By Jim Selman | Bio
I am in Kiev, Ukraine this week. This is my first time here. In fact, it is the first time I have been in this part of the world or to a country using the Cyrillic alphabet. I am not prepared to write a travelogue since I just arrived a day ago, but sometimes first impressions are fleeting but useful. In this case, my first impressions are reflections on an ‘old’ country that (from what I can tell) has yet to be discovered by the tourism industry. Even at one of Ukraine’s
By Shae Hadden | Bio
With elections today in Canada and next month in the U.S., this is a good time to remind all the women we know to exercise their right to vote–a right which we’ve only had for less than a century.
In July 1917, a group of 33 women picketed outside the White House, asking for the right to vote. They were rounded up by 40 police wielding clubs, brought to Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia and imprisoned for "obstructing sidewalk traffic". One of the women, Lucy
By Shae Hadden
Bio
If
I were to have a child (a hypothetical choice at this point in my life,
as I am long past my child-bearing years), I would not be able to bring
them up without teaching them what to expect in the future. For from
the first time they cry and I respond, I would begin a pattern of
stimulus-and-response behavior that would create an expectation. If I
can perceive that my child is hungry, I would feed them: wet, I would
change them. In need
By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is the third in a four-part series.
The new museum dedicated to the Battle of Warsaw is a compelling place to visit. It opened the weekend we arrived, and the queue stretched around the block. But after being informed of Dad’s participation in the battle, we were afforded special treatment, moving quickly to the head of the line. Serious deference is paid to elders. People give up their seats on trains and trams; seniors are acknowledged in the streets, especially those who, like my father, wore the pin bearing the insignia of the resistance, a stylized ‘P’ with curving feet. He did not wear the Cross of Valour, awarded to him in absentia, for sustained courage in the face of the enemy. This an honour I only learned about recently.Two days earlier, we had walked the street across from Saski Gardens,
where dad had been dug in. It is a broad roadway now, flanked with new
buildings for the most part. At the intersection of
Marszalkoska-Krolewska boulevards, he pointed this way and that with
his cane, to mark the presence of the German Army behind what were then
trenches in the park, and where lay the heaps of rubble in which he and
his