Last year, cold weather came on so quickly, that John did not even get a chance to rake the leaves! Not so this year, the cold of the fall is giving us time to adjust slowly - so far:)!

Today is the birthday of Els her son Diederik, whose first name is same as my second one. He was not an easy child and even now reminds me of my mother’s brother Herman, also one who marched out of line from the norm, but marching all the same and with much heart. I say, more power to them for what they do, how they do it and for who they are.

Yesterday I did cast my vote and my main choice made it in, mayor Nanshi, but alderman Mar had to make place for Woolley. I’ll have to buy a local paper to day to get the full scoop. Also, I fixed up my php image scaling programme to make it easier to switch from Kodak to Canon image file names.

In the wake of that, I brought the Mandala1973 album up to date and posted it as well. At the last minute the server became unavailable again, but it should be working today. I will leave it at this here today, because I want to complete my writings of yesterday, which were left unfinished.

The sharing of power never comes without some kind of force or compulsion, let alone the relinquishing of it. This can be illustrated with examples throughout history, both at the local level and world wide. In essence I see this reluctance as motivated by our natural drive for self preservation. We can first try negotiation, but in the case of power it is difficult to negotiate without the testing of each others powers and this quickly leads to violence.

To prevent this violence one needs a long history of experience, a willingness to learn from that and the self discipline to not be overtaken by one’s feelings. This is a tough combination to hold as an attitude, but is can be done as history also shows us in the cases of the European Union and the United States, among others.

In our world of today, we need a world wide concerted effort to bring our diverse cultures and traditions to a state of understanding about their common interests and shared values. When we look at the history of the formation of the two cited examples, we see that much violence preceded the eventual modern insights.

But, as the current crisis of governance in the US shows, some times old battles have to be fought again. The changing tides of politics and influence confront us with unavoidable needs for change. How, and to what extend, do the other and I have to change, is the question to ask and to answer. And, are we disciplined enough to avoid violence and damage in the process of constructing a compromise?

You do need to learn from history, if you want to make good history; ADV

This is a matter of wisdom and discipline over emotions and fixation. "You do need to learn from history, if you want to make good history." I offer this statement as an improvement over C. Rice’s comment re Iraq, “We do don’t study history, we make it” and some history that turned out to be.
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