George Rebane

Two back-to-back trips in as many weeks.  Last weekend we celebrated my 50th high school reunion in southern California with a bunch of old geezers who didn’t recognize each other – well, a few did.  And now we’re back from a weekend on Vancouver Island attending a triennial gathering with friends.  The scenery was classic northwest with low scudding clouds, bands of rain, and intermittent impenetrable fogs.  We took the ferry from Port Angeles to Victoria, a wonderfully scenic and tidy city with sweeping views of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  After a day plus exploring the town’s waterfront and antique stores, we drove through aboriginal forested mountains and lakes to the small resort town of Tofino nestled in the archipelago that shields the Pacific side of the big island.  On the way back after the festivities, we stopped for lunch in Port Alberni, the island’s biggest inland town and former home to several pulp mills.  Now only one remains and uses technology to produce more with a couple of hundred employees that formerly numbered over four thousand.  These people know economic hard times.  We took the long and picturesque ferry ride from Nanaimo back to the mainland.  It is now an hour’s wait to cross the border back into the US of A.  Remember the good old days of going to and coming from Canada?

During the current financial crisis, a correspondent is appropriately angered by what he considers as piling on in an already difficult situation.  He suggested that I insert his short rumination among my own – 
“Producer, advertisers, and writers of the Good Morning America show should be arrested for doing the equivalent of “yelling fire in a crowded theatre.”  Their fear peddling has gone over the line.  With a demographic of retirees and homemakers GMA has stooped to the selling of panic.  They have a Financial Crisis Hotline icon flashing constantly as they interview doomsday interviewees and anchormen, and women with nothing more than a communications (or theatrical) degree assume the role of financial planners and economists.  The same pseudo anchormen and women spend the mornings peddling fear in the hopes of creating ‘runs on banks’ and a ‘run on the stock market.’  Fear sells, and GMA should have sold out weeks ago.   Lock the bums up.”