From the Inside

Danes rock. That's all I want to say on the subject.

So, I picked my sister and niece up from YVR yesterday and dropped them back there today. Yesterday they were arriving by bus from Whistler, today they were flying back to the UK.
A couple of hours after they arrived yesterday, the Sea-to-Sky Highway was closed in both directions.
I haven't been able to show them much of Vancouver or Richmond, but I think they get it. Vancouver that is, they get it. My niece has also become addicted to ice hockey.

There have been people in my life, however briefly, that have said or done something that makes me remember them and has added to the sum of my thinking.

In the very first job I had, there was a woman called Linda Lines. At this point in my life I wasn't a fully-formed card-carrying socialist, but I had joined the white collar union that supported our job.
Linda Lines was the union rep but she didn't agree with a lot of things that went on within it, particularly because our union financially supported the Labour Party and this wasn't where her personal politics lay.
Looking back, I can see that she was also one of those strong women who did her job well and didn't suffer fools lightly. You know, the type people piss and moan about.
One day I asked her how she could be union rep when she felt there was so much wrong with it and she said to me that there's no point standing outside and whingeing about it, you had to work to make things better from within.

That stuck with me and I was reminded yet again of this when I was reading a blog post earlier. The post was about an extraordinary case in Kansas USA where a woman basketball ref had been told she couldn't referee a game at a Catholic Boys' school because she couldn't be in authority over boys.
The male ref walked out with her in disgust and the Activities Association is possibly (shouldn't really be just a possibility) going to ban the school from playing.
In the comments section, a number of people said that this was typical of the kind of thing that had made them leave the Catholic Church, and I can most certainly understand that. However it also made me think back to Linda Lines, it would be better to have a church (or any other religion - wonder to whom I am referring there) that is literally bristling with the bristling because that's how things get changed, from within.
Change rarely happens from the outside in that's for sure.