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]