Month: October 2017

A Message to My Children

A Dad’s advice to his children.

If you were to give your children advice, what would it be? In my last post (Artists May Have the Answer) I mentioned that my wife and I attended a Chris de Burgh concert. At that concert, Chris de Burgh sang one of his newer songs called ‘Go Where Your Heart Believes’, a song I had never heard before; a song from his album “Moonfleet and Other Stories” released in January of 2011. If you’ve never heard the song, here it is.

This song helped me answer that question. In September, I wrote a post (When the Nest Empties) about Empty Nest Syndrome where I admitted that I was afflicted with this syndrome when my middle daughter moved to Dublin, Ireland to attend Trinity College. This song helped me understand why our daughter needed to do what  she was doing.

Chris de Burgh’s song, ‘Go Where Your Heart Believes’ has put Empty Nest Syndrome–those feelings of loneliness or sadness after children grow up and leave home—into perspective for me. Henry Ward Beecher, a clergyman, once said, “We never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves.” This is so true! Sometimes as parents, we love our children so much we don’t want to let them go. That seemed to hold true for me.

Actor and producer, Peter Krause, says, “Parenthood…It’s about guiding the next generation, and forgiving the last”.  My wife and I have guided our children as best we knew how, just as our parents did. Yes, we’ve made mistakes as our parents did, but we have to trust that our guidance has enabled our children to be independent, strong, brave, and productive citizens. Chris de Burgh’s song ‘Go Where Your Heart Believes’ expressed for me the message I want to deliver to my children.

The lyrics say, “I am old but there’s a wisdom that comes with years. You are young and it’s so easy when you have no fears.”  I learned much wisdom throughout my years and I continue to do so, but I’ve also learned that I am hanging onto many fears which I acquired from my life experiences. I am now working to release those fears as they no longer serve me. You, my children, are just beginning your life journey, so live it without fear. What is fear anyway? It is False Emotion Appearing (as) Real.

Now don’t get me wrong. Fear serves a purpose. Psychology Today says,

“Fear is a vital response to physical and emotional danger—if we didn’t feel it, we couldn’t protect ourselves from legitimate threats. But often we fear situations that are far from life-or-death, and thus hang back for no good reason. Traumas or bad experiences can trigger a fear response within us that is hard to quell. Yet exposing ourselves to our personal demons is the best way to move past them”.

As it says in Psychology Today, fear protects us from legitimate threats. These are healthy fears. These fears protect us from life and death situations. The fears that I am referring to are “false emotion appearing as real.” As it says in Psychology Today, we “fear situations that are far from life-or-death, and thus hang back for no good reason. Traumas or bad experiences can trigger a fear response within us that is hard to quell.”  Those are the ones we need to dispose of. It is these fears that I am working on releasing now that I have the time to do so. These are fears like the fear of darkness, spiders, dogs, flying in an airplane, and such things as these; irrational fears.

Frank Sant’Agata says, “Love and fear are the only emotions we as human entities are able to express. All the others are just sub-categorical emotions. For example, on love’s side there is joy, peacefulness, happiness, forgiveness, and a host of others. On the other hand, fear reflects: hate, depression, guilt, inadequacy, discontentment, prejudice, anger, attack, and so on”.  Even the Christian Scriptures it is written, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (1 John 4:18). So, my advice to you, express love and not fear. Avoid those irrational fears.

The lyrics say, “Go, go where your heart believes, your memories are waiting, It’s the only way to find out who you are.”  So my advice to you is follow your dreams, your passions, your desires without fear! I truly wish I had done this more in my youth, but I held back because of irrational fears. I know many people who are afraid to travel to another country because of what they hear from the news media, mainly terrorism. Then there are those who fear flying likely because a bad experience or what they’ve heard on the news or tell themselves. These fears are “false emotion appearing as real.”  In an article called, Heart is more than a pump, it talks about a new branch of science called, Neurocardiology and studies in this field indicate there is constant communication between the heart and the brain. These scientific studies are showing that the heart may play a significant role in the way we experience emotions and make decisions. Maybe love is literally connected to the heart. Perhaps this is why the heart is a symbol of romantic love and a “wounded heart” means love sickness. It may also be why we have expressions like, “break my heart” (sadness due to breakup) or “have a heart” (show compassion) or “with all one’s heart” (deepest feeling). So, my advice to you is follow your heart. It is where your passions and desires are.

The lyrics say, “In this life, there is a road that you must follow, to the left or the right. One is wide but the other is hard and narrow. Take this one, and you can call it your own”. We can take the easy, safe road or we can take the tough road. I know I often took the safe road because of irrational fears. Looking back, I wish now I took the “harder” roads. Perhaps I would have taken that trip to Europe sooner. Perhaps I would have seriously considered teaching a year or two in another country, but I didn’t because I feared the amount of work involved and being far from home. So, my advice is to don’t always take the easy route!

The lyrics say, “There will be so many voices trying to turn you round, take a moment just to listen, then carry on”. Here is the most important message in the song. Stop believing what others say. It is fine to listen and consider what they are saying, but when deciding, follow your heart! I wish I had. I made the mistake of believing what others told me. My dad used to say, “If you have a job, hang on to it.” For him, a job pays the bills and to be fair, he lived through the Great Depression as a child and saw his dad–your great grandfather–struggle to feed the family. I listened to him and consequently, I went through periods of being discontented in my career.  In hindsight, I should have followed my heart.

The lyrics say, “There will be times when you’re lost and lonely, and you will have no-one beside you. And that is when you’ll find the hidden one inside, who will help you through.” There certainly will be times when you feel all alone and unsupported. These are the times when you need to trust your intuition; that knowing or understanding something without reasoning or proof. Trust that that is when the Universe, God, your angels, your guides are directing you. They are always with you. Most of the time we discredit our intuition with reasoning; telling ourselves it was our imagination. Trust it!

So, that is my message to you my three perfect children. It is a message not only for my children, but for all young people who are open to the message. Follow your heart without fear! Listen to others and decide with discernment what is best for you. Only you know what is best for you. Discover who you are. Better yet, decide who you are and be that person. And whatever you do, don’t fall victim to your fears!

Artists May Have the Answer

A commentary on the wisdom of war.

I came across a rather unsettling headline on the CBC News website: North Korea warns of nuclear war at ‘any moment’. There really hasn’t been much concern about nuclear weapons since the former Soviet Union fell. Whenever the topic of the United States comes up, I hear concern in people’s voices over what is transpiring with the North Koran leader, Kim Jong Un and the current resident of the White House. There has been a war of words between the two of them, each calling one other names. Trump called the North Korean leader ‘Rocket Man’ and Kim Jong Un responded saying Trump was “a mentally deranged U.S. dotard”.  In other words, Jong Un is insinuating that Trump’s mental faculties are declining. One has to wonder if there is some truth in that.

Seriously, these two world leaders are acting just like children act in the school yard. As a retired teacher, I have personally witnessed much bullying on the school playground. Donald Trump has made threats such as; “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen”. (see NYT) and Jong Un has uttered such things as; “If the American imperialists provoke us a bit, we will not hesitate to slap them with a pre-emptive nuclear strike. The United States must choose! It’s up to you whether the nation called the United States exists on this planet or not.” (see NYT). Watching these two world leaders act like school yard bullies is really reminiscent of the numerous supervision shifts I did as a teacher. You expect children to act this way but it is just sad when grown-ups behave this way especially if they are leaders of a country.

My wife and I attended a Chris De Burgh concert earlier this week. We haven’t been to a concert of his since the late 80s. My wife is an avid fan of Chris De Burgh and was long before I met her, and that was how I got to know his music. It was a fabulous concert and he can still put on a great show even though he just started touring after 30 years in the past few years. I was reminded of why I used to go to his concerts and listen to his records. The messages of his songs are so powerful and usually touch people at the soul level.

Why am I bringing up a Chris De Burgh concert? Well, it struck me, listening to Chris De Burgh sing his songs that his messages could teach these leaders a thing or two. Perhaps instead of looking to our politicians to solve conflicts, we should be looking to our artists. One of the songs that De Burgh sang at his concert was one he dedicated to the Canadian soldiers who liberated Vimy Ridge during WWI from the Axis powers, not without a high cost of lives. The song was Borderline. If you’ve never heard it, hear it is.

The song is about a soldier leaving to go to the front in WWI but the soldier is torn because he didn’t want to leave the love of his life, hence the lyrics; I hear my country call me, but I want to be with you. But the most powerful message of the song is the soldier questioning what he is about to partake in when he says; How men can see the wisdom in a war… Is there wisdom in a war? I can’t think of any. It was U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who said, “War is young men dying and old men talking.”  That is so true! The reality is a leader can only take his or her country to war if the people that they oversee agree with them and follow. It was Adolf Hitler who said, “How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think.”  The only wisdom related to war that I know of was by Niccolò Machiavelli, an Italian diplomat, politician, historian, philosopher and writer of the Renaissance period. In one of his writings, The Prince, he says “Wisdom consists of knowing how to distinguish the nature of trouble, and in choosing the lesser evil.” Perhaps it was said better in the movie, Pearl Harbor (2001), by Admiral Yamamoto (Mako) who said, “A brilliant man will find a way not to fight a war.”

Chris De Burgh has another song, one of my favorites, which unfortunately he didn’t sing. The song is called, Up Here in Heaven and it too has a very powerful message. In case you’ve haven’t heard it, here it is.

The song talks about visiting a military cemetery. Two years ago, my wife and I visited several military cemeteries while visiting the Normandy beaches and Vimy Ridge in France.  It was probably one of the most humbling and emotional experiences of our trip. The lyrics of Chris De Burgh’s song say:

What of the children caught in the war,
How can we tell them what it’s for,
When they cry, when they cry are voices heard anymore?

Are you listening, are you listening men of the war?
There is nothing, there is nothing worth dying for;

Up here in heaven, we stand together,
Both the enemy and the friend, ’till the end of time,
Up here in heaven, we are forever,
There is only one God up here, for all of the world.

Allied WWII military cemetery visited in Normandy, France.

His second song touches on the same theme. As the lyrics say; What of the children caught in the war, how can we tell them what it’s for. When they cry, when they cry are voices heard anymore? The characters in the song are questioning if war is justifiable, especially when it comes to the young men and women who are expected to fight it. It certainly isn’t the politicians who are battling it out. But the most powerful part of the song are the lyrics: Up here in heaven, we stand together, Both the enemy and the friend, ’till the end of time. Up here in heaven, we are forever, there is only one God up here, for all of the world. I believe when our souls arrive on the other side, heaven if you will, we will discover a God that sees no differences; that loves everyone equally. There are no enemies. Even though in our societies, God is referred to as Yahweh by the Jews, God by the Christians and Allah by the Muslims, as the lyrics say, there is only one God.

For me anyway, there is so much truth in these two songs. When the soldier in the song Borderline wonders; How men can see the wisdom in a war, the truth is, there is no wisdom in a war.  War is merely a school yard fight carried out in a big way. This is the message that needs to be sent to the bully politicians of the world. There is no wisdom in war! There is simply no way to justify war to those who are expected to fight it which is usually our young people. You might ask: What do we do when a bully leader threatens a sovereign state?  It was World War 1 veteran, the late Harry Patch, who once said:

“If I had my way I would lock all leaders in a room, and let them fight it out. Then there’d be no need, for lads like me, to go to war. Why should the government send me to a battlefield, to fight a man I never knew, whose language I couldn’t speak? All those lives, lost in a war, finished over a table. Now where’s the sense in all that? Give you leaders give them each a gun, and let them fight it out themselves”.

That is what needs to be done. Place the North Koran leader and the current resident of the White house into a room and let them ‘duke it out’. No more young soldiers need to die, or in the case of a nuclear holocaust, people of all ages all because two world leaders are behaving like school yard bullies.

A Mass Shooting? Not Again!

One Canadian’s view on its gun obsessed neighbour.

Yet again, the world watched in horror as another gun slaughter took place in the United.States. October 1, 2017, was the deadliest shooting in modern US history with 58 dead and just under 500 people injured. The 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, previously was the deadliest with 49 killed. This latest bloodbath happened in Las Vegas, Nevada, where sixty-four-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire on 22,000 concertgoers from his room at the Mandalay Bay Hotel. Paddock had no serious criminal history and killed himself with a self-inflicted wound before officers could reach him. Investigators are unable to find a motive for the killing spree.

What I find interesting, as many on Twitter have pointed out, is that the current resident of the White House did not use the words “terror” or “terrorist” during his remarks about the shooting, whereas he used those terms when referring to previous mass shootings. According to Merriam-Webster, an act of terror is “the use of violent acts to frighten the people in an area as a way of trying to achieve a political goal.”  Granted, we don’t know what the political aim of the shooter was but by definition it  sure sounds like an act of terror to me. I have to wonder if the president refrained from using the word “terrorist” because the shooter was white.

According to the article, Gun Violence by the Numbers, data from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention show that on an average day, 93 Americans are killed with guns and for every one person killed with guns, two more are injured. It is shocking to me that America’s gun homicide rate is more than 25 times the average of other high-income countries.

The CBS article, How U.S. gun deaths compare to other countries, reports that in 2010 the U.S. had a firearm homicide rate of 3.6 deaths per 100 000 people, the highest of all countries listed. Interestingly, the United Kingdom has a rate of zero as does Norway, Japan and the Republic of Korea or better known as South Korea. My country, Canada, has a rate of 0.5 deaths per 100 000 which is still too high in my view. One statistic that stands out for me is “even though it [the United States] has half the population of the other 22 [high-income] nations combined, the United States accounted for 82 percent of all gun deaths.”

According to CNN’s article on Mass Shootings, which used statistics from the Gun Violence Archive,  defining, a “mass shooting” as any incident in which a gunman shoots or kills four or more people in the same general time and location, reported that in the U.S. there have been 273 mass shootings so far in 2017  (January 1 to October 3, 2017). That averages to 7.5 mass shootings a week. It seems America, or maybe even the world, has become immune to these mass shootings since we only seem to hear about the big ones. Let’s compare that to Canada. According to Wikipedia’s chart of Massacres in Canada, Canada has had 23 mass killings since 1967, the most recent being the Quebec City mosque shooting on January 29, 2017, where a single gunman killed 6 people and wounded 18 others in Quebec City, Quebec. The difference between the two countries is astounding! I am so thankful to be living in Canada.

I’m dumbfounded! It seems so obvious to me what America needs to do. There ARE solutions, America! Let’s look at the Australian example.

CNN’s article, What the UK and Australia did differently after mass shootings, reports that Australian Prime Minister John Howard was six weeks into his new job when the Port Arthur massacre occurred. That incident occurred in 1996, where 28-year-old Martin Bryant went on a killing spree ending in the deaths of 35 people in  the town of Port Arthur in Tasmania, Australia.

PM Howard led the effort against a loud gun lobby and resistant state governments to push through a federal gun amnesty, in which the government compensated gun owners for the weapons they turned in. He also directed changes to gun laws that included lengthy background and identification checks for would-be gun buyers, and a ban on automatic and semi-automatic weapons.

That same article discusses the United Kingdom’s experience.  Also in 1996, 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton used legally owned handguns to kill 16 children aged 5 and 6 as well as a teacher before taking his own life. This massacre in Dunblane, Scotland, provoked public outrage and backing to ban handguns. After a public inquiry, the Conservative government banned all handguns in England, Scotland and Wales, with the exception of .22 caliber single-shot weapons, The Labour government elected afterwards added .22 caliber guns to the ban as well.

You might wonder why the United States does not follow the example of the UK and Australian. A PBS article titled, Obama to Gun Owners, provides President Obama’s explanation. If you listen to the news video, Obama compares the effort to implement gun safety measures to the effort to create more automobile laws, in which during the late 20th century, there were an excess of car deaths and accidents. Therefore, governments made it priority to make stricter driving laws to be able to drive. People need a license to drive, but people don’t need a license to buy a gun which is the problem, according to President Obama.

President Obama explains in the video that even suspected ISIL or ISIS, sympathizers who are banned from flying in the United States are able to buy guns, because the National Rifle Association (NRA) uses its power and wealth to lobby members of Congress. It is because of the NRA that stricter gun laws are so difficult to get passed in the United States.

So, the question is: Will stricter gun laws be implemented in the U. S. after the Las Vegas massacre?  Since no change occurred with the countless other gun massacres of the past, I doubt anything will change.

According to the National Safety Council located in the U.S. your chance of dying by a firearm in the U.S.  is 1 in 370. The chance of dying in a motor vehicle accident is far less, 1 in 114.

According to Politifact:

“Last year [2012], handguns killed 48 people in Japan, 8 in Great Britain, 34 in Switzerland, 52 in Canada, 58 in Israel, 21 in Sweden, 42 in West Germany and 10,728 in the United States.”

These statistics ‘blow my mind’. That is 10 670 more gun related deaths then in Canada. I am so grateful to live in a country that has tight gun control laws. They could be tighter still in my view. I just don’t understand how a country where the chances of being killed with bullets is 1 in 370 refuses to change. I’m mystified! If the current president really wants to make America great again, he could start by making America safe again and introduce stricter gun controls.