19:20 - 09.08.05
Scarecrows
I've been dreaming or getting glimpses of Saint Francis of Assisi whenever I've meditated the past few weeks. I was wondering if my Mom was trying to communicate something to me that way. You see, she, my Dad and my brother visited Italy in 1990. I am certain the two places my Mom said she loved the most were the Isle of Capri and the church dedicated to St. Francis in Assisi. That resonated for me, because the one Prayer - "Lord Make me an Instrument of Thy Peace" - is one I've long striven to emulate, although I know I fall short far too often. I thought maybe she was trying to remind me about my own behaviour being the focus of my attention rather than what anyone else was up to. One of her favorite lectures when I was growing up. She had always told me I was to set an example for others, not be like others. I think that is an "oldest child's" lecture somehow. One I steadfastly refused to pass on to my oldest, by the way. Tough enough to be one's own person, let alone an example you know. Besides, who knows what the best example for someone else is anyway. Then, a couple of evenings ago, I received this e-inspirational message about Saint Francis suing for peace first with the leader of the Christian Crusaders and then, when that failed, with the Sultan leading the defense of the Holy Land as it existed at that time. I was amazed at the outcome. Who knew? Maybe it is the strategy that should be tried in the Middle East now. Simple and straight forward, coming from the heart. Not much to lose but our pride now, is there. As I was reading that story, it suddenly dawned on me that there was one other thing I did know about this saint. I'm certain you've already guessed it dear diary, but not being of the Catholic persuasion myself, Saints aren't an area of specialty for me. Those photos my parents brought back from Assisi all showed him with animals. He is the Patron Saint of Animals. And what have I been praying for? A miracle to help me with finding loving homes for all our cats and kittens. Today this story from the healthcare community in Britain arrived in my inbox at home:
"British Patients get Money for Pets
Frequent visitors to some British hospitals could be eligible for an $1,800 stipend to purchase and care for a pet. A health authority in Lewisham plans to set up the chronically sick with a companion as a preventative measure. The project hopes caring for a pet will promote exercise and forestall depression, the Sunday Times of London said."This has a direct impact on (patients') physical and mental health," said Gill Galliano of Lewisham Primary Care Trust. "The benefit for the NHS is that the patients are able to take care of themselves and do not have to visit hospital so frequently." Therapeutic pet visits to British hospital wards have become somewhat standard. Pets for Therapy is a charity that brings 3,500 dogs and 90 cats to bedsides to cheer up the infirmed. "Caring for a pet can help patients to recover faster," Galliano said. "They feel less isolated and undertake increased activity."
See, a solution that not only uses the best aspects of living with pets, but also improves the lives of seniors and saves health care dollars into the mix. As I've noted many times the past couple of years, coming home to the cat family along with my youngest has been what saved my sanity - and lowered my blood pressure. Do I beieve in miracles? Well yes, remember I wrote a while back about the last year of my marriage, when I thought my death was inevitable because of the boys' Dad's addictions. Waking up in my own bed in the wee hours of the night to find myself being cut was what convinced me of that. Having to listen to him raving in the throes of his hallucinations - the psychosis. Believing that any move or response from me would be the trigger to unleash the rage he was expressing from any inhibition. Anyway, I bought my own cemetery plot and made the arrangements for my funeral so that neither my sons nor my family would have to deal with that too. The boys' father was finally charged with drunk driving (bless that police officer many times over) August of that year. Those charges are what made him decide to leave our family in September. I'm not certain why he saw that as a solution, but I didn't really care either. The fact that he made the desertion very public meant he couldn't force his way back in, without putting major cracks in the facade of the deception he was trying to create in others - observers - minds. I still can't figure that part out, but it doesn't matter either. It means I and the boys have had a dozen years more of being alive than I expected. What better miracle could there be? Do I think there could be another reprieve granted, this time for the family cats. Don't know, but I already know that the impossible isn't. Can I envision how? No, but who knew the last angel would come in the form of a policeman. Must have been true what was said once. That we all still have the vestiges of our wings. We may have fallen, but we can get up again.
Anyway I promised to talk more about what I learned at work about social engineering. We all still have vestiges of that horns and tail suit too, eh? Yesterday there was a big drug bust in another community. The drug (meth)lab was created in the other side of a duplex that housed a daycare for toddlers. I guess the idea being that no one would expect that something so dangerous could be carried out so close to children, putting them at extraordinary risk, without detection and complaints from the victims. Chances are the daycare staff and some of the families probably recognized what was happening. The smell and the constant traffic in and out of the unit. They were probably too afraid of the threats they had likely already received. "We'll report your daycare for stinky garbage" or "for the yelling we heard coming from there" or "we'll report that you are bad parents because we can prove you left your child here too long" - you get my drift. They were also probably very afraid of what type of retaliation they and the children would suffer, if it was discovered by the druggies, that they had been reported to the police by the families or daycare staff in question. Those two groups tend to favour non-violence and negotiation as first responses to aggression. Retreat would likely be the most common second choice. Plays right in to the gang's hands - doesn't it. As I noted yesterday, it was some of my sons' feelings - and mine too - that the abuse coming from both sides of my residence for that one month had a lot more to do with making us too afraid to stay living here. Truth is, if I had had the money available to me, I would have gladly moved to a new home - many years ago. However, having raised six sons as a single mom, mostly under my own steam only, not even keeping what I've got in reasonable repair has been possible. When the neighbours started their harassment and threats, the only viable option I could see was to completely strip the house down to the bare structure, since what the neighbours were saying the complaint was that disrepair of the building, as well as the presence and smell of the cats. As I've noted before the smell from cats spraying is most unpleasant, so I can understand that, but the frequency and violence of the verbal abuse and the continuous pressure to "get out" didn't make sense in that context. In a backhanded way though, a drug operation carried out immediately next to the home of an occasional government functionary - me - might seem to be a good cover, since it would be expected that I would be able to stop them somehow. The fact that I have been forced to cope with their presence for the past 20 years puts the lie to that, but who else would realize the circumstances under which the boys and I have had to live. The fact that their Dad not only would not protect his family, but would desert us given any choice, has made us vulnerable to the attacks of all sorts of human predators. I've written about a number of those.
That is what the security workshop was trying to explain to my co-workers too. Bad guys usually will try to hide their activities behind the most treasured social beliefs or conventions. Good manners, pillar of the community facade. I'm a police officer", "I'm a technician for the computer company", "I'm your supervisor's brother and he needs....", but behind the scenes something else again. The video we were shown demonstrated how easily other people can be fooled into giving away things, like passwords and access to a workplace, that they would never consider doing on purpose.
I recall being co-chair of the local Amnesty International group, when a Prisoner of Conscience dossier was sent to us from head office in London, England. Every proposed prisoner was carefully investigated, before being adopted for group action. They could not have used or advocated violence against anyone, for example. Therefore, even though Amnesty International strongly opposed the South African regime of apartheid, it never adopted Nelson Mandela as a Prisoner of Conscience, because he advocated the violent overthrow of that government. Desmond Tutu was another matter of course, being a man of non-violence.
The dossier contained the information for a Prisoner of Conscience in the Middle East. Could our group please publicly take up this person's cause. Almost immediately upon receiving this dossier, very odd phone calls and visits began at my home. One of the scummiest backroom boys for the provincial political party in power called me. First approach? Could I please meet him in a sequestered room at a very popular "power" restaurant downtown. Not on your life. The guy was a swine when it came to women at the best of times. I wasn't meeting him alone, not anywhere. Well he wasn't going to be alone. He said that he knew I was involved with Amnesty International and he had someone with him who desperately needed to talk with me about human rights abuses. Who then? Just one of the leaders of the Jewish Defense League. Oh yes - a terrorist group. It wasn't the first time I had been approached by any number of representatives from that type of organization. They all truly believed that if they could just explain their side of the story to groups like Amnesty, then we would not only understand, but condone any level of violence they could undertake. Not.
When he couldn't get me to agree to that, his next call a few weeks later was to make allegations about one of the local Members of Parliament. Someone who he knew I didn't have a lot of respect for, because of their business ethics - or lack thereof. This time the story was that Amnesty International had to publicly out this man. You see, he said, he was a known Nazi collaborator. He had, he said, run a death camp in Russia - specifically the Ukraine. He "needed to be brought to justice."
Well firstly, Amnesty International has always had way more work than volunteers to cover any but the most desperate cases for political prisoners. Branching out to catch and prosecute war crimes criminals was way beyond their capacity and there were several other organizations that had taken on that task as well. Why not talk to them. I can give you contact information for several. No no. This had to be done by a local group, so the media would give it credibility. Ah yes. Cred-i-bility. That aura of the truth, because community leaders said so. I've seen that one in action before. I think it was Hitler and Goebbels who said, that in order to be credible, the lie has to be so big that to question it would seem insane.
In this case, the person in question would have been 16 years old at the very end of the war. I think this fellow wasn't aware of my interest in astrology, or he might have realized that one of the first things I try to learn about someone who interests me is the date and year of their birth. Close after that comes place and, as close as possible, time of day they were born. Oh yeah. Yes, this fellow had had an association with the Nazis. He came to Canada as a refugee from them. One of many dispossessed eastern European youth who really had nothing left for them in their place of birth. Did I know the details of his experience and losses? No, I never trespassed on the man's privacy, but there is always a pattern of behavious associated with genocide and those who pursue it. I knew enough of the details to fill in the most important blanks. The one thing this man was not was a war criminal.
So why would the politcal sleazeball try to trick me into taking up the hue and cry? Well probably to achieve a number of ends. This particular politician was less that tractable when people like the bozo in question tried to force them to toe the "party line". The closet white supremacist one from my point of view, but then it is only my point of view, of course. It stemmed from having been forced to deal with this clown in almost every volunteer activity I had engaged in. He was endlessly undermining or chivvying for power or advantage. Creep supreme. To publically brand him as a suspected war criminal through an Amnesty International "official", just before an election call, would be most useful for prying said politician out of a seat he was pretty much guaranteed to win at an easy walk. The second reason seemed to be to discredit the local Amnesty International group. It seemed to be aimed at trying to discredit the information about our newly assigned prisoner of conscience by undermining the public trust in the integrity and honesty of the local chapter of AI, since it wouldn't be long before doubt would be cast on the story about the Member of Parliament being a war crimes criminal. That "boy who cried wolf" fairy tale, don't you know. It worked well just recently, when an Amnesty spokesman was duped into claiming that babies in a Kuwait neonatal unit were butchered in their bassinets - didn't it.
At that time I was doing a lot of work as well as spokesperson for several volunteer groups that were going against the wishes of the backroom boy's group of bullies. If he could also implicate me in that whole fiasco, then my shredded credibility would be used to undermine the progress our voluteer groups were making in raising funds for the regional park, persuading the governments to build schools and provide resources for families in our very densely populated and young communities. They wanted all that public money for their own things, like race tracks and casinos. Anyway when I wouldn't bite on those, or any of the other two or three big lies he tried to feed me, I found he started harassing me instead. Calling up when people visited my home. Asking what they were doing inside my doors, even though he was two communities away and shouldn't have had any way of knowing who was visiting at any given time. Things like calling up when my sons were at school, describing what they were wearing and what they were doing at that exact moment in time. Things that he knew I would know had to be true. That did scare me.
What really topped it off was that my co-chair that year was a lawyer. I explained what had been happening to them, starting around the time the dossier arrived. They didn't say much. Just told me to give them some time to try and figure it out. Six weeks later, I got a call asking me to meet them at a tiny little downtown restaurant. One in an old converted house. The maitre d'/owner met me at the door. He escorted me to a little cubbyhole that had, likely, once been a parlour. The lawyer was sitting there with a man. He was introduced to me as a private detective. Gave me his card and everything. The owner served us personally and stood in front of the cubicle making certain no one else approached. The detective told me many things that still scare me deeply. At that time too one of the senior members of the Amnesty organization, who happened to be stationed at Calgary, took the dossier and hurried back to London immediately " to deal with the security breach". Uh huh. Did I feel like Mrs King from the tv spy show "Scarecrow and Mrs King"? No way, not one handsome hero in sight. Well maybe. The detective might have been, but I can't recall how he looked, because what he said left me in shock. The Amnesty dude? Well maybe close to a James Bond clone, but not even close to looking like Sir Sean. Not once did he wear a kilt. Sais, through and through. The only thing I was thinking, when I wasn't questioning my sanity, was how I was going to protect my sons. Was I going to stop that work? No way. It is just such work that is the only protection we can truly give our children's futures. "All evil needs to succeed is for good men and women to do nothing". Fancy taking all those risks for years, because I trusted a lawyer. The problem was I believed they were telling the truth. Later encounters with others pursuing similar trails of evidence would prove it over and over again without any of them even ever having met. Social engineering 101.
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