sometimes it is the ones that are the hardest to love, that need love the most.

i see it in rescue, i see it in my nursing career, i heard about it tonight in the voice of my daughter who was close to tears.
i see the the more difficult dogs, the less than attractive ones, the ones who don't squeeze our hearts get left by the wayside while others get picked up.
i see it in nursing, i see the difficult clients who live on the edge or the bariatric clients who we won't help because their bodies are too big, or the ones who don't agree with us or argue over their treatments..i see how they get written off and the blame switches back to them.

my daughter is a teacher in one of the high schools, she teaches a special program for grades 8-12 with marginalized at risk youth. kids who come from difficult homes, maybe abuse, maybe such poverty that they are always hungry and don't have clean clothes, kids fighting substance abuse issues, or an anger so deep that they become disruptive or violent to themselves or to others and they become a problem to the schools and the teachers..they in short become the enemy.

how sad is that..hungry kids without clean clothes, unhappy, acting out children, standing before us and all we can see is the anger and frustration they cause. she feels like it is a losing battle to have the kids recognized as something other than a problem.

what i find incredible is people who love and will go to the ends of the earth to help a suffering or dysfunctional animal will buy into the whole good kid and bad kid thing..if there are no bad dogs, just bad owners..maybe there are no bad kids either, just the ones whose life is too hard for them to win in.

simple acts of kindness to troubled children or teenagers can go as far or further as simple acts of kindness to animals can.
it would infuriate me when my teenagers would go to the corner store and be told to leave their knapsacks at the door or only 2 kids were allowed in at a time. like teenagers were second class citizens or something or because a few might shoplift, they all had the same potential...they didn't treat adults like that but is was ok to treat kids that way? i think not.

what is with us anyway? as a society, we treat animals like things and we treat kids like the enemy. we cut funding to social programs to the very most vulnerable because for some reason what? their vulnerablitiy is their own fault? i told you a few weeks ago, our health region cut the funding to the seniors volunteer drivers...dontcha think that folks who actually drive and still have a car could have handled some kind of alternative cut better?

when did animals, and kids and old or sick people become the ones who were the most expendable? what were we thinking?

so here is my thought for today...it is not just the governments fault...it is our own fault too because we turn a blind eye to different kinds of suffering out there, we chose to not see or blame the sufferers for whatever it is that they are suffering.

we paint this world ugly, we pit us against them, we determine who is worthy or who we will ignore.....simple acts of kindness are easy if given to someone easy to give to...lets try giving simple acts of kindness to the more difficult ones to give to...we actually might change the world for them too.