The Stuff I Come From...

I sit here to night in the warmth of my apartment, food at my fingertips, shelter, despite my desire for more, I have all the money anyone should ever need. I have an education that led directly to the career and income that I have...but I must never forget where the motivation and spirit for all of this started...

It all goes back to that little Irish girl Mary Cooper. She grew up in the poor family led by her father, an unemployed shipworker in Belfast. At some point something inside of her pushed her as never before to win the ONLY scholarship in her school of Irish ragamuffins.

She married the Saskatchewan farm boy. He went through the depression, raised by a mother who's people came to this land from Tipperary in the belly of a ship for something better.He went through the war in the foreign jungles of Burma and vowed that if he survived that time of Evil, fear, and the stench of death, he would make something of himself.

We don't celebrate these people because they have always been here as ancestral claimants to this great land. We celebrate them because they left what they knew and drove blindly into a storm we can't imagine...No...I want their Faith...not the cautious old religion of this land.

Waiting For Justin...

This election has been called a dogs breakfast in political terms. The "frontrunner" Harper gets down on his knees every night and gives thanks for Stephane Dion . Dion is an honourable man and even a man of integrity. Unfortunately, we all know that this is not enough. To be a bastard , cruel, and ruthless, combined with a few "sound bites" and pictures of that same individual in a cardigan with some hapless kid on his knee is enough. We all retain enough fascism to celebrate decisiveness over integrity. Harper is a product of a Liberal party in dissaray...and he knows it. Imagine Justin Trudeau ( even now ) debating with Harper instead of Dion. Harper and others making the mistake of speaking of his youth or the legacy of his father...

Scan your memory , if you are over 40, try to remember Pierre Trudeau's sense of the moment and the articulation that was there during the debates and reporter scrums of his day. There was no equal.

I wondered at the possibility of this DNA not finding itself in Margaret and Pierre's son until I saw him in a clip debating with separatists at the Universite Du Montreal. The same swagger was there, the smile, not of sheer arrogance, but of a man who was ready to close the trap on the vitriole of his opponent. I watched this unfold, and he did . The opponent was dumbfounded , angry and responded in a childish manner which revealed the lack of depth in his response...then, I saw it; The shining eyes, the stare, and a sense that we are about to see a new leader on the political scene who may even be more intriguing than his father. Perhaps there is hope for this country.

Be glad to be alive in this time. We are about to experience the history of a political giant.
It's just a matter of waiting...

Our Children Are Us...

When my son is hurting, I hurt more than I do for me with less control over that life.

My age and wisdom allows me to know it will not last, but I walk through his hopeless feelings with him regardless. I am a counsellor and I have told many parents, with the certainty of 22 years of counselling experience, that the current hell of suffering for their offspring will pass. I am correct in the vast majority of circumstance that this is a reasonable statement.

All bets are off when it is my child. Others have told me what I have told them at other times. This is reassuring, but the current pain of my boy is something I want to tear away from the very sinew of his body and eat it, swallow it, and wear it, if it will save him from it.

In the long view, I know that he will learn and be formed by this pain and he will in time help others because of the journey he is taking now. But, God help me, in these times I will use everything that I am to keep him from the abyss. There are millions of parents all over the world in many lands doing this very thing right now. At the very least, I know that the God that made us all is listening.

Thank you...