Education is Key

Happy New Year everyone!

I enjoy the start of the New Year. After a great Christmas holiday, I look forward to a fresh start. That is what the winter solstice and the several religions that parallel the symbolism of it are all about - new life, hope and the gradual return of light to our long dark days.

2008 was a difficult year in many respects. Local, national and international challenges were many and the angst that they injected in to our daily lives was and still is real. 2009 will be a challenging year as well. As the world changes around us we will continue to face obstacles that will interfere with the way we think it should be.

At a local level we will be facing a provincial election. The usual list of issues remains at the forefront in South Delta and we should remember that several of them are beyond our control. When we elect our MLA this coming May, we will want he or she to share our concerns in Victoria but we should not expect our MLA to have the ability to change, on their own, any policies that are well down the road. They may be able to influence process to some degree but to hope that they will be able to single-handedly stop regional or national infrastructure initiatives is just a little far reaching.

Instead, we should hope that our MLA will be able to work with provincial caucus and hopefully our local government, so that regional and national interests are implemented with as little local impact as possible and that evolving local issues are dealt with diligently to ensure that our constituency is adequately informed of all of the trigger points in each issue.

Educating the public is a difficult but necessary function of government and industry.
Arguments on any side of an issue can often be uninformed and delivered in such a way that the ill informed and emotional get premier play time.

Periodicals, such as this one, will print what they wish for their own reasons and that is fine. That is what they do.

I am OK with that and you should be too, just as long as you recognize that letters and commentary express opinion for the most part. Fact-finding requires work and time and not many of us have the luxury of using time to present fact in our points of view. We generally rely on emotion to guide our expression.

As simple as it seems, we should make better effort to understand each issue before passing judgment on it.

With so many critical issues affecting our daily lives education and fact finding is required to help us better understand all sides of a problem and enable us to better empathize with our governors rather than continually berate them.

“If I have a belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it; even if I have not had that belief in the beginning.” – Mahatma Gandhi