Pickering College - Voyageur Yearbook (Newmarket, Ontario Canada)

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comfortably somewhere, think back for a moment to 'the common good', and derive some satisfaction from knowing the soothing words. I hope there won't be many in this last category ..... h Quite a few years ago now, there was a guy wandering around the Mediter- ranean shores, telling people for God's sake to smarten up and realize that when, tby following graven imagesl, they denied themselves the love of their fellow man and what he called the 'life of the spirit, which you can take to mean whatever you like, they were throwing away the only things that made the business of living at all worth while, the only things that raised it from a. stupid routine of being born, then suffering, and finally dying, to something glorious and triumphant. His name was Jesus of Nazareth, and most people thought He was crazy. Finally they nailed Him up on a cross because they got a. little afraid that if they let Him talk long enough everyone would start taking Him seriously. If He were on earth today I think He'd say just about the same things now as He did then. I don't think He'd admit that we've made much progress in His particular field. Probably the same thing would happen to Him as did then, and He'd be hung, electrocuted or put in a straightjacket as a radical or a nut.. It's my contention here tonight, however, that it's about time we realized He had something, and took His advice and acted on it. Those of us going into the world now have a great opportunity to do just that, at the same time using the conditioning of this school. We can refuse to accept the rules of a selfish society, and fight to find better ones. We can decide to stay out of the rat-race, and to put whatever energies we save thereby, and they will be considerable, into the much finer pursuit of whatever is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is honest, in the universe. We can decide to Wipe selfishness out of our lives and dedicate ourselves to helping others. We can resolve that by doing these things with many others, we can put an end to war, and greed, and starvation, and injustice. We can, in other words, make up our minds to follow in the tradition of man's few moments when he was at his best .... Perhaps the desire for power in man is an inescapable fact, but surely it's about time to at least give it a twist, and exchange the power of money for the power of knowledge, truth, and ideas. Going into the world now, we have an opportunity to do these things. It isn't, however, quite as simple as saying it. It means relearning a great deal, and sacrihcing a great deal, and working a great deal. It means being looked on with ridicule and being treated with disrespect. In the end, however, it is well worth it, and the end will be achieved when there are enough people of this sort. It is in such people, living such lives, that the only hope for a rather lpopeless world can be found. I hope that there are some of these before me tonight ..... FUI11'ff'1'I1

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reality, in a society which staunchly affirms that it is a Christian society, re- placed religion, and money has become man's God. As well as being ruthless, the pursuit of wealth is also a thing which allows no time for love of anything other than wealth. And this is the worst feature of it. It makes of men hollow shells who can appreciate nothing. They can have no love of beauty, art, ideas, culture, and most important of all, theif fellow man, because the business of making money becomes and must become so all- engrossing. I realize that all these things which I have just mentioned are abstract terms which regularly get the hell kicked out of them, but despite their abstract quality, they are, I think, things without which no one can have a life with any meaning. The man who looks at a sunset, and feels no thrill or sense of awe or humbleness, but sees it merely as a large blob, all of the colour of gold pieces, has little, I maintain, which makes his life worthwhile. Yet men whose lives are solely concerned with the acquisition of things, almost of neces- sity have no time to regard a sunset or a piece of music or a work of art as anything else, if indeed they have time to regard them at all. There may be exceptions but they are few and far between. The point I am trying to make is this-that the main concern of man today is getting things for himself, and that this is essentially a selfish individual business which rules out most of the things that are fine on the planet. This in turn means that a whole selfish society is created in which each man watches out only for his own interests, no matter who is hurt in the process. In such a society it is, of course, inevitable that all kinds of conflicts arise between men, and translated to an international scale, these result in major wars .... This then, is the kind of world into which we are going-a selfish world, hang- ing because of its very nature, always on the verge of war, in which we must look out for ourselves from the word 'go' or get trampled. Now this is not the sort of conditioning which we have had in this school. Here, we help each other to a fair extent. If you're out of a cigarette and someone else has lots, you ex- pect him to give you one, or he's a shmoe, and he usually comes through, I think. And this is the major pattern of life in this school. You have had. all in all, with varying degrees of success, a fair training in helping the other 'guy' out. You have sat in these seats for some twenty odd chapels at least, and read off glowing phrases like 'transmitting this city better than it was transmittedf or 'the good life shared by all', or 'the second mile', or 'Ending our welfare in the general good', and so on. And now you're going into the world. I wonder how much some of these things will mean to you after a few years in the world. I wonder how many of you will still be concerned with going that second mile or sharing the good life. I also wonder how many of you will simply, as soon as you leave the school, slip into the selfish way of society. and rush into the rat-race for the big pot of gold: and then, once every couple of years. sitting Th fr! mfr:

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I Remember PHIL ENn1eo'r'l' T wAs A calm Sunday in May when a tragedy that had occurred many times over the wartime capital of China, occurred so near to our house that I remember it still. i The day had dawned without a sign of a cloud in the sky. My two brothers, my sister, two Chinese boys who were living with us, and myself, had spent the morning playing in our rather large backyard. A Lunch began with the usual amount of chattering, but all at once we fell silent and listened with pounding hearts. Away in the distance to the east of us stood Chungking proper, and it was from that direction that we heard the sound which was the cause of our fear-the dismal wail of the air-raid sirens. telling the world that the Japanese bombers were on their way. What were we to do now? Some were ready to run for our air-raid shelter which was a hole blasted in the side of the small hill behind our house. Others were hungry, and were unwilling to abandon the meal until they heard the planes. VVe agreed upon the latter course, and settled back to finish our meal. How much time elapsed before we heard the second siren I do not know, but it could not have been more than a few minutes. We had just begun to eat when the first siren was heard, and we had not finished our first course when we heard the second. The wail of the siren had barely died away when the dull roar of the bombers was heard. As the roar became louder, we picked up our plates and walked down to our little shelter. It was not long before the Japanese planes were directly over our heads. Then the incident occurred. They encountered a group of Chinese fighters and pro- ceeded to fight it out with them. Nothing to me can be worse than sitting in ar small shelter dug in the side of a hill while two groups of planes fight for supre- macy of the air directly above you. Every few minutes a plane would become too shattered to stay in the air and would start to dive towards the earth with a whistling sound that changed to an almost human scream, then rose to a shriek as the plane neared the earth. Then came the sudden exploding crash as the plane hit the ground. The fight lasted for only two or three minutes, but the sounds of the struggle fwhich we could not seei were frightening. I was so terrified that I could not finish my meal, but just sat in one corner, shaking all over, and listening to the explosions coming from above. The Japs eventually got their way and bombed the city without further attempts by Chinese fighters to stop them. After it was all over, an hour or so from the time the first siren had sounded. we stood on our porch and watched the city burn. Wie knew there was nothing we could do, so we went inside to finish our interrupted meal. And yet we knew that even while we were eating, Chinese who had fled to the country during the raid were once more returning to the city, to a house which by this time was nothing but a pile of smoking rubble. We knew that these people would rake away the debris, and build again, with mud, wood. and straw, beside the holes which had once been their homes. Fifteen