Pickering College - Voyageur Yearbook (Newmarket, Ontario Canada)

Page 21 text:

of peace on our border, but in all modesty we should recognize that the credit largely goes to our gentle giant of a neighbour. Let's face itg it's a long time since we have had to wrestle with the temptation to conquer the United States. The kind of patriotism wedon'twantin this country is negative patriotism directed against the Americans or the British or the French or even those dirty rotten Swedish hockey players. It must be a national feeling based on confidence of what we are in our own unique way. It is important to realize that we are not just a second class United States, a generation or two behind them and going in the same direction. The fact that weact and look much alike and use the same mouth wash conceals the fact that as countries we are different. It is not only that we differ in the way our governments work but we differ also in our ideas of what a country should be. Now to consider ourselves different doesn't mean that we consider the Americans or others to be inferior. The world needs different kinds of countries. Just now, it especially needs countries like Canada which can prove that it is possible to have different cultures and languages within a single state. One of the major causes of war in the world is the fact that there are thousands of different races and tribes and languages and the boundaries of exist- ing countries don't coincide with the boundaries between them. If we tried to makea separate state out of each one of them, the world would be bogged down with all kinds of little countries who couldn't run themselves. We have to cling together in groups to make a go of it. Too few Canadians realize that we are in the majority in the world, and that it is a minority of countries which have only one language. And of all the countries with more than one we are the luckiest. We began life with the world's two richest and most valuable tongues. In some bilingual countries you would have to learn Urdu or Swahili or Flemish. All the world should admire what the United States has done in its two centuries. It has set the great example of democracy and produced something new, the all-American man. Not realizing that we have another mission, many Canadians are beating their breasts because we haven't created the all-Canadian man with the same measurements from the Yukon to Cape Breton. Well we are trying to do something else and we always have, and our success should not be judged by our uniformity because that is not what we are after. It is a marvelous thing that you can exist freely here in one way as a Prince Edward Islander and in another way as a British Columbian or Quebecker, or if you prefer the hard life as a seal-hunter in the Magdalen Islands or a student at St. Andrew's College. This is the freest country in the world because we don't have to conform to any single idea of what a citizen ought to be. lt isn't so much unity we should be after as harmony. I don't see why, for instance, French and English shouldn't have their own words to 0 Canada. It is true that for us it gets a bit exhausting being on guard for thee four times, as if we didn't have any forwards on the team. And the French words are a little hard for an Orangeman to swallow, but I don't know many Orangemen who want to sing in French. The words of a national anthem are really a kind of beloved ritual regardless of their meaning. When you start trying to have them make sense you're in trouble. If you look at the silly words of The Star Spangled Banner, you will realize that it's a good tune that's the thing. It is better that French and English Canadians be united Seventeen

Page 20 text:

Wondrous and sweet is our name. Canada! The very word is like a boy's shout in the springtime, is like the clamour of geese going north and the roar of melting rivers and the murmur of early winds. Can we not hear the sound of Canada? Can we not hear it in the rustle of yellow poplar leaves in October, and in the sudden trout- splash of a silent lake, the whisper of saws in the deep woods, the church bells along the river, the whistle of trains in the narrow passes of the mountains, the gurgle of irrigation ditches in the hot nights, the rustle of ripe grain under the wind, and the bite of steel runners in the snow? Have we not felt the texture of Canada? Have we not felt it in the damp, spring forest floor, in the caress of the new grass upon our face, in the salt spray off Fundy or Juan de Fuca, in the hot sun of the prairie, in the beat of blizzards and fierce surge of summer growth? And the colours of Canada... We have seen them in the harsh sweep of prairie snow, in sunlight and shadow vibrant across the heavy-headed wheat, in foaming apple orchards and in maple woods, crimson as blood, and in bleeding sumac by the roadside, and in white sails out of Lunenburg and in the wrinkled face of mountains. I would be inclined in 1967 to throw in the perpetual whine of the riveters in our great cities and the sun on the wings of a jetliner at forty below. We are no longer mainly country folk, though we may all be at heart. Whenl was looking up noble old poets of a hundred years ago I found some that had more enthusiasm than art. There wasa bard from Cape Breton who was so overcome with Queen Victoria's Jubilee that he addressed her thus in verse: Hail our great Queen in full regalia, One foot in Canada, the other in Australia. There was another who celebrated the entry of all those rough Fort Garry settlers into Confederation in 1870 with a poem that began: Now everybody drunk or sober, Sing loud the praise of Manitoba. My favourite poet of a hundred years ago was a Scotch-Canadian called Alex Glendinning who wrote inspirational things like those called Dam Yankees, 1830 and The Battle of Yonge Street, l837 . As survivors of Yonge Street traffic I am sure you would enjoy the references to loyal Scarborough's men of fight and the last two lines: And mothers mourn and widows weep Theflower of Markham's chivalry. He also tried to scare off the Fenians with a poem that wound up: Down with the ruffians and pound them like snakes: What business have they on this side of the Lakes? Please don't repeat that last line in the year of Expo. Their hearts were in the right place even if they didn't scan very well. But if there was good reason to shake a fist at the Yankees in those days there is less now. We like to take pride jointly for our unfortified frontier and the 150 years Sixteen

Page 22 text:

FL. X. .5 ' 5. 4. 1 1 E Nl nw 'X gf! vl 47N LW, gil The Headmaster. The Chairman ofthe Board. 'Q 4 S: .9 ' . f'.f7f.,. ' , fv- fx . VX. 1511.41 Pickering People: Joseph McCulley, John W. Holmes, Samuel Rogers, Arthur G. Dorland, and Harry M. Beer. lr'1'r1