PageM12 May 23,1990. This Week ANADA, EH What if they held a war... y favorite part of the Bible is The ~ Song of Solomon, and my favorite part of the The Song of Solomon is the verse that goes: They shall beat their swords into plough- shares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not I doubt that SAC Bombers would make useful traffic spotters and I can’t see Leopard Tanks converting easily to school buses. Think we could persuade the PM and his cabinet cronies to give up the limos in favour of jeep cavalcades to and from the airport? metal that look like they were slapped together by a third-rate performance artist on a very bad day: Theyre air raid sirens. There’s 1700 of them4 distributed right across the country. It was John Diefenbaker’s idea back in the’50s. He wanted to alert Canadians that the lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any- more. Twenty-eight simple words elegantly threaded into a statement first ut- tered in Biblical times. ==Basie Black By ARTHUR BLACK Russians were coming — or their bombs were — and to let us know ahead of time to head for the fallout shelters. Neither the Russians or their bombs ever showed up of course, and the air raid sirens remained on We've had 2,000 years to practise and we still can’t get the hang of it. Of course, things are more complicated now. We don’t use swords and spears much any- more. Would a Kalashnikov rifle make a- decent ploughshare? How many pruning hooks would you get out of a CF-18 combat jet? And who wants to risk beating a nuclear warhead into anything? Tough decisions — especially Perhaps we won't have to make all the decisions of hardware disposition. Perhaps nature will do it for us. As a matter of fact, its already happening. Look up onto the rooftops of many of the nation’s schools, fire stations and other public buildings. You can still see a few of them up there — gawky, ungainly looking blobs of sheet the roofs, freakish and silent. Last month a government report revealed that those air raid sirens couldn’t do their job if they had to. Thirty years of frigid Canadian winters and torrid summers, of rain and hail and general neglect have left the nation’s air raid sirens rusted, cobwebbed and virtually useless. Even if the sirens could wail it wouldn't do much good. They're the products of 1950s tech- nology, not powerful enough to pen- when youre living on a planet that’s been fueled ard fired by hate, fear and suspicion pretty much since Cain disabled Abel. We’ve got a lot invested in swords and spears. There are 87,000 Canadians in the Armed Forces. A lot of businesses in Canada graze off military con- tracts, turning out everything from bayonets to napalm. What happens to all that if nations truly decide to “learn war no more”? And there’s the simple hard- ware problem. Assuming that the Cold War really is over, and pray- ing that our leaders really are deft enough neyer to get us embroiled in anything so asinine again — what do we do with the tons of military junk that we’ve accumu- lated? etrate the soundproofed walls of today’s apartment houses. And even if they did wail and 26 million Canadians did hear them and realized they had, say, twenty minutes to escape a nuclear attack — what good would it do? Where would you run? How would you get there? Why. would you bother? All those questions, thank god, have been rendered academic by the Gorbachey Revolution. Just as well, I guess. According to the government report, mice are now nesting in those old air raid sirens. Squirrels use them for stor- ing nuts. Bees are even making honey in them. Mouse nests, nut banks and hon- eycombs, eh? Well, it’s not quite ploughshares, but it’s close enough for me. LEARN TO DRIVE. We have the ammunition. All you need is the desire! 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