Treading water or swimming for safety

One of the greatest blessings in my life is that my adult daughter and I are very close. Not geographically at the moment, as she lives up in Ontario with her husband and my lovely granddaughter. But, thanks to an "all you can eat' long distance plan, at least we can still chat as if we just lived five minutes apart.
That doesn't mean that she was a saint or even a model student in high school. To be completely fair, I know there were many times when it was a great embarrassment to be my child. I was marching to my own beat long before it was fashionable and was often regarded as being eccentric and an oddity.
How did we get past all that? Did we develop amnesia? Of course not. We just finally recognized that we couldn't rewrite history. That in turn liberated us so that we could explore and appreciate the common ground we DO have. The payoff of course is the love and nurturing support that we have, and will, provide for each other for the rest of our lives.
At the end of the day I believe that is the key to building any successful relationship. We don't need to forget, nor do we need to forgive. What we need to do is find enough common ground to move forward. Otherwise, the relationship just 'treads water' until it is exhausted and sinks, instead of swimming for the safety of the shore.
This time last year, who would have imagined that we would actually be engaged in positive communication with and support for the society? Yet within the space of one short year, we have gone from railing against injustice to the pleasure of seeing so very many positive changes.
We don't need to forget what happened to appreciate the progress that has been made. We don't need to forgive the past .....in fact we should never be so hard that we can dismiss what happened. Forgive and forget is a fantasy that is beyond most people, myself included.
What we can do is recognize that if the society could make a deliberate and conscious decision to pick a better path, that it may very well be possible for Cape Breton to turn a new leaf. We have already seen glimmers of this from the online BOD minutes ( last month , When opportunites knock , brought the ugly gas chamber issue out into the light of day) to the increased petfinder listings for the CB branch to the first queries into opening another branch on the island.
There is no way to ever undo the harm that has been done directly and indirectly by the CB branch. No one should ever be asked to forgive and forget the multitude of horror stories that abound. But at some point, if only for the sake of the animals, everyone is going to have to find a way to move forward. Otherwise, we will just be caught on a treadmill of criticism that stonewalls the participants while maintaining the status quo.
At the end of the day, forging a new relationship with the cb branch could create a better future for the animals in Cape Breton. Indeed, it is the only thing that will. So we need to decide whether we need to get even or we need to make a difference. Somehow I suspect we won't get to do both.
An eye for an eye would make the whole world blind Mahatma Ghandi