About Universal Daycare.

Some guy on the radio today said that the Liberal Government had done nothing for his 5 year old daughter and 7 year old son because they hadn't had access to a government supported and run daycare system.

I have news for you, pal! YOU'RE supposed to be doing for your children, not the government.

There is a government run and supervised daycare system in Canada. It is called the prison system!

People really need to consider the reqirements of having kids before they have them. One of those requriements is that your kids need you. They do not need to be raised in an institution by strangers, nor do they need to be raised by the lady down the street. They need their mums and dads.

Yes there is room for occasional childcare. Moms and dads need it so they can stay sane.
Yes, it is good for kids to have social interaction in groups of other kids.
Yes, some people are absolutely in a position where they must access care for their kids on a daily basis -- these are usually single parents or people whose spouses/partners can't work.

Those situations should not be confused with "We both have to work to afford our lifestyle," if that lifestyle means having all the latest, coolest, most expensive stuff. That's not a lifestyle, that's a complete lack of self esteem.

Empathetic Parenting's website puts forth some interesting ideas on ways society induces guilt in parents.

Two points:

If you can't afford to have children, don't have them.

Understand the difference between WANT and NEED as it relates to being able to stay home and raise children and affording to have kids.

You NEED a safe, comfortable place to live. You do NOT need a $3000 per month mortgage or a 4000 square foot home, unless you have 20 children.

You probaby need a safe vehicle. You do NOT need two Lincoln Navigators or anything like those.

Your children and you need clothing. You do NOT need branded, high-end, designer duds. Believe me, your kids will not remember that, between birth and kindergarten, they weren't wearing the latest, most expensive fashions. Kids care about play dough and sandboxes, not labels.

Canadians have such a weird, skewed idea of what they need. If people would stop worrying about who around them has what, and if they would concentrate on what's important, they'd find pretty quickly that a LOT of what they think is NEED is nothing more than competitive consumerism. You won't be any nicer a person if you have the latest, shiniest BMW.

For the record, and speaking of clothing, Value Village and all those great consignment shops have tons of hardly worn kids clothing -- and adult stuff as well. Swallow your pride and save tons of cash.

As for labels, since when does any corporation have the right to use you or your kid as their billboard??? If they want to paste their labels on your kids, make sure they're paying for the space. They won't do that, you say? Then why are you buying their stuff anyway? It isn't like you NEED it.

Monday night’s vanilla debate was expectably disappointing, full of hot air and stuffy with rhetoric. But one issue debated stands out in its redundancy and that is the continued discussion of whether Quebec will or will not choose to separate.

That issue is nothing more than a political ping-pong ball, being essentially weightless and without significant mass. It can be violently battered about and can impact any of the players without ever doing any significant damage.

I have lived in Quebec, am fluently bilingual and speak unaccented French. I lived in Montreal during the Oui-Non campaign and passed myself off as une Quebecoise for the entire two and a half years I lived in the province.

I am absolutely sympathetic to why the Quebecois are so disenfranchised, the reasons for which became patently obvious in very short order while I was there.

The reality is that a referendum on separation will not succeed in Quebec now or at any time in the future for three reasons.

One is a question of simple demographics. The majority of people of voting age in Quebec have children, jobs and a mortgage, all of which require continued economic stability.

Secondly, there is a large First Nations population in Quebec that enjoys significant benefits by being part of Canada. What's more, with Oka and other skirmishes as examples, it is not likely that members of First Nations would fare well in a sovereign Quebec.

Finally, there is a large immigrant population in Quebec, as lamented by Jacques Parizeau at the last referendum. Those people came to Canada the country, not to Quebec the potential nation.

Without anything to export other than a distinct culture and language and really excellent food, which amount to the groundwork for an excellent tourist trade, Quebec cannot survive as a country on its own.

Even the vocal separatist minority in Quebec must agree that if being part of a multicultural Canada poses problems, being assimilated into the great U.S. melting pot would be the death of the culture and language entirely.

That assimilation, however undesirable, would be inevitable baring a lot of crow-eating in the vein of “Please let us come home.”

What is more worthy of debate is why a provincial party that does not want to lead the country and fields no candidates outside its provincial boundaries, despite French communities across the country, is even participating in a national election.

The questions that should be asked are “Mr. Duceppe, why is your party even participating in a national election?” and “Why are we still talking about this?”

Monday’s debate left Canadians with nothing more on their hands than the stink of a rotting red herring.

Issues in the news

I was going to post something about this move for reparations regarding the hated head tax. Before I do so, I'd like to know what people's opinions are on the subject.

To very briefly quanitfy what I think, I am apalled that such an awful episode in Canadian history should be reduced to money.

I'd love your comments.

WriterWriter

January 1st 2006

“bad” Kids…

So, over the last two years, one of my sibs has been having “problems” with one of their kids.

Here’s my perspective: the kid is

1. Brilliant


2. Fearless


3. Highly Intelligent


4. Very Independent


5. Supremely Self-Aware


6. Street Smart


7. Smarter Than 90% Of Adults

My sib’s perspective on the same child:

1. Abusive


2. Trouble Maker


3. Detests Authority


4. Sneaky


5. Criminal


6. Defiant


7. Angry

Here’s a bit of background on someone most of you are very well acquainted with, and even if you’re not, your life has been irrevocably influenced by this person:

1. Adopted by a non-nonsense, Midwestern Calvinist, was-hobo, tattooed, enlisted “Hooligan Navy,” blue collar American;


2. Described as “hyperkinetic” and as having “a gift for getting into trouble;”


3. Ate ant poison and stuck bobby pins into electrical sockets just to try it out;


4. A loner, renegade and crybaby;


5. Suspended from school several times for misbehaviour;

1. Defied teachers, refused to do schoolwork that was “a waste of time;”


2. was “bored in school…turned into a little terror;”


3. Exploded bombs and let snakes loose in the classroom;


4. “Basically destroyed the teacher,” in third grade;


5. cheated at sports;


6. Eventually expelled from school, but identified as gifted;


7. Finally refused to go back to school – at the age of 11- forcing his family to move;


8. Discovered Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas Sex and Pot in high school;


9. An individualist who refused to follow the rules or be intimidated by them;


10. Demonstrated and enthusiasm for ‘mind-expanding’ drugs;


11. Was skipping most high school classes by age 16;

This list of “bad” characteristics could go on (it does in the book “ICon” by Jeffrey S. Young and William L Simon). The point is that nearly every adult who came into contact with this person bought into the “bad” label that had been applied to him.

Here’s the question: why do adults in positions of power and influence – parents and teachers – refuse to consider that kids who don’t toe the line are not simply “troubled?”

What a cop-out!

Why are these adults so blind to what is so obvious; these kids don’t conform because they’re far more intelligent and talented than the system can manage and that they’re bored out of their minds by a world that is paced for the average student/human - a world where newspaper articles on international affairs are written for an 8th grade reading level?

Have you figured out who this person is? Sounds like a total bad-ass, hey? Well, he is Steve Jobs, founder and foundation of Apple Computers. Who’s Steve Jobs? Where’s your IPod; Jobs is your IPod’s daddy and your MAC’s daddy and your G6’s daddy. He’s how cool Bill Gates wishes he was. Oh, for the record, Gates is a Harvard dropout and a quitter – he dumped IBM.

Back to my nephew: same issues. Doesn’t always appreciate authority; gets into trouble, hates school; bored by the pace of most things; bothered by most adults; much underestimated by the significant adults around him and very much underestimated by nearly every teacher whose class he’s been in.

Here's a quote from Gifted Services in Australia:
" MANY GIFTED children come to me because of social and emotional difficulties and yet, the assumption that that gifted children are more likely than others to have a variety of personal and social problems, is not supported by research. Social and emotional difficulties are not directly attributable to giftedness. Rather, they result from a lack of understanding by the child of the nature and significance of their intellectual and emotional difference."

There are more resources for understanding gifted kids at KidSource OnLine


I took him for ‘coffee’ last year, when life was particularly tough for him: the family was in the midst of a breakup and there was plenty of shit going on all around him. I told him to believe in himself and never believe the shit other people said about him or to him – particularly the very mean chastisements he regularly got from one of his parents and the regular insults by the other (these continue); I told him his first loyalty was to himself and to his definition and decisions regarding the path his life should take.

Over the Christmas holiday, he said this: “I win Auntie, I win.”

He has found his path, has established his OWN goals and has a very firm, determined plan for what’s going to happen in the next 5 years. He’s going to do bad things and he’s going to piss people off and he’s going to be so much more successful than his family previously believed he would be. And yes, I have an ego about all this, because I know and I always knew that this brilliant, fearless boy will be come an astounding, wonderful adult. I win too, ‘cause I get to say “I told you so!”

December 30 Rant

What is up with spitting?

I just wanna know what the deal is with spitting?

Is it sexy? No. I so don’t want to be kissing someone, or having them kiss me, after they’ve horked up a wad of green goo

Is it healthy? No, it is disgusting and leaves some idiot’s germs all over the street for the rest of us to walk in.

Does it help the environment? Yeah, if you’re a microbe!

So here’s a clue for all you spitters out there. Everyone who sees you do it is feeling their own bile come up. We’d all like to barf on your feet, but we are too well-mannered to play on your dirty field.

Disgusting.

No, you don’t look cool. You’re a pig.

Simple.

Now stop it!

Damned Christmas, Reprise...

Damned Christmas, reprise: Scapegoat for Dinner

Note: Help and resources at the end of this post

True to form they are, my family; true to form. A person cannot fault them for their unending consistency, although the reasons they are consistent are certainly suspect.


Due to a very interesting parenting style, my mother has managed to instill a very firm foundation of insecurity and narcissism with two of my siblings. That insecurity, which she also has, manifests in scapegoating – of me – and has for as long as I can remember, and extreme bullying by my sisters towards certain others, often me and usually women. My youngest sister does not trust women and my middle sister makes a great show of having many female friends.

The first memories I have of me being the family scapegoat – and I obviously didn’t realize what it was then – were the foggy feelings that whatever was wrong with my mother and her relationship with my father was somehow my fault. I know now that I remind my mother very uncomfortably of my father, who she called selfish, but who was probably more self-protective. The whole basis for the beginnings of this abuse was that my mother would not acknowledge her part in the failure of her marriage and so needed something to hang it on: me. She resorted to shaming me and continued it until I was 35 (she tries to yet).

During one particularly difficult year, my mother hauled me off to a shrink. It was such a terrifying experience that I remembered only two things: the first meeting and one subsequent family "therapy" session. Later on, when I was 25, following a terrible fight with my mother (she was, among other things, belittling me, my husband and my father and trying to physically take my one-year-old out of my house, which resulted in the police coming...), I tracked down said shrink, and found out there had actually been eight sessions.

I asked for permission to read the transcripts of those sessions. I was not allowed to photo copy them, as my mother had not given permission for me to read them, but I did copy them down, by hand. Among the copious notes was a comment from the Therapist, Betty Wickens, that my mother was using me as a scapegoat for all that was wrong with her life.

In present times, my youngest sister who has had almost nothing but failure in her life until quite recently (and it is tenuous at best now), transfers her anger, guilt and whatever other negative feelings she has to me. Somehow, her blaming me for anything and everything makes her feel better – for a minute. She seems not to notice she is still entirely a fuck up. (Update, 2012; we have an excellent relationship now and have waded through our experiences of our family and come out as allies).

The middle child, my other sister, was the very innocent witness to years of my mothers abuse towards me. She was powerless and invisible and now suffers from a huge lack of self-esteem, despite being well-liked and successful. She takes anything said to her, no matter how much out of concern or interest, as criticism and reacts violently. She is unaware that she is acting out years of witnessing my mother abuse me (update: .. .being generally abusive). She is also unaware that she is trying to resolve being the witness by visiting the same horrible treatment on her son and daughter and her now ex-spouse.

As can be expected, when these people are stressed and unhappy, they go very much on the attack. Recently, my niece was visiting Paris with her mother. They met a charming man there. He toured them about the city, brought them out for dinner and made their visit quite magical. My niece, although she did not know this man at all well, and despite his being 9 years her senior (she is was 18), decided to return to Paris and to stay with him a week.

I have a very coloured past (A Short, True Story) so am in no position to judge her decision. I was, however, quite concerned and communicated that to my sister, who took my concern as a serious criticism of her parenting abilities. She took me so to task by phone that I had to hang up on her. She is not secure enough to hear concern; she only hears criticism. She is painfully aware that she overreacts to many things, but is also painfully unable to apologise.

My youngest sister does not tolerate change at all, due mostly to having lived a highly unstable life. Recently, she has suffered an major, unanticipated change to her work situation. She communicated her fear and frustration by lashing out at me, quite out of the blue, over Christmas dinner last night. She left the family gathering (gifts in hand, it should be noted), but the damage had been done and the scapegoating commenced in earnest, which resulted in my departure as well.

Prior to leaving, however, I did advise my mother that, after 30 years of it and of her letting it go on – even encouraging it – I was finished with being the scapegoat for my sisters’ insecurities, anger, aggression and fears.

My mother, for her part, has developed two scapegoats: anything that my sisters do or ever have done wrong is, according to her, due to my having taught them how. The great dysfunction in our family she blames on my now-deceased father. According to her, everything that is wrong with how I and my sister turned out has to do with him being a weak and absent father. Much against his personal and religious convictions, he was so abused by her that he was forced to divorce her. He would not rise to her bait in life and cannot now. It must be so frustrating for her.

My sister's marriage has recently failed. Her abuse of her spouse and her children has caused much pain in her own family. My mother conveniently ignores my sister's part in it all, alternately blaming me and my ex-brother-in-law.

The rest of the family is following a predictable path of weariness; a ‘not again’ attitude that permeates any gathering where two or more siblings are present. As my mother is what she calls “faithful,” and “evangelical,” or "born-again," there are three major family events per year, if one doesn’t include birthdays (I avoid those at all costs). All of them are, for me, painful and sad.

Scapegoating and Bullying are pretty much one and the same. My sisters have used bullying against me for years, and both have also employed shame. My next-youngest sister denied she even knew me when we were in school (we look very much alike, so the relationship was clear, despite her denial). My youngest sister also shames me by criticising my riding - but I'm a pleasure rider and I don't care if my technique isn't perfect....

What’s the point of this post? Beyond that I needed to get it off my hairy, goat chest, nothing, other than leaving it here for others who are aware, or becoming aware they are the family target.

Further information: follow any of the links in this page for scapegoat resources and help.
The Scapegoat Society
Scapegoats, Scapegoating Psychodynamics

This page is an excellent resource for people who have been and/or currently are being scapegoated in their families: Family Fun: Words that Hurt
Nasty Women: How to Stop Being Hurt by Them

Your comments are always welcome and I will be happy to refer you to other sources of help.

WriterWriter

More: Mr. Martin Stands for Canada

Prime Minister Paul Martin demonstrated resoundingly that he alone had the qualities of statesmanship by standing up for Canada and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the French Leaders debate on December 15.

“We need Quebec’s energy, its momentum, at the national level. When we work together, nothing can stop us,” the Prime Minister said when asked about national unity.

[Mr. Martin highlighted the facts that Canada has] one of the strongest economies in the world, record job growth, lower public debt and strategic investments in health care, the environment, cities and innovation.

He reminded voters that it was he – and he alone – who had the courage to get to the bottom of the sponsorship mess by appointing the Gomery Inquiry.

Above all the Prime Minister hammered home the stark differences in vision and values that distinguishes the Liberal plan from that of Gilles Duceppe and Stephen Harper.

He was especially strong in his exchanges with Gilles Duceppe on national unity, showing clearly that Duceppe and the separatists’ obsession on working with Andre Boisclair is to divide Quebecers one from another with a referendum.

“When the majority of MPs from Quebec are there just to put up obstacles rather than working with the rest of the country, it hinders the ability of Quebec –and Canada – to succeed. This is not the time for division. It is time to work together,” the Prime Minister said.

And Stephen Harper showed once again that he is unwilling to show the candor that Canadians expect of their leaders on questions of fundamental values.

[Harper] said tonight the he would not invoke the notwithstanding clause to revoke the Charter Rights conferred on same-sex couples by the courts. But he also said he would enforce a vote to defy courts and restore the traditional definition of marriage.

He knows he cannot do both, yet he won’t admit it. He is either not telling his social conservative base the truth or he is not telling the rest of us the truth. He has to come clean.

The Prime Minister immediately confronted Mr. Harper about this duplicity, saying, “Either Mr. Harper is going to try to change the law of the country that protects the rights and freedoms of gays and lesbians or he's not going to. If he's going to use the notwithstanding clause, he should say so, and the people will at least know what his position is.”

NDP leader Jack Layton’s inability to explain his recent reversal on private health care left Canadians wondering why he chose to join Mr. Harper and Mr. Duceppe to force this election.

Canadians expect a Prime Minister to be a statesman – to focus not on the next election but the next generation. In the first of four debated in this campaign, Prime Minister Paul Martin lived up to that expectation.

Canada: A Sovereign Country!

Canada: Sovereign, Independent Country

This week, our Prime Minister has been attacked by the Canadian Press for speaking out against US involvement in this election and for standing up for Canadians in respect to softwood lumber and defense. (Canadian Telecommunications Law)

It is disgusting to have our own country’s press attacking our Prime Minister for standing up for our rights and our resources and for reminding Canadians that we are NOT part of the US and we do not have to kowtow to a neighbour that resorts to threats and bullying to get its way. (Ethical Journalism)

US politicians have no right to dictate to our country’s leaders what they will say and how they will act. We are absolutely within our constitutional and national rights to defend ourselves against US involvement in our affairs. We are a sovereign country. We are NOT an offshoot of the US.

The US ambassador to Canada should be silenced in his own country for commenting on a Canadian election. He’s not from here and has nothing to do with us and so should butt out and and button up.

Here’s to you, Mr. Martin, for standing up for your country, regardless of the Canadian Press that whores itself out to US government lackeys and regardless of the media skewering you for doing exactly what a Prime Minister should do: Speak for his country.

The Fallacy of Race

I did some writing -- or threatening - a while back to discuss the concept "race", as a political term.

Before I get into this blog, I want it clear that I DO intend to make you think and I hope that you will do some reading or writing or something that is not at all like buying into a long-term, unchallenged political construct that has caused and continues to cause unending misery and chaos planet-wide.

Background
I come from a mixed family, meaning that from as always as I can remember, there have been people of every skin colour and ethnic background possible in our family or attached to our family or somehow in our lives.

So what? Well, see, when you grow up like that, you realise that skin, like any other body organ, does not define a person. You also see skin as nothing other than the stuff that holds your guts in.

It takes a long time -- and usually an unenlightened adult -- to even make you aware that there is anything particularly different about the people in your family. It took a long time to even really understand that these people were not my family members in the north American way of thinking. It's like kids who have really ugly parents: until someone points it out to them, those kids don't even think about how their parents look. They're just mom/dad. What they look like doesn't enter into the picture.

So, some years ago, whilst having a discussion with my then-mother-in-law about my mixed family and their 'race', as she put it, I mentioned the fact that the term 'race' serves a divisive political construct. She, not being particularly educated, nor interested in much beyond sending money to televangelists, told me I was spoiled and that I read too much. Wow. Touché!

I realised, however, from her defensive comment, that she (and lots and lots of people) didn't want to consider how they think about things because that might cause reconsideration and, for some reason - probably because it would turn their world on its head - that would be bad.... Hence the defensive comment.

She was right in saying that I read too much (is there such a thing as too much reading?). While in college, I had happily discovered Stephen J. Gould, who taught at Harvard and wrote wonderful, thoughtful essays about all things evolutionary. One of these essays, in "Dinosaur in a Haystack" deals specifically with this ridiculous idea of race being anything real. The essay is much more profound than I might make it seem here, so forgive my simplifying: a point I remember specifically from the essay had to do with mitochondrial DNA and how there are some 32 markers that occur in the population worldwide that are NOT specific to anyone's skin colour, religion or country of origin.

What this means is that, regardless of your skin colour, you probably share these DNA markers with millions of people who are completely unlike you in respect to their hair/skin/colour/ethnicity. Somewhere along the line, Mr. and Mrs. Racist, you originated from the same mother as everyone else did and that mother came from somewhere in Africa. You might call her Eve, but she's the same mom every modern human has in common. The likelihood that she was a blond, blue-eyed person is, well,... there's no likelihood.

So how did we get to the point of separating humans along the lines of what colour their exterior organs are?

It is true that what we don't understand scares the crap out of us and also true, for most people at least, that we'd rather kill what we don't understand (fight) or run away and hide under a rock (flight). In the case of people who look and act differently, back in the good old days, we started by killing them (we being people of every type in every corner of the world). Later, we realised that those different people might be better at lifting the heavy stuff and being sweaty and working hard, so we just turned them into slaves, destroyed their families, their family structure, their culture and language and did that via the use of a divisive term: race, otherwise known as "those people".

As it did then and continues to do, defining people on the basis of their skin colour and calling that 'race' serves the ruling class by separating people from each other and diverting their attention from other really important stuff -- like their previous Prime Minister spending billions paying "advertising companies" to promote Canada, or their President spending $40 million on a one-day party in a country where illiteracy is rampant.

Race has nothing to do with skin colour, really. Take Rwanda for instance. From where I sit, two groups of people in a country whose people are almost all dark skinned, decided to kill each other. Those people somehow managed to see each other as different 'races'. Really, it was a huge, terrible, devastating political power play that left a lot of people dead and millions more totally confused and incapable of trusting anyone. The conflict also slaughtered the country's economy.

In reality, there is no such thing as race. There is no difference under the skin between people whose skin colour differs. In fact, according to William Marples, a forensic anthropologist, it is largely impossible, in the absence of any external clues, to determine the 'race' of a skeleton.

Skin colour is an adaptive feature. It simply made evolutionary/biological sense for humans to adapt to the heat/cold/environment they lived in, way back when.

Why don't people morph now, you ask? What has happened to the evolutionary process? Well, as points out Dr. Gould in another of his essays (same book), when the animal cannot act on its environment, its biology will undergo change. Where the animal CAN act on its environment, and can control the variables, certain adaptive changes become unnecessary. So, if you're living in the Australian outback, in constant sun, your hair and skin don't have to evolve 'cause you can get a hat and a T-shirt.

I would argue, however, that as we live in such a polluted world, our bodies have adapted -- evolved, if you will -- to accommodate pollution. We've also evolved to handle diseases that would have killed entire populations in days gone by, but which make us only mildly ill. So yes, the evolutionary process is still at work.

As for race, though, back in the day, many terrified, uneducated people, who, confronted with people who were vastly different than they, dealt with their fear and ignorance by subjugating or killing those they feared.

A note about that lack of education: by no means can those people way back when be faulted for being terrified when coming across others who were different and probably scary looking. No TV/radio/internet meant that a person could go their whole lives believing that all people looked as they did and never seeing anything to counter that knowledge.

In modern times - our times-- it is inexcusable to separate humans based on what we know scientifically to be a non-starter. There is one 'race,' being human, which is comprised of a zillion different types of hair, eyes, noses, face shapes and skin colours.

One argument suggested to me to establish the reality of 'race' is that certain diseases are more common in certain 'racial' groups. On the face of it, yes, some are; but this argument breaks down because those diseases can be passed on outside of those groups. The only real argument about diseases being more common with one group or another has to do with genetics: some family groups have a greater incidence of certain diseases but if those family groups mix with other family groups who have completely dissimilar characteristics, and who do not have a propensity to a certain disease, that disease can still be passed along into the progeny of this new blend. No disease that is specific to any one 'race' because the genetic markers for the disease can be passed on.

Just because something is more common with some people doesn't make 'race' a reality: it just means that people have more closely shared a bunch of genes. If that were the case, then fat people who are prone to heart disease would be a 'race.'

If people recognized they've been had by the machine and chose to disregard the political construct 'race,' it would be so much more difficult for those in political power to divert people's attention from more significant issues. Imagine if we didn't say "That's a black issue" or "That's a White issue," or "That's an Oriental issue," but if we said, "This concerns all of us and we're pissed off about it."

This is the challenge: consider how the term 'race' has been used to manipulate you, how you act, and vote; how you view political issues, and issues specific to identifiable groups; what effect and cost the establishment of special interest groups (those formed on the basis of physical characteristics) has on your local, provincial/state, and national government.

Here's the other challenge: choose to be blind to 'race'.

WINTER

Canadian Winters….

So, today in the paper, there was an article about snow removal in Calgary. The lady who wrote it said she was ‘forced to wear grips’ on her boots when she went outside, because the city doesn’t legislate that people have to shovel their back lanes….

I think it is so funny how, every year, people in this city treat snow, bad roads, cold and winter in general like they’ve never seen it before!

Good boots – and grips if you have’em, - are a great idea in this city. Chinooks, which we get about seven times a year, will easily reduce a pile of snow to an icy, slippery patch of potential injury in about 2 hours.

It is totally amazing to me what people in this rich city have to moan about. Yes, people ought to shovel their walks for sure -- common courtesy -- but people also have to have some personal responsibility. If you're afraid you're going to encounter some snow on your walk and if you're older and concerned about falling -- or even if you're not older but still concerned about a fall, get some grips. They're cheap and they will allow you to WIN over those other people who don't shovel.

As for shovelling, just do it. Common courtesy and personal responsiblity - honour - also apply here.