament to a survivor's anguish over his or her inability to make amends with the deceased while there was still time left to do so.
Death is with us from the moment of our births until the final beat of our hearts and although we are constantly aware of its presence, we think of it subliminally and carry on with the rest of our lives as if death is merely an inconvenience we will have to face, sooner or later, and preferably later, in fact, much later.
It is for this reason that everyone over fifty should plan ahead for their inevitable deaths. I don't mean plan in the same sense that we do for weddings. But to ignore the idea of planning for one's demise is to show a lack of concern for family and friends who will ultimately be faced with arranging for the funeral of the procrastinator. If you really care for your loved ones and don't want to saddle them with the costs of a funeral, cemetery and monument and you have the money; pay all the expenses ahead of time. I have done this so that my family won't be burdened with the expenses after I pass on.
It has been repeatedly said that of all the traumatic events we must face in our lifetimes, the loss of a loved one, especially one's spouse or a child is a loss that is the hardest to bear.
The loss of a husband may mean the loss of a sexual partner, a companion and friend, wage earner, a confident, a disciplinarian for the children, and the loss of a wife means the loss of a sexual partner, a companion and friend, a cook, an audience, a baby-sitter, and a house keeper. The loss of a child means the loss of a friend when you grow older and one who will carry your line beyond your grave. Both partners in a marriage share responsibilities so when one predeceases the other, the survivor must not only cope with his or her own burdens in life, he or she must now take on the added burdens of the loved one who has passed on. To the surviving husband, this means cooking the meals, getting the children ready for school; to the surviving wife, this means looking for a source of income, paying off the bills, etc.
The death of a loved one causes stress in the body of the survivor which in turn brings about chemical changes. Stress can cause changes in the blood pressure and heart rate, in the flow of blood through the coronary arteries and in the chemical constituents of the blood. Any of these changes could play a part in precipitating clotting within a diseased coronary artery and therefore bring about a coronary thrombosis upon the survivor. Hence, it's not unusual for a survivor to shortly thereafter follow a spouse to the grave. I lived with an old couple when I was fourteen and after the old man died, ten days later, his wife died.
Some spouses depend so much upon each other that when one dies, the other goes into a psychological death; that is, that person's personality deteriorates until he or she can no longer function in a normal society.
This characteristic feature of grief is a prolonged depression, such as was experienced by Queen Victoria when she lost her husband and consort Albert in 1861. She mourned for him for the rest of her life, and for many years after his death, she refused to perform her duties as a Queen of a vast empire. She completely isolated herself from her subjects and all her friends except her closest confidants.
But the main characteristic feature of grief is acute and episodic pangs of severe anxiety and psychological pain. Such grief begins almost immediately after the death of a loved one and can reach a peak of severity in about fourteen days. Add to these features, aimless hyperactivity, confusion, concentration on anything but the loss of the loved one and when all this is mixed about in the survivor's mind, a mind already numbed by shock, a mind that still expects the loved one to enter the room, the survivor must now face the next most traumatic experience in his or her life; what to do with the remains of his or her loved one. A great many people die while they are asleep and this is the main reason why you should not go to bed angry. First of all, it weakens your heart and equally important, if you speak angry words to your spouse and he or she dies, you will carry that burden of guilt for the rest of your life.
A great many survivors haven't the slightest idea of what they are to do next. Often what they actually do sometimes depends on factors that are clearly out of their own control.
For example, a great many people die in hospitals so the hospitals initiate the next step for the survivor, especially if the death has been more or less sudden. The hospital will suggest the name of a funeral home (Sometimes such establishments are called funeral parlours, funeral chapels, mortuaries) and the survivors will accept the hospital's suggestion simply because she or he has no one else's advice to turn to.
A phone call to the funeral home by the hospital administrator, doctor, nurse or even the orderly, will bring the black limousine to the hospital to pick up the body of the loved one (called the 'remains' by those in the funeral industry) The remains are taken into the funeral home through a back or side door (and placed in a refrigerator room, (if there is one in the funeral home) to await the instructions from the family.
Naturally, many bereaved survivors are emotionally overwrought and therefore are not in a proper emotional state to make that important decision in their lives in which they must deal with the disposition of their loved one's remains in a decent but not too expensive manner.
Walking into the office of a funeral home today to do business with the firm is not like walking into the office of a real estate firm. In the latter instance, home buyers may more or less take their time browsing through the pictures of the homes on display. In funeral homes, speed is all important because the deceased's body is already undergoing the process of deteriorating and the funeral home only has so much time to prepare the body before it's too late.
The casket is the most important commodity the funeral home has to sell. So before you are assessed your worth, (asked questions to determine what you can afford) you are invited to the 'selection room' where the caskets (they're not called coffins anymore) are appropriately placed.
Caskets are generally placed in one large room and the experts state that there should be a minimum of forty square feet allotted for the location of each casket. (The top of the line rates 60 square feet) As you enter the selection room, there before you is the top of the line. If you are a sailor, it would be your Chay Blythe sailing yacht, if cars are your thing, it would be your Mercedes Benz. But since most of us can afford neither, we will just take a peek into these caskets later but before doing so, let's look at the less expensive ones.
Those caskets line the room with the better caskets situated like ships of the line in the center of the room. There are three main types of caskets. First, is the 'full couch' in which the entire body can be seen. Second, is the 'half couch' in which the body from the waist up can be seen, and finally there is the 'quarter couch' or 'hinge cap' in which the head and shoulders can be seen. Most people purchase the 'half couch' but it should be kept in mind that the entire lid is hinged and can be lifted in all caskets for the obvious reason of placing the remains into the casket.
The body rests on one of a variety of fabrics that ranges from muslim, to transparent velvet, to a satin sheet, each which is fitted over a thin mattress which in turn, rests on a bed of springs and the head (slightly turned to face the mourners) rests on a ruffled pillow made of soft material.
A considerable range of materials are used in the construction of caskets. For example, there are about twenty kinds and grades of woods used, ranging from the cheaper woods, such as pine, chestnut, cypress, and red cedar, which are generally covered with a grey cloth made from inexpensive doeskin or broadcloth to brocade or all-silk velvets. Then there are the more expensive hard-woods such as oak, birch, maple, cherry, mahogany and various imported woods. The hardwoods are treated with clear natural finishes....applied in the same manner as highly polished fine furniture. Metal is another kind of material used in the construction of caskets and is very popular. The metals consist of iron, stainless steel, zinc, aluminum, copper and bronze and range in thicknesses from 20-guage to 16-guage. (the latter being thicker for the same reason that a 12-guage shotgun is thicker than a 20-guage shotgun)
The copper casket is very popular and is produced by an electrolytic process that deposits a layer of copper upon a casket-shaped form. The copper is about one-quarter inch thick.
The bronze casket is the eye catcher that grabs you as you enter the selection room. You're looking at $13,000. You're looking at the casket that has everything but the kitchen sink. You're looking at a casket that has your name written on a piece of paper that will be inserted into a glass vial which in turn is screwed into the lid of the casket so then should your casket and your bronze name plate be unreadable and someone in the far future is building a super skyway over that cemetery that was long forgotten a thousand years ago, some five-hundred ton super scooper will lift up your casket with its glass vial with your name intact--and your previous existence will be there for all to see---if the super scooper hasn't smashed the glass vial into a million pieces while crushing its way across your gravesite.
Now comes the best part of the sales pitch. It takes place in the selection room and the salesman's pitch would make the finest Churchillian speech in the British House of Commons seem like a stammered resuscitation from a kid reading a grade one primary. This, according to the silver-tongued, golden-lips orator, is what makes the casket par excellence. It transcends the style, the colour, the polish, the glitter, the magnificence. The casket is airtight. None of those nasty, smelly, crawlies and maggots are going to eat their way through those rubber gaskets to get inside your loved one's casket, to feast upon the deceased like the invited courtiers at the banquets of Nero. These unmentionables will be banned from your loved one's cadaver forever. If a car salesman could come up with a pitch like that, he could sell cars to Eskimos living on melting southbound icebergs. Being airtight however isn't going to stop the attack of little beasties. Why? Because like members of the fifth column in a war; they are already in our bodies.
It's true nevertheless that the funeral homes do make an effort to kill off as many of the amoebas and microbes in the body of the deceased. A tube is inserted into the belly of the cadaver and the body fluids and wastes are pumped out. A strong chemical solution is pumped back into the just previously vacated body cavities, a solution that is so strong, an unprotected nose wouldn't just twitch, it would convulse, not to mention the rest of your body. This solution goes after the amoebas and microbes in a manner not unlike the German gas attack on Ypres during the First World War.
However, what the silver-tongued, golden-lips orator hasn't told the bereaved, is that both before and after the casket is sealed, all the amoebas and microbes in the deceased's body that have survived the formaldehyde and the chemical attack (and millions will) are lying in wait in the hermetically sealed banquet hall, to have the deceased all to themselves till the end of time or the source of the banquet--- whichever comes first. And, yes, they can and do live in an airless environment.
The body will remain intact as far as contours are concerned for many months, and perhaps for years but the silk lining of the casket will be stained with body fluids and the body will be covered with a greenish black, whisker-like penicillin mold which ironically, will do more to preserve the body than the diluted formaldehyde would have ever done. The fleshy part of the body will soften to the point where its own weight will cause it to pull away from the bones and fall to the mattress. Inside the body, the material will turn into a gray mushy mucosa material, the product of the passage of time. The bones will remain intact however for a great many centuries but the cartilage that holds them together will release its grip eventually, and the bones will be forever separated.
So in reality, all those phrases that flow from the septic mouths of the orators in the selection rooms, phrases such as, 'forever, for all eternity, till the end of time, security through the ages, protection for peace of mind'; they are meaningless to the realities of death and to the amoebic and microbe banqueters inside the hermetically sealed casket. But it is with such ease that those phrases do flow past those shiny pearlies of the orator---not unlike a beautifully fresh and clear cool summer stream meandering through the New York Sewer System. Somewhere in the back of your mind, the thought of a fresh clear cool summer stream meandering through the sewer system of death seems to relax you to some extent and it does prevent your nose from going into some form of an involuntary twitch.
Mind you, I don't wish to give the impression to my readers that the casket of today is the dust of tomorrow. Almost 70 percent of caskets sold nowadays are made of metal and the casket manufacturers place fifty-year warranty's on their products and will replace the caskets should the originals be deemed faulty. Believe me, if the original was faulty, the last thing you would want dug up is the remains of your beloved one. In any case, such a warranty is meaningless because you would have to get a court order to exhume your loved one's body, and even if you were of such a mind just to test the warranty, the authorities wouldn't grant you permission to exhume your loved one for that purpose alone in any case.
Caskets will last forever if they are encased in a concrete vault which is lowered in the ground first. Once the casket in lowered into the vault, and the latter is sealed, nothing can get at the casket. The weight of the earth above it along with people constantly walking across the grave will not crush the casket. If you are in a cemetery and you see depressions where the caskets were lowered, you know that the caskets were crushed because they weren’t laced in a concrete vault. Nowadays, many cemeteries insist that caskets be placed in a vault.
There is a difficult issue that must be decided by the survivors of a loved one if the body is to be cremated. What kind of casket should the loved one be placed in? Some funeral homes (fortunately very few) remove the body from an expensive casket and place the body in a cheap wooden one before placing the body and casket into the funereal furnace. Then they resell the expensive casket. This is of course highly Illegal and inappropriate. Most people use common sense and purchase a wooden one made of pine and have the loved one placed in it. Unless someone is extremely rich, it doesn't make much sense to place a loved one who is about to be cremated, into a $13,000 casket that is going to be destroyed in the furnace.
A question that comes to the fore is; how long will the body of your loved one remains as you last saw it in the casket? That question is not an easy one to answer since there are limited opportunities to inspect the cadaver. In fact, unless the authorities suspect that you have poisoned your spouse and therefore they wish to exhume the body to conduct an autopsy on it, the condition of your loved one's body, shall remain a secret from you and the rest of Mankind forever.
But the funeral industry does have some idea of just how effective the preservative (called embalming fluid) is so I will share with you their secrets in this area. Embalming is the process in which a fluid (about seven gallons--31.8 litres) that is both a preservative and a disinfectant (the most common being a mixture of formaldehyde as the preservative and carbolic acid as the disinfectant) is injected through an incision in the groin of the cadaver which then flows through the arteries of the cadaver by gravity alone through the arterial system which is the system that carries the blood away from the heart to the tissues. The blood (the average adult male has 10 pints--5.1 litres and the average adult female has 8.5 pints--3.8 litres) meanwhile flows out of the cadaver ahead of the embalming fluid and when the blood is completely drained, the body ends up with more embalming fluid in its system than there was original blood.
If you have any fears about coming back to life while interred in your casket or coming back to life while being cremated in your casket after being embalmed, you may rest assured that will never ever happen. No longer is there a need for a bell to hang above the grave for the person inside who just happens to be alive in order to pull on a rope that will ring the bell. In any case, even If anyone heard the bell, by the time the casket was lifted out of the grave, the person inside would definitely be deceased by then. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that centuries ago, many persons who were buried were in actual fact, still live. That doesn't happen anymore but there have been instances in the last century where persons declared dead were actually alive but they weren't buried while they were alive. If the medical authorities thought they were dead and the body was taken to a funeral home and still appeared as if dead; believe me, they would be dead after they were processed in the embalming room. Do not fear being buried alive. When you are lowered in your grave or about to be cremated, you will definitely be dead before that happens.
According to some religious customs, deceased persons have to be buried or cremated almost immediately after death. If bodies are not stored in a refrigerator room, they will begin to decompose almost within hours, depending on the warmth and humidity of the surrounding air of course. Generally eight hours is the maximum time that can elapse if embalming is to arrest the decomposition process although in cold weather, bodies can maintained their normal appearance for many days. Anything after that is academic and an immediate burial or cremation is most appropriate but if you insist on having a funeral nevertheless, a closed hermetically sealed casket is the only alternative to instant burial or cremation. I would hate to be the persons in the War Graves detachments in the armed services who have to remove the bodies from the temporary containers since the bodies of the soldiers are removed without having been embalmed when placed in them.
If it is your intention to have your loved one buried or cremated within a day of death and no one will be viewing the body, then embalming the body is pointless and an unwarranted expense since the purpose of embalming the body is primarily done in order that the body doesn't decompose right there in the viewing room in the presence of all the mourners.
I should point out to my readers that the Orthodox Jewish faith expressly forbids embalming as it is considered repugnant to Jewish teachings, and besides, it's really unnecessary for them because the deceased are generally buried on the same day as their deaths.
Let me clear up one myth for you right now so that you won't get stuck paying for embalming if it isn't necessary. I haven't heard anyone in the funeral industry state this but I have read of it so I will bring it to your attention. Some funeral directors have stated that embalming is necessary and required by law because a non-embalmed body is a health risk to those of us still walking above ground. That is pure bunk and billions upon billions of people have been buried non-embalmed and you don't see scenes from Poltergeist or diseases creeping out of the ground to attack the living. If a funeral director tells you that the body should be embalmed for health reasons before being buried, go elsewhere because this guy is the same one who sold that bridge in Brooklyn to all those suckers.
Embalming does serve one very useful purpose of course and that is, it prevents the body from putrefying in a way that will turn away all your friends, not to mention yourself, when you are viewing him or her while in the viewing room. Some funeral directors (all licenced undertakers who work in a funeral home and are in charge of a funeral are called funeral directors even though they may not necessarily own the funeral home) genuinely believe that embalming is the key to long-term preservation. But the gist of such a belief hinges on the concept of what really constitutes long-term preservation. It is recognized in the industry that if a body is preserved properly and put into a moisture-proof and air-tight casket, the body will last up to about thirty years before it begins to disintegrate.
That is why no reputable funeral director will tell you that there is a universal everlasting preservative that will preserve the body for all eternity. I know that you are thinking about the mummies in Egypt but that involved an entirely different process that undertook months of work and as such, was very time consuming and isn't practicable in this day and age.
Embalmed bodies can be preserved intact for a long time if a very heavy concentration of formaldehyde is used but unfortunately, some funeral homes have been known to dilute the embalming fluid and that dilution becomes obvious to the mourners when the olfactory nerves in their noses begin telling them that something is not holding its own in the immediate area of the casket.
In fact, it is a common practice in funeral homes to sprinkle a deodorant powder at the base of the casket in order to mask the odours that come from the fluids that have somehow slipped out of the body and have settled onto the mattress in the casket. It's a necessary precaution and saves embarrassment for everyone should things not go according to plan.
The funeral homes will tell you that their services are the same no matter what casket you purchase. That means that if you purchase a soft wood cloth covered casket for $1,000, their services will be no different than if you purchased the $13,000 bronze casket with your loved one's name enclosed in the glass vial that is screwed into the casket's lid. They are telling you the truth.
The fact that funerals are for the living and not the deceased, is definite proof that we often cared more for the deceased when they were gone, then we ever did when they were still with us. A monument of great beauty has often been placed at the grave site as a testament to a survivor's anguish over his or her inability to make amends with the deceased while there was still time left to do so.
A case in point. When my mother suffered a stroke years ago, she couldn't speak or remember who anyone was. One day, I made a long distance call to the hospital where she was being cared for and asked a nurse to remain with her during my telephone call to her. I didn't know if my mother even knew who was on the phone when I told her of my family, my work and told her how much we all loved her. After I finished with the call, I immediately called back and spoke to the nurse who had been standing beside her when I was talking to my mother on the phone. She told me that my mother had smiled most of the time I was on the phone with her. I believe that she understood what I was saying to her and knew who I was but simply couldn't communicate her feelings to me. Three weeks later, she died. Her death was easier for me to deal with after that.
The knowledge of our pending deaths is with us from the moment we can think rationally until the final beat of our hearts and although we are constantly aware of its eventuality, we think of it subliminally and carry on with the rest of our lives as if death is merely an inconvenience we will have to face, sooner or later, and preferably later; actually much later.
But to anyone over fifty, death frequently raises its ugly head and we who have survived childhood diseases, cancer, famine, car accidents, wars, pestilence, earthquakes and outright stupidity on our own part, have come to recognize death for what it is----a constant companion----a nagging awareness of our own human frailty and mortality and possibly, and hopefully, an entry into an afterlife.
Death is with us from the moment of our births until the final beat of our hearts and although we are constantly aware of its presence, we think of it subliminally and carry on with the rest of our lives as if death is merely an inconvenience we will have to face, sooner or later, and preferably later, in fact, much later.
It is for this reason that everyone over fifty should plan ahead for their inevitable deaths. I don't mean plan in the same sense that we do for weddings. But to ignore the idea of planning for one's demise is to show a lack of concern for family and friends who will ultimately be faced with arranging for the funeral of the procrastinator. If you really care for your loved ones and don't want to saddle them with the costs of a funeral, cemetery and monument and you have the money; pay all the expenses ahead of time. I have done this so that my family won't be burdened with the expenses after I pass on.
It has been repeatedly said that of all the traumatic events we must face in our lifetimes, the loss of a loved one, especially one's spouse or a child is a loss that is the hardest to bear.
The loss of a husband may mean the loss of a sexual partner, a companion and friend, wage earner, a confident, a disciplinarian for the children, and the loss of a wife means the loss of a sexual partner, a companion and friend, a cook, an audience, a baby-sitter, and a house keeper. The loss of a child means the loss of a friend when you grow older and one who will carry your line beyond your grave. Both partners in a marriage share responsibilities so when one predeceases the other, the survivor must not only cope with his or her own burdens in life, he or she must now take on the added burdens of the loved one who has passed on. To the surviving husband, this means cooking the meals, getting the children ready for school; to the surviving wife, this means looking for a source of income, paying off the bills, etc.
The death of a loved one causes stress in the body of the survivor which in turn brings about chemical changes. Stress can cause changes in the blood pressure and heart rate, in the flow of blood through the coronary arteries and in the chemical constituents of the blood. Any of these changes could play a part in precipitating clotting within a diseased coronary artery and therefore bring about a coronary thrombosis upon the survivor. Hence, it's not unusual for a survivor to shortly thereafter follow a spouse to the grave. I lived with an old couple when I was fourteen and after the old man died, ten days later, his wife died.
Some spouses depend so much upon each other that when one dies, the other goes into a psychological death; that is, that person's personality deteriorates until he or she can no longer function in a normal society.
This characteristic feature of grief is a prolonged depression, such as was experienced by Queen Victoria when she lost her husband and consort Albert in 1861. She mourned for him for the rest of her life, and for many years after his death, she refused to perform her duties as a Queen of a vast empire. She completely isolated herself from her subjects and all her friends except her closest confidants.
But the main characteristic feature of grief is acute and episodic pangs of severe anxiety and psychological pain. Such grief begins almost immediately after the death of a loved one and can reach a peak of severity in about fourteen days. Add to these features, aimless hyperactivity, confusion, concentration on anything but the loss of the loved one and when all this is mixed about in the survivor's mind, a mind already numbed by shock, a mind that still expects the loved one to enter the room, the survivor must now face the next most traumatic experience in his or her life; what to do with the remains of his or her loved one. A great many people die while they are asleep and this is the main reason why you should not go to bed angry. First of all, it weakens your heart and equally important, if you speak angry words to your spouse and he or she dies, you will carry that burden of guilt for the rest of your life.
A great many survivors haven't the slightest idea of what they are to do next. Often what they actually do sometimes depends on factors that are clearly out of their own control.
For example, a great many people die in hospitals so the hospitals initiate the next step for the survivor, especially if the death has been more or less sudden. The hospital will suggest the name of a funeral home (Sometimes such establishments are called funeral parlours, funeral chapels, mortuaries) and the survivors will accept the hospital's suggestion simply because she or he has no one else's advice to turn to.
A phone call to the funeral home by the hospital administrator, doctor, nurse or even the orderly, will bring the black limousine to the hospital to pick up the body of the loved one (called the 'remains' by those in the funeral industry) The remains are taken into the funeral home through a back or side door (and placed in a refrigerator room, (if there is one in the funeral home) to await the instructions from the family.
Naturally, many bereaved survivors are emotionally overwrought and therefore are not in a proper emotional state to make that important decision in their lives in which they must deal with the disposition of their loved one's remains in a decent but not too expensive manner.
Walking into the office of a funeral home today to do business with the firm is not like walking into the office of a real estate firm. In the latter instance, home buyers may more or less take their time browsing through the pictures of the homes on display. In funeral homes, speed is all important because the deceased's body is already undergoing the process of deteriorating and the funeral home only has so much time to prepare the body before it's too late.
The casket is the most important commodity the funeral home has to sell. So before you are assessed your worth, (asked questions to determine what you can afford) you are invited to the 'selection room' where the caskets (they're not called coffins anymore) are appropriately placed.
Caskets are generally placed in one large room and the experts state that there should be a minimum of forty square feet allotted for the location of each casket. (The top of the line rates 60 square feet) As you enter the selection room, there before you is the top of the line. If you are a sailor, it would be your Chay Blythe sailing yacht, if cars are your thing, it would be your Mercedes Benz. But since most of us can afford neither, we will just take a peek into these caskets later but before doing so, let's look at the less expensive ones.
Those caskets line the room with the better caskets situated like ships of the line in the center of the room. There are three main types of caskets. First, is the 'full couch' in which the entire body can be seen. Second, is the 'half couch' in which the body from the waist up can be seen, and finally there is the 'quarter couch' or 'hinge cap' in which the head and shoulders can be seen. Most people purchase the 'half couch' but it should be kept in mind that the entire lid is hinged and can be lifted in all caskets for the obvious reason of placing the remains into the casket.
The body rests on one of a variety of fabrics that ranges from muslim, to transparent velvet, to a satin sheet, each which is fitted over a thin mattress which in turn, rests on a bed of springs and the head (slightly turned to face the mourners) rests on a ruffled pillow made of soft material.
A considerable range of materials are used in the construction of caskets. For example, there are about twenty kinds and grades of woods used, ranging from the cheaper woods, such as pine, chestnut, cypress, and red cedar, which are generally covered with a grey cloth made from inexpensive doeskin or broadcloth to brocade or all-silk velvets. Then there are the more expensive hard-woods such as oak, birch, maple, cherry, mahogany and various imported woods. The hardwoods are treated with clear natural finishes....applied in the same manner as highly polished fine furniture. Metal is another kind of material used in the construction of caskets and is very popular. The metals consist of iron, stainless steel, zinc, aluminum, copper and bronze and range in thicknesses from 20-guage to 16-guage. (the latter being thicker for the same reason that a 12-guage shotgun is thicker than a 20-guage shotgun)
The copper casket is very popular and is produced by an electrolytic process that deposits a layer of copper upon a casket-shaped form. The copper is about one-quarter inch thick.
The bronze casket is the eye catcher that grabs you as you enter the selection room. You're looking at $13,000. You're looking at the casket that has everything but the kitchen sink. You're looking at a casket that has your name written on a piece of paper that will be inserted into a glass vial which in turn is screwed into the lid of the casket so then should your casket and your bronze name plate be unreadable and someone in the far future is building a super skyway over that cemetery that was long forgotten a thousand years ago, some five-hundred ton super scooper will lift up your casket with its glass vial with your name intact--and your previous existence will be there for all to see---if the super scooper hasn't smashed the glass vial into a million pieces while crushing its way across your gravesite.
Now comes the best part of the sales pitch. It takes place in the selection room and the salesman's pitch would make the finest Churchillian speech in the British House of Commons seem like a stammered resuscitation from a kid reading a grade one primary. This, according to the silver-tongued, golden-lips orator, is what makes the casket par excellence. It transcends the style, the colour, the polish, the glitter, the magnificence. The casket is airtight. None of those nasty, smelly, crawlies and maggots are going to eat their way through those rubber gaskets to get inside your loved one's casket, to feast upon the deceased like the invited courtiers at the banquets of Nero. These unmentionables will be banned from your loved one's cadaver forever. If a car salesman could come up with a pitch like that, he could sell cars to Eskimos living on melting southbound icebergs. Being airtight however isn't going to stop the attack of little beasties. Why? Because like members of the fifth column in a war; they are already in our bodies.
It's true nevertheless that the funeral homes do make an effort to kill off as many of the amoebas and microbes in the body of the deceased. A tube is inserted into the belly of the cadaver and the body fluids and wastes are pumped out. A strong chemical solution is pumped back into the just previously vacated body cavities, a solution that is so strong, an unprotected nose wouldn't just twitch, it would convulse, not to mention the rest of your body. This solution goes after the amoebas and microbes in a manner not unlike the German gas attack on Ypres during the First World War.
However, what the silver-tongued, golden-lips orator hasn't told the bereaved, is that both before and after the casket is sealed, all the amoebas and microbes in the deceased's body that have survived the formaldehyde and the chemical attack (and millions will) are lying in wait in the hermetically sealed banquet hall, to have the deceased all to themselves till the end of time or the source of the banquet--- whichever comes first. And, yes, they can and do live in an airless environment.
The body will remain intact as far as contours are concerned for many months, and perhaps for years but the silk lining of the casket will be stained with body fluids and the body will be covered with a greenish black, whisker-like penicillin mold which ironically, will do more to preserve the body than the diluted formaldehyde would have ever done. The fleshy part of the body will soften to the point where its own weight will cause it to pull away from the bones and fall to the mattress. Inside the body, the material will turn into a gray mushy mucosa material, the product of the passage of time. The bones will remain intact however for a great many centuries but the cartilage that holds them together will release its grip eventually, and the bones will be forever separated.
So in reality, all those phrases that flow from the septic mouths of the orators in the selection rooms, phrases such as, 'forever, for all eternity, till the end of time, security through the ages, protection for peace of mind'; they are meaningless to the realities of death and to the amoebic and microbe banqueters inside the hermetically sealed casket. But it is with such ease that those phrases do flow past those shiny pearlies of the orator---not unlike a beautifully fresh and clear cool summer stream meandering through the New York Sewer System. Somewhere in the back of your mind, the thought of a fresh clear cool summer stream meandering through the sewer system of death seems to relax you to some extent and it does prevent your nose from going into some form of an involuntary twitch.
Mind you, I don't wish to give the impression to my readers that the casket of today is the dust of tomorrow. Almost 70 percent of caskets sold nowadays are made of metal and the casket manufacturers place fifty-year warranty's on their products and will replace the caskets should the originals be deemed faulty. Believe me, if the original was faulty, the last thing you would want dug up is the remains of your beloved one. In any case, such a warranty is meaningless because you would have to get a court order to exhume your loved one's body, and even if you were of such a mind just to test the warranty, the authorities wouldn't grant you permission to exhume your loved one for that purpose alone in any case.
Caskets will last forever if they are encased in a concrete vault which is lowered in the ground first. Once the casket in lowered into the vault, and the latter is sealed, nothing can get at the casket. The weight of the earth above it along with people constantly walking across the grave will not crush the casket. If you are in a cemetery and you see depressions where the caskets were lowered, you know that the caskets were crushed because they weren’t laced in a concrete vault. Nowadays, many cemeteries insist that caskets be placed in a vault.
There is a difficult issue that must be decided by the survivors of a loved one if the body is to be cremated. What kind of casket should the loved one be placed in? Some funeral homes (fortunately very few) remove the body from an expensive casket and place the body in a cheap wooden one before placing the body and casket into the funereal furnace. Then they resell the expensive casket. This is of course highly Illegal and inappropriate. Most people use common sense and purchase a wooden one made of pine and have the loved one placed in it. Unless someone is extremely rich, it doesn't make much sense to place a loved one who is about to be cremated, into a $13,000 casket that is going to be destroyed in the furnace.
A question that comes to the fore is; how long will the body of your loved one remains as you last saw it in the casket? That question is not an easy one to answer since there are limited opportunities to inspect the cadaver. In fact, unless the authorities suspect that you have poisoned your spouse and therefore they wish to exhume the body to conduct an autopsy on it, the condition of your loved one's body, shall remain a secret from you and the rest of Mankind forever.
But the funeral industry does have some idea of just how effective the preservative (called embalming fluid) is so I will share with you their secrets in this area. Embalming is the process in which a fluid (about seven gallons--31.8 litres) that is both a preservative and a disinfectant (the most common being a mixture of formaldehyde as the preservative and carbolic acid as the disinfectant) is injected through an incision in the groin of the cadaver which then flows through the arteries of the cadaver by gravity alone through the arterial system which is the system that carries the blood away from the heart to the tissues. The blood (the average adult male has 10 pints--5.1 litres and the average adult female has 8.5 pints--3.8 litres) meanwhile flows out of the cadaver ahead of the embalming fluid and when the blood is completely drained, the body ends up with more embalming fluid in its system than there was original blood.
If you have any fears about coming back to life while interred in your casket or coming back to life while being cremated in your casket after being embalmed, you may rest assured that will never ever happen. No longer is there a need for a bell to hang above the grave for the person inside who just happens to be alive in order to pull on a rope that will ring the bell. In any case, even If anyone heard the bell, by the time the casket was lifted out of the grave, the person inside would definitely be deceased by then. I would be remiss if I didn't mention that centuries ago, many persons who were buried were in actual fact, still live. That doesn't happen anymore but there have been instances in the last century where persons declared dead were actually alive but they weren't buried while they were alive. If the medical authorities thought they were dead and the body was taken to a funeral home and still appeared as if dead; believe me, they would be dead after they were processed in the embalming room. Do not fear being buried alive. When you are lowered in your grave or about to be cremated, you will definitely be dead before that happens.
According to some religious customs, deceased persons have to be buried or cremated almost immediately after death. If bodies are not stored in a refrigerator room, they will begin to decompose almost within hours, depending on the warmth and humidity of the surrounding air of course. Generally eight hours is the maximum time that can elapse if embalming is to arrest the decomposition process although in cold weather, bodies can maintained their normal appearance for many days. Anything after that is academic and an immediate burial or cremation is most appropriate but if you insist on having a funeral nevertheless, a closed hermetically sealed casket is the only alternative to instant burial or cremation. I would hate to be the persons in the War Graves detachments in the armed services who have to remove the bodies from the temporary containers since the bodies of the soldiers are removed without having been embalmed when placed in them.
If it is your intention to have your loved one buried or cremated within a day of death and no one will be viewing the body, then embalming the body is pointless and an unwarranted expense since the purpose of embalming the body is primarily done in order that the body doesn't decompose right there in the viewing room in the presence of all the mourners.
I should point out to my readers that the Orthodox Jewish faith expressly forbids embalming as it is considered repugnant to Jewish teachings, and besides, it's really unnecessary for them because the deceased are generally buried on the same day as their deaths.
Let me clear up one myth for you right now so that you won't get stuck paying for embalming if it isn't necessary. I haven't heard anyone in the funeral industry state this but I have read of it so I will bring it to your attention. Some funeral directors have stated that embalming is necessary and required by law because a non-embalmed body is a health risk to those of us still walking above ground. That is pure bunk and billions upon billions of people have been buried non-embalmed and you don't see scenes from Poltergeist or diseases creeping out of the ground to attack the living. If a funeral director tells you that the body should be embalmed for health reasons before being buried, go elsewhere because this guy is the same one who sold that bridge in Brooklyn to all those suckers.
Embalming does serve one very useful purpose of course and that is, it prevents the body from putrefying in a way that will turn away all your friends, not to mention yourself, when you are viewing him or her while in the viewing room. Some funeral directors (all licenced undertakers who work in a funeral home and are in charge of a funeral are called funeral directors even though they may not necessarily own the funeral home) genuinely believe that embalming is the key to long-term preservation. But the gist of such a belief hinges on the concept of what really constitutes long-term preservation. It is recognized in the industry that if a body is preserved properly and put into a moisture-proof and air-tight casket, the body will last up to about thirty years before it begins to disintegrate.
That is why no reputable funeral director will tell you that there is a universal everlasting preservative that will preserve the body for all eternity. I know that you are thinking about the mummies in Egypt but that involved an entirely different process that undertook months of work and as such, was very time consuming and isn't practicable in this day and age.
Embalmed bodies can be preserved intact for a long time if a very heavy concentration of formaldehyde is used but unfortunately, some funeral homes have been known to dilute the embalming fluid and that dilution becomes obvious to the mourners when the olfactory nerves in their noses begin telling them that something is not holding its own in the immediate area of the casket.
In fact, it is a common practice in funeral homes to sprinkle a deodorant powder at the base of the casket in order to mask the odours that come from the fluids that have somehow slipped out of the body and have settled onto the mattress in the casket. It's a necessary precaution and saves embarrassment for everyone should things not go according to plan.
The funeral homes will tell you that their services are the same no matter what casket you purchase. That means that if you purchase a soft wood cloth covered casket for $1,000, their services will be no different than if you purchased the $13,000 bronze casket with your loved one's name enclosed in the glass vial that is screwed into the casket's lid. They are telling you the truth.
The fact that funerals are for the living and not the deceased, is definite proof that we often cared more for the deceased when they were gone, then we ever did when they were still with us. A monument of great beauty has often been placed at the grave site as a testament to a survivor's anguish over his or her inability to make amends with the deceased while there was still time left to do so.
A case in point. When my mother suffered a stroke years ago, she couldn't speak or remember who anyone was. One day, I made a long distance call to the hospital where she was being cared for and asked a nurse to remain with her during my telephone call to her. I didn't know if my mother even knew who was on the phone when I told her of my family, my work and told her how much we all loved her. After I finished with the call, I immediately called back and spoke to the nurse who had been standing beside her when I was talking to my mother on the phone. She told me that my mother had smiled most of the time I was on the phone with her. I believe that she understood what I was saying to her and knew who I was but simply couldn't communicate her feelings to me. Three weeks later, she died. Her death was easier for me to deal with after that.
The knowledge of our pending deaths is with us from the moment we can think rationally until the final beat of our hearts and although we are constantly aware of its eventuality, we think of it subliminally and carry on with the rest of our lives as if death is merely an inconvenience we will have to face, sooner or later, and preferably later; actually much later.
But to anyone over fifty, death frequently raises its ugly head and we who have survived childhood diseases, cancer, famine, car accidents, wars, pestilence, earthquakes and outright stupidity on our own part, have come to recognize death for what it is----a constant companion----a nagging awareness of our own human frailty and mortality and possibly, and hopefully, an entry into an afterlife.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
How I met my wife by fate alone
What follows is the first part of a series taken directly from my memoirs. This piece is from volume three, RISING FROM THE ASHES.
Until I was 41 years of age, I was a very lonely man. For years I tried to find a mate I could truly live with but it was to no avail. I had waited far too long to find a woman that I could want to spend the rest of my life with. Christmas was the worst time of the year for me because there was no one close to me that I could share it with. There were beautiful and intelligent and very nice women around me but they were already going with other men and I don’t cut the grass of other men’s lawns, so to speak. My friends told me, "Hey! Some day, a great woman who is just right for you will come along." But it appeared to me that none of them would ever come along.
Perhaps I was too fussy in looking for a mate. There were five attributes that I was seeking in a mate and I would settle for three of them, if I found a possible mate who had them. The first was that she had to be reasonably pretty. I didn’t want my friends to laugh at me because they thought I was blind. She didn’t have to have a great figure, however; I wasn’t really looking for a fat woman. She had to be reasonably intelligent. I didn’t want a woman who would say, “Uhh?” every time I asked a simple question. She had to be compatible in bed. I didn’t want a woman who would cross herself every time we finished making love. She also had to be a great mother of my children. Of course, I would have to wait until we were married before I could make that determination.
Some women I went with were great in bed but terribly argumentative. Some were very pretty but extremely fat. Some others had nice personalities but often they acted stupid. Some were very intelligent but terrible in bed. I just couldn’t find one woman who had at least three of the attributes I was looking for in women. As I said earlier, those women that did, were already spoken for.
How I eventually met my mate in September 1975 is a very strange story indeed.
That year, I was attending a United Nations Congress as a speaker at the UN Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. My speech dealt with the UN’s proposal to create a Transnational Tribunal on Terrorism. I had spoken about the Japanese Red Army terrorists who for the most part, were women. After my speech, the head of security approached me with a big smile and said, “Whatever you do, Mr. Batchelor, don’t pick up any Japanese women while you are here. They could be members of the Japanese Red Army terrorists.” I replied, “I have no intentions of picking up any Japanese women.”
Two days later, I was at a bus station and ready to take a bus to Chaamoix, France for a three-day break so that I could climb on Mount Blanc, Europe’s highest mountain. Apparently I had missed the bus. The man at the ticket wicket suggested that I catch the train as it would get me there quicker. I ran up the street and when I arrived in the train station, there in front of me was the woman I was looking for. Mind you, I didn’t know that at that particular moment. In fact at that moment, not only was that woman not the woman I wanted to be with, she was actually a woman I was trying to hide from. You see, she was a young twenty-four-year-old Japanese woman. I thought, ‘Perhaps she is a Red Army terrorist.
When we got onto the train, she sat at one end and I sat at another end. I was nervous because she was always staring at me. We had to switch trains at the border of France and Switzerland so I went into the small washroom at the station and when I left it, there was the woman a few steps from the door as if she was waiting for me. I didn’t know if she was following me so I walked around the station and she followed me wherever I went. When the second train arrived, I went to the lead car and she too went to that car. I got out and walked on the platform until I arrived at the second car. She too entered that car. I immediately got out and went to the third car. She did the same thing. Now I was nervous but what really made me nervous was that she sat immediately across the aisle from me. If she was a Japanese Red Army terrorist, I was doomed if she was aware of my speech.
There were two girls from Ontario sitting across from me and while I was telling them jokes, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, the Japanese girl was laughing at the punch lines. Two thoughts immediately came to my mind ---- she speaks English and anyone who laughs at my jokes has to be a good person. I leaned over the aisle and asked, "Do you speak English?" She smiled and replied, "Yes I do." I asked, "Do you understand my jokes?" She laughed and then smiled, "They’re very funny?" I then said, "Why don’t you sit next to me and I will tell you some more."
The rest is history. From then on, we were together as soul mates. She came to Canada with me and six months later, we were married. At the time of this writing, that was thirty-three years ago. On Father’s Day, June 21, 2009, my wife, Ayako and I, and our two beautiful daughters, Sarah and Michelle and their spouses and my four granddaughters, were together as one very happy family. Since my wife and I were married, we have traveled around Europe, Africa, South America, North America and South Asia together. I learned that those who travel alone; travel the fastest but they who travel alone, also end up being the worst off for their travels.
Ohh! You are wondering why she was following me on the train. I wondered that also so recently, I asked her. I hinted that it was because of my good looks. She laughed. I then suggest that it was because of my magnificent figure. I did have an hour glass figure back in 1975. She laughed even louder. Alas, in the past thirty-three years, the sand has all shifted.
Finally the truth came out. She began; "Do you remember when we were in the train station in Geneva, and a train conductor was walking towards you and you asked him what platform you were to go to in order to catch your train?" I replied, "Yes."
She continued, "And you remember that he told you what you wanted to know and you thanked him and then you walked along the main platform and then onto the specific platform that you were to be on to catch your train?" Again I replied, "Yes."
Then she said, "Well, as you know, I was going to the same town you were going to so that I, like you, could go partway up Mount Blanc but I too didn’t know what platform to go on. I heard you ask the question but I didn’t hear the conductor’s reply. But I knew you did and since we were both going to the same destination and you knew how to get there, I decided that I would follow you all the way and never let you out of my sight in doing so."
Before I met my wife, I prayed to God for help and in my prayer I said, "I will forgo any riches that I might acquire in life if you would send me a mate I could truly love." If there is a God, he must have heard my prayer. I never acquired any riches in my life, however; I did find a mate that had all five attributes I was looking for.
All good things come to those who wait. I waited a long time but the wait was well worth it. Since then I have never been lonely. I entered this world alone and for some time, I lived it while I was alone. I will be alone when I leave this world but I know that when I leave it, I leave behind, a family that loves me and what greater ending of one’s life can anyone hope for than that?
What is really strange about our meeting on that fateful day is that it wouldn't have happened at all if it wasn't for the fact that although the bus station was only two blocks away, I was late and missed my bus by two minutes because I spent several minutes talking with the desk clerk of my hotel instead of going immediately to the bus station. That is one instance when procrastination really paid off. Now that is what I call fate.
Until I was 41 years of age, I was a very lonely man. For years I tried to find a mate I could truly live with but it was to no avail. I had waited far too long to find a woman that I could want to spend the rest of my life with. Christmas was the worst time of the year for me because there was no one close to me that I could share it with. There were beautiful and intelligent and very nice women around me but they were already going with other men and I don’t cut the grass of other men’s lawns, so to speak. My friends told me, "Hey! Some day, a great woman who is just right for you will come along." But it appeared to me that none of them would ever come along.
Perhaps I was too fussy in looking for a mate. There were five attributes that I was seeking in a mate and I would settle for three of them, if I found a possible mate who had them. The first was that she had to be reasonably pretty. I didn’t want my friends to laugh at me because they thought I was blind. She didn’t have to have a great figure, however; I wasn’t really looking for a fat woman. She had to be reasonably intelligent. I didn’t want a woman who would say, “Uhh?” every time I asked a simple question. She had to be compatible in bed. I didn’t want a woman who would cross herself every time we finished making love. She also had to be a great mother of my children. Of course, I would have to wait until we were married before I could make that determination.
Some women I went with were great in bed but terribly argumentative. Some were very pretty but extremely fat. Some others had nice personalities but often they acted stupid. Some were very intelligent but terrible in bed. I just couldn’t find one woman who had at least three of the attributes I was looking for in women. As I said earlier, those women that did, were already spoken for.
How I eventually met my mate in September 1975 is a very strange story indeed.
That year, I was attending a United Nations Congress as a speaker at the UN Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. My speech dealt with the UN’s proposal to create a Transnational Tribunal on Terrorism. I had spoken about the Japanese Red Army terrorists who for the most part, were women. After my speech, the head of security approached me with a big smile and said, “Whatever you do, Mr. Batchelor, don’t pick up any Japanese women while you are here. They could be members of the Japanese Red Army terrorists.” I replied, “I have no intentions of picking up any Japanese women.”
Two days later, I was at a bus station and ready to take a bus to Chaamoix, France for a three-day break so that I could climb on Mount Blanc, Europe’s highest mountain. Apparently I had missed the bus. The man at the ticket wicket suggested that I catch the train as it would get me there quicker. I ran up the street and when I arrived in the train station, there in front of me was the woman I was looking for. Mind you, I didn’t know that at that particular moment. In fact at that moment, not only was that woman not the woman I wanted to be with, she was actually a woman I was trying to hide from. You see, she was a young twenty-four-year-old Japanese woman. I thought, ‘Perhaps she is a Red Army terrorist.
When we got onto the train, she sat at one end and I sat at another end. I was nervous because she was always staring at me. We had to switch trains at the border of France and Switzerland so I went into the small washroom at the station and when I left it, there was the woman a few steps from the door as if she was waiting for me. I didn’t know if she was following me so I walked around the station and she followed me wherever I went. When the second train arrived, I went to the lead car and she too went to that car. I got out and walked on the platform until I arrived at the second car. She too entered that car. I immediately got out and went to the third car. She did the same thing. Now I was nervous but what really made me nervous was that she sat immediately across the aisle from me. If she was a Japanese Red Army terrorist, I was doomed if she was aware of my speech.
There were two girls from Ontario sitting across from me and while I was telling them jokes, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, the Japanese girl was laughing at the punch lines. Two thoughts immediately came to my mind ---- she speaks English and anyone who laughs at my jokes has to be a good person. I leaned over the aisle and asked, "Do you speak English?" She smiled and replied, "Yes I do." I asked, "Do you understand my jokes?" She laughed and then smiled, "They’re very funny?" I then said, "Why don’t you sit next to me and I will tell you some more."
The rest is history. From then on, we were together as soul mates. She came to Canada with me and six months later, we were married. At the time of this writing, that was thirty-three years ago. On Father’s Day, June 21, 2009, my wife, Ayako and I, and our two beautiful daughters, Sarah and Michelle and their spouses and my four granddaughters, were together as one very happy family. Since my wife and I were married, we have traveled around Europe, Africa, South America, North America and South Asia together. I learned that those who travel alone; travel the fastest but they who travel alone, also end up being the worst off for their travels.
Ohh! You are wondering why she was following me on the train. I wondered that also so recently, I asked her. I hinted that it was because of my good looks. She laughed. I then suggest that it was because of my magnificent figure. I did have an hour glass figure back in 1975. She laughed even louder. Alas, in the past thirty-three years, the sand has all shifted.
Finally the truth came out. She began; "Do you remember when we were in the train station in Geneva, and a train conductor was walking towards you and you asked him what platform you were to go to in order to catch your train?" I replied, "Yes."
She continued, "And you remember that he told you what you wanted to know and you thanked him and then you walked along the main platform and then onto the specific platform that you were to be on to catch your train?" Again I replied, "Yes."
Then she said, "Well, as you know, I was going to the same town you were going to so that I, like you, could go partway up Mount Blanc but I too didn’t know what platform to go on. I heard you ask the question but I didn’t hear the conductor’s reply. But I knew you did and since we were both going to the same destination and you knew how to get there, I decided that I would follow you all the way and never let you out of my sight in doing so."
Before I met my wife, I prayed to God for help and in my prayer I said, "I will forgo any riches that I might acquire in life if you would send me a mate I could truly love." If there is a God, he must have heard my prayer. I never acquired any riches in my life, however; I did find a mate that had all five attributes I was looking for.
All good things come to those who wait. I waited a long time but the wait was well worth it. Since then I have never been lonely. I entered this world alone and for some time, I lived it while I was alone. I will be alone when I leave this world but I know that when I leave it, I leave behind, a family that loves me and what greater ending of one’s life can anyone hope for than that?
What is really strange about our meeting on that fateful day is that it wouldn't have happened at all if it wasn't for the fact that although the bus station was only two blocks away, I was late and missed my bus by two minutes because I spent several minutes talking with the desk clerk of my hotel instead of going immediately to the bus station. That is one instance when procrastination really paid off. Now that is what I call fate.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Stupid Statements (Part XII)
Heinrich Boere has admitted to gunning down three men as part of a Waffen SS death squad – civilians killed in retribution for partisan attacks in Holland as the tide of World War II turned against the Nazis. Boere volunteered for the Nazis' fanatical Waffen SS only months after Adolf Hitler's forces had overrun his hometown of Maastricht and the rest of the Netherlands in 1940. After fighting on the Russian front, Boere ended up back in Holland as part of a notorious death squad codenamed Silbertanne. The Nazi death squad consisting of 15 SS men; is believed to be responsible for 54 killings. Made up largely of Dutch SS volunteers just like him; they were tasked with reprisal killings of their countrymen for resistance attacks on collaborators. In statements after the war to Dutch authorities Boere detailed the killings, almost shot-by-shot. In a 2007 interview with the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad he justified the actions, saying "I am sorry for what I had done but it was another time, with different rules." Murder at any time has the same rules. Don’t do it. For more than six decades after the war, he managed to avoid punishment – first escaping from a prisoner of war camp in the Netherlands, then successfully eluding the courts in Germany. The 88-year-old was finally arrested and at the time of this writing, goes on trial at the state court in Aachen, Germany, charged with three murders – a bicycle-shop owner, a pharmacist and another civilian.
Former President George W. Bush made some really stupid statements. Here are some of them. "To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say: You, too, can be president of the United States." And he is the living proof that his statement is quite correct. Here is another of his stupid comments. "Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness." I don’t need to comment any further on that one. This next one really boggles the mind. "The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants." Try explaining that one to your children. Come to think of it, try explaining that to adults.
Here is another Bushism. "I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." If you have strong opinions, it means that you do agree with them. One day he said, "There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again." Georgie boy. It is supposed to be like this. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me again, shame on me." Here is a nice one. "And so, in my State of the - my State of the Union - or state - my speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation - I asked Americans to give 4,000 years - 4,000 hours over the next - the rest of your life - of service to America. That's what I asked - 4,000 hours." Did he write that speech himself? Yes. No one else could be that stupid. In the following statement, he meant to say something else but true to form, he goofed. "It would be a mistake for the United States Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber." What he was trying to say was that he didn’t want the Chamber of Senators to vote in favour of cloning. He should have let a young kid write his speech for him. The kid would have done it better.
Here is one you will want to forget. "Columbia carried in its payroll classroom experiments from some of our students in America." Uhhh? It makes as much sense when you read it backwards. "The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself." Do I really need to comment on that one? Not really. "One year ago today, the time for excuse-making has come to an end." "I think the American people - I hope the American - I don't think, let me - I hope the American people trust me." It would have sounded better if he left out the first thirteen words. The only words in his statement that is believable is, "…I don’t think…" "We're concerned about AIDS inside our White House - make no mistake about it." Now you know why not many people visited the White House when this president was in office. He should have said, "We in the White House are concerned about AIDS." "I frankly felt like the reception we received on the way in from the airport was very warm and hospitable. And I want to thank the Canadian people who came out to wave -- with all five fingers -- for their hospitality." If he had looked closer, he would have noticed that all five fingers were pointing straight up in the air in that same manner that people stick their third fingers up in the air.
"There's no bigger task than protecting the homeland of our country." Uhh? "You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on." The ones he concentrated on during his running for the presidency were those identical fools who voted for him. "We need an energy bill that encourages consumption." No wonder the United States is in debt for three trillion dollars. "I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn't here." Is he speaking about his body not being there or is it his mind that he is referring to? "I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe - I believe what I believe is right." With that many ‘believes’ in that sentence, it is equivalent to having a straight in a poker hand. "Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace to enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment." Redefining that sentence and making some sense out of it is akin to redefining the scratchings of hens in a hen house and trying to make sense out of them. "Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods." So are farts.
One statement this twit made which made a lot of sense and is funny also was, "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive." It is so good, it was probably written by that kid I spoke of earlier.
Former President George W. Bush made some really stupid statements. Here are some of them. "To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say: You, too, can be president of the United States." And he is the living proof that his statement is quite correct. Here is another of his stupid comments. "Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness." I don’t need to comment any further on that one. This next one really boggles the mind. "The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants." Try explaining that one to your children. Come to think of it, try explaining that to adults.
Here is another Bushism. "I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." If you have strong opinions, it means that you do agree with them. One day he said, "There's an old saying in Tennessee - I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee - that says, fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again." Georgie boy. It is supposed to be like this. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me again, shame on me." Here is a nice one. "And so, in my State of the - my State of the Union - or state - my speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation - I asked Americans to give 4,000 years - 4,000 hours over the next - the rest of your life - of service to America. That's what I asked - 4,000 hours." Did he write that speech himself? Yes. No one else could be that stupid. In the following statement, he meant to say something else but true to form, he goofed. "It would be a mistake for the United States Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber." What he was trying to say was that he didn’t want the Chamber of Senators to vote in favour of cloning. He should have let a young kid write his speech for him. The kid would have done it better.
Here is one you will want to forget. "Columbia carried in its payroll classroom experiments from some of our students in America." Uhhh? It makes as much sense when you read it backwards. "The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself." Do I really need to comment on that one? Not really. "One year ago today, the time for excuse-making has come to an end." "I think the American people - I hope the American - I don't think, let me - I hope the American people trust me." It would have sounded better if he left out the first thirteen words. The only words in his statement that is believable is, "…I don’t think…" "We're concerned about AIDS inside our White House - make no mistake about it." Now you know why not many people visited the White House when this president was in office. He should have said, "We in the White House are concerned about AIDS." "I frankly felt like the reception we received on the way in from the airport was very warm and hospitable. And I want to thank the Canadian people who came out to wave -- with all five fingers -- for their hospitality." If he had looked closer, he would have noticed that all five fingers were pointing straight up in the air in that same manner that people stick their third fingers up in the air.
"There's no bigger task than protecting the homeland of our country." Uhh? "You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on." The ones he concentrated on during his running for the presidency were those identical fools who voted for him. "We need an energy bill that encourages consumption." No wonder the United States is in debt for three trillion dollars. "I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn't here." Is he speaking about his body not being there or is it his mind that he is referring to? "I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe - I believe what I believe is right." With that many ‘believes’ in that sentence, it is equivalent to having a straight in a poker hand. "Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace to enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment." Redefining that sentence and making some sense out of it is akin to redefining the scratchings of hens in a hen house and trying to make sense out of them. "Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods." So are farts.
One statement this twit made which made a lot of sense and is funny also was, "When I take action, I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive." It is so good, it was probably written by that kid I spoke of earlier.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Do we really want Prince Charles to be Canada’s king?
I was six years old when I first saw King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, his wife and their two daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. It happened in May and June of 1939 while the royal family was visiting Canada just before World War II began. I saw them twice. The first time was when my mother took my brother and I to Parkside Drive in Toronto where her aunt lived. The royal family was going to be driven up that street. When their car passed by us, I saw all four of them, the king and queen and their two daughters. Queen Elizabeth, the current queen was seven years older that I was and her sister, Margaret was three years older that I was.
The second time I saw the king and queen, was while my brother and I were living on a farm during June of that year. The farm was situated between Toronto and Bolton, Ontario. The farmer and his wife were looking after my brother and I while our mother was visiting relatives out of the province of Ontario. He had heard that their train would be moving north approximately half an hour east of the farm while on their way across Canada. He decided that we should all go to a road where the railway tracks intersected with it and watch the royal family as they passed us. We arrived about ten minutes before the train reached us and because the intersection was crowded, he moved us further up the tracks. When the train arrived, the engineer slowed down (probably on orders of the king if crowds had gathered) and by the time the last car had reached us, the train was beginning to pick up speed. I was sitting on the shoulder of the farmer and the car that the king and queen were in, had a rear platform at the end of the car. The royal couple were sitting in two chairs, waving at everybody. I hollered out, “Hello!” They turned and faced me. Then I hollered out, “Goodbye!” They began to laugh and waved at me. I waved back. That was the only time I got to address the king and queen. Alas. It was only a one-way conversation.
No one has to express their admiration for the king and queen in that era as they were greatly respected by all, especially when they chose to remain in London during the blitz while German bombers were dropping bombs onto the city. One even hit Buckingham Palace where they lived. When the king died, the royal family just began going down hill.
Princess Margaret, the present queen’s sister, definitely was not a person one could really respect. She was the bad-girl of the British monarchy. Often she defied the traditionally strict code of conduct imposed by the monarchy. choosing instead to live her life the way she pleased.
On one occasion, she went through her mother's papers in 1993, several months after the Prince (Charles) and Princess of Wales (Diana) had announced their separation. Margaret had burned bundles of her mother's letters though at the time it was not known which ones. Previously in a letter to her mother, who was staying at Birkhall on the Balmoral estate, the Princess wrote: "I am going back today to clear up some more of your room. I am keeping the letters for you to sort later." On the Princess's orders, large black bags of papers were taken away for destruction rather than for ultimate consignment to the Royal Archives. Also, Princess Margaret and her husband were divorced. I don’t know why they were divorced but a divorce in the monarchy doesn’t sit well with with the general public. Despite her failings, she was nevertheless, an active supporter of numerous worthwhile organizations.
The present Queen Elizabeth became the queen of England and the British Commonwealth which includes Canada, on February 6, 1953 when she was only 26 years of age. When she was in her teens, she was highly respected because of her contribution towards the war effort during the Second World War. However, after she became a queen, there was one big flaw in her reign. She didn’t bring up her children properly.
Whenever I think of Queen Elizabeth, II, my mind goes back to a time when she and Prince Philip had visited Australia in 1954. They didn’t take their two children, Charles and Anne with them and finally when the Queen and her consort returned to England on their yacht, HMS Britannia, Charles who was only six years old that year, ran up the gang plank to greet his mother. He began to hug her and she responded by telling him “Later!” as she shooed him away so that she would meet dignitaries who had come aboard the yacht. That must have been very depressing for him as a child since it must have appeared to him at that time that she was indifferent to his presence.
That is hardly the way a mother should treat her child especially when they have been separated from one another for some considerable time.
I can well appreciate however how difficult it is for a king or queen to give lots of attention to their children since they are so busy dealing with state affairs.
Many scientists now believe that 20 per cent of a person's outcome in life is the result of innate brain capacity. The other 80 per cent is based on what happens after birth. That means nurturing – particularly parenting and schooling – can affect whether a child becomes a successful adult or a slacker.
The difference between a baby and an adult is the amount and location of connective tissue – synapses – among the neurons. The business of growing the brain from newborn to child to adult is to build synaptic connections and then networks of these connections within the brain. Those synapses carry understanding and memory, or what we know as learning. The synaptic connections are made by learning many things. In other words, if a small child isn’t given love and attention regularily, the chances are that he or she won’t give the love and attention that his or her children need. When that happens, their children grow up with behavior and learning problems.
Two examples of this is with respect to King George IV and King Edward (who later abdicated) Although George didn’t have any behavior problems, he stuttered all of his life. This has been attributed to his relationship with his father, King George V. His father showed very little attention or love to him. The same applies to George VI’s older brother, Edward.He too was for the most part, ignored by his father. Not only did he act in a manner that was against the custom of England when he was king by marrying a divorcee, he praised Hitler, the German dictator who later attacked the British Isles by bombing the south of England.
Prince Andrew, (who is Prince Charles’ younger brother) and Sarah (Andrew’s wife) were welcomed by adoring throngs on their cross-country jaunts. They dazzled effortlessly as the super-celebrity couple of that era. And for all that their marriage has since been portrayed as a totally loveless sham, on their first visit at least, in 1983, the prince could hardly keep his hands off his princess, touching her constantly and even patting her bottom. On their last visit, a year before the 1992 separation, the couple were barely speaking to each other. They finally divorced.
This doesn’t necessary mean that all persons in the British Royalty won’t succeed. Prince Andrew became a one-man chamber of commerce. He is Great Britain's special representative for international trade.
When I was a young child, I got the feeling that I wasn’t loved all the time, especially since I spent years in seven foster homes. I didn’t have any real behavior problems but I was definitely a failure in school. I was sent back to kindergarten from grade one and spent three years in grade five. I finally left school in grade nine at the age of 17. However, when I was 37, I was much smarter then and I entered University with a grade nine education and eventually got my doctorate in criminology and as of 1975, I have addressed the United Nations in UN crime conferences 23 times in places like Europe, Africa, South America and South Asia. I have always wondered how well I would have done in school if I had lived with my mother during all of my childhood years.
When Jacques Chirac was the president of France and even while he was spending years in pursuit of power, he had little time for his children. His son, Laurence subsequently was battling severe anorexia and mental illness for 30 years.
Sir Winston Churchill had a difficulty childhood. His parents were too busy to pay that much attention to him and yet despite that, he grew up to be an incredible leader of his nation.
Prince Philip is married to Queen Elizabeth II of England, making him the Duke of Edinburgh. I don't know anything about his childhood years but what ever they were like, he grew up to be a real twit. He is quite infamous around the world for making some rather embarrassing and ridiculous statements.
When he was in China on an official visit, he was overheard to say; “If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed.” To a blind women with a guide, he said; “Do you know they have eating dogs for the anorexic now?” To an Aborigine in Australia, he said; “Do you still throw spears at each other?” To a Briton in Budapest, he said; “You can’t have been here that long. You haven’t got a pot belly.” To a driving instructor in Scotland, he said; “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?” To a student who had been trekking in Papua, New Guinea, he said; “You managed not to get eaten, then?” To Elton John after hearing Elton had sold his Gold Aston Martin, he said; “Oh, it’s you that owns that ghastly car. We often see it when driving to Windsor Castle.” With respect to the London Traffic Debate, he said; (brace for it) “The problem with London is the tourists. They cause the congestion. If we could just stop tourism, we could stop the congestion.” To the President of Nigeria, dressed in traditional robes, he said; “You look like you’re ready for bed!” While discussing key problems facing Brazil, he said; “Brazilians live there” The royal family would be better off if this buffoon would simply stay inside his home and never venture out again and make silly and embarrassing statements.
Princess Anne unfortunately is a very rude and foul-mouthed person. This kind of behavior is most unbecoming for someone who is part of the royal family. One day on June 11, 2007, she slipped and fell on an uneven path during an official visit to Guernsey. More than 300 schoolchildren had lined the high street in St Peter Port, the island's capital, and were giving her a round of applause when her legs gave way beneath her. Bailiff Geoffrey Rowland – the head of Guernsey’s legal and political system – tried immediately to help the Princess to her feet. But the Princess reacted most unseemly when she said to him: “Don’t do that, thank you. Grabbing me round my fucking stomach won’t help.”
It is 27 years since she infamously barked at photographers to "naff off" (a euphemism for 'fuck off!) when she was pictured falling from her horse at a water jump during the 1982 Badminton Horse Trials. On one royal tour to Africa, a photographer who asked her to lift up a starving baby to highlight the crisis facing her host country was given short shrift. She said to the photographer, “I don’t do stunts.”
Princess Anne, among the most hard-working of the royals, was famed in her youth for her grumpy outbursts, although she has appeared to mellow with age - or at least to keep her temper under a tighter rein.
Prince William appears to be a real gentleman and is admired by everyone. His younger brother on the other hand, when he was younger, was a real jerk. Harry had earned a reputation in his youth for being rebellious, leading the tabloid press to label him as a "wild child". He was found at age 17 smoking cannabis and partaking in under-age drinking with his friends, would clash physically with paparazzi outside nightclubs, and was photographed at Highgrove House at a Colonial and Native themed costume party wearing a German Afrika Korps uniform, usually referred to as a Nazi uniform. In 2006, he referred to a Pakistani fellow officer cadet as "our little Paki friend," and later called a soldier wearing a cloth on his head a "raghead". Lately, he has improved and is no longer an embarrassment to the monarchy.
Finally, I will deal with Prince Charles, the man who just might eventually be the king. Keep in mind that that may not be for a long time. The queen has said that she has no intentions of abdicating and she may live as long as her mother who died at 101 years of age.
The return to Canada of Prince Charles in November 2009 provides an opportunity for Canadians to look again at the institutional eccentricity of the Canadian monarchy. The royal family has received complete inadequate attention, here and in Australia and New Zealand, for its novelty. These are all among the most successful and promising countries in the world, and no other serious countries in history have had a non-residential monarchy.
Fortunately, Canada has graduated from the adolescent self-consciousness of an insecure country preoccupied with the symbolism of national sovereignty and now and for some time, it has concerned itself that a British royal family which comes among Canadians fairly disparagingly and randomly, happens to include the Queen as our chief of state. Canadians have not quite reached the point of appreciating the endearing originality of this system. In fact, that appreciation is slowly waning.
Of course it's an anachronism, but most Canadians would now say that there is nothing wrong with that but at the same time, they would also decline to subscribe themselves as committed monarchists.
It has been suggested that the monarch’s role should be updated, perhaps by making the monarch co-chief of state in the overseas Commonwealth countries such as Canada, with a domestic governor-general which is appointed by the Prime Minister as it is at present or the president if Canada becomes a republic, endowed with enhanced status and a more legitimizing form of selection than nomination by the prime minister.
With Prince Charles on the throne, that may result in Canada definitely becoming a republic instead of being a monarchy. A new documentary is airing on the final day of his trip to Canada and its main premise is hardly flattering: it predicts Charles' coronation could spell the demise of the monarchy in Canada.While the Queen is widely liked, people just don't feel the same way about her offspring, least of all, Prince Charles.
Many still harbour ill will toward Prince Charles for his failed marriage to Diana and they don't like his outspokenness and quirky ideas. The documentary notes a Canadian poll where two-thirds of respondents expressed support for ditching the monarchy once the Queen dies. Only 23% of Canadians want Charles to be king. If Canada ever holds a referendum, the monarchy’s role in Canada would be a historical footnote in the past.
I personally have nothing but contempt for Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall who will never be queen but instead, the king’s consort when and if her husband becomes the king.
While Charles was married to Diana, a sweet woman whose’ interest in the welfare of Britian’s citizens and a loving mother to their two children, William and Harry was paramount on her mind, he was sexually cavorting with his old girlfriend, Camilla Parker Bowles. There is no doubt that they were having sex together. This is not a story of enduring romance, star-crossed lovers who got a second shot at happiness in middle age. This historical event is a sordid tale of betrayal and infidelity, with not an iota of survival guilt in their happily-ever-after marriage, while Diana moulders in her grave, a receding footnote in the Windsor annals.
King Edward II, the older brother of King George VI conducted a lengthy affair with Alice Keppel, the wife of William and Sophia's son, George who was married to Queen Alexandra. This is a bit of history that enthralls Camilla from the time she was a young girl. Her favourite family anecdote, according to biographer Caroline Graham, was the story of Alice famously saying: "My job is to curtsy first and then jump into bed.'' That was what happen when Charles and Camilla were initially going with one another before Charles married Diana.
Indeed, as everyone now knows, upon first meeting Charles on a rain-swept day at the polo field in Windsor Great Park, a brassy Camilla uttered the immortal line: "My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather's mistress.” How about that for an opening line” It surpasses saying, “Would you like to come up to my flat and look at my etchings?” Now their subsequent sexual cavorting is real Déjà.
Talk about stupidity. One day, Charles was talking to Camilla on his cell phone and somehow their conversation got picked up by a listener over the airwaves. Charles said to her, “I wish I was a Tampon so that I could be right inside you.” His sexual longing always ran towards the dowdy Camilla, as revealed so excruciatingly in the notorious "Tampon phone call event in their lives. And this is the man-who-will-be-our king, Canada. Or maybe not.
He can smile and shake hands with people in Canada but when it comes right down to it, I don’t think many Canadians really want him to be their king, even if it’s only in name.
Monarchist loyalty in this multicultural country appears on shaky ground, with forty-nine per cent of Canadians support reopening the constitutional debate on possibly replacing the sovereign with an elected head of state. Seven in ten said they'd rather a Canadian serve in that role – further fueling the recent kerfuffle over Governor General Michaëlle Jean's ‘gaffe’ during a speech she gave in Paris when she was referring to herself as the head of state. (which she later said that she was wrong in saying it)
Succession could become an issue for Canada, since close to two in five believe there should be no monarch after the current one dies and only 23 per cent want Charles to become our king. A higher proportion, 30 per cent, would prefer Prince William directly ascend to the throne, skipping a generation. That unfortunately probably won’t happen.
Charles and Camilla are viewed dimly by Canadians, with disapproval rates at 49 and 51 per cent respectively. Still, only 27 per cent want the Royal Family to cease their excursions to Canada and nearly 40 per cent claimed they would attend an event here featuring a member of the Windsor clan.
Charles meanwhile is intent on showing off the missus to his subjects-from-afar. He said when he arrived in Canada, "I can hardly believe that this is my 15th visit, and I am greatly looking forward to introducing my wife to a country and a people which are very dear to my heart."
That may be how he feels but speaking for myself and probably most of Canada, I am not looking forward to seeing his wife even though I was at the airport where she was arriving for the purpose of visiting Toronto while I was seeing my Japanese-born wife off for her month vacation in her homeland. I was only ten feet from the former prime minster of Thailand at a reception in 2005 in which my wife and I were invited to meet him. It was then that I decided that I would not shake his hand at all because of his dishonesty for which he was later removed from office. I am finicky as to who I want to meet or shake hands with.
Indeed, as everyone now knows, upon first meeting Charles on a rain-swept day at the polo field in Windsor Great Park, a brassy Camilla uttered the immortal line: "My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather's mistress. How about it?'' What a line. It certainly surpasses that old line, “Would you like to come up to my flat and look at my etchings?”
In any event, the bloom is well off the royal rose circa 2009, most especially with these wilting middle-aged flowers. Gone is the glamour of those heady Diane days, the princess oozing sex appeal – if not, apparently, in her husband's straying eyes. His sexual longing always ran towards the dowdy Camilla, as revealed so excruciatingly in the notorious "Tampon call.
According to the Angus Reid poll, 35 per cent of Canadians now prefer an elected head of state and only 27 per cent are content with a monarchy. Rumblings of severing our ties to an across-the-pond sovereign have been given new impetus with this tour.
If Camilla has come in out of the cold, tucked now into the correct side of the silk sheets as far as Brits are concerned; or so palace spin-courtiers insist; Canadians, with so little exposure to this royal couple apparently remain cool. Even the inherent eccentricity of the royal clan – and we all got a voyeuristic kick out of their assorted soap operas through the '80s and '90s – has turned to dullness with their antics. They seem to be suffering from a charisma bypass.''
“Long live the king!” My response to that proclamation is to quote Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dicken’s tale of Christmas, “Bah, humbug.”
The second time I saw the king and queen, was while my brother and I were living on a farm during June of that year. The farm was situated between Toronto and Bolton, Ontario. The farmer and his wife were looking after my brother and I while our mother was visiting relatives out of the province of Ontario. He had heard that their train would be moving north approximately half an hour east of the farm while on their way across Canada. He decided that we should all go to a road where the railway tracks intersected with it and watch the royal family as they passed us. We arrived about ten minutes before the train reached us and because the intersection was crowded, he moved us further up the tracks. When the train arrived, the engineer slowed down (probably on orders of the king if crowds had gathered) and by the time the last car had reached us, the train was beginning to pick up speed. I was sitting on the shoulder of the farmer and the car that the king and queen were in, had a rear platform at the end of the car. The royal couple were sitting in two chairs, waving at everybody. I hollered out, “Hello!” They turned and faced me. Then I hollered out, “Goodbye!” They began to laugh and waved at me. I waved back. That was the only time I got to address the king and queen. Alas. It was only a one-way conversation.
No one has to express their admiration for the king and queen in that era as they were greatly respected by all, especially when they chose to remain in London during the blitz while German bombers were dropping bombs onto the city. One even hit Buckingham Palace where they lived. When the king died, the royal family just began going down hill.
Princess Margaret, the present queen’s sister, definitely was not a person one could really respect. She was the bad-girl of the British monarchy. Often she defied the traditionally strict code of conduct imposed by the monarchy. choosing instead to live her life the way she pleased.
On one occasion, she went through her mother's papers in 1993, several months after the Prince (Charles) and Princess of Wales (Diana) had announced their separation. Margaret had burned bundles of her mother's letters though at the time it was not known which ones. Previously in a letter to her mother, who was staying at Birkhall on the Balmoral estate, the Princess wrote: "I am going back today to clear up some more of your room. I am keeping the letters for you to sort later." On the Princess's orders, large black bags of papers were taken away for destruction rather than for ultimate consignment to the Royal Archives. Also, Princess Margaret and her husband were divorced. I don’t know why they were divorced but a divorce in the monarchy doesn’t sit well with with the general public. Despite her failings, she was nevertheless, an active supporter of numerous worthwhile organizations.
The present Queen Elizabeth became the queen of England and the British Commonwealth which includes Canada, on February 6, 1953 when she was only 26 years of age. When she was in her teens, she was highly respected because of her contribution towards the war effort during the Second World War. However, after she became a queen, there was one big flaw in her reign. She didn’t bring up her children properly.
Whenever I think of Queen Elizabeth, II, my mind goes back to a time when she and Prince Philip had visited Australia in 1954. They didn’t take their two children, Charles and Anne with them and finally when the Queen and her consort returned to England on their yacht, HMS Britannia, Charles who was only six years old that year, ran up the gang plank to greet his mother. He began to hug her and she responded by telling him “Later!” as she shooed him away so that she would meet dignitaries who had come aboard the yacht. That must have been very depressing for him as a child since it must have appeared to him at that time that she was indifferent to his presence.
That is hardly the way a mother should treat her child especially when they have been separated from one another for some considerable time.
I can well appreciate however how difficult it is for a king or queen to give lots of attention to their children since they are so busy dealing with state affairs.
Many scientists now believe that 20 per cent of a person's outcome in life is the result of innate brain capacity. The other 80 per cent is based on what happens after birth. That means nurturing – particularly parenting and schooling – can affect whether a child becomes a successful adult or a slacker.
The difference between a baby and an adult is the amount and location of connective tissue – synapses – among the neurons. The business of growing the brain from newborn to child to adult is to build synaptic connections and then networks of these connections within the brain. Those synapses carry understanding and memory, or what we know as learning. The synaptic connections are made by learning many things. In other words, if a small child isn’t given love and attention regularily, the chances are that he or she won’t give the love and attention that his or her children need. When that happens, their children grow up with behavior and learning problems.
Two examples of this is with respect to King George IV and King Edward (who later abdicated) Although George didn’t have any behavior problems, he stuttered all of his life. This has been attributed to his relationship with his father, King George V. His father showed very little attention or love to him. The same applies to George VI’s older brother, Edward.He too was for the most part, ignored by his father. Not only did he act in a manner that was against the custom of England when he was king by marrying a divorcee, he praised Hitler, the German dictator who later attacked the British Isles by bombing the south of England.
Prince Andrew, (who is Prince Charles’ younger brother) and Sarah (Andrew’s wife) were welcomed by adoring throngs on their cross-country jaunts. They dazzled effortlessly as the super-celebrity couple of that era. And for all that their marriage has since been portrayed as a totally loveless sham, on their first visit at least, in 1983, the prince could hardly keep his hands off his princess, touching her constantly and even patting her bottom. On their last visit, a year before the 1992 separation, the couple were barely speaking to each other. They finally divorced.
This doesn’t necessary mean that all persons in the British Royalty won’t succeed. Prince Andrew became a one-man chamber of commerce. He is Great Britain's special representative for international trade.
When I was a young child, I got the feeling that I wasn’t loved all the time, especially since I spent years in seven foster homes. I didn’t have any real behavior problems but I was definitely a failure in school. I was sent back to kindergarten from grade one and spent three years in grade five. I finally left school in grade nine at the age of 17. However, when I was 37, I was much smarter then and I entered University with a grade nine education and eventually got my doctorate in criminology and as of 1975, I have addressed the United Nations in UN crime conferences 23 times in places like Europe, Africa, South America and South Asia. I have always wondered how well I would have done in school if I had lived with my mother during all of my childhood years.
When Jacques Chirac was the president of France and even while he was spending years in pursuit of power, he had little time for his children. His son, Laurence subsequently was battling severe anorexia and mental illness for 30 years.
Sir Winston Churchill had a difficulty childhood. His parents were too busy to pay that much attention to him and yet despite that, he grew up to be an incredible leader of his nation.
Prince Philip is married to Queen Elizabeth II of England, making him the Duke of Edinburgh. I don't know anything about his childhood years but what ever they were like, he grew up to be a real twit. He is quite infamous around the world for making some rather embarrassing and ridiculous statements.
When he was in China on an official visit, he was overheard to say; “If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed.” To a blind women with a guide, he said; “Do you know they have eating dogs for the anorexic now?” To an Aborigine in Australia, he said; “Do you still throw spears at each other?” To a Briton in Budapest, he said; “You can’t have been here that long. You haven’t got a pot belly.” To a driving instructor in Scotland, he said; “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?” To a student who had been trekking in Papua, New Guinea, he said; “You managed not to get eaten, then?” To Elton John after hearing Elton had sold his Gold Aston Martin, he said; “Oh, it’s you that owns that ghastly car. We often see it when driving to Windsor Castle.” With respect to the London Traffic Debate, he said; (brace for it) “The problem with London is the tourists. They cause the congestion. If we could just stop tourism, we could stop the congestion.” To the President of Nigeria, dressed in traditional robes, he said; “You look like you’re ready for bed!” While discussing key problems facing Brazil, he said; “Brazilians live there” The royal family would be better off if this buffoon would simply stay inside his home and never venture out again and make silly and embarrassing statements.
Princess Anne unfortunately is a very rude and foul-mouthed person. This kind of behavior is most unbecoming for someone who is part of the royal family. One day on June 11, 2007, she slipped and fell on an uneven path during an official visit to Guernsey. More than 300 schoolchildren had lined the high street in St Peter Port, the island's capital, and were giving her a round of applause when her legs gave way beneath her. Bailiff Geoffrey Rowland – the head of Guernsey’s legal and political system – tried immediately to help the Princess to her feet. But the Princess reacted most unseemly when she said to him: “Don’t do that, thank you. Grabbing me round my fucking stomach won’t help.”
It is 27 years since she infamously barked at photographers to "naff off" (a euphemism for 'fuck off!) when she was pictured falling from her horse at a water jump during the 1982 Badminton Horse Trials. On one royal tour to Africa, a photographer who asked her to lift up a starving baby to highlight the crisis facing her host country was given short shrift. She said to the photographer, “I don’t do stunts.”
Princess Anne, among the most hard-working of the royals, was famed in her youth for her grumpy outbursts, although she has appeared to mellow with age - or at least to keep her temper under a tighter rein.
Prince William appears to be a real gentleman and is admired by everyone. His younger brother on the other hand, when he was younger, was a real jerk. Harry had earned a reputation in his youth for being rebellious, leading the tabloid press to label him as a "wild child". He was found at age 17 smoking cannabis and partaking in under-age drinking with his friends, would clash physically with paparazzi outside nightclubs, and was photographed at Highgrove House at a Colonial and Native themed costume party wearing a German Afrika Korps uniform, usually referred to as a Nazi uniform. In 2006, he referred to a Pakistani fellow officer cadet as "our little Paki friend," and later called a soldier wearing a cloth on his head a "raghead". Lately, he has improved and is no longer an embarrassment to the monarchy.
Finally, I will deal with Prince Charles, the man who just might eventually be the king. Keep in mind that that may not be for a long time. The queen has said that she has no intentions of abdicating and she may live as long as her mother who died at 101 years of age.
The return to Canada of Prince Charles in November 2009 provides an opportunity for Canadians to look again at the institutional eccentricity of the Canadian monarchy. The royal family has received complete inadequate attention, here and in Australia and New Zealand, for its novelty. These are all among the most successful and promising countries in the world, and no other serious countries in history have had a non-residential monarchy.
Fortunately, Canada has graduated from the adolescent self-consciousness of an insecure country preoccupied with the symbolism of national sovereignty and now and for some time, it has concerned itself that a British royal family which comes among Canadians fairly disparagingly and randomly, happens to include the Queen as our chief of state. Canadians have not quite reached the point of appreciating the endearing originality of this system. In fact, that appreciation is slowly waning.
Of course it's an anachronism, but most Canadians would now say that there is nothing wrong with that but at the same time, they would also decline to subscribe themselves as committed monarchists.
It has been suggested that the monarch’s role should be updated, perhaps by making the monarch co-chief of state in the overseas Commonwealth countries such as Canada, with a domestic governor-general which is appointed by the Prime Minister as it is at present or the president if Canada becomes a republic, endowed with enhanced status and a more legitimizing form of selection than nomination by the prime minister.
With Prince Charles on the throne, that may result in Canada definitely becoming a republic instead of being a monarchy. A new documentary is airing on the final day of his trip to Canada and its main premise is hardly flattering: it predicts Charles' coronation could spell the demise of the monarchy in Canada.While the Queen is widely liked, people just don't feel the same way about her offspring, least of all, Prince Charles.
Many still harbour ill will toward Prince Charles for his failed marriage to Diana and they don't like his outspokenness and quirky ideas. The documentary notes a Canadian poll where two-thirds of respondents expressed support for ditching the monarchy once the Queen dies. Only 23% of Canadians want Charles to be king. If Canada ever holds a referendum, the monarchy’s role in Canada would be a historical footnote in the past.
I personally have nothing but contempt for Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall who will never be queen but instead, the king’s consort when and if her husband becomes the king.
While Charles was married to Diana, a sweet woman whose’ interest in the welfare of Britian’s citizens and a loving mother to their two children, William and Harry was paramount on her mind, he was sexually cavorting with his old girlfriend, Camilla Parker Bowles. There is no doubt that they were having sex together. This is not a story of enduring romance, star-crossed lovers who got a second shot at happiness in middle age. This historical event is a sordid tale of betrayal and infidelity, with not an iota of survival guilt in their happily-ever-after marriage, while Diana moulders in her grave, a receding footnote in the Windsor annals.
King Edward II, the older brother of King George VI conducted a lengthy affair with Alice Keppel, the wife of William and Sophia's son, George who was married to Queen Alexandra. This is a bit of history that enthralls Camilla from the time she was a young girl. Her favourite family anecdote, according to biographer Caroline Graham, was the story of Alice famously saying: "My job is to curtsy first and then jump into bed.'' That was what happen when Charles and Camilla were initially going with one another before Charles married Diana.
Indeed, as everyone now knows, upon first meeting Charles on a rain-swept day at the polo field in Windsor Great Park, a brassy Camilla uttered the immortal line: "My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather's mistress.” How about that for an opening line” It surpasses saying, “Would you like to come up to my flat and look at my etchings?” Now their subsequent sexual cavorting is real Déjà.
Talk about stupidity. One day, Charles was talking to Camilla on his cell phone and somehow their conversation got picked up by a listener over the airwaves. Charles said to her, “I wish I was a Tampon so that I could be right inside you.” His sexual longing always ran towards the dowdy Camilla, as revealed so excruciatingly in the notorious "Tampon phone call event in their lives. And this is the man-who-will-be-our king, Canada. Or maybe not.
He can smile and shake hands with people in Canada but when it comes right down to it, I don’t think many Canadians really want him to be their king, even if it’s only in name.
Monarchist loyalty in this multicultural country appears on shaky ground, with forty-nine per cent of Canadians support reopening the constitutional debate on possibly replacing the sovereign with an elected head of state. Seven in ten said they'd rather a Canadian serve in that role – further fueling the recent kerfuffle over Governor General Michaëlle Jean's ‘gaffe’ during a speech she gave in Paris when she was referring to herself as the head of state. (which she later said that she was wrong in saying it)
Succession could become an issue for Canada, since close to two in five believe there should be no monarch after the current one dies and only 23 per cent want Charles to become our king. A higher proportion, 30 per cent, would prefer Prince William directly ascend to the throne, skipping a generation. That unfortunately probably won’t happen.
Charles and Camilla are viewed dimly by Canadians, with disapproval rates at 49 and 51 per cent respectively. Still, only 27 per cent want the Royal Family to cease their excursions to Canada and nearly 40 per cent claimed they would attend an event here featuring a member of the Windsor clan.
Charles meanwhile is intent on showing off the missus to his subjects-from-afar. He said when he arrived in Canada, "I can hardly believe that this is my 15th visit, and I am greatly looking forward to introducing my wife to a country and a people which are very dear to my heart."
That may be how he feels but speaking for myself and probably most of Canada, I am not looking forward to seeing his wife even though I was at the airport where she was arriving for the purpose of visiting Toronto while I was seeing my Japanese-born wife off for her month vacation in her homeland. I was only ten feet from the former prime minster of Thailand at a reception in 2005 in which my wife and I were invited to meet him. It was then that I decided that I would not shake his hand at all because of his dishonesty for which he was later removed from office. I am finicky as to who I want to meet or shake hands with.
Indeed, as everyone now knows, upon first meeting Charles on a rain-swept day at the polo field in Windsor Great Park, a brassy Camilla uttered the immortal line: "My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather's mistress. How about it?'' What a line. It certainly surpasses that old line, “Would you like to come up to my flat and look at my etchings?”
In any event, the bloom is well off the royal rose circa 2009, most especially with these wilting middle-aged flowers. Gone is the glamour of those heady Diane days, the princess oozing sex appeal – if not, apparently, in her husband's straying eyes. His sexual longing always ran towards the dowdy Camilla, as revealed so excruciatingly in the notorious "Tampon call.
According to the Angus Reid poll, 35 per cent of Canadians now prefer an elected head of state and only 27 per cent are content with a monarchy. Rumblings of severing our ties to an across-the-pond sovereign have been given new impetus with this tour.
If Camilla has come in out of the cold, tucked now into the correct side of the silk sheets as far as Brits are concerned; or so palace spin-courtiers insist; Canadians, with so little exposure to this royal couple apparently remain cool. Even the inherent eccentricity of the royal clan – and we all got a voyeuristic kick out of their assorted soap operas through the '80s and '90s – has turned to dullness with their antics. They seem to be suffering from a charisma bypass.''
“Long live the king!” My response to that proclamation is to quote Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dicken’s tale of Christmas, “Bah, humbug.”
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