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PORT PERRY STAR - Tuesday, July 10, 2001 - 7 Question of the Week... Do you think Lake Scugog is safe to swim Mike Donaldson in? It seemed fine. This Dee Laws Not at all. Three summers ago my son went in for not even 10 minutes and five days later he was (sick). is the first time I've been in it, but | did see the sign. (Kinsmen Beach has been posted unsafe for the past five weeks) Mike Bryant Not around this time of year, with this humidity. The bacte- Hilda Sibma - Not after | saw the sign. We went Dave Dailey Not around the beach area, near swimming before the shore. Maybe fia level Is prety the sign was put out (in the middle). high, but it's the up. | same thing every year. Page Seven by Jeff Mitchell ON THE PASSING OF HEROES One of the things | routinely do during the course of my day, ~ and don't ask me why, is look up papers like The New York Times on the Internet, and read the obituaries. "It's good to keep abreast of things, you know, and among the salient information that's out there is, in addition to what's going on with the people moving among us, information on who's no longer among us. And to tell the truth, the obituary news of late has left me a little bummed out. No fewer than three of my heroes have died in the past few weeks, and while these deaths have no real impact on my day-to-day life, they have saddened me, and left my world a little less magical and inspiring than it was before. Consider: * John Lee Hooker, blues pioneer, who passed away peacefully at age 83. Everyone who's ever picked up a guitar or harmonica and attempted to recreate the blues owes John Lee Hooker, large. A funny John Lee Hooker story: One magical summer, probably 20 years ago, a friend and | made it our mission to catch every big name blues act that passed through Toronto. We saw B.B. King; we stood and cheered and wouldn't let Muddy Waters leave the stage. Lightnin' Hopkins played for us in a sweaty bar, and Buddy Guy took a liking to my girlfriend, and played for us all night. And when | was informed by my pal that John Lee Hooker was playing the amphitheatre at Ontario Place on a Friday night, we boarded a bus and made our way to the city, snuck illicitly-obtained whiskey through the gates, and went to the stage area - only to find a high school band warming up... Turns out Hooker was playing two weeks from the date we arrived, and we were in for an evening of performances by prize-winning marching bands. Undaunted, we stretched out on the grass in the cool evening air and drank the whiskey, while on stage kids wheezed and farted their way through J.P. Sousa's greatest hits. Two weeks later we came back to see John Lee Hooker growl about being a Crawlin' King Snake. He was cooking. I'll never forget it. Mordecai Richler. What Canadian who can read does not love Mordecai Richler? His novels have enriched my life and fostered in me a keen appreciation for and pride in Can Lit; a brilliant writer, each of whose works is an absorbing and memorable joumey. And he was also the quintessential curmudgeon, something | have always secretly hankered to be. Rumpled, smoky, boozy, sarcastic... and loved by all who knew him well. Unswayed by criticism and controversy, he fearlessly confronted and ridiculed the dim-wits who irked him, such as Quebec's language zealots. The Canadian universe has shrunk a little with his passing. It is sad indeed. Chet Atkins. Mr. Guitar. Years ago, when | was a.rocker with hair down to my bum, there were a clatch of Chet Atkins records, among The Who, and Hendrix, and Black Sabbath and such, in my collection. We were all guitar freaks then, of course, amazed by guys with big hair and tight pants who could play blazing scales and complex chords. | found Chet Atkins in my dad's record collection, put it on... and kept it. And bought more and more, finding each new slab of vinyl remarkable. Perhaps even more interesting was his career as a producer, aiding the careers of musicians like Merle Travis, Dolly Parton, Kitty Wells, Charlie Pride - and Canada's great, tragic player, Lenny Breau. Chet Atkins was one of those guys, low-key and brilliant, who let the music do the talking. "Years from now, after I'm gone someone will listen to what I've done and know | was here. They may not know or care who | was, but they'll hear my guitars speaking for me," he said. I'll miss him, too. Funny that the end of a life so distant from one's own in so many ways can cause melancholy, especially on a bright summer morning such as this. But these people, these artists, give of themselves, and when we accept what they give, and come to admire them, we identify with them, sometimes profoundly. So we raise a toast, look for their work in the book case, put one of their disks on and appreciate it. And say thanks for the memories, | guess. The Final Bell By Rik Davie WE ALLOW ABUSE When stories of child abuse come to light, the first and last question all of us ask is, how? The recent allegations of hor- rific abuse visited on two young brothers near Blackstock gained almost immediate national atten- tion. While they remain unproven allegations, the very possibility that children who attended school on a regular basis spent most of their after-school time locked in make-shift cages, wearing diapers - maybe for years - begs the question: How did this go unnoticed? Unnoticed by teachers, by neighbours, by the very children who shared a seat on the school bus with these kids. How could they not know? The most horrifying thing about this type of sub- human child treatment is that the answer to how is this: It is quite simple, really. Grant Yeo, director of education for the Durham District School Board, said that teachers in our school system are obliged to report even the suspi- cion of abuse against a child. "Normally the charges come as a result of visible bruises or marks, or vivid changes in behaviour of a child," Mr. Yeo said. "But it is not always simple." Teachers, like the resf of us, do not want to think of the people they have met in parent interviews or other situations as being child abusers. They, like the rest of us, want a reasonable explanation for the signals of possible child abuse. We hope that the school setting will be the first place possible abuse will be spotted and yet, because some who enter the teaching profession use the position to abuse the children they should protect, we have passed rules and laws that prevent the kind of hands-on and emotional contact between teacher and student that would give an abused child the safety zone in which to confide in a teacher. How can this happen? That's how, and that's always been how. Take my best friend. The man who has been closest to me since we both attended a rural high school was horribly abused, physically and mentally, along with his numerous siblings, by a tyrannical man whose only gift to his family was an early death. My friend's aggressive and physical behaviour throughout his youth was attributed variously to laziness, a bad attitude and even learning disabilities. The wonder of it is that his abuse was common knowledge among his friends and neighbours. This abuse was accepted as a parent's need to control "those rowdy kids." In adulthood he 's a quiet, introspective man of strong beliefs and a deep, gentle love for his young son that is a strange contrast to his huge physical size, and a menacing appearance that sends most people to the other side of the street. We failed him. Just as we fail children every day with low funding for prevention of child abuse, and information programs. We have become top heavy in treatment programs to help the victims of child abuse, and ignore the preventative measures that could stop abuse before the damage is done. We hamstring teachers and put them jn the posi- tion of risking their own careers through civil suits if they err on the side of caution in suspected child abuse cases. Child abuse happens because we let it. That is the how of child abuse. We should accept it and fix it.