Writing - A strange Business

Some days I don't post to this blog - sometimes it is because I am busy, but more often than not, I don't write because there is nothing that I want to write about (given the fact that I have decided to take a few weeks off from bashing Mr. Harper, there are now slow news days). On other days I feel as if I have an overwhelming number of  choices to chose from. Sometimes the conversation I share with readers almost pops out of my brain with a minimum of work, while for other topics it is a bit of a struggle to get the words out in some sort of, at least for what passes for me, a coherent form. What amazes me about this process that seems to be evolving is how often the act of writing changes how or what I think about a specific topic.

My last post is a good example of how the process of thinking about what I wanted to write, changed how I felt.  Initially I was irritated at the parents of the young child who died. Why were they blaming the government? According to the media reports, when the Ministry of Education's investigators did get to the unlicensed day care facility there were a number of dogs and 29 children (CBC) - 19 children over the limit of allowable children at a unlicensed day care facility! How could the parents not know when they dropped their child off or picked her up that there were too many kids there? Should not they have been aware of both the legislation and the capacity of the building? Aren't parents obliged to do due diligence? How is it my fault (as a tax payer) that they messed up?

As well the whole issue of suing someone for $3.5 million for the death of your child felt absurd and in some bizarre, perhaps convoluted thought process, it felt as if the very act of suing negated the legitimacy of their grief.

But as I started to think about the parents and their grief, and to wonder how any parent would willing leave their child in a facility that seemed perhaps over crowded but generally to be all right - I realized that thousands of parents every day in Canada have to do the exact same thing as did this child's parents. All of these parents, because they do not perceive that there is a choice as to whether or not they both need to work, have to find a reasonable place for their child - a place that they can afford. They drop their children off early in the morning and pick them up, at least in the winter months, after it is dark. No matter how loving and competent they are as parents, they have just spent eight hours at work and perhaps a hour or two commuting. It is not surprising that they lack the energy or capacity to investigate their child's life every night. My thoughts evolved from blaming the parents to accepting that we all need to take some responsibility for the way children are now raised.

The act of writing, for me, starts off with an internal conversation. I argue with myself - test my hypothesis - always allowing the topic to evolve at its own pace. When I start to play with words and phrases, I frequently am never sure as to where it is going to end up. But I do know that thinking about how I feel and what I believe is a good thing.

Perhaps if more of us engaged our brains and thought things through before we regurgitated either the opinions of others or our own poorly developed musing, the world would be if nothing else more reasonable and less angry.