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12:23 - 28.02.07
Completion
Monday was my last day to look after my grand-daughter. I wasn't ready to write about it until now. Not that anything out of the ordinary happened. Just the emotions that went with it. My Dad and two of my sisters came by with lunch in hand, so a couple of hours were spent as part of the larger family grouping. I appreciated and resented it equally. I truly cherished my time with that little one. I also am ambivalent about her transition to daycare, but I've hashed over that one a couple of times haven't I? It was a good time to stop though since there was tension starting to arise between my daughter-in-law and me. My grand-daughter was showing increasing affection and trust in me, sometimes preferring me to her mom. I'm a cuddler and I use positive reinforcement to point children in a direction I think is best for them. My daughter-in-law is more of a discipline-the-old-way type of person. She has an eye for an eye philosophy that makes me very uncomfortable, especially because she often overlooks factors that are "inconvenient truths" with respect to her own part in a situation. We all do, of course, and that is why I think the idea of retaliation first is so wrong. Paraphrased "Take the log out of your own eye, before trying to take the mote out of your brother's eye" Matthew 7:4. Judge not lest ye be judged likewise in the eyes of the Lord. One of the toughest commandments to follow as far as my own life has been concerned. Not judging others because one is without full knowledge of their reasons is hard. How does one incorporate that principle with the discernment/discrimination about choosing between "bad" and "good". What are the guideposts mediating between those two principles then for deciding on a course of action or restraint. It starts with a parent teaching their child. Each parent and each child. All else in a child's experience is dominated and coloured by those initial observations of their parent's/caregivers behaviour and their own experiences. My son says my daughter-in-law's behaviour is a direct reflection of her mother's, for example. The question becomes, why does a child model more on one parent's or grandparent's behaviour than the other's?

Yesterday I slept mostly and dealt with correspondence. There has been a lot of that from staff and peers I've had when working on Elections Canada assignments. Exchanges of information and responses to queries. Some of the staff responses are quite revealing and for the most part in a positive way. It is always hard to tell in a written communication what thoughts or emotions are being filtered out so that is taken into consideration too.

In the news some of the best stories have been about positive movement with respect to the environment and social development. Some of the most befuddling have to do with government. Of course - what was I thinking? Legislating the use of live non-consenting humans to carry out medical experiments? The last I read about behaviour like that was respect to certain World War II elements. This story about a tuberculosis scare in an eastern Canadian daycare hit home. There is still the remains of a sanitorium here. One of the cashiers at my local grocery store brought up the subject a week ago when she noted that at her other office job all the staff had to be tested and received booster shots after one of their co-workers was diagnosed with it. Given that an intractible form of the disease has started to spread it might be more important for governments to focus on a real threat to public health rather than the endless warnings about a flu pandemic that may or may not ever emerge - except by intent, biological warfare.

This website was encouraging. The person behind it is one politician who has acted from a place of integrity through a very long career. I had only one oblique experience with him. When I was co-chair for the local Amnesty International group here, we received a request from a Canadian family whose relative was being held in a jail in Africa after being acquitted on charges of spying, not once but several times in that country's courts. Could we help? They had tried going through foreign affairs to no avail. I approached one local provincial politician who I had a good working relationship with - one the media constantly slandered by calling him "slick" because he put community needs before their editorial boards agendas of the day. He made some enquiries for me, then asked if he could pass the information on to the website owner. Within a couple of months that man was back safely in Canada. No fanfare, no attempt on either of those two politicians' part to gain kudos, press or even acknowledgement of the major part they played in a very delicate and potentially dangerous situation. Those two politicians, from different political parties, often worked in concert with the representative for the third largest political entity, ignoring those ideological chains in order to best act as the stewards they were for the people they were elected to represent. All three politicians were unceremoniously dumped by the people they helped most helped by the howling of certain media outlets whose editorial policy was that of slander and character assassination just as a matter of course if someone disagreed with their philosophical beliefs. Is it surprising that most people of integrity won't run for office? Look at what we do to the ones who try.

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