The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and every system created by
humans has within itself the potential route to its own destruction.  Why am
I thinking now of an idealist whose dreams echoed admonitions found in each
religion but lacked the practicality to work; and why quote or paraphrase
him?
 
To make a difference ourselves we also need to discover practicality and
then mesh it's lessons with the hopes our own idealism give us, whether
those hopes are of changes in laws, or breeder standards, or any further
protection for the ferrets we love.
 
Without that synthesis all that is achieved is a roiling, non-directional,
clash of opinions, leading eventually to emotions overflowing and extremes
sought to hide within -- any shelter in a storm.  When the tempest is of our
own making there are options, especially before serious harm is done.
 
We all know damage has happened in the past, with paths of change destroyed
because a few reacted so extremely that they decimated ways to advance
actual improvements (as opposed to just satiating their own anger): in some
situations bridges which were needed to help ferrets buckled between ferret
people and the researchers whose work could keep more ferrets alive and
well, in some cases we lost contacts at breeding farms who were working
toward the same goals but were harrassed so badly for not having infinite
power that they left, in some cases enemies were created of politicians
whose votes and arguments for ferrets would have helped us, and so on...
 
If anything is going to be achieved to help ferrets then we must recognize
that NO ONE and NO GROUP OF PEOPLE, whether it is a company or a legislature
or anything else, is intrinsically bad.  Within each there are ways to reach
TO the people involved, ways to CONVINCE, ways to get them WORKING WITH US.
To not realize this is to set our shared goals of improving conditions for
ferrets up for failure.  Fine, people have different opinions -- where is
the surprise in that?  Fine, people have different priorities and different
timetables -- are you surprised , yet?  We have to work with people AS
people -- just as fallible and bound up as we are, and we have to work with
companies AS companies -- systems created by people which can be changed.
Companies, like other systems, can also be destroyed, but it is folly to
blindly destroy unless we know for sure that the options are better.  Anyone
here who is at all informed knows there are worse things than have often
been the subjects of our recent turmoil.
 
So what now?  Now we need to be practical.  Hubbub is not taking us
anywhere.  Several people have started to make suggestions of practical ways
to bring changes which matter to them.  Like anything else those will have
their weak points but that does not mean that given the right time and
displayed against the alternatives they would not find their years for
acceptance.  Let's think of practical options to the problems which bother
us rather than finding devils in each corner.  Let's do this in ways which
would not destroy our means of communication or our potential future
champions.
 
It may feel good to rant and rave but it will not do anything good, in fact
it will do the opposite.  Stay calm, and CREATE ... TOGETHER.
[Posted in FML issue 2005]