As a follow-on from the experience of helping out a friend which my son experienced recently (discussed previously), he gave me another example of some very sound and generous decision making last week.
He had been at work on the weekend, pursuing his part time work and when he got home after a long day, announced that he was probably going out with some friends for dinner to celebrate a birthday. He was asked all the usual questions...with whom, where to, when are you meeting and what time will you be home?
It turns out that the group were people he met through a close friend, not direct and personal friends of his, but he had been invited to go along by the close friend and he wanted to go. The promise was to be home by 10pm, which is decently early. As they were going downtown, he didn't take the car but was relying on public transit.
10 pm came and went and after a half hour a call was made to his mobile phone just to check on progress. There was no answer and the anxiety level notched up a little. At 10:45 pm still no sign of him and another call was made. Contact was made and he said that he was on his way home now. 11:30 pm came and there was no sign of him. No call came. I finally managed to get hold of him at 12:30 am on his mobile phone and he was almost at the train station home bound. Buses are hard to find at that time of night so I agreed to pick him up at the station.
Needless to say I had a few things I wanted to say, but I just asked "what happened?" and listened.
They had indeed eaten at the restaurant which had been named, but afterwards these 16/17 year old boys had gone to a Karaoke Bar and taken a private room and started to drink alcohol. Neither my son, nor his friend, who happens to be Moslem, partook of the alcohol, but the rest of the group did and some quickly became badly intoxicated. One wonders at the license holder of the Karaoke Bar, making no effort to check the age of the persons he served excessive amounts of alcohol to. My son's friend became irritated with his friends and didn't wish to be involved with them, suggesting to my son that they leave and head home. My son realised that there was a problem as especially one of the lads was in very poor condition and needed guidance to get safely home. He suggested to his pal that he should go home if that was how he felt and that he would stay and make sure that the drunks were marshalled home.
It turned out that the worst of the drunks did not want to go home and face the wrath of his parents and this left my son with a dilema. He could not leave this lad to stagger around the city, so eventually he discovered that there was an older brother who could be reached by mobile phone. He was at a party and didn't want to leave but offered that if my son could get his sibling to the party location, he would see to getting his drunken little brother home.
So my son took this lad to the party location by public transport, guiding him along, and handed him over to his older brother and then had to make his own way home from an unfamiliar part of the city.
I have to admit that I was impressed by this action, looking after the wellbeing of someone he barely knows because he knew someone had to. However I did have some issues with it all, but at that time of night felt it best he just sleep and it could all be discussed later in the morning.
The conversation next morning opened up with wanting to know why he hadn't called home to let us know that things had gone awry and say that he may be a bit late. Also reviewed was that they had no business going into a licensed premise under-age in the first place, should not have been drinking underage, and all of the implications of that to them and to the owner of the licensed premises. Next was a review of the fact that these kids were friends of his friend and that if his friend had the smarts to realise that the best thing to do was to vacate a bad scene before it became worse, then perhaps he should have followed the example.
However, a mightier cause became evident. He saw a potentially very bad situation which could quickly become a lot worse. Finding himself the only competent person in the group he took the responsibility upon himself to marshal this large number of kids into a safer situation and to personally take the worst case to a place of safety. A lot can be said about not being responsible for the stupidity of others, about not getting dragged into situations like that, but at the end of the day my biggest criticism was that he didn't answer my calls and didn't initiate a call for help.
I always get nervous in this big city when my kid is late home late at night when transit is scarce, if still running, and this conversation has been had enough times to have sunken in by now. I resent the tension and the rising fear when things become very overdrawn and I resent the loss of sleep, but this time I think that the responsibility of my son was exceptionally well met (except for letting us know what was happening) in what was a very irresponsible situation all round, where self responsibility was non existent, brotherly responsibility was not really picked up, leaving my son and eventually us in a supporting role, to sort out the mess irresponsibly created by some other kid's parents. Had that drunken child been left to his own devices, he may well have ended up under the wheels of a car, or beaten up...or worse.
However, the point was made that you cannot save the world from itself, all the time. Its a hard lesson to learn, but an important one. None of us are totally alone on this planet. We have some responsibility to ourselves and to others around us. In this instance he evaluated the circumstances and made the right decisions.
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Believe the memories of older men
My Grandfather was born in a small Cambridgeshire village in 1891. He was one of many children and when 1914 came along he volunteered for the Cambridgeshire Regiment of the Territorial Army and went off to war. His brothers also went off to war. One, his favourite older brother Captain Alfred Langley, was to die near Hollebeke, Belgium on September 20th 1917, successfully taking a German machine gun post which had his men pinned down near a railway embankment.
He went through the trenches for all those years and fought in many of the ugliest major engagements. At the end of the war he was one of only 11 men from the original Regiment who was still alive.
He saw a great number of things by 1919 when he finally came home to stay and unlike many men of that era, he didn't mind too much talking about them with his grandson. He was always descriptive, amazingly not bitter, sometimes critical and analytical, but because I asked questions he always gave me very complete answers. I learned a great deal from him.
One of the things he talked about with me was about the fledgling air force, the Royal Flying Corps, and their role in the conflict as he saw it from the ground. He mentioned to me that the majority of the pilots were officers and that they were accorded a very special and rather glamorous status, flying above the filth and degradation of the trenches, but was honest enough to say that their lifespan was often short and once shot at, they had no means of escape from their burning aircraft, as parachutes did not exist at that time.
He also mentioned to me that there were also Sergeant pilots, many of whom were mechanics who fixed the aircraft and who were required to fly repaired aircraft before they were returned to active duty to ensure that the mechanical and physical repairs had been done properly. He told me that when they flew, they flew unarmed, and that many were in fact caught in the air by German raiders, and many were killed because of this.
I never had any cause to doubt any single thing that was told me by my Grandfather. In fact I relied heavily on the truths the man taught me. The undeniable fact that Sergeant pilots existed in the RFC was an absolute truth to me.
After the turn of the 21st century, 90 years after this vile conflict, as a collector of military aviation history, I tried to make contact with the Royal Air Force Museum in London and with the Imperial War Museum, also in London, to discover some more facts about these enlisted pilots. I received a simple denial that such enlisted men had ever been awarded their flying badge. At first I was puzzled and queried this statement and received some apparent ridicule for my insistence that an eyewitness account had verified their existance. I contacted another Canadian who "wrote the book" on the history of the development of flying badges in the RFC and early RAF and asked what he knew. He also denied that there had been enlisted (Sergeant) pilots and referenced "many conversations with the curatorial staff at the RAFM and the IWM" and said that there was absolutely NO EVIDENCE of sergeant pilots having existed in the Royal Flying Corps.
I must confess that I took this as an insult to my intelligence and to my Grandfather. I knew that there must be evidence. I knew it must be that there had been Sergeant pilots in the RFC, simply because my Grandfather told me so.
This simmered inside me. Time passed and I knew that something would materialise if I kept raising the question and kept the thought alive.
Then one day on Ebay I found an old photograph for sale.....a photo of a man wearing the enlisted uniform of the RFC, wearing the rank of Sergeant....and undeniably wearing the pilot flying badge. I immediately copied that image and mailed it out worldwide to a very strong network of collectors, with my story and quickly I was contacted by a man in the USA who had MANY old photographs he had collected of Sergeant Pilots wearing RFC uniform.
He copied all of these images to me. I must confess to a very excited self satisfied sense of rightness. I had known that my Grandfather would not have created these men. I sent some of the images to the two official recording museological institutions and what happened next was amazing. Absolutely NOTHING happened. Silence.
Next, with this material in hand, I asked a fellow who lived near Kew in UK where the National Archives are kept, if he would join with me and undertake a detailed search of written documents (of which there were many thousands to be searched) and soon we found official War Ministry correspondance referring to Sergeant pilots and regulations referring to NCO pilots. This again was sent to the official museological bodies and still there was no response.
By now I was flabbergasted at this reaction. I was also very happy because I knew that my trust in my Grandfather's word, which was absolute, had proven true.
However what pleased me the most was that these obviously forgotten men, who had served their nation so loyally and at great cost to themselves, were finally acknowledged, at least by the evidence if not by a grateful nation.
I know that my Grandfather would be totally delighted that his tales told to a small boy were remembered and used to bring back these long gone warriors. Its worth listening to the words of old men.....there is truth in them.
He went through the trenches for all those years and fought in many of the ugliest major engagements. At the end of the war he was one of only 11 men from the original Regiment who was still alive.
He saw a great number of things by 1919 when he finally came home to stay and unlike many men of that era, he didn't mind too much talking about them with his grandson. He was always descriptive, amazingly not bitter, sometimes critical and analytical, but because I asked questions he always gave me very complete answers. I learned a great deal from him.
One of the things he talked about with me was about the fledgling air force, the Royal Flying Corps, and their role in the conflict as he saw it from the ground. He mentioned to me that the majority of the pilots were officers and that they were accorded a very special and rather glamorous status, flying above the filth and degradation of the trenches, but was honest enough to say that their lifespan was often short and once shot at, they had no means of escape from their burning aircraft, as parachutes did not exist at that time.
He also mentioned to me that there were also Sergeant pilots, many of whom were mechanics who fixed the aircraft and who were required to fly repaired aircraft before they were returned to active duty to ensure that the mechanical and physical repairs had been done properly. He told me that when they flew, they flew unarmed, and that many were in fact caught in the air by German raiders, and many were killed because of this.
I never had any cause to doubt any single thing that was told me by my Grandfather. In fact I relied heavily on the truths the man taught me. The undeniable fact that Sergeant pilots existed in the RFC was an absolute truth to me.
After the turn of the 21st century, 90 years after this vile conflict, as a collector of military aviation history, I tried to make contact with the Royal Air Force Museum in London and with the Imperial War Museum, also in London, to discover some more facts about these enlisted pilots. I received a simple denial that such enlisted men had ever been awarded their flying badge. At first I was puzzled and queried this statement and received some apparent ridicule for my insistence that an eyewitness account had verified their existance. I contacted another Canadian who "wrote the book" on the history of the development of flying badges in the RFC and early RAF and asked what he knew. He also denied that there had been enlisted (Sergeant) pilots and referenced "many conversations with the curatorial staff at the RAFM and the IWM" and said that there was absolutely NO EVIDENCE of sergeant pilots having existed in the Royal Flying Corps.
I must confess that I took this as an insult to my intelligence and to my Grandfather. I knew that there must be evidence. I knew it must be that there had been Sergeant pilots in the RFC, simply because my Grandfather told me so.
This simmered inside me. Time passed and I knew that something would materialise if I kept raising the question and kept the thought alive.
Then one day on Ebay I found an old photograph for sale.....a photo of a man wearing the enlisted uniform of the RFC, wearing the rank of Sergeant....and undeniably wearing the pilot flying badge. I immediately copied that image and mailed it out worldwide to a very strong network of collectors, with my story and quickly I was contacted by a man in the USA who had MANY old photographs he had collected of Sergeant Pilots wearing RFC uniform.
He copied all of these images to me. I must confess to a very excited self satisfied sense of rightness. I had known that my Grandfather would not have created these men. I sent some of the images to the two official recording museological institutions and what happened next was amazing. Absolutely NOTHING happened. Silence.
Next, with this material in hand, I asked a fellow who lived near Kew in UK where the National Archives are kept, if he would join with me and undertake a detailed search of written documents (of which there were many thousands to be searched) and soon we found official War Ministry correspondance referring to Sergeant pilots and regulations referring to NCO pilots. This again was sent to the official museological bodies and still there was no response.
By now I was flabbergasted at this reaction. I was also very happy because I knew that my trust in my Grandfather's word, which was absolute, had proven true.
However what pleased me the most was that these obviously forgotten men, who had served their nation so loyally and at great cost to themselves, were finally acknowledged, at least by the evidence if not by a grateful nation.
I know that my Grandfather would be totally delighted that his tales told to a small boy were remembered and used to bring back these long gone warriors. Its worth listening to the words of old men.....there is truth in them.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
The negative power of hypocracy in religion
I have no desire to offend a soul in this rant. However something happened today which raised my ire and I have to write it.
First let me say that I am a strong believer in tradition and belief. I am far from being a despiser of a faith in a greater being than ourselves who has some power over our existance. I was raised a Christian and substantially still follow my faith on a one-to-one basis of relationship with my maker. I love some religious observances, I love spiritual places (which are certainly not just found in churches). I am fascinated by the observances and beliefs of others and to some degree critical of much of the man-made dogma which seems to surround all religious faith groups. I keep myself outside of dogma.
This rant involves people of the Jewish faith, but do not let that raise and red flags. As you read this you will see that it doesn't matter to which faith block they belong.
Tonight my almost 18 year old son came home from school. He has been visiting various post secondary institutions to get a feel for them and for the programs they offer. He has been heavily encouraged and assisted and guided at home to ensure that he has a selection of reserves and can pick a path for himself.
Tonight he said to me "Dad, you know how you have been helping me to get out to these post-secondary functions to figure out what I want to do and where to do it? Well one of my friends at school is doing the same thing and tonight he needs to attend a local presentation by some Quebec-based University. His parents are Jewish and because its Passover they cannot leave their house to take him and they are asking me if, as I have a driver's license, I could take him. Its out in West Vancouver (far side of the inlet then a long way west). They are saying I could drive their car...."
Well..........my back went up immediately and I needed to work out why, so we had a conversation which started out with "You have only just got your driver's license and it makes me nervous enough when you head out into traffic in our car, let alone someone elses that you are not familiar with and have not driven before, so No, that is not going to happen.
Then out came the story that "He cannot go by bus because he won't be able to get home; the buses don't run out there after 8pm." To this my only reply was "and this is therefore your problem.....why?"
Next came a discussion that my son is days away from his International Baccalaureat and Provincial exams to graduate High School, and needs every minute to study, uninterrupted, at this time. The other lad is apparently a "brain" and a "nerd" and doesn't need to study to guarantee a good performance. Again I tried to point out that my son's exam success is more important than being someone's taxi-driver.
The next discussion was part of the other parent's well laid plans. "well if you don't want me to drive their car they have offered to "pay for gas" if I drive our car" !! I see, I thought to myself...suddenly finding that we are now involved in getting their son to his post-graduate information session. I have NO clue who this family is, by the way.
It was at this point that I brought up the subject of abjectly stupid religion. If this parental couple care about their son's further education, then surely for this one time abberation they could alter their observances and look after his needs without inconveniencing someone else? The night slashers of 2011 probably wouldn't be hunting for them if they showed their faces outside this evening. It also dawned on me that if they are so devoutly religious, then why is their son being allowed out to attend something his parents do not consider vital or worthy of supporting? Then I thought... Taxi?
There is a hugely hippocritical double standard here being applied to the life and standards of this young man's formation and expanded by the inconvenience, at a bad time, of innocent bystanders.
My son is a generous kid. He understood all my points and said he realised that they were all very good points, but knowing that his friend really wants to find out about this Quebec based University, he thought he may be able to help him out and wanted to do so. That, as I told him, is an admirable thing and cannot be argued with, but I wanted him to be aware of the construct under which this has grown, and to reason through it and recognise the hippocracy of the entire thing. I hope that he also will have the guts to discuss this with his friend. I certainly intend to take it up with the other boy's parents.
So, based on his final words about helping out a friend, which at the end of the day is the only real and valid issue here for me, we got the address of the location, entered it into the GPS so that he can drive in this totally unknown area to him and find his way home easily in the dark. We set it up in the car and asked him to call on arrival and again before leaving. I am still waiting for the arrival call.
The lesson here is don't use people and don't be so slavish to the formalities of your religion that they bind you into a state of servile uselessness. Be responsible.
I hope we have dealt with this lesson responsibly.
First let me say that I am a strong believer in tradition and belief. I am far from being a despiser of a faith in a greater being than ourselves who has some power over our existance. I was raised a Christian and substantially still follow my faith on a one-to-one basis of relationship with my maker. I love some religious observances, I love spiritual places (which are certainly not just found in churches). I am fascinated by the observances and beliefs of others and to some degree critical of much of the man-made dogma which seems to surround all religious faith groups. I keep myself outside of dogma.
This rant involves people of the Jewish faith, but do not let that raise and red flags. As you read this you will see that it doesn't matter to which faith block they belong.
Tonight my almost 18 year old son came home from school. He has been visiting various post secondary institutions to get a feel for them and for the programs they offer. He has been heavily encouraged and assisted and guided at home to ensure that he has a selection of reserves and can pick a path for himself.
Tonight he said to me "Dad, you know how you have been helping me to get out to these post-secondary functions to figure out what I want to do and where to do it? Well one of my friends at school is doing the same thing and tonight he needs to attend a local presentation by some Quebec-based University. His parents are Jewish and because its Passover they cannot leave their house to take him and they are asking me if, as I have a driver's license, I could take him. Its out in West Vancouver (far side of the inlet then a long way west). They are saying I could drive their car...."
Well..........my back went up immediately and I needed to work out why, so we had a conversation which started out with "You have only just got your driver's license and it makes me nervous enough when you head out into traffic in our car, let alone someone elses that you are not familiar with and have not driven before, so No, that is not going to happen.
Then out came the story that "He cannot go by bus because he won't be able to get home; the buses don't run out there after 8pm." To this my only reply was "and this is therefore your problem.....why?"
Next came a discussion that my son is days away from his International Baccalaureat and Provincial exams to graduate High School, and needs every minute to study, uninterrupted, at this time. The other lad is apparently a "brain" and a "nerd" and doesn't need to study to guarantee a good performance. Again I tried to point out that my son's exam success is more important than being someone's taxi-driver.
The next discussion was part of the other parent's well laid plans. "well if you don't want me to drive their car they have offered to "pay for gas" if I drive our car" !! I see, I thought to myself...suddenly finding that we are now involved in getting their son to his post-graduate information session. I have NO clue who this family is, by the way.
It was at this point that I brought up the subject of abjectly stupid religion. If this parental couple care about their son's further education, then surely for this one time abberation they could alter their observances and look after his needs without inconveniencing someone else? The night slashers of 2011 probably wouldn't be hunting for them if they showed their faces outside this evening. It also dawned on me that if they are so devoutly religious, then why is their son being allowed out to attend something his parents do not consider vital or worthy of supporting? Then I thought... Taxi?
There is a hugely hippocritical double standard here being applied to the life and standards of this young man's formation and expanded by the inconvenience, at a bad time, of innocent bystanders.
My son is a generous kid. He understood all my points and said he realised that they were all very good points, but knowing that his friend really wants to find out about this Quebec based University, he thought he may be able to help him out and wanted to do so. That, as I told him, is an admirable thing and cannot be argued with, but I wanted him to be aware of the construct under which this has grown, and to reason through it and recognise the hippocracy of the entire thing. I hope that he also will have the guts to discuss this with his friend. I certainly intend to take it up with the other boy's parents.
So, based on his final words about helping out a friend, which at the end of the day is the only real and valid issue here for me, we got the address of the location, entered it into the GPS so that he can drive in this totally unknown area to him and find his way home easily in the dark. We set it up in the car and asked him to call on arrival and again before leaving. I am still waiting for the arrival call.
The lesson here is don't use people and don't be so slavish to the formalities of your religion that they bind you into a state of servile uselessness. Be responsible.
I hope we have dealt with this lesson responsibly.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)