I Try Not To Pay Too Much Attention

To figures. How many visits. How many views. I don't know what it means. Stats used to tell me where visits and views were from . But why should it matter...they might have been Aurora folk far from home.

When I started writing the Blog,I had no idea where it would take me or its limit.My gut told me it would be a powerful tool. Perfect for my hand.

I found myself thinking, if only people knew. then I'd realise...I can tell them

I thought things recorded in Wikipedia are there forever.I can't worry about stuff that can't be changed.

Now I find the record can be changed. I'm still not going to concern myself .. Doing what I do occupies enough of my time.

Paranoia is an occupational hazard for politicians..

Obsessing on what people think of you, needs to be strictly disciplined. Of course it matters,

But people will believe what they believe. I certainly don't have the personality to be worrying about how I am portraying myself at the same time as trying to project an idea or a rationale.

I think therein lies a path to madness.

I learned things as I went along.

I use names if there's political involvement . I think that's fair. If one holds public office, everything said, every thought expressed belongs in the public domain.

I can't know what was in a person's head when a statement was made. But I'm hearing it the way any other would hear it. It is subject to the listener's reception..

If I'm writing about it, my perspective is read. Readers still have the freedom to decide for themselves if my perspective is acceptable.

They do.

It has been an interesting journey. The upcoming election will be a measurement.

Did this blog influence readers' perception of politics?

I think it must.

Did reading a table-side view of events as they happened ,make them participants?

I hope it did.

In the years since we have had a right to vote, are people more engaged because of the social media now than they were before.

That's what I am anxious to discover.

Since I started, hundreds of thousands of public dollars have been spent. Various lawyers have been engaged. A bylaw was adopted to prohibit my freedom to speak. A person was added to the town's payroll "to read blogs and letters to the editor to correct any misinformation that might be out there".

I am still writing the Blog.

But not without cost.

When my grandfather was a young husband and father, he gathered around the kitchen table with others like him, to talk about why they had to work so hard and still not earn enough to feed their children properly. The " baillies" (police) had authority to smash open the door to his home, attack them with truncheons, to stop all talk abut the right to vote.And they did.

When my grandmother's first-born son fought and was wounded in the trenches in France and in 1917, killed at the age of twenty -two, on blood-soaked beaches at the Dardanelles, he had no right to vote.

Now I do have the right to vote . I have the means to provide my neighbours, a well rounded account of what they have a right to know without meeting in secret at a kitchen table.

Yet, in the Town of Aurora, in 2010, it remains for a court to determine that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms really means "freedom of thought,belief, opinion, expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication"