Feature Article January 8, 2004
LAND O' LAKES NewsWeb HomeContact Us
My new Canadian family
- This New Year I feel the way I imagine an adopted child must feel. I am in a new family and I wonder about my future. A new great grandfather, a new grandfather and a new papa can't but help provoke changes in my life. Life may be easier or more difficult, depending on many aspects of our new relationships and how my approximately 30 million siblings and I are respected.
On reflection, my family has not really changed but, as is the trend in our modern society, our family heads are rotating.
My new Great Grandpa Paullie is a little younger than my former Great Grandpe and richer, even though he protects his fortune by keeping it abroad and letting his biological, not adopted, sons control it. He waves our Maple Leaf in public, being certain it is well displayed behind the throne from which he spouts his promises, but his fortune is protected from Canadian taxes by foreign flags; does he not like and trust my country? He is worldly in philosophy, promising us a better home and more self-control of our fate. He is wiping out the past and promising us a new improved future. Encouraging, but those of us who have been around for a few years have heard similar stories before.
My new Grampa Dalt was elected with a burst of enthusiasm. He promised to throw out the old ways. We need change and we need relief from a recent sensible revolution; we need good, clean and honest government. Openness and honesty is the new rally call. He was to fill our future with more nurses, more teachers, more doctors and many assorted inspectors to keep us safe and healthy. The future is rosy but the present is bleak. My poor Grandpa is bankrupt, so broke that on the very day he took over my family he was qualifying his agenda -'If only I had inherited money rather than debt!'
Papa Ronnie, the head of my immediate family, is an acclaimed political neophyte. No one else wanted the job! No one else thought I was worth fighting for. He claims to know what is best for me and I have to accept that, there was no one to argue otherwise. Since the usual democratic process was suspended I hope he will be a benevolent dictator; there certainly is efficiency in dictatorship but too often a failing in the benevolent aspect, particularly when he has few financial resources except for the benevolence of his own grandpa and papa and a lien on my home.
I hope that some of the promises made during the last year's wooing will be kept, at least for a while. Some will be broken and the blame laid on others, and the famous buck, instead of stopping at the top, will be passed to us little guys at the bottom to pay.
In the meantime life will proceed and if I am unhappy I will have to find a new great grandpa, a new grandpa and a new papa a few years hence.
And while I wait and watch I am certain there will be some interesting situations about which to muse.
