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the HERALD Wednesday September IBM Opinion People have final say in protecting environment In last weeks column I called for Halton residents to voluntarily focus more attention on reducing the amount of garbage they create and reusing more material they would otherwise put out for garbage collection As residential waste comprises approximately 50 per cent of the waste streamthese two methods of waste conservation must be popularized The popular blue box recycling program alone is inadequate to solve the present day garbage crisis Another essential requirement to soving this problem is for the in dustrial and commercial sectors to follow the same advice Theses sectors are responsible for the other 50 per cent of waste generated the Region Local environmentalists claim Halton Region isnt doing enough to encourage industry and the com mercial sector to develop waste reduction and reuse programs To substantiate thier claim they point to Peel Region Peel has employees working on industrial and commercial waste diversion programs while Halton has four GrantedPeel is significantly larger than Halton however it appears the Region could do more work in this area Art Leitch Public Works Commissioner defends he Regions lack of staff by saying the number of staff isnt the important factor in getting the industrial and Bens Banter by Ben Dummett commercial sectors to become more environmentally conscious needs to have legislative powers over industrial and com mercial garbage pick up to achieve significant results said Mr These powers will enable the Region to dictate to industry and the commercial sector what material is acceptable waste and what material should be diverted from the waste stream through reduction and reuse programs Mr position makes sense because the result gives the Region a big stick to hold over the head of the industrial and commercial sectors Businesses would either have to voluntarily divert a significant amount of garbage they are producing or face municipal bylaws forcing them to take such action Here is where the province plays an important role The Region needs the province to pass legislation enabling it to control industrial and commercial generated waste provinces role doesnt stop here Assuming the province passes the required legislation the Region will also need provincial funding to ensure the industrial and com mercial sectors abide by any reduction and reuse bylaws introduces In the end money will be the deciding factor Since any new government programs are paid through taxes people will have the final say concerning the priority protection takes in and throughout the province Potential of technology generally being ignored The rather comical disaster of the wouldbe revolutionaries in the Soviet Union has provided a new meaning to the word in competence The would be saviors of the Motherland managed to mismanage their coup but at the same time to show how difficult it has become today to control the flow of information With minute world wide coverage the secrecy ele ment needed to create fear is debunked and weakness or in competency is easily exposed The Chinese revolution of the late eighties was made largely possible by the use of the fax machine Apartheid in South Africa is coming to an end because of the power of the elec tronic media Brutality hidden under the cover of censorship is nowadays difficult to use as a tool to solve political problems Unfortunately the reverse is not true While our global information system has shown capacity to expose and debunk it has so far failed to educate and encourage We still live in a world where the real power of the technology we have created is not understood Take the postal strike Television has brought us every evening the picture of elderly people waiting in line for their pension cheques A depress ing and sad vision More depress ing however is the fact that such misery did not need to be inflicted on our people No the solution is not an end to the postal strike and deliver the cheques to pensioner unemployed etcetera The solu an extremely easy and inex pensive one is to get rid of the cheques and transfer the moneys by electronic means It only does take a computer at one end and another one at the other Actually a facility which is available to anybody who owns a computer to the moderate expenditure of a couple of hundred dollars The system is absurdly simple The oldage pensioner gives the Government the number of its bank account and the Govern ment transfers the money to it A procedure already common in many private corporations Please do not raise the point that seniors do not have bank ac counts the exceptions are so few that money could be delivered to those few by horse- and buggy Our Government however has like many of us ignored the potential of the technology which every third grader uses and is still prisoner of the paper world A Provincial government depart ment refused last week to accept information by fax we had to send it in hardcopy by messenger Back to the past Our inability to avoid the unpleasant side effect of the postal strike and the deflation of the Russian coup have one com mon element technological il literacy And one common source the leaders technological illiteracy The past has got some grand features Ignoring the new powers at our fingertips is however not a sign of devotion to the past it spells out just one word incompetence Fixation with excellence is hard to shake At long last a counterattack has been launched against one of the most pernicious obsessions of the late Twentieth Century No less a newspaper than the Globe and Mail has officially beg ged us to stop trying to improve ourselves Praise heaven Just when wed begun to fear that all might be lost our national newspaper is leading the crusade to make the world safe once more from mediocrity Well perhaps Im going a bit overboard The Globe hasnt ex actly launched a crusade But the other day it did run a freelance column which bemoan ed the North American mania for self improvement by which we end up killing ourselves to meet impossibly high ideals of physical beauty intellectual ac complishment and financial sue cess According to the columnist weve utterly lost touch with the traditional meaning of the word satisfactory which tionally meant satisfactory It now means less ttuin excellent and is sneered at accordingly Well Bravo And hear hear In fact Id take this even fur ther Settling for satisfactory rather than excellent is a step in the right direc tion But when you come right down to it whats really wrong with Ive seen worse Personally I dont think this world wilt ever be a happy place until we can all rise in the morn Weirs World Hew St mice ing preferably late in the morn look at ourselves in the ror and happily exclaim Every day in every way Im deteriorating less rapidly than I might be Granted the fixation with ex cellence will be a hard one to shake considering that weve ail been victimized by the most in propoganda campaign in the history of humankind I refer of course to self help books Self help books repeatedly assure me that I should be able to accomplish anything I put my mind to This is because I am a Truly Special Individual there is not another one like me in the en tire world But weve swallowed this doc trine whole and hurled ourselves headling into the pursuit of ex cellence beginning with day care centres for gif Personally Im never really sure what a gifted child is in the first place Perhaps theyre referring to kids like my boyhood Sam who was able to entertain us at birthday paties by squirting pop through his nostrils On the other hand I sometimes suspect that a gifted child is in actual fact a perfectly ordinary child whose parents are deter mined to produce a genius even if it kills the little beggar The fatal blow in the whole doc- trine of self improvement is of course perfectly illustrated by the societal quest for physical fitness The world is full of people who are obsessed with running faster and further than they were able to do before Unfortunately this flies in the face of the fact that the human being reaches his peak in terms of physical energy and capacity for exertion at the age of two He starts onto the downhill slope at about the same time as he masters the intricacies of the pot When its put in this tive we can see the futility of our aspirations to climb as it were to the mountaintop For most of us the journey through life is more like a descent from the foothills They key is to do it gracefully Sooner or later were all going to wind up resting in peace The truly happy man is the one who starts doing so well before he is dead Hi Yin Peels Corner THE SPIDER AND THE FLY Do you love me asked the spider Yes I you said the fly Then come and Ih with me she said Oh no he said Id die Were not meant to lie together For you then kill our mate Id rather Ih e alone Than suffer such a fate But I do truly loieyou And Id cherish you said she Id ever hard you And Id tote you faithfully The fly thought about the spider And he missed her It was true dfdnt want to e without her So he knew just what hed do He came to see her at her web To beg forgiveness for his sin But before he could e en call her He got firmly stuck thereln His Impassioned pleas Oh help me Brought the spider to his side And she gazed at him in sadness And she held him as he died She failed to hear his dying words As her poor heart broke in sorrow And she stored his stiffening body And said Ill deal with this tomorrow The next day as she ate her lunch His body mistake She learned at last his dying words But It was then too late Su sure hed been shed kill him Hed committed suicide Hed filled himself with poison Which the spider ate then died Theres a moral to this story Its enough to make you cry You can sometimes trust a spider But never a suspicious fly L Rockwood Write us a letter The Herald wants to hear from you If you have an opinion you want to express or a eom- ment to make send us a or drop by the office Our address is 45 Guelph Street Georgetown Ontario 3Z6 All letters must be signed Please include your address and telephone number for verification