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the torce Of It. _ ( } I finished my coffee and was halfway up the stairs to check the noise source when the building shook with a second tremor. It was followed closely by a third, lesser shock. [ & **What on earth was that?" "I didn‘t hear anything,‘‘ I told her. ‘‘You must have; it sounded like Skylab in our attic. And besides, the ‘overhead light is still swinging from the force of it." '"l‘l;'édvfié idea what to expect so I started looking into secondâ€"floor rooms until I found the area that had been hit. ‘ Retracing the route down the stairs, I gave my reâ€" port on the condition of the attack zone. "It‘s just the kids playing that game where they jump from the bureau to the bed, and Jenny keeps missing." Noise. It‘s all around us. Phones are ringing, people are talking, traffic is trafficking; and it has all beâ€" come very much a part of our everyday life. Kids are running around making a helluva din and distraught parents are invariazly running right behind them yellâ€" The lady of the house continued to study whatever it was she had been reading, and my account fell on deaf ears, so to speak. I took it upon myself to call upstairs asking the kids to play some other game, and that too got a reaction of undivided disregard. ~ _ The second time I called upstairs, I startled the kids, my wife and myself. Which brings me to the point of all this> S 2o Perhaps. But the fact is, the Canadian governâ€" ment‘s budget indicates it will spend $867,658,000 directly on Indians or descendants of other native peoâ€" "ple this year alone. According to a column by Toronto Sun writer Dougâ€" las Fisher, that‘s two per cent of total government spending annually. Almost one billion dollars. â€" Since my column last week on the plight of Vietâ€" namese refugees, I‘ve had a number of discussions on the subject. And, to my chagrin, I‘ve found most peoâ€" ple have some illâ€"feelings about letting 80,000 boat people settle in Canada. Two common concerns seem to be the spread of disease due to the influx of refugees, and the plight of native people in Canada versus the plight of refugees. The latter point would seem to be a valid one. Why is our government allowing 80,000 refugees into the country when so many Canadian Indians are living in No doubt, the argument centering around our own native people is an emotional one. Could the money being spent on the Vietnamese be better spent on Inâ€" dians? > That $867 million is basically divided up between two departmentsâ€"Health and Welfare and Indian Afâ€" fairs. One program, under the Indian Affairs minâ€" . So this is the Year of the Child. Well, you can have it. And them. Our society is breaking up fast. First, in the 60s, the teenagers took over. They got into drugs and politics and violence and dropping out and comâ€" munes and health food and free love and rippingâ€"off the government and driving their parents to drink and depression Then we got into Women‘s Liberation Movement. Raucous and intelligent women trying to upset a perâ€" fectly good system that has been working well, on the whole, for about 20,000 years. We should never have given them the vote back in ‘21, or whenever They have wrecked family life, population growth, and the economy by their ridiculous demands. They have psychologically castrated their husbands and turned the occasional kid they had into a whining brat who thinks that love and whatever else he wants are more important than a good whack on the bum. They have sent the unemployment rate soaring by sailing into the job market in their hundreds of thouâ€" sands. Just because they have high skills or a univerâ€" sity degree. they think and say, quite openly and withâ€" out shame. that they should be considered on the same level as, or even higher than, a Grade 10 dropout male who can barely tie his shoelaces. Sheer arrogance conditions on reserves or in squalid towns and Howard Elliott By Geoff Hoile ing for them to shut up. If 1 understand it correctly, too loud a noise or even ‘a medium volume for a long enough time will flatten the hair in your inner ear and give you relief from all the noise I‘ve been talking about. The only problem is you won‘t hear anything. . _ 10 30. A noisy restaurant would be around 80 decibels, a powerful snowmobile puts out an uncomfortable 125 decibels and your average rock band can be anywhere along the scale depending on how close to blast off they feel they are. Apparently the average factory runs around 80 to 90 decibels, which is a subject of There‘s absolutely no way of getting away from it. You lock yourself in a phone booth and sure as hell some guy in a hurry will start banging on the doo% use the phone. Some people have for decades making a good living out of making noise â€" recording pop music. But why all the fuss? According to the Canadian Hearing Society â€" who deal in sound barriers, hearing thresholds, decibels and a multitude of other impressive elements of sound â€" listening to a vacuum cleaner for an extended period of time can cause permanent hearing loss. On a scale of decibels the noise impact of an Apollo liftoff would be 190 whereas a sexy whisper would only rate For a .long time I thought both my kids must be going deaf; they shout at us whenever they want to conveg some tidbit of information. It took me three months before 1 realized th%}; were being '{)ro' grammed by the guys flogging LPs and tapes by Kâ€"Tel on Saturday morning TV. Yet many people feel we should spend more on our native people rather than opening our economic and social doors to the Vietnamese refugees. With staggering expenditures like that, can we honâ€" estly be concerned about a mere 80,000 people and their needs? â€" â€"I find that especially grating since the refugees aren‘t even being sponsored by the government for the most part but rather by private interest groups. National Health and Welfare is another big spender on native people. That ministry spends $128.7 million on Indian Health Services and Northern Health Serâ€" vices, two programs specifically designed to keep naâ€" tive people reasonably healthy. Judging by the amount of public money spent on naâ€" tive people programs, it seems safe to assume that our government is genuinely concerned about Indians and Inuits in Canada. According to the Native Council of Canada, there are over one million native people in Canada. But Douglas Fisher said government census records inâ€" dicate only 313,000 Indian and Inuit people. Assumiflg the government records are correct, this country is spending over threeâ€"quarters of a billion dollars on under half million people. _ _ They have wrecked the educational system by reâ€" fusing to remain baby factories. This has caused raâ€" pidly falling enroliment in our schools and a lack of jobs for male teachers, whose wives are among the worst examples of tiny families and hitting the job market. And now it‘s the year of the kids. There are series on childâ€"battering in the papers, articles about oneâ€" parent children, and even child symposiums in which the little turkeys are asked to comment on how their parents should behave, what‘s wrong with the world, what freedoms they should have, and any other inane question a smarmy, patronizing interviewer can think up. _. istry, is called Indian and Inuit Affairs, and it will cost taxpayers $728 million this year. o We are smothered by stuff from the media about children: dayâ€"care centres, inner city schools (slums), special education, gifted chlidren, obscene Tâ€" shirts for kids. We are harassed and harangued by priests who have never had a child and social workers up to their ears in stale psychiatry, and politicians who know that kids can‘t vote, but grab the coatâ€"tails of any issue that receives media attention. And what good is all this going to do the kids? Not much. They‘ll go right on doing what they‘ve always done: dreaming, fighting, playing;. being the happy. morose, belligerent, shy, cruel, gentle, brilliant, slow, and utterly delightful little animals they‘ve always Abcbrdin [+] to 'Hoiléâ€"â€"â€"4â€"\ I Bill Smiley The Canadian Hearing So:;flet{ conducted free hearâ€" ing tests in Fairview Park Mall last week as a public service. About a year ago an audiometrist conducted one of these checks on my internal sound system and found that my woofers were okay but my tweeters were going downhill. Desolated by this terrif('mg news, I tried to blame it on the cold I had the day I was tested. In ration I sought the advice of a wonm is to have a remedy for everythintfi inc warts, dandruff and an excess of hair on the bottom of your feet. She told me to take daily megadoses of orange juice. ‘"‘Orange juice!‘"‘ she said ‘‘is the only solution, son. Take lots of it and you will drown that cold, and once again hear those crystal clear high notes." 7 What could I say? Armed with this punchy insight, and a jug of orange juice, I have been creeping around the house listening. Listening to every sound 1 can find: The clock ticking. The tap drippinfi. The frig humming. I almost dived under the sink when the phone rang. _ â€" o e â€" Last night I tipâ€"toed into the kids‘ room. Silence. Nineâ€"yearâ€"old Tony is standing on his bed firing what looks like a machineâ€"gun at me, and there‘s no sound. Good grief, the orange juice has failed me‘ Sm living in a sonic vacuum. Panic. I start raving that I can‘t hear the gun. I‘m a gonner. * Tony gives me a slightly scornful glance and exâ€" plains that laser guns wipe you out silently. As an afâ€" terthought he says, ‘"Dad, are you sure it‘s okay for you to drink all that orange juice; it‘s making you act kinda weird." Whether they are Indians from northern Ontario, Inuits from the Northwesf Territories or the Yukon, or boat people from Vietnam, they are after all, peoâ€" ple who need our help. NEXT WEEK:; How serious is the threat of disease being brought to Canada by the refugees? Is there a threat at all? Â¥ ,/In fact, refugees had to pay the government in gold so that they could leave their homes and fight for life on the China Sea. In comparison, I have to feel that our native people aren‘t suffering to any great extent. If health, social and living conditions in native areas are poor, it cerâ€" tainly isn‘t due to lack of financing. I‘m not suggesting for a moment that we shouldn‘t be concerned about the folk that inhabited our land before the French and English arrived and began squabbling over territory. But let‘s not forget, that Vietnamese are natives in some land as well. While our government spends milâ€" lions on educating and caring for native people, Vietâ€" nam‘s government and others like it spend money on exiling their people. If we‘re going to be concerned about the welfare of minority groupsâ€"such as Indians and Inuitsâ€"let us at least be universal in our concerns. In Canada they‘ll be overâ€"fed, overâ€"spoiled and over here. In Africa they‘ll be overâ€"starved, overâ€"populated and over there. And in both places they‘ll be overâ€" loved with that weird, irrational love of children that prevails throughout the world, civilized or uncivilized. Oh, a few laws might be passed, and many resoluâ€" tions approved. But the drunken mother or father who beats a chld will go on doing so. The ultraâ€"permissive parents will go on turning out monstrous teenagers. The overâ€"protective parents will go on turning out still more monstrous teenagers. But the great mass of kids in this Year of the Chilâ€" dren will be much like every other generation: curious, resentful of things that they don‘t underâ€" stand. ready to fight to death for ideals, gradually conforming and compromising to the realities of life, and going on to become monstrous parents themselâ€" ves Now I don‘t speak from the seat of the Old Philo sopher, or any such hypocritic elevation. I recently had a visit from my Grandboys. I speak firstâ€"hand. It was Easter weekend. and we‘re still scraping chocolate off the woodwork and picking up squashed jellyâ€"beans and ripped rabbits‘ ears But it was a great weekend. That marvelious alcheâ€" mist, Time. has wrought a great change in them. They are becoming personal friends, instead of sibling rivals. *~ The Canadian Hearing Society conducted free hearâ€"