Ginger will be sorely missed

By Gerry Warner

Cranbrook Daily Townsman

Dec. 10, 2010

Not every Christmas story has a happy ending, but I suppose in the long run, this one does, but I can assure you that going from the short run to the long run leaves a lot of pain in between.
Last Saturday, our extraordinary, Calico cat of 16 years “Ginger” died, or to use the weasel word vernacular was “put down” which really means we killed her. I’ll get to that later.
Ginger came into lives as a fluff-ball of black, white and orange fur on Christmas Eve of 1994 wrapped up in a cage under the tree for our two children barely into their first years of school. She almost didn’t make it to our house at all because we we’re living in Whitehorse at the time and it was 40 below and I feared the shivering little kitten was going to freeze to death in our old Toyota before I made it home.
But she made it and it wasn’t long before she wormed her way into all of our hearts like most kittens do. But Ginger was definitely special. She was simply the most affectionate and well-mannered cat ever. A true “lap cat” who would immediately jump in the lap of any stranger who dared to sit down in our humble duplex, but an incredibly feisty cat as well that would attack any cat or dog that dared stray into our tiny yard under the jack pines in our Whitehorse neighbourhood.
She had one Yukon litter of four and my daughter called two of the kittens Marigold and Snowflake and I can’t remember the others . . . And what a mother! She gave birth behind the couch, then one-by-one she picked those kittens up with her teeth and moved them to a quiet spot downstairs and that was that. There was nothing for us to do. She did it all.
Ginger had another litter after we moved to Kimberley and then we had her “fixed” and she settled down to a spoiled rotten life of running the Warner household, chasing birds and mice and warming every lap that ventured into the house. But one of the truly unique things about Ginger is that she loved to go on walks with us when we left the property. Once, when the kids were away and I was doing their paper route, she accompanied me the entire two hours. She even got chased up telephone poles a couple times, but was undeterred, scolding the dogs from the pole and meowing at me in her polite way until I chased the dogs away and we resumed delivering the Bulletin.
And so it was for 16 years and she continued going out for walks with me with several neighbours remarking how “cute” the two of us appeared. Me, cute? My goodness.
Then about three weeks ago, just before the snow came, I came home from work and Ginger bounced across the lawn to greet me, but she was noticeably limping. Her rear left paw seemed to be bothering her so we took her to the vet and had her treated with antibiotics for what appeared to be an infected paw, possibly from a bite from the mean, old tom down the street.
Unfortunately it didn’t get better and the problem rapidly escalated to her entire rear leg, which she began to drag in an obviously painful way. Back to the vet. This time some hair was shaved off and a big, egg-shaped lump appeared, hard and growing. Poor Ginge, as I called her, deteriorated rapidly after that. She couldn’t drag herself upstairs anymore, so we moved her into the living room with the litter box and lined a cardboard box with her favourite blanket and did what we could do to make her comfortable. She still wanted up on our laps and we lifted her but as her oft-petted head began to droop and she began to loose control of her organs, my wife and I made the fateful decision.
Back to the vet. Things happened quickly. Too quickly. We made the decision all right and the vet staff were very consoling but before we knew it there was Ginge, barely able to hold her head up, in my wife’s lap and a vet staff member armed with a needle of anaesthetic – enough for a quick overdose – she said, and then she injected the needle into Ginger’s leg and she gave the same polite meow she always did.
For a few crazy seconds I said to myself maybe it won’t work and we can just take her home again. A few seconds later – it couldn’t have been more than 10 – Ginger’s head flopped over and 16 years of a perfect cat’s life was gone. The vision of her head falling will haunt me the rest of my life.
Nothing more need be said about this and I commend the vet’s staff for doing what needed to be done. But my advice to any of you that may go through this someday is when you’ve made the decision, let the vet staff handle the execution. It’s their job. You don’t need to assist. As my wife Sandra said, we’ve got the pictures. (And so many of them)
God bless Ginger. R.I.P.

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Assange is fighting for all of us despite the politicans that would assassinate him

Politically Incorrect

By Gerry Warner

Cranbrook Daily Townsman

Dec. 10, 2010

In the ordinary scheme of things, I’d be writing a column today about the implosion of B.C. politics and the desperate need for a Third Party as the two mainstream parties continue to soil themselves.
But these aren’t ordinary times and there are far more important things happening on the world political stage than the juvenile antics of B.C. politics. What I’m referring to makes a mockery of the entire political process and the right of ordinary citizens to have all information available so they can make informed decisions for themselves.
I’m talking, of course, about the threats – literally – to kill WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and with him free speech itself and our inalienable right to access all the information we need, not just the crumbs politicians want us to know.
And lest you think the foregoing paragraph was a little hyperbolic, consider this. Speaking on a Fox News business show “Follow the Money,” American political commentator Bob Beckel said “a dead man can’t leak stuff” and then went on to say “I’m not for the death penalty, there’s only one way to do it; illegally shoot the son of a bitch.”
Alright you say, that’s Fox News, you can’t take them seriously to which I respond millions of Americans do including Mike Huckabee, who almost won the Republican nomination for president and has publicly called for Assange to be “executed” and, wouldn’t you know it, Sarah Palin, who lumped Assange in with the Taliban and al-Qaida.
But if this doesn’t convince you, what about former Stephen Harper senior adviser and University of Calgary political science professor Tom Flanagan, who joined the lynch mob last week calling for Assange’s death. On the CBC Power and Politics show, Flanagan said: “he should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something.”
Calgary police are now investigating Flanagan for counselling to commit murder. Hopefully, the University of Calgary is investigating him too. He should be fired.
And what evil things has Assange done to earn such hate and opprobrium? Well, he released state secrets in the U.S. about the war in Iraq such as the killing of thousands of civilians and numerous Iraqi journalists by U.S. forces during the Iraq war. He also published secret military cables about extra-judicial killings by U.S. troops in Afghanistan, as well as U.S. and Israeli plans to invade Iran, espionage activities by China and – are you ready for this -- some of Canada’s dirty little secrets in the Afghan war.
Such as the fact that millions in Canadian aid money spent in Afghanistan to build the Dahala Dam, our key development project in the war-torn country, went into the pockets of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the half-brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and, according to a U.S diplomatic cable “widely understood to be corrupt and a narcotics trafficker.”
So this is what 153 Canadian soldiers have died for in Afghanistan – to support the international heroin trade. Don’t you think we have a right to know that?
WikiLeaks’ stated goal is to ensure that whistleblowers and journalists are not jailed for emailing sensitive or classified documents. The project has been compared to Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 which helped to end the Vietnam War. Ellsberg today is regarded as a hero for doing that whereas Assange has been branded an international outlaw and is currently in jail. Go figure.
And don’t for one minute think that unfettered access to information isn’t important everywhere. Look at the sad spectacle of B.C. politics the past several months. What if we knew the Liberals planned to spring the HST on us after the election? Wouldn’t it be nice to know what really went on with the billion-dollar sale of B.C. Rail and the Basi-Virk affair?
But lacking a Julian Assange, or someone like him in this province, we’re never going to know and our supposed democracy is the poorer for that. And what about our own city? For years we were in blissful ignorance about our leaking sewage lagoon and the problems it was causing.
Information is the oxygen of democracy. Take it away and suffocation sets in soon. Julian Assange may not be an angel, but the cause he’s fighting for benefits us all.

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