Success and accomplishments abound

The news sometimes is enough to make me sick. Assaults on the street. Sentencing in the courts for drunk driving. A shaky economy. Wars. Poverty. Starvation.

So when it sometimes gets too much, here's my advice: Just ignore it and look for the accomplishments in our society. It will brighten your day. And boy, we've had a boatload of accomplishments recently.

Start with Vancouver, where Jon Montgomery is the toast of Canada, Manitoba, Westman and, in particular, Russell, for his gold-medal performance in the men's skeleton. You'll be excused for thinking before the Games began that the skeleton was last year's Halloween costume worn by your neighbour's six-year-old, but now you know better. It's an Olympic sport which demands that you be afraid of nothing, that you be athletic, determined and maybe just a little bit crazy. Montgomery fits that criteria to a T — especially the last part, according to people who know him well, and now he's an Olympic gold medalist. (But it's a good kind of 'crazy'.)

Come back to Brandon from the Olympics and pay a visit to the Western Manitoba Centennial Auditorium and you will see accomplishment galore in music, dance and speech arts as the Brandon Festival of the Arts runs until March 14. Performers from pre-teens to adults show off their talents every spring and besides what you see on stage, you'll see scads of volunteer accomplishment as well. Local people like festival president William Gordon, who simply knows that the show can't go on without a cast of people willing to give their time to make it happen, well . . . they make it happen. Festival volunteers take tickets, assist the adjudicators and give advice to inquiring members of the media, and dozens of other thankless tasks. And why? Just because they like to improve their community, and it doesn't get any better than that.

You'll see all kinds of accomplishments in our high schools. Kids these days are no worse and no better, in my opinion, than they were 40 years ago when I was in high school. They're probably smarter, because they've got access to so much more information than we did. Don't believe the complaints you hear from some older members of our society who say today's kids are no good for nuthin' and bound for a lamentable future. That's only a small minority, about the same small minority as we had as age-peers 40 years ago. Drop into a high-school classroom, as I have had the opportunity to do a couple of times in recent weeks, and you'll see informed, enthusiastic, smart and talented kids ready to take over as leaders in our society. Our future's in good hands, believe me.

You want accomplishment? You don't have to look much further than Kelly McCrimmon's Bran-don Wheat Kings, who will be in the four-team Memorial Cup championship this May because they are the hosts, but they are strong enough to win the league title outright. If they do, or if they don't, it won't be an upset. While McCrimmon has the team playing on all cylinders, some of the individual skills these kids possess are to make you die for a video recorder when you see a tic-tac-toe passing play between Matt Calvert, Brayden Schenn and Scott Glennie, or when Finnish import Toni Rajala starts to dangle with Jay Fehr and Aaron Lewadniuk on his line. Sometimes they make it look so easy, and it's a joy to behold.

You want accomplishment? Stay away from the front page of the daily, or the first few minutes of the nightly news. Go inside to the sports pages, the entertainment section and the school corner. There are accomplishments galore and unless you're going out of your way to find the bad stuff for some perverse reason, you'll get flooded by the good stuff.

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