To the editor,
I'm a fair-weather Coast reader, but Savage cracks me up, so when I pick up the paper I head for the rear, which I think he'd approve of. In the case of the July 5 issue, reading the paper from back-to-front was clearly reading from best-to-bad.
Brent Sedo's cover story on the murder of Bobby Smith ("The silent killers"), with those catchy, graphically gothic, dripping hands, was set up as a story with "a twist worthy of a good Law and Order episode." I'm no fan of the show but this "investigation" was about as compelling as my kid's grade six novel study. It was simply a chronological recollection of events that barely scratched the surface of his obvious beef here: the imperfection of a judicial system that at times allows the guilty to walk free. I'm no defense attorney, but if we didn't allow for "reasonable doubt" our prisons would be full of folks who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or close enough, to be caught up in a big-time mess. Mr. Sedo wraps up his book report with the bad guys going free (implied but not articulated for the obvious legal reasons), while the victim's family laments the failure of seeing justice done. But justice was "done," just not the way we'd all perhaps liked to have seen it played out. This is real life, not some cheesy night of Law and Order.
Then there's "Spinning the bottle," Bruce Wark's editorial. Mr. Wark, exactly what is it you are trying to say? "Close those damn liquor stores, you're gonna kill us all!" To follow this logic, the obesity rates in Nova Scotia are going to fly off the charts because we can all trip out at Sobeys one extra day a week. Nova Scotia has some of the highest obesity and alcohol-abuse rates in this country, and we are also the last province to open our stores on Sunday. It simply isn't going to get statistically worse here, just as it hasn't happened elsewhere.
By Dan LeBlanc
