Karlyle Tomms's Blog: Second Edition

Comment: I began to write this as a prologue for my upcoming novel Edge of Smoke. However, it began to become much more than a prologue for the book, and I think it stands alone at this point. I will rewrite the prologue for Edge of Smoke, but I want to put this out there as an essay that describes what the fictional story is oriented toward. Watch for the release of Edge of Smoke, probably sometime in 2024. As with all my novels, a character identified in The Calling Dream (Stephanie) now tells her story in Edge of Smoke.

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Human beings like labels, niches, and categories, don’t we? We like to define all things, including people. We like to know when we pick up a can labeled beans that beans are what we are going to find inside. We don’t want to open the can to find corn or tomatoes. We want what we expect. It seems to comfort us if we can have niches where things neatly fit, a square peg in a square hole, a round peg in a round hole. If it doesn’t fit, we often try to force it instead of allowing a square peg to be a square peg. We expect to be able to categorize each other in this same way. We expect to be able to force people into the category that we assume for them, and if that square peg doesn’t fit into the round hole and we can’t force it, we either discard it or try to eliminate it rather than let the square peg be the square peg without a square hole. We don’t like things that don’t fit our concept of what fitting means.

We have niches and categories that we expect people to fit into. What is your income? What is your job? What state were you born in? Where did you grow up? What family did you come from? What religion do you practice? What is your political party? Are you liberal or conservative? What is your name? What is your football team? What race are you? What ethnicity are you? What sexual orientation are you? Do you classify yourself according to the gender of your birth? Were you born in Honduras? Are you Chinese? Are you a friend or foe? Are you a savior, saint, devil, or wretch? The categories go on and on. We want to know if others are one of us or one of them. If we conclude that they are not one of us, the temptation is to either discard them or destroy them, at the very least, to hate them for being different because, if they don’t fit with our definition and label, they must therefore be devil, wretch, or foe. They could not possibly be a friend, especially when we never give them a chance to be. So, when anyone thinks in terms of us and them, no one who is not classified as one of us is allowed to be our friend or granted our approval, much less our love and understanding.

Perhaps this goes back to the days of tribes, where different groups staked out their territory and defended themselves. They had to band together lest another tribe would come to raid their village, kill their children, rape their women, and take their goods. The survival method was to stick together. Then, the next time the other guys try to steal our wheat, we can fight them off as a unified group. Let’s face it: these defenses were necessary because human beings have always created alliances based on the fact that human beings have always tried to take from each other rather than share. The early admonishments of civilizations not to steal were efforts, perhaps, to move beyond the barbaric practices of tribal conflicts.

Nonetheless, conflict has always persisted in humanity because humans continue to have an inherent urge to differentiate us from them. The continuation of the temptation to take from others has also persisted. However, it manifests on a much larger scale through colonialism and the building of empires rather than the petty skirmishes of tribes.

Human beings have had untold centuries of thinking in terms of friend or foe/us or them. To survive, we first had to distinguish ourselves from the other guys. Are you with us or against us? This may have been necessary for survival during tribal days, but today is different. Today, us versus them is more likely to be a product of greed and selfishness because one of the biggest temptations of a human being is the illusion of power or superiority. What is essential to understand is that power and superiority are, at their very core, only illusions because people confuse power with authority or control. Superiority can only be an assumption of the ego. Authority cannot be power because it may be granted, or we may grant it to ourselves, especially if we consider ourselves superior. Still, authority is not true power because authority can be taken away.

In truth, we all possess only one power, and we all possess it equally. That is the power to choose what we will think, say, or do in this moment only. Because we all possess this one and only equal power, we are all equal in value. We may not know that we are of equal value. The majority of us continually question our worth, whether we admit it or not, because most of us are continually trying to live up to the role we were taught, we must play. Because of this, we may need the drug of feeling superior to others, lest our feelings of inferiority be revealed, especially to ourselves. We may need to unite ourselves with those whom we perceive to be superior or of like mind so they will grant us, by assimilation or fraternization, some level of their perceived superiority. We are, therefore, more likely to follow someone who claims to be superior than to think for ourselves. We are more likely to align ourselves with a winning ball team, some political candidate, or an entertainment star than to take a truthful look at ourselves. That alignment may give us a momentary surge of feeling a kinship with superiority, but it always fades.

Those with the strongest need for superiority are the least likely to admit it because admitting we need the drug of superiority would mean admitting how inferior we actually feel. Instead, we go mindlessly about declaring, at least to ourselves, that we are, at the very worst, better than whomever we perceive to be them. Those who feel most inferior are the ones who most need a ‘them’ to look down on and condemn. We may go to great lengths to prove to ourselves that we are better than them because of their race, ethnicity, country of origin, socioeconomic level, education, or our determination that their behavior is immoral. We may push ourselves to excel so we can claim the baton of superiority. Many of us try to prove that we must have some modicum of value by demeaning others so that no matter how low we feel, at least we are not one of them. We then fail to realize that genuinely confident people have nothing to prove. So, we cannot be truly confident if we need to prove ourselves superior to anyone.

The need for control of others is always based on fear, whether or not there is any legitimate reason for that fear. If they are different, therefore not one of us, if they behave in a way or present in a way that does not fit what we were conditioned to believe, they must therefore be feared, must by assumption be our enemy, and either controlled or destroyed. Usually, we do this without considering that those we wish to control and condemn are of equal value as human beings and, therefore, deserve the same rights that we would claim for ourselves. To have an excuse for control, we must first define them as separate and inferior. In cases when we define them as extremely inferior, perhaps subhuman, or not human, we may permit ourselves to destroy them, but this is the absolute pinnacle of ego-feeding human arrogance.

To control them, we may attempt to manipulate or influence those similar to ourselves to get them to join our cause, perhaps huge groups of others. We may need to solicit and fool those who don’t engage their time with critical thinking into joining us. We may plan efforts to control ahead of time, seduce great crowds with fervor and lies, and for a time, perhaps be quite successful at feeding our addiction to feeling superior. At the same time, we feed the crowds the illusion that they, too, are superior because, at the very least, they are not one of them. Yet, in the end, all illusions must crumble, and those who have utilized hateful and destructive means to exalt themselves always find themselves among the despised, not for being different but for soliciting and engaging in acts of malice and evil.

Control is an illusion because no one can control the past, the future, or the mind of another human being. The past is gone the instant it occurs, and although we can plan, no one can determine what will happen, even in the next second. So-called brainwashing is merely a technique for manipulation utilizing certain traits and habits of human thinking. It still does not determine what we choose to think. Although we may tend to follow the crowd and fall in line with those who are like us, our thought remains our choice. Although we may make expected choices to alleviate pain and torture, it is still a choice we make. We all choose what we think, even if that is based on our conditioning, and no one can take the choice from us, for in every moment, we are granted another choice. Yet, we were all trained and indoctrinated into our choices and behavior. We were trained at a time when we didn’t realize that we had a choice, and although small children may question, they do not have the maturity to discern. They learn what they are taught, from the ABCs to what they are told they must think and how they must behave. Few deviate as children, and if they do, it is likely due to an issue with their brains, not their consciousness. To think something other than what we were indoctrinated to believe, we would have to be willing to question and examine our indoctrination, and few of us are willing to do that. Therefore, more often than not, our illusions are not freely surrendered but shattered when, at last, they collide with the wall of reality, and this is an emotionally excruciating thing to endure. Also, beliefs continue to clash with other beliefs because it is the only thing a defended belief can do. Ultimately, all conflict is the result of one belief pitted against another.

On the other side of greed, selfishness, and the illusions of power and superiority, a global awareness is beginning to confront the concept of tribe and superiority. At the same time, some people vehemently cling to the illusion of us versus them. Selfishness and the temptation to the fantasy of power are why they adhere to the concept of separation. The basic definition of a cult is the notion of us versus them taken to the extreme. We are special; they are not. We are superior; they are not. We are the chosen; they are not. Yet, those same people forget that no one has exclusive rights to life or to God. Still, a movement is underway to define that we are all part of humanity, all part of a vast and complex system where things don’t fit neatly into labels, categories, and niches. Over eight billion of us are on Mother Earth, with over eight billion distinct variations of humanity. No two people, even identical twins, are exactly alike, especially in their experience. There are over eight billion human stories, not including past ones. Deviations from our conditioned thinking, as well as variations of human expression and experience, are inevitable. Those alternatives of humanity do not deserve our condemnation but our recognition, acceptance, and compassion.

Some still cling assiduously to the concept of separation, fearing anyone who might be different, casting them into the shadows of society where they can rot in hell as far as we are concerned. Our society tends to cast them into the shadows and then punish them for being there, not because they have less value as human beings but because they don’t fit the mold that our particular segment of society prescribes and are therefore perceived as having less human value. If they don’t fit the mold, they must, therefore, be inferior, our enemy, or both. The problem is that the same God that made us made them. Yet, in our addiction to superiority, we dare to perceive that an omnipotent and all-powerful God must have been wrong to have created them and, therefore, requires our intervention.

Nonetheless, we are all children of the same creator, no matter how we seek to define the creator, ourselves, or others, whether we insist on fitting others into our mold or accept each other as beloved children of God. Let us never forget that no matter how we define another human being, it cannot be truly who they are or how they define themselves. We all have the right and the choice to define ourselves regardless of any other definition of us. I am not, nor will I ever be, your opinion of me, and whether I was created differently or live my life differently does not mean that I have less value than you.

Influences from childhood on our developing beliefs are powerful, and we may look at one another and see differences and separation because that is how we were indoctrinated. Yet, we are more genetically and emotionally alike than any perceived differences. Still, those tiny differences divide us to the extreme, and the human ego tempts us to judge and hate those who are different. Our beliefs are a product of our conditioning, and it is essential to understand that no belief can be true, even if it is a belief about the truth. Beliefs vary from individual to individual, although we may share some beliefs in common. Yet, no two people have the same beliefs, which is why we argue. Beliefs can be debated, but truth is irrefutable. Once truth is recognized, there can be no argument. The good news is that beliefs can change if we are willing to examine them instead of clinging to and defending them. The problem is that most of us cannot define the difference between belief and truth, nor do we ever examine the difference or question it. Instead, we believe as we were taught to believe. We live as we were taught to live.

If you were born in Iran or China, you have a much lower chance of being a Christian than had you been born in The United States or European Countries. We are all indoctrinated into our beliefs and worldviews from the time we are old enough to comprehend, and who is to say that the indoctrination of one is superior or inferior to another? Our beliefs vary from individual to individual, family to family, region to region, country to country, religious denomination to religious denomination, etc. Many of us were trained never to question but to willingly accept that the beliefs we were indoctrinated into can only be the proper beliefs. Most of us grow up thinking about us and them because we are taught to define differences rather than look for commonality. Many of us are trained from early childhood to resent, hate, or at least judge people different from us. Yet, our commonality far outweighs our differences, and all beliefs can be brought into question.

Most of us never question the beliefs we were indoctrinated into from an early age, including beliefs about ourselves, others, and everything else—money, sex, marriage, gender, friends, family, religion, education, politics, you name it. We mindlessly operate under our beliefs while we are convinced that what we believe is the truth. We suffer from the illusion of superiority or inferiority to others. We count ourselves as worth more than them because___. We count ourselves as worth less than them because___. We especially hate when others don’t seem to measure up to our personal moral standards and forget that those morals were indoctrinated into us from our first moment of comprehension. Regardless of our moral standards, they are our standards for us to follow rather than standards to be imposed on others. If we choose to follow those morals, that is our right, but we never have the right to insist that others follow the same path that we have chosen, and we most assuredly never have the right to force others to follow the way we have chosen. For to do so would assume that we have greater authority than God.

Most of us never make the slightest effort to walk a mile in the shoes of the other or try to understand their plight or experience. We judge human books by their human covers and refuse to look inside. Perhaps we fear what we might see in the mirror of their existence and experience. You know, we are all mirrors of one another. We don’t want to acknowledge whatever we hate in another and may even hate in ourselves. Perhaps we hate the other because their life is antithetical to the beliefs we were indoctrinated into. As long as we assume our beliefs are superior, we will continue to hate them. Perhaps we hate them because they dare defy the rules we have been taught to prescribe for ourselves. Perhaps they live as we would never dare to live, which is not that they express themselves differently, but live as themselves while we chain ourselves to our beliefs and indoctrination. Whatever we love in another is something that we have come to acknowledge and love in ourselves or something we admire in them, something we aspire to. If we dare to get to know them, look beyond the surface, and deep within, we may see a glimmer of ourselves, perhaps even learn to break the chains of feeling inferior and needing the illusion of superiority. Maybe we might even see our love in them reflected back to us.

The human book we most fear looking into is our own, and maybe we also fear those willing to look inside themselves. Perhaps we fear those willing to be true to themselves despite the lifetime indoctrination we have all received. If we do what they have done, look into ourselves, and be true to ourselves, would we find something we love and cherish or fear and hate? Would we have to face our own shame that we can never live up to the expectations placed on us? While fitting into the roles we have been assigned throughout life, we tend to resent those who have the courage to be themselves. How dare they love themselves, stand up, and be themselves when who they are does not fit our beliefs, concept of morals, or expectations? We never consider that it is possible and necessary to love ourselves and challenge our roles and beliefs simultaneously and that the mirror of their experience is a call to learn to love ourselves, as many of them have done. Suppose they have broken free and have been able to free themselves of the internalized bigotry that our indoctrination prescribes for them. In that case, they come to love themselves for who they are, not what others think they are, and they come to value themselves despite hatred and condemnation that continues being cast against them.

It is our own shame that we most fear to examine. Most of us are actors who never let the world see who we truly are, and most are terrified of those who allow the world to see who they are. They have the courage that the rest of us cannot muster. They dare to risk disapproval. They dare to break free from constraints we defend rather than ever question. Yet, they are often also the members of society who can engage with genuine love the most because when anyone can love and accept themselves, it is easier to love and accept others. When anyone cannot love and accept themselves, it is more challenging to love and accept others. When we perceive superiority or inferiority rather than equality, loving and accepting ourselves or others is almost impossible. When we accept our assigned beliefs and roles without question, we may feel safer, but at what cost to ourselves and others? At what cost to love? Doing what we are expected to do may seem safe. It may prevent us from being attacked by those who continue to follow their expected roles and beliefs and live as they are expected to live, but it is always at the risk of never learning to love who we truly are.

Unfortunately, life and the human experience do not have neat little niches, regardless of our attempts to create them. Oh sure, a rose is a rose, and it is not likely to produce cucumber flowers. It is what it is, but people are what they are despite the roles they play for others. The difference is that a rose can’t pretend to be something it is not, but people can. If others cannot force themselves into something that they are not, or they don’t want to, we would rather they pretend to be what we want them to be than allow them to be themselves. We may feel safer when we can convince them to play the role that we have assigned them. Then, we think we know what to expect. Yet, even when they play their expected role, we have an underlying awareness of their truth, and we still count them as separate, even if they are members of our own family, our community, or attend our church.

Beneath all the garbage that we were taught, all that was dumped on us from early childhood, our true authentic self, the self that is beyond our concept of value, the self that shares the exact same value as everyone else, is always present and always has been. You can throw a diamond in the trash, but that cannot change the value of the diamond. Our worth is not diminished by others dumping their trash on us. Our value remains forever as the universe created it, no matter how others treat us or what they think about us. Whether they praise us or condemn us, our value remains the same. If our presentation to the world doesn’t quite match the expectations that others have for us, then that does not mean that we have to change or that we have to play a role to appease them. Nor does it mean that we are in any way of less value to life or God than they are. True self-esteem is the recognition of our exact equality with all others, no matter who they are. When we recognize this, we realize that no one in the world is superior to us, no matter what they think, and no one in the world is inferior to us, no matter what they think. We recognize that we have a right to be ourselves, to be true to ourselves, and to live our lives without being pressured to become what others expect or attacked because we don’t fit the mold of their indoctrinated beliefs.

Humanity is like smoke. There are varying levels of density and shades as smoke dissipates into and becomes the air, but how do you know when smoke ceases to be smoke and becomes the air? How do you discern the edge of smoke? How do you define what part of the smoke differs from another? Some portions may seem darker than others, but those portions are still smoke. Human beings may seem different from each other, but they are still human beings. The eyes alone cannot discern when, precisely, smoke blends into the air. Even though the smoke appears separate from the air, it dissolves into the whole and is no longer recognized as different. In the end, we all blend into one unified human race despite all the variations that occur. Ultimately, we are all more the same than we are different. In truth, we are more united than we are separate. In the meantime, human beings keep wanting to create niches and roles that they try to force others into because it helps them to feel safe in their own assigned role, or they resent not being unable to break free from their engrained expectations of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a Christian or a Muslim, etc. When we have a society that fully embraces our differences and uniqueness rather than fearing and hating it, when we allow people to simply live their lives in peace and be who they are without oppression, we will finally have a civilized society. In truth, there is no us and them. There is only WE, the people.

I don't remember when I didn't make up stories. I wasn't a liar except for a few told during childhood, but I guess it could be argued that fiction writers are creative liars. We write the lies that people want to read, at least some do. We just let readers know upfront; this is fiction, a creative lie.

I think I was inspired to write from a very early age. After my mother died when I was a little boy, the one connection I had to my father was through his book Laughter in Hell about his true life experience as a POW in Japan during WWII. I didn't meet my dad until I was eighteen, but I knew that he had written a book. He narrated his experience to Stephen Marek who wrote it, and then his book (initially published in 1954) was the first book published about Japanese POWs. I kept the book and thumbed through it as a child, but the reading was too complicated for me then. I actually didn't read it cover to cover until after I met him. My experience with my dad is referenced in my blog post Standing in the Shadow of Courage.

The first time I actually remember writing anything was in the sixth grade after I played Bob Cratchit in a play adaptation of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. The play was a total flop and we were booed by other schoolchildren from the first grade through the sixth. Nonetheless, it gave me an awareness of a script format, and with that knowledge, I decided that I would write my own play. I called it Who Ate the Tree, and it was a story (even in 1966) about saving the environment. I have no idea what happened to it and the content is lost in the deep recesses of my memory, so deep that I am not willing to dig for it.

I continued to write in high school, poetry mostly. What troubled teen, and many who are not so troubled, does not write poetry? I kept a journal as a teen, bla. . .bla. . .bla, daily musings. Those have also disappeared over many years of moving. Then in college, even though I didn't major or minor in anything remotely related to writing, I continued to write poetry and short stories. In college, I also began writing songs. There were guys who would sit on the front steps of the dormitory, who would play guitar, and sing. I asked them if they would teach me how to play the guitar, and ended up buying a cheap pawn shop guitar, learning cords, and learning that I could set poetry into melody. I wrote songs through much of my college years and for several years afterward. As well, I edited the college literary magazine in which students, including myself, would submit works of poetry, essays, and short stories.

After college and graduate school, I continued to write mostly music. I even moved to Nashville to see if I could break into the music business, but I was too insecure to have a good stage presence and my songwriting, except for one or two songs, didn't really fit the country formula. I lived in Nashville for fourteen years and during that time, I wrote a monthly feature for a regional magazine focused on addiction recovery. I wrote about my own childhood in those posts and about the effects of addiction on families. I had multiple ideas for novels during that time but found that I couldn't get more than three or four chapters done before I would hit writer's block and could not take the writing any further. Maybe it just wasn't time, yet. Those ideas (mostly science fiction) are still in my head and maybe I will write them one day.

I moved out of Nashville in 1997 and went home to the Ozarks where I got a job in a local hospital near where my grandmother lived so I could spend a few years with her and care for her before she passed on. I was pleasantly surprised when I moved back that things appeared to have progressed in the area. I had initially expected that I would be going back to the conservative hell of my childhood, but I discovered that there are enlightened people everywhere. I got involved with community theater and the hospital would frequently ask me to do radio spots or write articles for the local paper. I had pretty much given up on the idea of writing a novel. I simply expected that I didn't have it in me and that it would never happen. Yet, there was always a nagging in my heart to write.

Around 2010, I was joking around with a friend and playing a character of a burned-out old hippie woman who smoked, was irreverent, and basically didn't give a shit about what other people thought. We had a good laugh out of it, but something occurred to me. What if I were to give her a voice? What if I were to sit down and allow her to tell her story and write as though she was the one telling the story? I sat down at the computer with no intention of writing a novel. I figured that there might be some good jokes coming out of it, but something happened that I didn't expect. Not only did she tell her story, but she kept telling it and kept telling it. It didn't turn out the way I expected and it was as though I was watching the story unfold as I was writing it. It felt more like channeling a spirit than creative writing. In 2012, I went through a rough breakup, hit a snag in the writing at about the twelfth or fourteenth chapter, and decided that the same thing had happened that had always happened when I tried to write a novel. I was stuck. I kept the file and didn't touch it for about a year after that. When I finally did sit down at the computer again, she backed up, deleted a couple of chapters, and then she finished telling the story. It was not the kind of story that I had ever thought about writing and the comedy in it was minimal. The story she told was about family, about frustration and fear, and her experience of living through the tumultuous 1960s when she discovered that her paradigm did not match the reality of life.

A few years before I finished the novel, I had met friends who had retired to the Ozarks from New York, Frank and Su Sherry. Frank was an author and had written multiple novels, mostly about pirates. Su had been a part of his writing process throughout the course of their marriage and she had written her own memoir My Three Lost Girls about growing up in an orphanage. I would have asked Frank to review my novel and tell me what he thought, but he had developed fairly severe dementia. Instead, I asked Su to read it. She came back to me with the affirmation that the story was good and that I needed to get it published. Then, she set about teaching me how to prepare it for publication. At the time, as well, I had known that Marideth Sisco had just finished working on the Oscar-nominated film Winter's Bone, based on a novel by Daniel Woodrell and starring Jennifer Lawrence. I had met Marideth, and asked if she would read and review the book. To my surprise, she did and gave it a glowing recommendation. After that, I thought, I might actually be onto something here.

The next thing I knew I was learning about the publishing industry and it has been a long and difficult journey indeed. When I was recently asked what advice I would give to young writers, I said, "The writing is the easy part and that is not easy." In the ensuing years after that first novel, I began to learn about the truly difficult part of writing; marketing and publishing. I withdrew the novel Confessions from the Pumpkin Patch from the first publisher because they didn't publish it in eBook format. Then I discovered that I could self-publish on Amazon. So, I kept it in self-publication for several years while I continued to work on the next novel. I entered the book in a writing competition in 2015, and again to my astonishment, it won a New Apple Awards medal for general fiction. Then, I was just beginning, but after continued affirmation of my writing, the only thing I could think of was to write another novel.

There had been a character in Confessions from the Pumpkin Patch who had kind of intrigued me, and I thought, What would he say if I let him tell his own story? That character was Pastor Ronald Dennison. I did the same thing that I had done with the first novel and simply let him tell the story. There were no snags with writing this novel, no writer's block, and the story just told itself. The snags came later when I realized, after trusting the wrong people to edit my work, that there were major flaws in the writing, not with the story, but with grammar, punctuation, and occasional spelling mistakes. This was when I took the second novel The Calling Dream off the market. I then had it published by a New York publisher and it was well edited, but after about a year, I found myself dissatisfied with how they were handling the book. I then took the book back from them and went with Fresh Ink Group publishing. Although Fresh Ink Group did a wonderful job, there were all kinds of problems with the formatting when I transitioned from the other publisher. Included with that were at least eight crashes of my PDF service which dumped corrections that I had made while going through the book. I finally got a good PDF program and, after nine proofs, we were ready to publish the second edition of the book. During this time, Fresh Ink Group also allowed me to make some alterations here and there and add an epilogue to the book. The result, I think, is a much better version of the book.

While I was going through all of this, I continued to work on writing the third novel which is based on a character who showed up during the writing of The Calling Dream. I guess, therefore, this has turned into a series of sorts. It is what I call The Soul Encounters. Basically, a soul encounter is when we meet someone who has a profound and perhaps life-changing effect on us. That could be someone we meet briefly at a party who shares a concept that we had never considered before. It could be a chance encounter. It could be a relationship that lasts a little while, but when we walk away from that relationship, we find that we are not the same person. We all have soul encounters almost every day. Most of the time, that is simply the recognition of connection with another person, but sometimes it amounts to a shift in consciousness and the development of awareness that we never had before. Sometimes, it is experienced more in the heart than in the mind and we feel a deep connection with someone who may never cross our path again. So, basing the writing on soul encounters, the protagonist of a different novel is therefore generated out of the current novel that is being written. That protagonist shows up as a cameo character in the current novel and there may be one or two chapters devoted to that character, or maybe only a couple of paragraphs. The protagonist of the current novel gives his, her, or their perception of the encounter and when the next novel is written, that protagonist gets to tell his, her, or their version of the encounter. So, unlike a traditional series that follows the same characters through several different stories, each of my novels is a separate story that stands on its own but interacts with characters in one of the other novels.

After I realized that The Calling Dream was not up to par in terms of mistakes, it caused me to take a look at the other books, and then I found that those were also not ready for prime time. I, therefore, took those books off the market to revise and correct errors which are sometimes as simple as a misplaced comma. When they are ready, they will be published as second editions of the same book, and the story of my writing continues and will likely continue for as long as I can sit before a keyboard and allow the words to flow. I don't know that I would ever become a famous writer, but if that never happens, I pray, at least, that my work will not only be entertaining, but uplifting and encouraging to those who happen to read these stories.

Okay, Gillette does a commercial which chastises men for bad behavior, a shadow of the “#MeToo” movement. Some men react, “I don’t need Gillette to lecture me on masculinity.” Many men are not used to being called to task. They are used to being dominant and in control, not necessarily of themselves. Call them on their stuff, and it pisses them off because no one is supposed to call them on their stuff, not even another man. The term “Toxic Masculinity” gets tossed around, but the truth is that terms like “Masculine” and “Feminine” are somewhat nebulous and difficult to define. Does it have to do with sexual attractions? No, not necessarily, but there are generalities of behavior that are expected of men and of women. Still, there are multiple exceptions. There are gay men who fit every characteristic that society likes to think of as masculine except for the fact that they are sexually attracted to other men. Also, in my personal experience, there has been more than one time that I have met a man who had multiple “feminine characteristics” who walked and talked according to the standard perception of feminine. However, their sexual attractions were to women. On the flip-side of the coin, there are “lipstick lesbians” who do not fit the stereotypical view of the “bull dyke” lesbian. It is not at all unusual for transgender people, born as biological males, to be attracted to women, and continue sexual relations with women even after having reassignment surgery as transwomen. As well, transgenders born as biological females may continue to have sexual attractions to men after having reassignment surgery as transmen. These are confusing times for the status quo. Confusing because the reality of human nature is finally coming to the surface, and people are having to admit that most of us do not fit into neat and convenient categories. What Gillette is really talking about here is not masculinity, toxic or otherwise. What they are talking about is bullying, intrusive behavior, a sense of entitlement, and excuses for the behavior as though it can’t be helped. Women have long dealt with men who blame them for their own intrusive behavior. For instance, one of the reasons that women in some fundamentalist religious societies, are expected cover themselves is so men do not have lustful thoughts for them. Woman got blamed in the Garden of Eden and have been being blamed ever since. This is why women are finally shouting, “Enough is enough!” God forbid that men should finally have to take responsibility for their own choices and behavior, and control themselves. Women are tired of excuses, and so am I.

Let me preface the rest of what I am about to say by informing you that I grew up in the 1960’s, an era in which men dominated, and in which women continued a fight for their equality, a fight that goes back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many people don’t really recognize how women continue to be oppressed because it has been, and continues to be insidious. It was in the late 1970’s when I heard a man from Zimbabwe, Africa tell me, “There will be a black man elected president of the United States before a white woman.” His prophesy came true, and I literally heard people saying, during the 2016 election, that they would not vote for Hillary Clinton simply because she is a woman. A young veteran I met proclaimed, “I don’t want a woman as my commander in chief.” What is wrong with that picture? It ignores all other factors of either candidate’s qualifications and determines a vote for the presidency of the United States based on which one has a penis. I thought we were better than that, but it seems that there is a very long way to go before the majority of us are making fair and informed decisions based on character instead of presentation of genitalia.

Men have dominated so long, and the oppression has become so insidious that many women don’t even seem to recognize when it is occurring. They fall right in line with “masculine” expectations of them. Men have always had a the best deal with the societal notion that women were expected to enslave themselves into marriage. Research shows that, even today, in marriages where both husband and wife work, women typically have about 40% less leisure time than their husbands, because they are expected to work, and then come home to do childcare and homecare in addition to everything else. This is just expected. It is a drawback to Biblical times when women were expected to submit themselves to their husbands, and not put up a fuss about their position in life. There are still some states that have laws on the books allowing that a husband may legally rape his wife if she does not submit to him sexually. Domestic violence is simply an exaggeration of a toxicity that is already prevalent in society as a whole. I grew up watching this insanity and questioning it. I was raised by my grandparents. So, I got to see first hand, how men were allowed to get away with about anything they wanted when women were concerned, and that was only a couple of generations ago. For instance, my grandmother eloped across the county line at the age of 14, lied about her age, and married my grandfather who was 24. In this day and age, he might have been prosecuted for child molestation. In those days, things were different, and that’s just how it was especially in rural Arkansas. It is not likely she even had a birth certificate to verify her age.

After they got married, Grandma announced to her father that she had gotten married and, “What do you think about that?”

He said, “I think you have made your bed, and you are going to lie in it.”

I might have been more inclined to take a 24-year-old man to task for running off with my underage daughter and convincing her to break the law in order to get a marriage license. However, it was the early 1920’s and things were very different then, especially in the backwoods. Lie in that bed she did until sixty plus years of marriage brought an end to Grandpa, and she finally obtained her freedom from his oppression. Technically, the marriage was illegal, but she had made a commitment, “for better or worse”, and considered herself married in the eyes of the church. She was not going to go back on that promise, but her oppression was so secure that she was never allowed to drive a car, or visit with anyone who didn’t meet with Grandpa’s approval, and the first check she ever signed on their joint checking account was to pay for his funeral.

Toxic masculinity? That is probably a good term to define the difference between men who think they are masculine and men who truly are masculine. There were examples of toxic masculinity on my mother’s side of the family. When I was about sixteen, my maternal uncle chastised me for wanting an education, telling me that you are not a real man if you don’t work manual labor. There is nothing wrong with manual labor and all honest work is honorable work. However, he was basically telling me that I wasn’t a real man if I wanted an education instead of doing the kind of work that he had always done with less than a high school education. He had also abused me, and when he said that, I was long past his idea that mistreating me somehow showed his superiority as a man. My response was, “If you are a shinning example of manhood, no thanks.”

Still, I had examples of real men in my childhood, men who were not like my grandfather who insisted that Grandma do all of her chores and half of his, or men like my uncle who drank himself into a stupor almost every weekend and depended on my grandmother to wash his cloths, cook for him, provide him a place to sleep and practically wipe his ass until the day that he died of lung cancer from excessive smoking at the age of 62. In truth, Grandma was stronger than both of them put together. They were bullies and I never considered them to be real men. The real men I knew were men I went to church with, and there was one example on TV.

In those days, the “Bonanza” show was popular on TV, and even up in the sticks, we could watch our black and white version of it. I recall thinking, as a child, that Hoss Cartwright, a character on the “Bonanza” show, was an example of a real man. To me, he was the epitome of masculinity. He was big, husky, and strong, but he was also soft spoken and gentle, kind and compassionate. He was a true gentleman who respected others. He would only shove your head through the saloon wall when you left him little other choice.

I had my own personal example who was a man very much like Hoss Cartwright. He was a man who attended our church, and he also happened to drive my school bus. So, through the school year, I could see him almost every day, as well as on Sunday. During the summer, I only saw him on Sunday at church. I wrote about him in my poetry book, “The Gulls Are Always Laughing”. His name was Hollis, and he was the only man in my childhood who ever touched me with gentleness and affection. Although he subscribed to the same fundamentalist Christian religion as my grandparents, the one that said that a man is the head of the household and a woman should submit herself to him, he still did not laud over his wife the way Grandpa lauded over Grandma. They seemed to be more like equals. His wife was a nurse and worked outside the home. She earned the bulk of their income, and that never seemed to bother him. He, like Hoss Cartwright, was strong and gentle, fair and ethical. I also felt safe with him. I never doubted that he would protect me if I needed to be protected, and he did protect me. I never told anyone, but I loved him more than many in my own family.

I was often bullied when I grew up. Until my senior year in high school, I was picked on and made fun of, and I wasn’t generally accepted by most in my school. Maybe that’s because I was different. I had a lazy eye, I didn’t care for sports the way other boys did, I tended to be shy and I had no mother or father. My mother had been killed when I was five years old, and although I knew that my father had been a prisoner of war in Japan in WWII, I had never met him. When I did meet him at the age of eighteen, he proved to be a better example of true masculinity than the men on my mother’s side of the family, but until that time, I had Hollis as my role model.

One day, on the school bus, when I was in the sixth grade, a high school senior, who sat behind me, was pulling my hair. I had asked him several times to stop, but he continued. Finally, I turned around and told him, “If you do that one more time, you are going to be sorry.”

He said to his friend, “What did he say?”

His friend said, “I think he said, if you do that one more time, you are going to be sorry.”

He asked, “Do you think I will?”

His friend said, “I don’t know. Why don’t you try it and see?”

The high school boy pulled my hair again. I did not say anything. I did not give any warning. I simply stood up and slammed my books flat across his face as hard as I could.

Immediately, his nose started to bleed. I don’t know for sure if I broke his nose, but I suspect that I did.

He got up, went to the bus driver, Hollis, and asked, “Did you see what that kid did to me?”

Hollis said, “Seems I heard someone say, if you do that one more time, you are going to be sorry. Are you sorry?”

The boy said nothing, and Hollis suggested, “Maybe you need to sit on the front seat where you are safe.”

That boy sat on the front seat next to Hollis for the remainder of the trip. I never got punished for that, and the boy I hit never pestered me again. I think it was after that when I began sitting on the front row so I could be near Hollis. It was then that I realized he would have my back, and I wished, at the time, that I could have had a father like him. However, there is a significant point I need to make here and that is, because I am male, fighting was understood and acceptable to a certain degree. Girls, especially in those days, were not allowed the luxury of fighting. A girl would likely have been chastised for “un-lady-like behavior”, even if it was applied subtly. Some women, who may have been taught thoroughly enough that they are not allowed to fight, could have increased susceptibility to domestic violence, and if they fight, it is often done through passive aggressive means rather than through direct assertive confrontation. Men with the most toxic masculinity think they have the right to make emotional slaves of those women and beat them if necessary. Women with the most toxic form of femininity believe it is their place to submit to those men or even men who have less aggressive dominance, because they believe it is a woman’s place to be submissive to a man. Many women don’t know how to stand up for themselves, but even in those days, some did. I will never forget, at the age of seventeen, when I was working as a nurse’s aide at the county hospital, I saw one of our nurses turn on her heels and slap the face of one of only three doctors in the county. She slapped him hard across his face because he had pinched her on the ass. She then stuck her finger in his face and said, “Listen here, Mr.! That belongs to me! It belongs only to me, and no one is allowed to touch it except my husband!” She was at risk of losing her job, and perhaps she might have if medical professionals were not so scarce in those parts in those days. I am not sure that she might not have been forced out because she switched to working at the local nursing home within a year. Still the same doctors attended to patients at the nursing home.

So, back in the sixties, times were different. Men dominated. Women were told that the man was the head of the household and the wife and children were to do what he said, but there were still examples of men who had integrity, honor, and character. There were men who were loving and adoring fathers who taught their children the right way, and instilled respect for themselves and for others, including respect for girls. In those days when “Women’s Liberation” was just catching steam, and people were scoffing because women burned their bras, my high school (in 1973 in the backwoods of Arkansas) had a girl who was the valedictorian and the president of the student council. Perhaps, we were a little ahead of our time. Still, that same girl, despite her intelligence and talent had to go into a work force where men made, and still make, more money for the same job, where women are less likely to be promoted, and more likely to be discounted and disrespected despite their intelligence and skill.

So, I see the Gillette ad which, to me, does not so much scold men for bad behavior as it calls them to a higher standard, and I think, “It’s about damn time!” It is about time that the “boys will be boys” attitude, and the rape culture in which men seem to think that it is okay for them to do whatever they want, gets thrown to the curb. It is about time that men begin to see themselves as equals instead of superiors. In my article “#MeToo”, I address some of my own episodes of sexual harassment as a gay man. Back in high school, no one knew (at least not overtly) that I was gay. It was in the days before don’t ask, don’t tell, and I absolutely was not going to tell. I did my best to play the part of the typical masculine male. You didn’t tell in those days, especially up in the sticks. Telling put you at risk of being beaten up, or worse. I never admitted to anyone that I was gay until I was in my mid-twenties. Still, I was picked on and put down in high school until I started fighting back.

Years later, after I came out, I endured toxic masculinity in the gay community, as well. I endured some of the same things that women endure, because masculinity, toxic or otherwise, has nothing to do with sexual orientation. If I wasn’t into someone, or I didn’t respond sexually the way they wanted me to, I got called “Bitch, slut, cunt”, all the same derogatory names that women get called, and for the same reason. I was called names and put down because I didn’t serve some guy the way he thought he ought to be served. Toxic masculinity was so prevalent that it was present even in the gay community. You were not supposed to say, “no”, and if you did, you were treated as though there was something wrong with you, and you were cast aside, even within your own community. Add toxic femininity to the mix and you get passive aggressive, cutting put downs of one another. Some in minorities internalize their oppression and the toxic societal views of themselves, then turn that on each other. There was no insight for the guy who insisted that I have sex with him. Instead of looking into the mirror and recognizing that there is something wrong with the arrogance that says you are not allowed to say, “no”, toxic masculinity perpetrated itself in the gay community the same as it did in straight society. There was also a time that I was raped, but didn’t really recognize it until I had a nightmare afterward.

I am glad the “#MeToo” movement is here, and I am glad that men, who haven’t figured out what real masculinity is, are being held to a higher standard. There is a huge difference between someone letting you know they are attracted to you or that they would like to have sex with you, and someone forcing themselves on you, manipulating you or treating you like you are worthless if you don’t give in to their solicitations. There is no place in civilized society for that type of behavior, and real men don’t treat women, or other men, that way. Real men respect themselves and others.

Of course, there is a backlash to the Gillette commercial asking men to look at themselves, and calling them to be the best that men can be. What comes with the backlash is the arrogance of toxic masculinity that insists you are not allowed to question or challenge. It is about time that we started questioning and challenging the status quo of perceived masculinity, and about time that we began to redefine masculinity. It is time for real masculinity to stand up and be heard. It is time to get real, and recognize that dominance is not masculinity. Abuse is not masculinity. Bullying is not masculinity. Rape and sexual oppression, or sexual microaggression are not masculinity. Demanding servitude is not masculinity. Arrogance is not masculinity. True masculinity is found in the examples of Hoss Cartwright and Hollis, as well as a few others from my childhood and many I know today. True masculinity is strength tempered with integrity. It is male sexuality tempered with respect and understanding. It is the loving father who can protect and comfort his child as well as hold his child accountable. It has been said that feminine love says, “I love you no matter what.” Masculine love says, “I believe in you no matter what.” We need both male and female, true masculinity and true femininity. We are each capable of extending both, and we need to. There is not one person in civilized society who does not need to step up and practice a better way of being themselves and of interacting with others.

While we are on the subject of true masculinity, real men cry. Real men know that, if they cry, it is not the end of the world. They know that crying does not mean anything about their strength because their strength can be expressed in the midst of tears. Real men know that you can cry and still stand up and do whatever you need to do in spite of the tears. Real men get to say, “I don’t feel like a superhero today, and I don’t really want to leap tall buildings right now.” Real women get to say that as well. Real men own their fear and walk through it. They know that courage is what happens when we stop listening to fear and that the act of courage never requires the demeaning and disrespect of another person. Real men, not only have the strength to stand up for what is right, they have the strength to challenge what is wrong. The opposite of toxic masculinity is real masculinity, true masculinity which is not tainted by false bravado and the arrogance of narcissism. Real men know that those who are confident have nothing to prove. Real men love as deeply and as compassionately as women. Real men admit when they are wrong, and never feel defeated for having been wrong. Real men have humility instead of allowing ego to define their masculinity.

So, there has been a lot of backlash to the Gillette ad, some saying, “I don’t need Gillette to lecture me.”, some saying, “It’s a war on men.” First of all, if you think you don’t need to be lectured, then you do. Second, there is no damn war on men, any more than there has ever been a war on Christianity. It’s all myth. For the first time in history, as far as I have known, women and other men are standing up to the bullshit notion of masculinity as arrogance, narcissism and dominance, and they are calling it for what it is. Of course, those who have bought into toxic masculinity shout, “Don’t lecture me!”, and “This is a war on men!” Because—you are not supposed to challenge them. The rule is, and has been for as long as I can remember, “We get to make the rules, and you are not allowed to question them, much less challenge them.” The men who are getting their “panties in a wad” over this ad are the very ones who have been behaving badly in the first place. Or, as Shakespeare put it, “Me thinks he doth protest too much.” Men who are confident in their masculinity are not offended by this ad. Men who have an understanding of what pure and true masculinity is are applauding this ad, and saying, “Well done!” Real men are not offended. The only ones who are offended are the ones who have perpetrated this lie of masculinity, this toxic dominance for far too long. Sorry guys that you got your toes stepped on. Maybe you should consider how many toes have been stepped on by toxic masculinity for hundreds of years. This is a classic scenario of being able to dish it out, but being completely unprepared to take it. Here is a little bit of toxic masculinity for you guys to swallow from your own pill box. A real man would suck it up and get over it.

I applaud Gillette for having the cajones to stand up to an establishment that has gotten away with way too much for way too long.

I labored over whether to write this for a couple of months. I wasn’t quite sure exactly what I wanted to say, or in the final edit, that I have said everything that I needed to say. Some of the things I have said reveal more of me than even some of my closest personal friends have known. I struggled over whether to write this at all. I struggled over how much I might reveal, and how I have felt about revealing these things, at this point, to everyone. However, like many, I am given courage by the Me-Too movement, and I am of the opinion that at the very least, the Me-Too movement has brought a discussion about sex to the forefront of our society that has long been overdue.

When I started thinking about my own episodes of sexual mistreatment, the memories began piling up. It occurs to me, as I think about all those memories, that there is a reason why the Me-Too movement built up steam. There is a lot of collective anger out there. There is a lot of underlying anger, as well as fear, that has festered under the surface, and has never been discussed. For instance, some statistics indicate that one in every three girls is molested during childhood and one in every five boys is molested. So, at least 33% of all women and 20% of all men have experienced sexual abuse during childhood. That does not account for the covert abuse that tends to get overlooked, and never gets reported, or other sexual abuse in general that doesn’t get reported. Nor does it account for the phenomenon of sexual shaming. A huge number of both girls, and boys deal with sexual teasing and bullying in school that they never tell an adult about. So, at least a third of all women have been sexually molested by the time they are adults, and probably most women have had to put up with unwanted sexual advances as adults, even if they were not sexually abused as children. Many men also have to deal with sexual misconduct from both males and females who don’t respect their boundaries. I would venture to say that practically everyone has had to deal with sexual misconduct at least once in their lifetime.

Some of my own memories carry more hurt feelings than others. Some of them, although they were sexual mistreatment, were taken in stride. The first one occurred when I was about four years old. It was a simple thing, child’s play. My older cousin, who was about eight or nine at the time, had the idea of putting balloons under our shirts to imitate breasts. So, my three cousins and I had balloons under our shirts, and were prancing around the living room pretending to be women. My aunt walked into the room and went into a rage. She spanked every one of us, and I recall that I really had no idea why she was so upset. As I think about it now, it was her rage that I couldn’t understand. Why did she get so upset over something that really only required a scolding, if that? It was just innocent child’s play. I think that is the first time I ever recall anyone spanking me, and it was certainly the first time I had seen someone in a rage. Shortly after that, my mother, who had been living with my aunt and uncle at the time and working in the same town, took me to stay with my grandparents through the week instead of leaving me with my aunt and uncle. There was something she knew, that I did not.

I learned, years later, that my uncle, the raging aunt’s husband, was a pedophile. None of what he did was ever brought to any public awareness, and he died without ever being prosecuted. Perhaps my aunt’s rage was about her own confusion and feelings of powerlessness in that situation. I was introduced to sexual play by that uncle’s oldest son, along with several other cousins both male and female, when I was maybe six years old. We called it “playing nasty” and continued it for most of my childhood, I suppose, because it was pleasurable. However, I was raised as an only child and visits with my cousins were not that frequent. I don’t recall my uncle ever being directly involved, but discussions with his daughter after I became an adult, indicated that there was a lot he did behind the scenes when we were growing up. My cousins and I stopped playing nasty when a younger cousin told on us at about the time I was a pre-teen. He told only because we wouldn’t allow him to go with us. We would go out into the woods together, strip and begin touching each other, and he knew about this. He was about six years old at the time, and I was about twelve. My grandmother, and a different aunt, confronted all of us, admonished us that it was wrong, and told us that they wanted it to stop. We were not punished, and it did stop. If either of them had ever known what my uncle had been doing, that never came to light.

I moved back to the Ozarks when I was in my forties. When I was in my fifties, that pedophile uncle actually made an excuse to come to my house without my aunt present, and solicited sex from me. He made sexual comments about my grandmother which led me to believe that he had also done things to her after she had developed dementia. He had access to my grandmother because my aunt had tried to keep my grandmother at their house before we ended up having to place her in a nursing home. He admitted to me that his older sister had introduced him to sex when he was about five years old, and he had become obsessed with it. I told him to get out, and not to come back. Then, when I discussed this with my cousin, she told me things that he had done during her childhood and into her adult life that my aunt had denied, and refused to accept. I didn’t realize, as a child, when sexual play was introduced to me by his son, that it likely had originated with him. I reflected to my cousin that he should have been prosecuted for what he did, and had probably continued to do throughout his life. Her comment was, “The problem is the burden of proof.” This is always the problem. We live with the rightful law that someone is to be considered innocent until proven guilty. However, with this law, we also know there many who are guilty when it will never be proven. This is one of the reasons why men like Harvey Weinstein and others get away with sexual intimidation for far too long.

Had there never been a pedophile in my family, I still would have experienced sexual mistreatment. I recall a boy on the school bus, when I was about eight years old who suddenly grabbed, and began repeatedly pinching my penis until I was able to fight him off. There were times that I witnessed things being done to girls on the bus or at school. When I was in the eighth grade, a girl in my class, whom I had been friends with, got pregnant at the age of thirteen. The rumor went around school that I had gotten her pregnant, but she disappeared from school, and then rumor went around that it had been her father who had gotten her pregnant. I never saw her again.

There were multiple episodes of sexual misconduct when I was a child, including another uncle, my mother’s brother, who would do things like go into my room, and masturbate in my bed. I was in my early teens when he started doing this. Since he abused me in other ways, and was extremely jealous of me, that was nothing more than a show of dominance. It was one of his ways of showing that he could do anything he wanted, and I could not stop him. In fact, it is important never to underestimate the link between sex, and the need to dominate or control. There is an aphrodisiac of power. When men are raped in prison, it has nothing to do with either the rapists or the victims being homosexual. Rape is not really about sex. Sex is just the tool that is used. Most of those rapists, when out of prison, would not gravitate toward sexual activity with other men. They were with women, and if you were to ask them if they were gay, straight or bi, most of them would be likely tell you they are straight. Prison rape is about dominance and humiliation, about showing another man that he can be completely dominated. It is about doing to a man what he thinks should only happen to a woman. However, all rape is about either control, humiliation or both, and sexual misconduct, or sexual advances without permission are essentially lesser forms of rape, but there are all kinds of ways in which we can be mentally or emotionally raped.

Having grown up in a very fundamentalist Christian home and community, I can tell you that I grew up with incredible shame about sex, especially since I am gay. In fact, when I was about sixteen years old, the minister who baptized me did a sermon in which he stated, “The sin of homosexuality is worse than the sin of murder.” Is it any wonder that suicide among gay teens is around three times the national average, and same sex orientation is cited as a risk factor for suicide among adults? Gay, bi, and transgender people have long suffered the experience of sexual harassment, and remain in many states, the only minority without legal protections for workplace discrimination. I hated the fact that I was gay, and when I went to college, one of the first things I did was go to the campus counselor and begin therapy sessions, partly to try to convert myself into a heterosexual. I made that concerted effort for several years. It didn’t work. I didn’t tell anyone, other than the campus counselor, that I was gay. I didn’t want anyone to know, and it would be many years before I would accept that fact about myself. However, in the dormitory one evening, the president of my fraternity made a comment about me being gay, and shamed me about it in front of others. When I confronted him, he said, “Well that’s what you told (insert campus counselor name here).” I confronted him that I was going to beat his ass if he didn’t back down, and he did back down. When I confronted the campus counselor about it, he said he would sometimes discuss cases with campus leaders, and that he told my fraternity president I was gay because he thought it might “help” me. The lawsuit against that counselor and the college that could have ensued was never filed. Had I not been ashamed of the fact that I was gay, and intent on keeping it secret, that suit might have been filed, and should have been filed.

In college as everywhere, sex and sexual misconduct were prevalent. A great deal of the discussion about sex was not bothersome to me, but during my freshman year, the dorm mother of our building got pregnant by one of the students. There had been a girl on campus who was sexually naive, and a couple of students, who were dating, decided that it would be a good idea to tie her into a chair and force her to watch them have sex so she could learn the truth about sex. It was my understanding that when this got reported, the college president gave the couple the option of enlisting in the military or being prosecuted. They chose the military, and disappeared from campus. There was another girl who was supposed to have “pulled a train” with the basketball team. It is more likely that she was gang raped by the basketball team when she was drunk. I recall seeing the girl walk across campus getting taunted and shamed by males and females alike. Some people would imitate train whistles when they saw her. Some called her “peanut butter” because she “spread so easy”. What I don’t recall is a single one of the boys on the basketball team either being taunted, shamed or reprimanded for their behavior. No one seemed to consider that this girl had actually been gang raped. Even if she had initially solicited sex with the basketball team, which I doubt, she was most assuredly not the only one who should have suffered the fall out from it.

In graduate school, thanks to the fact that social work is a very loving and accepting profession, I finally began to come to grips with being gay. I finally began to accept myself, and stop feeling shame about who I was/who I am. I had friends who began taking me to gay bars, and I remember being astounded that men would actually voluntarily sleep with me. I began dating the bartender at a local gay club, and began to discover that my new sexual freedom was not all fun and games. Even though we considered ourselves a couple, he was never faithful to me, and would do things like cruise the parks or go to the quarter movies before he would come home after work. I guess I was supposed to be at his convenience if he couldn’t find sex somewhere else. It didn’t take long for me to determine that it is just as bad to be sexually mistreated in a relationship as out of one, and I broke up with him.

When I got my first job after graduate school, there was an older psychiatrist there who literally used one of the most derogatory, and demeaning names for a woman during my first meeting with him. I don’t know how he treated women to their faces, but I know he said demeaning things about women when not in their company. Before I left that job, there was a psychiatric resident who took me out to lunch, invited me to join his private practice when he finished his residency, and came on to me at the same time. He was a married man. I turned him down for both propositions.

After I moved to Nashville, I worked in an admissions screening office for an acute psychiatric hospital. On one occasion, I had a secretary come into my office, plop herself down in my lap, begin curling her finger around in my hair, and start whining for me to take her out to dinner. I told her to get up, and get out of my office, but I never reported it. Another time, I walked into a female social worker’s office to see the other secretary, a nineteen-year-old young woman, sitting across from her desk. The secretary had on a pearl, snap-button western blouse that was unbuttoned well below the cleavage line. I told her she was showing a little too much cleavage for work in the admissions office of an acute psychiatric hospital. She said, “Oh you like this?”, and ripped the blouse completely open down to her waist. The female social worker’s mouth dropped open in complete astonishment, but she said nothing. I told the secretary to button up her blouse above her cleavage line, and keep it buttoned up or I would be filing a complaint. The director of that acute treatment program had been having an affair with an employee in the admissions office, and after she was fired, came into my office and solicited me sexually. I also told him to get out of my office. Then, I went to the president of the hospital to report what was going on, and was told not to worry about it. Shortly after that, I turned in my resignation, the only time in my life I have quit a job without having another job already lined up.

After that, I dropped out of social work for three years, managed a health club, and did massage therapy. One day, one of my massage clients told me that he liked the way I handled my job, and the way I dealt with customers. He suggested that I could go to work for him managing barber styling schools, and that he was creating a styling school franchise with a business partner with plans to go national. He suggested I could make a considerable amount of money in a few years by coming in on the front end. I considered it, and went to one of the out of town schools with him for an overnight stay. While there, we stayed in a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor above the styling school. When we went out to dinner, he proceeded to solicit sex from me. He was a married man, and his wife was a gospel singer who I had met, and had spent time with. I, of course, turned down the sexual encounter. Then, when we got back to the apartment after dinner, he changed his shirt, put on some cologne, and told me that if his wife called to tell her he had gone out for dinner. I said, “But we just got back from dinner.” He said, “Just tell her I went out to dinner.”, and left. When his wife called, I told her, “He told me to tell you that he went out to dinner.” When he came back, I told him, that whatever he was up to was his business, but not to ever ask me to lie for him again. I learned later that this man, in his late fifties, had additionally been having an affair with an eighteen-year-old styling student. Needless to say, I did not take that job and went back into social work.

Add to everything else, that I was date raped once. I didn’t realize, at the time, what was what was going on. I had gone out with this guy because I was attracted to him. He was quite a bit taller and heavier than me, and athletic. He kept pushing for what he wanted while I was telling him, “No, let’s wait. I’m not ready for that.” He wouldn’t take no for an answer, and would not relent. It was not until the next morning that I realized I had been raped, and it was because of a dream I had that night about the uncle who used to masturbate in my bed. In the dream, my uncle wanted to drive my car, but I kept telling him he couldn’t drive my car. Then he grabbed my hips, slammed his pelvis into mine, and took my car. When I woke up, I realized that I had been forced into something the night before that I wanted, but was not ready for. It took me a while to define in my head that I had been date raped, but because there was an unrecognized fear of this bigger man, that was exactly what had happened. There were no more dates with that man.

Whether it is wanted or unwanted, let’s face it. Sex is a powerful human urge falling only behind food and survival as the strongest human need. Those people who do not have sexual urges are the minority. Sex permeates film, television, commercials, magazines and the internet. The pornography industry is extremely profitable, and has been practically since the beginning of photography. At least since the legal battles of Hugh Hefner in the 1950’s and 1960’s, explicit sexual content has been more accepted by our society, and perhaps it should be. Sexual repression actually increases, rather than decreases, the likelihood of sexual misconduct. It is the difference between squeezing a tomato until it bursts or neatly slicing it, the difference between whether it will be a big mess, or something that we deal with directly and constructively. It is also the difference between not talking about it, and pretending it doesn’t happen versus having an open discussion that allows clear boundaries to be clarified. It is when we don’t have the discussions that there is a problem. At least the Me-Too movement has brought the discussion to the forefront. It has made the world look at what is going on instead of denying it. When we hide sex, sexuality, and sexual expression, it becomes a festering problem beneath the surface of our society. Granted the lines are blurred, and there have been situations in which the opposite takes place, and someone is accused of sexual impropriety that they did not commit. However, maybe we need to have more discussions about sex and sexuality to create a clearer distinction of those lines, and better define what is, and is not appropriate and acceptable regarding sexual conduct. Certainly, if someone does something, and the other person says they don’t like that, no matter what it is, the behavior should not be repeated.

I admit I have mixed feelings about it all, and I think possibly we all do. I certainly have mixed feelings and fears about what I have revealed about myself in this article. On one hand, I believe in sexual freedom, and the expression and discussion of even explicit sex. My novels, even though they are not about sex, contain a great deal of sexual content. Sex is not the story, but sex is part of the story. Sex is a part of almost everyone’s story. It has to be. In my books, I am not afraid of discussing sex, and I am not afraid of describing explicit sexual scenes. Sex, after all, is a significant and legitimate factor in humanity. It is not going to go away. Sex is part of life, and we have to deal with it. I believe in every person’s right to participate in whatever they are comfortable participating in, so long as someone else is not being hurt or forced into it. I don’t think it is our right, as a society, to dictate the behavior of others, and laws should be more about things that do actual physical, or financial harm than about morals. Whether anyone asks for any kind of sexual contact is irrelevant so long as the other person maintains the right to refuse. The simple question, “Are you comfortable discussing sex?”, could eliminate a great many misunderstandings so long as the person who asks the question is willing to respect the boundaries of the person who is asked. I have never had a problem when my refusal of a sexual advance was accepted, even though I may not have respected the morals, and behavior of the person making the solicitation. The only problem I have ever had has been those times that someone has tried to force me into something I didn’t want, even if that was not overtly sexual. That includes a couple of times in my life that I have also been stalked.

It all comes down to, respect, choice and boundaries. Every human being deserves respect, and every human being deserves to maintain control over their own body. God gave your body to you, it belongs solely to you, and you have the right to determine what you do with it. You have the right to determine who is allowed to touch you, where, when, how and how much. You have the right to stop any sexual activity at any time, even if it began as consensual contact. You have the right to allow another person to touch you in any way that you wish to be touched, and you have the right to refuse any touch from any one if you don’t want it. You also have the right to expect respectable sexual behavior in your presence. You have the right to engage in any type of sexual encounter that you and another person, who also chooses it, wish to engage in. No one has the right to take that choice from you. No one has the right to pressure you into making a choice with your body that you don’t want to make. The flip side of this is people who try to tell you what sexual activities you are or are not allowed to have with another consenting adult. Just as no one has the right to engage in sexual behavior in your presence that you do not want, no one has the right to tell you what your sexual behavior is allowed to be so long as it does not directly involve them, and is not causing overt harm. If we simply accept that another person has the right to do whatever they want to do with their own body, and that no one has the right to pressure another person into something they don’t want, that should be sufficient.

With all that said, I can further say that I don’t recall anyone ever expressing any concern about my sexual behavior that I did not respect. I can’t say that my own sexual behavior has always been appropriate, or that I have never touched anyone in a way that they did not want. If anyone ever told me that they are not comfortable with something I was doing, I stopped doing it. If anyone ever felt uncomfortable with my sexual behavior, and did not tell me, you have my most sincere apologies. However, I enjoy my sexual attractions, and as long as they don’t step on the toes of someone else, I reserve the right to be attracted. Also, I am a cut up. I joke around, and that includes sexual comments and jokes. I am open to discussing practically any sexual topic with practically anyone in the appropriate place, and at the appropriate time. I have friends who are quite comfortable with sexual teasing, and others who are not. I don’t engage in sexual teasing with someone who is not comfortable with it. They have the right to have their boundaries respected. However, my boundaries can be quite fluid with others who also have fluid boundaries, and who also know where the lines are drawn. You see, it is possible for someone who is sexually open, sexually interested, and sexually expressive to also be sexually respectful of another person’s boundaries.

It all comes down to respect, choice and boundaries, and it is our responsibility to define our boundaries for other people, whether that is in the work place or not. I have worked with people who would tease and joke sexually with whom I have been quite comfortable, and I’ve worked with people with whom I was not comfortable at all. At one work site, I recall one of our nurses once quipping that when she gave education about Viagra, she was tempted to say, “If you have an erection lasting longer than four hours—call me.” I was sitting with another nurse one day when my personal physician happened to walk down the hall. I said, “You see that guy right there?” She said, “Yes.” I said, “He’s had his finger in my butt.” She laughed and commented, “You are so crazy.” I have been known to say to my personal physician just as he is about to do a prostate exam, “You know doc, I don’t get naked for just anyone.” When it is in jest, and we know where the real boundaries are, what is the problem with it? In all these situations there was no problem because we knew each other, and were comfortable with each other. We also knew it was a joke, and there was no solicitation or any form of intimidation involved.

I am not afraid to deal with sex, not anymore. My books have jokes about sex and explicit content about sex, and my books have characters who deal with sex. However, the stories are not about sex itself. My characters deal with their sexual issues, and with sexual boundaries. They deal with their guilt, grief, fascination, and issues about sex. My characters deal with sexual abuse, rape, sexual compulsion, sexual identity/orientation, and gender identity/orientation. They deal with relationship issues, the rules around marriage, love, family, and sexual boundaries. This is part of what makes the character, because it is part of what makes humanity. My novels are about people who overcome, who develop awareness, and become better for the battles that they have fought in life. I want to teach people through these stories, not just entertain. I want people to see themselves in these characters, though none of the characters in my books is about anyone I have ever met or worked with. None of the characters in my stories match anyone I have ever known. They come strictly from my imagination and my awareness of human behavior and the human spirit. More than anything, I draw from my own experience and awareness. Any wisdom I might share has been achieved though my own hard-fought battles of life experience. I want people to realize that there are multiple layers to the human experience, and we all fight battles that we have to overcome. Also, sex is a very significant and important layer of the human experience. We all deal with experiences in life that are unfair, inappropriate, demeaning, degrading, and hurtful. It is not the fact that we experience those things that it important. It is how we deal with those experiences that is important. Every one of us has, or has had a wound we must face, and often those wounds involve sex and sexuality. The wound may vary from person to person, but we all have them.

It is my hope that the characters in my novels, as they fight their way through their own life battles, may teach people some of the ways that they might overcome their own wounds. Maybe, they might also teach people how to loosen up, and not be so sexually restricted that they cannot accept themselves and others. Yes, the subject of sex and sexual boundaries is a discussion in our society that is long overdue. That discussion continues through the characters in my novels, screenplays and short stories. It is way past time for society to have this discussion, and we all need to be a part of that discussion from teaching our children how to protect themselves, and how to honor and protect their own boundaries as well as the boundaries of others, to teaching adults the very same thing because many of us, especially from my generation, never really had this discussion. On one hand, everyone needs to loosen up and stop making sex into a bigger deal than it actually is. We need to accept that it is an integral part of society, and the human experience. On the other hand, we all need to get real with each other, be willing to define our own personal sexual boundaries, and be willing to expect that those boundaries will be honored and respected.

Even though my father was from southern California, I was born in the butt crack of nowhere, in northern Arkansas where my mother’s family is from. I was told that my parents separated before I was born, and then when I was five years old, when my mother was killed, I was taken to raise by my grandparents. They apparently never saw fit to try to locate my father, and I didn’t meet him until I was eighteen.

I was raised on a farm about ten miles out of town, and town (the county seat) was less than two thousand in population. Any town larger was about 40 minutes away, and that town had a population of about six to eight thousand at the time. It was across the border in Missouri. The region was rural, scrub farm land with more trees and rocks than pasture, and it was almost totally white in human population. As a matter of fact, I was fourteen years old when I saw my first black person in the flesh. It was on a trip to Kansas City, arranged by my aunt and uncle who lived in Independence, near Kansas City, at the time. I never saw another black person in the flesh until I went to college at the age of eighteen. Yet, my grandparents were not prejudiced, and I have written about this in other blog posts. My childrens’ books were the Uncle Remus stories, and I was raised to respect all races the same. It was not until I was almost an adult that I understood why there was no prejudice in my family even though I had been raised in an ocean of white. Finally, I put two and two together, and remembered my grandmother talking about going “to the bottoms” to pick cotton when their children were small. The hill people of Arkansas (Ozarks people) called the flat lands down around West Memphis “the bottoms”. During the Great Depression, people did whatever they could to survive, and hill people would go down to work in the cotton fields of east Arkansas near Memphis: the bottoms. This meant that my grandparents tugged a cotton sack right along next to black people. Therefore, they saw themselves as equals, and I had Uncle Remus stories for my childrens’ books because of the influence of black culture on my family.

It has always been difficult for me to understand how one race could see themselves as superior to another. Because I was influenced by seeing news broadcasts about race riots on TV when I was growing up, I had bought into certain stereotypes before I went to college. I didn’t consider myself any better than someone else, but I had been somewhat swayed by general society. More than anything, what I had seen of riots on TV made me afraid that blacks might attack me just for being white. Much of what I had seen in variety shows (Sammy Davis Jr., Lena Horne and even Moms Mabley) had been positive. I had even fallen in love with Motown music when I got a transistor radio for Christmas at the age of fourteen, and could tune in Memphis Motown stations if I sat out behind our smokehouse, and aimed the antenna in the right direction, but the news about racial tensions made me wonder if black people might automatically hate me. I had white fear. There was also a part of me that bought into the prevailing effect of antiquated social ideas that I should resent black people who become wealthy, or more successful than whites. The politics of media was a mix in those days, and I actually had very little knowledge of other races except for what I had seen in evening news broadcasts or variety shows on the only two TV channels we could get up in the hills. When I got to college, my actual experience with black students and other races made me realize that the stereotypes were false. Often, we don’t even realize how much we are influenced by news broadcasts, conversations, and rumors. In this day and age, with the concept of “fake news”, we don’t even realize how much we are being lied to in social media, and a variety of attitudes abound. The politics of media is much more complicated now, and is a thicker mix. With the ability to manipulate social media with bots, and other tricks, those with arrogance, and the illusion of power have much more influence than is reasonable and acceptable. Unfortunately, prejudice is alive and well and living in America, and some have been able to use social media, to play on human fear to propagate it.

One thing I have thought about, as I have watched recent happenings unfold, is that after centuries of so called civilization, we still can’t seem to grow up as a society. Disagreement is interpreted as disrespect, and of course, if you disagree, then you must be drowned out, and your voice completely silenced. If one can’t drown out the other by figuratively or literally putting his hands over his ears and screaming, then the other is drowned out by harassment or violence. This is the way children behave on a playground when they have never been taught manners and respect. It is the way bullies behave. It is not the way mature people conduct themselves in civilized discourse. However, at the moment, it appears to be the prevailing manner in which America conducts itself, especially in politics. There appears to be such a backlash after America elected its first black president. The pendulum has swung so far back in the opposite direction, it may hit the wall and shatter. As I have watched these things unfolding by reading a variety of posts on social media, reviewing the news, and thinking it through, I have come to the conclusion that one of the reasons America is currently divided is white fear. There is currently a vicious effort by the previous status quo of white establishment to maintain control and authority when it appeared to shift away from them for a time. I use the word, ‘authority’ here, instead of the word, ‘power’ because technically there is only one human power, and we all possess it equally. That is the power to choose, in this given moment, what we will think, say or do, and that’s it. Authority is something that is either awarded by election or appointment, or by seizing control, and it can be taken away. The illusion of power comes when manipulation, intimidation, corruption and violence are used to control others. The good news is that it is always temporary.

So, while we had a black president, the emphasis was on civil rights, LGBT rights, womens’ rights, the right to healthcare and other socially conscious causes. Those on the left might have dreamed of a utopian United States in which everyone respected the other, regardless of superficial differences, and everyone could expect at least reasonable care and comfort. One might have thought that the characteristic of “white supremacist” would have been about to become a thing of the past. However, something else was happening. Beneath the surface, there was a festering cancer in America that many did not see. One thing the Obama presidency did to feed that cancer was by daring to challenge the white establishment. This increased white fear and fed into an undercurrent. Recognizing the need to sell themselves to the general population, white supremacist and Christian extremist groups went about rebranding themselves with different names that would make their propaganda easier to swallow. Now they call themselves the “Alt-Right” or “white nationalists”, among other polite names. However, to debase the Shakespearian quote about a rose, a turd by any other name stinks just as much. Putting a polite name on a hate group does not change the hate that drives the group. It only becomes a branding and marketing tool. A turd in a pretty box is still a turd. Poison in a pretty bottle is still poison. Now that the Alt-Right Trojan Horse has gotten into the White House, these groups are coming out of the woodwork with the same hate and bigotry they always had, except they now feel freer to express it, and they have a fairly strong propaganda machine behind it. They always had the right to express their beliefs. Freedom of speech belongs to everyone, but because of the lack of popularity, they kept it a bit more under wraps. Because of fear, hate seems to have become popular again. Perhaps the unspoken meaning of a campaign slogan from the last election was make America hate again.

The driving force behind hate and anger is always fear. Anger is the emotion we choose when we don’t want to feel, or admit to feeling, some form of vulnerability. Acting on that anger gives the illusion of power to those who actually feel quite vulnerable. White fear is essentially the terror of becoming a minority, and if the Devil has tools on earth, fear is one of his best. There is actually legitimate reason for whites to have fear. First of all, it is not a matter of if, but when whites will become a minority, and it will be soon. European whites only make up 8% of the total world population as it is now, anyway. Whites of European heritage make up 62% of the current population of the United States, but projections say that by the year 2065 that will fall to 46% of the population. Whites will be outnumbered, and out voted by what have previously been considered minorities. It is projected that by the year 2020, current minority groups will make up the majority of American school aged children, and since 2010, there has been up to a 20% drop of white populations in 46 states. Hispanics are getting the brunt of the current backlash because of illegal immigration. However, Hispanics are just the current scapegoat. This may be in part due to the fact that at the present time, there are more foreign-born Hispanics in the United States than Hispanics born in the United States, and the numbers are rising. Illegal Hispanics come here, have babies, the babies are automatically U.S. citizens, and this plants the seeds for a takeover of America by Hispanic populations. This scares the hell out of the American white establishment. Yet, at the present time, there are still ten states in America that are about 90% white in population. Those include Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Iowa, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Kentucky, and North Dakota. The region I came from in the Ozarks is still about 92% white, and I am one of those whites. With family names like Dover, Applegate, Lennox and Todd, it would be pretty difficult to deny my European white heritage, nor would I want to. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being proud of who you are, and being proud of your heritage, no matter who you are.

So, why does white fear exist? There is a fear, and many Alt-Right and white nationalists have expressed this, that a movement is underfoot to wipe out European white heritage in America. It doesn’t matter if it is not true. Since fear is a fantasy that something bad is going to happen, it is never rational. In my opinion this fear relates to something my Grandmother used to say, “Turn-about is fair play.” Another old parable is, “Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” Whites are simply afraid that the tables will be turned, and they may have good reason for that fear. There are already some whites who are reporting that they have experienced prejudice and discrimination. So, the tables may be turning, but turning the tables is kind of normal in human behavior. For example, when I was a kid, my uncle Ray used to abuse and mistreat me. That went on until I grew into my teens, at which point I turned on him, and beat the crap out of him. It is not uncommon for abusive parents to have abuse turned on them by their children, after those kids grow old enough to have the ability to dish it back. In extreme cases, children of abusers may actually murder their abusers. I eventually forgave my uncle, but he had already learned not to mess with me again. Those who have been bullied are likely to turn on and reduce their bullies to victims once they have gained enough strength to do so. History shows that oppressed cultures in revolution are often quite cruel to their former oppressors once they gain control. Since some of the biggest oppressors in history have been European whites, there may be good reason to fear.

If you look at the history of whites, you have to consider imperialism. The British, in particular, did it very well. There is an old saying that the sun never set on the British Empire, because the British Empire was the largest empire in the history of the world. The British tried to take over every part of the globe. At one point there were British colonies and settlements in every hemisphere. The British were able to do this as a minority in world population because they got to the technology first. They had weaponry available that many of those they oppressed did not have. America is a bit of an anomaly in the British efforts of imperialism. America presented a situation in which the British were turned on by their own, and the American colonies were the first to break away from British rule, not because the indigenous people rebelled, but because the colonists themselves rebelled. America initially set about establishing something which was practically the polar opposite of imperialism. The United States constitution has nothing to do with imperialistic ideals. However, the lust for wealth and authority managed to ignore parts of the constitution. India is actually the only country ever to break British rule without going to war with Britain, and that was accomplished primarily under the tutelage of Mahatma Gandhi who advocated the principle of passive resistance. The French and the Spanish, not wanting to be left out of a good deal, went about attempting the same imperialism as the British, and the British had simply copied it from the Romans, Persians, Greeks and Mongolians who went before them. More recently Nazi Germany and Japan attempted to establish imperial rule which brought about World War II. However, one must not overlook American imperialism which was a bit more insidious. American whites went about genocide more slowly and stealthy, but on a scale much greater, in the long run, than Hitler’s attempt at exterminating Jews. Some estimates indicate that the populations of pre-Columbian indigenous peoples in the Americas could have been as high as between fifty or a hundred million. Yet today’s population of Native Americans is only around 5.4. million. Today, the United States possesses several territories that are part of, but not quite included in the United States. Puerto Rico is just one example. The United States also has a finger in the pie of multiple countries all over the world, and has done this for more than a hundred and fifty years.

The basic philosophy of imperialism is to take from others and give to yourself. Build an empire, and you build wealth. Steal lands and goods from those who aren’t strong enough to oppose you, and create the dependency of those countries on the mother nation. If you think about it, this is just gang mentality on a much larger scale. Countries still compete to control world wealth, and there are ongoing resentments of, and challenges to American domination and interference. Even though the United States was formed as a backlash against British imperialism, and was set up to establish democracy and freedom, we didn’t quite follow the constitution our forefathers had established. The lust for imperialism found its way into our culture. Perhaps it was due to having been born of the British Empire. We (my ancestors) pushed Native Americans off their lands, and took it for ourselves. We regulated Native Americans to reservations, and attempted to turn their minds white while never accepting that they could be equal to us. Whites have always been arrogant. Hitler is just an extreme manifestation of that. We hauled slaves from Africa and treated them despicably even unto the resolution of the Civil War, and after. Many of us (whites) have problems accepting that other races could be equal to us. After having had an Ivy League educated, Magna Cum Laude, Harvard trained constitutional attorney as president, who also just happened to be black, too many of us still buy into black, or other stereotypes, and still consider ourselves to be somehow superior to other races. Some of us just can’t seem to get it through our thick heads that the only real difference between one race or ethnic group and another is skin color and cultural heritage.

If there is anything that prejudice is about, it is about arrogance and fear. It is about a sense of entitlement that is allowed to override justice. It is about exploitation of those who have less authority and control, and it is the sociopathic arrogance that says it is okay to take from others in order to profit for yourself. It is anything but, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men (people) are created equal.” It does not ask if we truly believe in our own Declaration of Independence. Mature ethics and morality do not allow for the kind of thinking that generates prejudice. It does not matter which ethnic group or race is in authority, the phenomenon of prejudice can still occur. It is not necessarily a white thing. The aphrodisiac of the power illusion is something that many succumb to, and once they have it, they are terrified of letting it go for they know what atrocities they, and their own committed in order to keep it, and they assume that others, if in authority, will do the same. It is human nature to project onto others that which we most despise within ourselves, and to assume that others, given the chance, will behave as we behaved. White fear is the fear of being treated as we have historically treated others.

There is another way, but the history of human behavior would indicate that it is a long shot. That way would be for minorities to forgive those who have been their oppressors, and instead of emulating their behavior when at last their authority wanes, to treat them and others who are not in authority with compassion, or as Obama said, “When they go low, we go high.” There is a great deal of difference between leaders and rulers. Leaders inspire and motivate. Leaders respect their followers, even if they disagree, and treat them with compassion and understanding. Rulers dominate, expect orders to be carried out, even if they are tyrannical, and take whatever steps are necessary to maintain authority. It is possible for rulers to hand down their rule in one way or another to likeminded predecessors, and it is possible for those who once did not have authority to succumb to the same aphrodisiac of the power illusion that previous rulers were addicted to. It is possible for leaders to become rulers when the temptation of wealth and the illusion of power is high. This is the greatest fear of white establishment America: that those who have been oppressed will turn on us, and treat us with the same oppression as we have treated them. The logic is that we must, therefore, maintain authority at any cost, and this, I believe, explains the current backlash that is going on in America.

The time will come when American whites of European heritage will be a minority, and those who were previously the recipients of our prejudice and oppression, will be in authority. We fear, that they will do to us what we have done to them, and this is certainly a distinct possibility. One option that we have, instead of continuing to engage in bigotry, hatred and control, would be to embrace those whom we have oppressed, cease oppression and prejudice, and show compassion to those who do not yet carry the torch of authority. One option would be to get down off our arrogant high horse, and recognize that every heart pumps blood that is the same color, and there is no such thing as anyone who has less worth than anyone else. As well, there is no one who has any greater worth. If we truly believe “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men(people) are created equal.”, and that this principle is what our forefathers intended, then there is no room for prejudice and bigotry. There is no room for clashing over color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, religion, nationality or any number of other things. There is no reason to assume that a position of authority authorizes taking advantage of those who are not in authority. There is no room for infighting in a family, the human family, that must live together. We all share the world, and we all have the same Mother, Earth. For goodness sakes, if your Momma didn’t teach you to share, she should have. More than anything, we all need to divorce ourselves from fear, especially of one another, and come together as a unified humanity with the goal of creating the best we can for all our human brothers and sisters. We are not here to be selfish. We are not here to take from others, and live at the expense of others. We are here to share in the bounty of a world that is plentiful enough for all. When we stop fearing, and start respecting one another, a peaceful existence with one another is an obtainable goal, but we cannot get there with the assumption that anyone is worth less or deserves less than ourselves.

She eloped across the county line at fourteen, lied about her age, and married a man almost twice her age. In today’s world, he probably would have been arrested, but in 1923 it was a different world for women and children, at least slightly different. She came back and told her Pa, “I ran off and got married. What do you think of that?”

He said, “I think you have made your bed, and you are gonna lay in it.”

It was not an easy bed to lay in. No sooner had she moved in with my Grandpa and his family than she was burdened with taking care of the whole lot when they came down with fever. She says that’s when she learned to cook. Grandpa’s mother despised her. Grandma stole her little boy, the baby of the family who had never moved out even at the age of 24.

By the time the Great Depression hit, they were trying to raise two children on the scruff of the Ozark Hills with another child on the way. There was barely enough for them to get by, so they went to the bottoms (flat land down around Memphis) to pick cotton. Granny gave birth to all five of her children at home, without a doctor and without the benefit of medication to sooth the pain. Grandpa didn’t realize it, never admitted it maybe, but she was tougher than he was. Still, he controlled her, and she let him. He demanded so much control over her that the first check she ever signed on their joint checking account was to pay for his funeral.

Throughout their marriage, she did all her chores and half of his. She raised five children, did the laundry, the cooking, the house cleaning, the canning and gardening. Then she went to the fields with him, hoed and picked cotton, picked corn, mowed and hauled hay, milked the cows, fed the chickens and pigs, and for this she didn’t even get a thank you.

When I was five years old, my mother was killed, and they took me in to raise. They never contacted my father, and I didn’t even become aware that I had a father until a little later in life. The men in my life were my grandpa and my mother’s oldest brother, neither of whom, in my opinion, qualified as real men. My uncle had been the first born and only boy in the family, and at 33 years old when I came into the family, had never married and never left home. Granny took care of all three of us, and considered it her divinely ordained duty. After all, the Bible says the man is the head of the household. In my opinion, the family took that a bit too far.

I grew up watching my grandma be a slave to my Grandpa and uncle asking myself, “What’s wrong with this picture?” My uncle was drunk every weekend from Friday through Sunday with a very rare exception. She paced the floors at night waiting for him to come home, praying he would be okay because he would go straight to the liquor store on Friday night, and start drinking as soon as he walked out. Sometimes, he would drive the backroads and drink till after midnight before he came home. Sometimes, he didn’t come home at all. When he did come home, it could be guaranteed he would drink all night. He would drink till the last drop was gone out of his bottles, and start his sober up sometime Saturday night. On Sunday, he rarely got out of bed. Sometimes he worked, and sometimes he didn’t. When he did work, more of his money went to whiskey than it did to helping with the house or the farm. He never did a chore. I can’t remember him going to the barn to milk, or to the fields to work. He might have helped haul hay a few times, but that was about it.

Grandpa wasn’t much better. He had quit drinking before I came along, but there wasn’t much he contributed. If it hadn’t been for Granny we all would have been lost. As I got older, I did what I could to help her, but until I matured and realized what was going on in the family, I resented my chores. More than anything, I resented the fact that I was asked to do chores when my grandpa and uncle rarely moved from the front of the radio or the television. In retrospect, I realize I was learning the responsibility they never took. By the time I was in college, I had observed enough to realize there was something grossly wrong with the dynamics of my family. This whole idea that a woman had to serve a man, or that she had to submit to him, was something I couldn’t wrap my mind around. It was an idea that appeared completely unfair to me. I could understand that if a man worked outside the home, and brought home the only income, it might be fair for a woman to take care of the household and the children, but the opposite is also true. However, that wasn’t the case in my family, and what I grew up with was a magnifying glass on a problem that has gone on in the world for far too long.

When I was in college, I was home for the summer. Grandpa, Grandma and I had gone to the back of the farm to cut wood for the potbellied stove, our source of winter heat. We would cut wood around the edge of the pastures and leave it to dry before hauling it to the house. That summer we had finished working for the morning, and were headed back to the house to get lunch. Grandpa was driving the truck, I was sitting in the middle with my hands braced on the dash, and Granny was on the passenger’s side. Grass had grown up around one of the stumps left from the previous year’s cutting, so Grandpa didn’t know it was there until it hit the drive train of the truck. The impact threw us forward, but the only one who was not braced in that old truck that had no seat belts was Granny. Her head hit the windshield hard enough to put a crack in it, and leave a sizeable bump on her head. Grandpa didn’t even ask if she was okay. He merely backed the truck up, drove around the stump, and drove on up the lane to the house.

When we got to the house, I helped Granny out of the truck, into the house and to her bed in the back bedroom. I then put ice in a damp wash cloth for her to hold on the knot in her head. Grandpa sat down in his living room chair while I checked on her, and tried to tend to her wound. After a while, he got up, walked to the back bedroom, stuck his head in the door and said to her, “Ain’t you gonna fix me no dinner!”

At that point I turned on him. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I told him, “Get your ass back in there, and leave her alone! If you are too damn lazy to fix your own dinner, I will fix it for you later, but you leave her alone.”

He quietly turned, went back to the living room and sat down. I have wondered what might have happened if I had not been there, but at that point in my life, I had had enough of watching him treat her like a piece of property instead of a wife and mother of his children, instead of a human being deserving respect, honor and dignity.

Although my family may have been an extreme example, women rarely get the respect they deserve, and they are considered second class citizens more often than not. Research shows that women typically have about 40% less leisure time than men. The glass ceiling still exists, and research also shows the continued discrepancy in pay for women when they have equal qualifications to men. I had a man from Zimbabwe tell me in 1979, “There will be a black man elected president of the United States before there will be a white woman.” I didn’t believe him at the time, but now I realize that what he was saying was prophesy, based on keen observation of how women in America are treated. What I have never been able to understand is why women are so disrespected. The prejudice toward women is very subtle, unlike the usually overt prejudice of racism. I have literally heard some men comment, “At least they don’t have to wear a burka and walk five paces behind their husband.” This is supposed to somehow excuse the fact that one of the wealthiest, and what should be one of the most progressive countries in the world, still lacks true equal rights for women?

What is important to understand here is that in every group that is subject to prejudice, there are those within the group who buy into the stereotype, and buy into the expectation of their role as prescribed by outer society. Despite some of the most disrespectful behavior I have ever seen toward women, Donald Trump would not have been elected president had it not been for women voters. There is a passive acceptance of disrespect, and double standards by many women themselves. My grandmother accepted her role. She lived it, and made no attempt to rebel. To her, it was a woman’s place. She lived what she had been taught her entire life, and didn’t question it. I once asked her why she had never considered divorcing my grandfather when he was such a tyrant, and she said, “Because I made a commitment, for better or for worse.”

I responded, “And all you got was worse.”

The problem with women is that too many of them passively accept their “role”, and do not put forth the challenge necessary to make legitimate change in American society. There are certain situations in which women have very little choice. A woman in a relationship with an abuser, may be very limited by the fear that he will kill her if she tries to break free. However, it is important even then, for women to understand that most of the time they do have other choices they can make.

As long as women buy into and perpetrate the myth that men are somehow better than they, the mistreatment and lack of respect for women will continue. There are many women who treat their sons like a prince to be worshiped rather than teaching him that he is an equal to the opposite sex. There are both mothers and fathers who don’t hold their sons accountable. The hero worship of men in which they get a free pass for sports and macho behavior, has to stop in order for women to find a place in society in which they can truly be considered as equals. Both men and women have to stop worshiping masculinity in order for “rape culture” to be eliminated.

Because the prejudice is more insidious and subtle, it will take something more than the symbolic gesture of Rosa Parks refusing to go to the back of the bus for these changes to take place. It cannot happen without women themselves taking a good hard look at their own internal belief systems. It will take challenging their own beliefs, and then challenging those beliefs in others when they are subtly displayed. For years, gay people put up with the ridiculous question, “When did you know you were gay?” They began to return with the question, “When did you know you were straight?” People asking the question didn’t have a clue they were doing something offensive. They thought they accepted gay people, but in truth held the underlying belief that someone just makes the choice one day. It will take something similar to that for women. Women and those men who understand and affirm their equality are going to have to start questioning and challenging the double standards. This is about more than calling a woman a bitch if she is assertive, or calling her a slut if she behaves as sexually open as a man does. This is about refusing to passively accept behavior in men that is degrading, disrespectful or demeaning to women, no matter how subtle it may be. This is about challenging things that both men and woman say, challenging the idea that it is okay to grab or touch anyone without at least their implied permission. It is about challenging the idea women are less capable or as hard working. It is about challenging rather than passively accepting, period!

My grandmother was smarter than my grandfather. She worked twice as hard, and kept up with him every step of the way. She was a successful mother and housekeeper, a successful farmer and gardener. She had more potential in her little finger than he had in his whole body. Sometimes I wonder what might have happened if she had grown up in a world where women were respected, and given full equal rights and permissions to pursue whatever they wanted, including being a housewife or a sex symbol if that were their passion, instead of being assigned to a man. Perhaps I wouldn’t be here to write this right now, but perhaps her life could have been far better than it was.

On the day my father died, I found a black feather on my way back from lunch standing straight up in the grass as though it had been planted there. Having been taught by some of my metaphysically minded friends that feathers are angel signs, I picked it up and took it back to my office. The feather was old and tattered. The bristles were frayed, and barely holding together. A black feather can symbolize death, or the finishing of a chapter in our lives. Within an hour, my sister called to tell me that Dad had passed.

It was no surprise, but then again it was. At the age of 93, he had been hospitalized recently, but he was one of those people who was so tough it was difficult to imagine that he would ever die. At the age of 91, the housekeeper found him passed out in his house. He was taken to the emergency room, and the medical conclusion was dehydration. He simply needed to consume more fluids. He made it to his 93rd birthday before having to be placed into a veteran’s nursing home, but physical wounds, illness, dementia and Post Traumatic Stress had finally taken their toll on him.

This was not the first time my father had faced death. There were multiple times in his life when he might have been taken, but he beat them all, right up to September of 2016 when at last he let go. He had been captured by the Japanese in Guam a few days after Pearl Harbor. At first he had fled into the jungle with others when the Japanese began their invasion of Guam on December 8th 1941. He was soon captured with other GI’s, and placed in front of a firing squad. The Japanese officer conducting the firing squad had already given the commands of “ready” and “aim” when a Japanese commanding officer stepped in to stop it. Ultimately, it was purely for intimidation, and the pregnant pause before the commander stepped in was simply to allow American GI’s to contemplate their demise. My Dad told me that there was barely a dry pair of pants left in the lineup.

After that, they were all locked into a small closet, piled on top of each other and left for a couple of days to starve, and marinate in their own stench before being loaded into ships for the trip to Japanese POW camps. Upon arriving in Japan, they were given paper and pen to write letters to their kin back home. These were, of course, carefully monitored by the Japanese, and used as a form of propaganda. My Dad commented to another GI, “I’m going to tell them I’m really enjoying the fruitcake. They know I hate fruitcake, so they will realize we are not being treated well.” Prisoners were then forced to take lessons in Japanese language, and were not allowed to address any Japanese national in English, so my Dad became fluent in Japanese.

My Dad spent the entire four years of world War II in Japanese POW camps, before being liberated by the Americans at the end of the war. During his time there, he endured beatings, and ate cockroaches or whatever he could find to survive. He reported to me that he had gotten down to seventy-eight pounds at one point, and he was six feet tall. He kept a hidden journal while he was there, scratched on whatever paper he could find. If the journal had been found by the Japanese, he would have been severely beaten at least, probably killed. He wrote in the journal maybe once a week, but there is a space in the text where he did not write anything for several months. I have wondered if perhaps that was the point at which he got so sick and thin that he almost died.

My Dad learned how to pick locks in prison camp. When his group was assigned to unload cargo trains, he was able to steal sugar, rice and other commodities that could be hidden in the barracks and rationed. All this had to be carefully sneaked by the guards, and hidden stealthy away. Because the Japanese people were also rationed due to the expense of war, he was eventually able to negotiate deals with certain guards, and share stolen bounty that they could take home to feed their families in exchange for favors. Even then, they all had to be very careful that certain evidence did not show to those higher in authority. It is likely those skills of theft and deception helped him survive where a third of the prisoners died.

After his liberation and return to the states, he re-enlisted so he could go to Korea and fight. Even though he endured hell through World War II, he felt as though he had not been able to do what he was sworn to do. He needed to fight. He needed to feel like he was fulfilling his mission as a Marine, defending his country and living up to his commitment. Korea was also no picnic. He told me of times when the weather was so cold there, that while taking a piss down range, the urine would freeze before it hit the ground.

In the early 1950’s, he and a Navy friend from POW camp narrated the story of their experience as prisoners of war in a book called Laughter in Hell which was written by Stephen Marek. That was also around the time he met my mother. She was much younger than him and he told me he was intrigued by her when he happened into a bar near Taft, California and spotted her sitting alone near the back. When he inquired about her, the bar tender told him they called her “The Mystery Woman” because she would come in once a day at about the same time, sit alone, have one drink and put off the advances of any man who tried to talk to her.

He apparently took that as a challenge, and set about trying to get to know her. I have no idea how he did it, but he must have seemed glamorous to her. He was a very handsome man who had written a book about going to war, and he was also doing bit parts in movies for Universal Studios at the time. She was a naive young woman from a liquor dry county in the sticks of Arkansas. She was there because my Grandfather had been encouraged to move to California, and was told the desert air would give him relief from his asthma. It didn’t take long for Grandpa and Grandma to go into culture shock as there is, even now, a huge difference between rural northern Arkansas, and Southern California. Her family soon moved back home, but my Mom stayed, and my Dad developed a relationship with her.

I don’t know what my Dad may have been going through emotionally after being a prisoner of war, and also fighting in the Korean Conflict, but I know from what he told me, he was drinking heavily at the time he met my mother, and he was also womanizing. He told me it was the latter that broke them up after he slept with the hostess of a party they were attending when my Mom was pregnant with me. Apparently, that was the final straw for her in their relationship, so she moved back to Arkansas while she was still pregnant.

I was born in a rural clinic a year after my Dad’s book was published. He had autographed a copy to my mother, “To the finest woman I’ve ever known. May fortune always smile at you and your loving heart always be filled with happiness.” That book was one of the things I treasured and clung to throughout my childhood.

My mother was killed, reportedly in an auto accident, just after I turned five years old. She had taken me to see my Dad when I was eighteen months old and had contacted him when I was about four years old, but I never knew that until I was eighteen. When she died, my grandparents filed for guardianship, and did not inform my father that she was gone. Apparently they told the courts that my father could not be located. Throughout my childhood, he made no effort, that I knew of, to contact me. He told me, after I finally met him at the age of eighteen, that he would have come to get me if he had known my mother was dead.

My grandparents did not describe him as an abusive man, but told me that he had problems, that he would hoard food, that he was angry and a perfectionist. That was not the impression I gained of him when I finally met him, but he had sixteen years to heal during the interim.

I was finally able to reach my Dad by writing a letter to the publishing company of his book. My efforts started as soon as I turned eighteen, and my grandfather could no longer forbid it. The publishing company sent me a letter stating they did not release contact information of their authors, but they had forwarded my letter to him. At that point, I could only wait and hope.

A few weeks after receiving notice from his publishing company, I got the first letter from my Dad. He noted that it was obvious I needed answers, so he borrowed money to buy airline tickets, and flew to Little Rock to meet me. He could have denied me, but he chose instead that we would begin our relationship as father and son. I drove to Little Rock to meet him, and after spending those first few days with him, he hugged me at our departure. That was the first time, in my recollection, that any man had ever hugged me. Many take a father’s hugs for granted, but there had been no real father figure in my life to that point. So that hug became one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. Afterward, I stood on the street and watched him drive away in his rented car. I was dazed by the experience, but I also felt comforted and reassured. He proved himself to be different from the father my grandparents had described. After all, they had only the hearsay of my mother who had been deeply hurt by him.

When Christmas came, he sent me tickets to fly to California and meet my little brother and sister, as well as his current wife. There had been another wife since my mother whom he had divorced. There had been a wife previous to my mother with whom he had two children, a son who had died at age seven from kidney failure, and a daughter who had also been taken from him. She, as well, contacted him as an adult around the same time that I did.

I had a whole new family then, an older sister, step brothers and a little brother and sister. After being raised as an only child, I discovered siblings, and a way of life that was completely contrary to what I had grown up with. While I was growing up in a four room house that had no running water in rural poverty, my Dad had become an electrical engineer, and raised my little brother and sister in a nice middle class home in Chatsworth, California. There has been more than one occasion that I imagined what my life might have been like if I had been raised by him instead of my grandparents. However, life is what it is. It becomes what it becomes, and our story unfolds only partly because of our own choices.

I experienced my step mother as always having been kind to me. She encouraged my Dad in his relationship with me, and smoothed over rough places between us. When she died at the age of 87, I had known her for 35 years, and I could not recall a single time that she had ever spoken an unkind word to me. She had been with my Dad for many years before I met him. She had been the love of his life, and the only woman who had been with him for more than a couple of years. She tempered his anger, and comforted him when he woke up screaming in Japanese. She had been the one to smooth the jagged edges between us when I first admitted to my Dad in 1981 that I am gay. He did not take it well at first, but after she spent time with him, he came to me and apologized for his initial rejection. He admitted fear that I could be the target of hate crimes, and talked about the way gay men were treated during his generation. His fears were as genuine as my own. I could not be the son he had hoped I would be, but he came to accept that I am who I am. I am reminded, when thinking of those times, that although I had grown up without him, my father authentically loved me.

My Dad did not receive 100% service connected disability for the impact of his military experiences until he was in his fifties. I don’t think he had asked for it. Even then, it took several years to be granted benefits. He had multiple problems due to starvation, beatings, malaria and other illnesses that he experienced as a prisoner of war, but he had to prove those problems resulted from time in the military. He had previously endured the pain, and had been very proud that he was able to continue working for as long as he did. By the time he was in his late fifties, he was in a wheelchair due to his chronic pain and neuropathy. He was in a wheelchair for most of the time I knew him. In his eighties, he could no longer deal with the manual chair, and had to be switched to a motorized wheel chair. That didn’t stop him. He went where he wanted to go, and did what he wanted to do.

My Dad’s willingness to face and conquer his anxiety, and his willingness to forgive the Japanese is probably one of the things that saved him, and kept his Post Traumatic Stress from being any more severe than it was. He still had nightmares about being in the prison camps, and later in life, my step mother was incorporated into those nightmares. He reported dreams where she was interred with him, and he was protecting her. He refused, much of the time to eat rice, but despite his torture, he seemed to have forgiven the Japanese. When I was visiting Los Angeles during the 1970’s he asked what kind of food I wanted for dinner. I asked for Polynesian. So, he got out the yellow pages and began searching. He found a Polynesian restaurant, and while we were there, he noticed that our server, a Japanese woman, had a noticeable ethnic accent. The next thing I knew, he was bantering, and laughing with her in pure Japanese as though they had been old friends. He did not blame the Japanese people for what their government had done, and did not seem to have resentment toward those who had incarcerated and tortured him. He had even named his last service dog Tomodachi, Japanese for Little Friend.

As my father aged, I felt as though we were getting closer. For a time, I was on the phone with him two or three times a week despite the fact that I was living back in the Ozarks, and he was in California. However, the stress of aging began to take its toll on him and my stepmother.

When my stepmother began to develop Alzheimer’s, Dad seemed to have difficulty understanding what it was doing to her. I had noticed that something was wrong almost three years before her doctors, and she took pride in telling me that her doctors said she was fine. However, I noticed this woman who had been able to throw a gourmet meal together in a snap was having to repeatedly measure, never quite thinking she could go ahead and dump the cup of flour into the bowl. She had been a realtor for fifteen years in the small town where they lived in San Diego County, but had to look at a map to figure out how to get home. Dad had to repeat simple instructions to her over and over, yet she still could not seem to comprehend. He became increasingly frustrated with her, but continued to try to keep her at home. Eventually they settled into a gated community in El Cajon where he thought she was safe to walk the dogs within the gates. He affirmed that the dogs knew the way back to the house even if she didn’t. When she didn’t come back one afternoon, and was found wandering the next day miles away with the dogs still on the leash, it became evident that he could no longer look after her at home.

I underestimated the strain this had placed on him, and I underestimated what role my Step-Mom had played in helping him to think things through. I also underestimated that he was probably already developing some frontal lobe dementia back in 2008 when I visited California. He had placed my step-mother into an Alzheimer’s unit only a couple of months before my visit. We were having a gathering at my Sister’s house when he began saying that he paid for my college as well as my graduate school. He then said, I had gone to school on his GI bill. When I affirmed to him that I had gotten scholarships and grants, worked during school and it had taken me ten years after graduate degree to pay back student loans, he continued to insist that he had been solely financially responsible for my education. I reflected that it probably would not have been possible for me to go to school on his GI bill, and that he had many great accomplishments to be proud of, but he did not get to take credit for my accomplishments. The result was that my Dad stormed out, and refused to speak to me again.

A couple of years later, after my step mother’s death, he apologized to me at her memorial service. I hugged him and said, “Thank you.” However, he then forgot that he had apologized, and even though my sister pointed out to him that he had apologized in front of witnesses, he continued to insist that I had turned against him, and he refused ever to talk to me again.

After he had been placed in a nursing home earlier this year, I received a call from a nurse stating that my Dad wanted to speak to me. A moment of hope filled my heart, but when she told him I was on the phone, I heard him telling her in the background that I was not the one he wanted to talk to. Since he was having a hard time explaining, I explained to her that he probably wanted to talk to my brother Ryan. Those words, spoken in the background of a phone call, were the last words I ever heard my father speak.

After work, on the day my father died, I walked to the ocean near where I now live in Texas, and went to a little hide away beach where I like to hunt for sea glass. In order to find that beach, one has to step off the beaten path, and go behind bushes and pampas grass. Otherwise it cannot be seen. I had no sooner stepped down into the sand when I saw another black feather standing straight up as though it had been planted there. This feather, unlike the first one was in perfect condition. I have come across feathers in my path on multiple occasions over the years, often during times of stress and reflection, but until the day my father died, I had never come across any feather that was standing straight up, tip down, as though strategically and purposefully planted there. On that day, I found two. I picked up the second feather and kept it. I interpreted the two feathers to mean that the first was a harbinger of his death, and symbolized the casting off of his physical form that had been so tattered over the years. The second feather was a messenger that he had become renewed, and was no longer in the tattered form he had inhabited when he was alive. I would like to think this was my father’s way of letting me know that he now understands how much I loved him.

His memorial service was held at the National POW MIA Memorial in Riverside California, and I was honored to be there. Despite my father’s stubbornness during the last years of his life, my sister knew the truth. She understood how much he had meant to me. His stubbornness was both his greatest strength, and his greatest weakness. It had probably gotten him through Japanese POW camps where a third of all captives died. It got him through dealing with years of pain after going through the torment of being a prisoner of war from 1941 to 1945. It got him through spending the second half of his life in a wheelchair. It got him through his battles to be granted his service connected disability that he so profoundly deserved. It got him to the age of 93 when so many times death had come for him and failed. Unfortunately, his stubbornness also kept him from me during the waning years of his life. In 2008, I had lost my father a second time. However, he has never been lost to my heart.

During my layover in the Las Vegas Airport on my way to California for his memorial service, I suddenly looked up from my laptop to see a few troops marching by. Then I heard bagpipes and applause. I stood to look, and there at the next gateway Marines were at attention, saluting as old men with veterans’ caps were wheeled from the plane. I realized this had to be the return of an honor flight in which aging veterans are taken to the memorials of significance related to their particular military conflict. I stood with the others and applauded as each man was wheeled from the plane.

There was a sadness I felt during that interesting coincidence. To my knowledge, my Dad never went on an honor flight. He had many honors, but that one he missed. At his memorial, his medals were pinned to a Marine Corps Uniform that was dressed on a mannequin nearby. His military service was the proudest thing of his entire life. It permeated his life right down to the bronze plaque that will carry his name at the Riverside National Cemetery.

I was never so honored as when my brother, sister and I sat down at the end of his service, and were each presented a flag by perfectly groomed young Marine, along with a brass shell casing from his salute. My father was a hero. He fought for his country, and sacrificed for his country more than many. He suffered for all of us, and I have to say that I am deeply offended when I hear someone spouting the erroneous belief that people who have Post Traumatic Stress are weak. Obviously, they never met my Dad. He was anything but weak. He was the strongest man I have ever known, and he was much more than a military hero. What he may never have known is how much of a hero he was to me. He perhaps never knew that I always felt as though I was standing in the shadow of his courage. He was the first man who ever hugged me. He was the first man who honored me, and did not abuse me. He took out a loan to come see me when it would have been easy enough to simply ignore my letter. He accepted me, and gave me the family I had longed for throughout my entire childhood. He was a role model of strength, courage, and yes, stubbornness. He had his faults. Who doesn’t? Yet, his strengths, outweighed any fault that I ever found in him. He will forever live as the hero of my heart, the greatest hero I have yet known.

Pinnacle Mountain stands alone along the Arkansas River, and from the I-630 bridge appears like a burned out volcano in the distance. It isn’t. It takes about two or three hours to climb the mountain from the park at the base to the boulder covered peak. The trails become ever more steep near the top and climbing over boulders is required to complete the journey.

Once there, the views are spectacular. On the east side, the Arkansas River can be seen drifting off into downtown Little Rock. On the west side, dark blue Lake Maumelle is usually filled with colorful sail boats. To the north, the Arkansas River curls around the base of the mountain, and tug boats push barges of merchandise up and down the river. On the south side, miles of farm land and neighborhoods stretch as far as the eyes can see.

When I lived in Little Rock, this was one of my places of refuge from the stresses of life. In addition to the trails up the mountain, there are hiking trails that wind off through the forest on the opposite side of the park. I learned that I could sneak away from one of those trails, (Yes, I know I’m not supposed to.) and take a five or ten-minute walk through the woods to a cliff overhanging the river. I used to go there and sit on the edge of that cliff with my legs dangling over a rock. There I would watch the boats traverse the curving river and spend quiet time alone in nature.

Have you ever noticed when you just sit quietly, alone in nature, you automatically calm down? No drugs or alcohol are needed to sooth the anxiety. It is soothed simply by sitting and observing the natural world. This is what I call rocking in the arms of mother nature. I learned to do this when I was a child by observing my grandmother. She would leave the house angry, be gone for an hour or two out on the farm, and when she came back, the anger was gone. You could tell that she wasn’t just pretending not to be mad anymore, the anger was simply gone. Since my grandfather was a bit of a controlling tyrant, she had frequent reasons to be angry. He was so controlling of her that the first check she ever signed on their joint checking account was to pay for his funeral. She once told me that she stayed with him because she made a promise for better or for worse. I responded, “Unfortunately, about all you got was worse.”

I watched her leave the house angry and come back in peace. So, when I became upset, I began to leave the house for hours alone on the farm. I didn’t know what she did during her time out there, and when I was a child, I didn’t ask. I simply left the house. At first I meandered about the pastureland of approximately 180 acres. I went down into a huge sink hole that edged one of our pastures. It was so ancient that full grown trees grew within it all the way to the bottom. I found a rock that sat in the middle of one of our pastures. It was about as high as the average chair and about as wide as a small dining table. Sometimes, I would sit on that rock, but it was too much out in the open. Sometimes I sat on the bank of one of our various ponds, and listened to the frogs sing. Eventually, I found huge rock that was about the same size as a large home storage building, yet taller. The rock was on a hillside that rose up from the spring fed creek that ran across the back side of our farm. Trees grew around it, spread branches over the top and shaded it from hot summer sun. Don’t the hill, I could hear the waters of the creek trickling away on natures journey. This became my favorite refuge.

I would climb that rock and sit for hours up in the tree line where no one could see me even if they walked around the base. There among the branches of oaks and hickory, I watched squirrels play, listened to cardinals sing and observed the leaves gently dancing in the summer breeze. There, I calmed down. I didn’t necessarily give up the resentments I had about being mistreated by my grandfather or my alcoholic uncle who lived with us, but I relaxed enough to rest. Sometimes, I even fell asleep atop that rock only to awaken as dusk was casting low shadows over the world. At those times, I had to rush back to the house before darkness fell.

I was never quite as good with letting the anger go as Grandma was, but I was at least able to find some calm before I came home. Years later, when I learned to meditate, I found another source of peace and found it to be very similar to the experience I had atop my rock. When I saw the movie “Phenomenon” with John Travolta, it perfectly depicted those states of mindfulness that occur when one is deeply in tune with the present moment. There is a particular scene in the movie where, Travolta’s character becomes very angry. He goes home and begins digging aggressively at the dirt in his garden. As he is digging, a breeze comes through. He stops digging, and is transported fully into the present moment. Watching the leaves gently dancing, he becomes centered in the experience of mindfulness and becomes peaceful again.

When we are fully centered in a peaceful moment, it is impossible to have resentments, anger, guilt or fear. All those experiences are based either in the past or future, in some memory or the imagination. The bottom line is this; if it is not happening right now, in this very moment, it is either a memory or a fantasy. Since neither a memory or a fantasy can be real, ultimately the only reality we experience is the present moment. Our mind can travel in time, go back to some memory, whether pleasant or unpleasant, or go forward into our imagining of what the future might become, but the body cannot travel in time. It can only be in this moment, right here, right now. We can remember the last moment or imagine the next, but the body is always here. When we are able to focus our attention into the moment, there is peace. The way we know we are here in this moment is to become as fully aware as possible of what we experience in our senses, what we physically feel, see, hear, smell or taste. This is the essence of mindfulness.

One of the tricks of learning to become mindful is simply to slow down. If there is a dollar on the sidewalk you are most likely to see it if you are casually strolling by, not rushing or running. The slower we go, the more aware we become, and when we are able to stop for a while and be present, we experience a greater peace. Although nature is wonderful for helping us do this, it is not absolutely necessary. We can learn to do it on a bench at the mall or in an airport. We can learn to take a moment out of our busy day to pull our mind away from schedules, deadlines, and other pressures to simply be aware of our surroundings. We can take a walk after work or simply sit in a quiet room and pull our attention as fully as possible into the moment.

If you can’t get out into nature, go to a quiet room. Turn off everything, the phone, the computer, TV, radio—everything. Sit quietly, with your feet flat on the floor, your hands in your lap and your back straight. Imagine a force at the top of your head gently pulling you up toward the ceiling, so your back becomes straight. With your eyes closed, look upward. Begin to breathe as deeply and slowly as you can. Simply pay attention to the feeling of breathing, to the air flowing in and out of your nose, the sensation of your chest rising and gently falling. Imagine that your whole body can take the breath all the way down to your toes. If your mind wanders, gently and repeatedly pull it back to focusing on the moment and the sensations of the moment. Then pay attention to your feet. The sensation of your feet on the floor, the weight of your feet, anything that may be touching your feet. Then feel your ankles, your shins and calves. Feel your knees, your legs against the chair, the weight of your body on the chair. Feel anywhere that any fabric is touching your legs. Feel your waist band, your back, your belly and your chest. Notice the sensation of breathing and whether the fabric touches your torso in one place with one breath, and touches somewhere else with the next. Feel your collar, your sleeves, any jewelry you might be wearing. Feel your face, your head, your lips touching together, your tongue lying inside your mouth. Feel the air flowing in and out of your nose as you breathe. Feel your eyes and the top of your head.

When you have spent time simply feeling your body, even if it is pain, then listen to the gentle sounds of silence. You may hear a clock ticking, traffic passing, a dog barking up the street. You may hear the heating or cooling unit kick on or off. You may hear a fan or various other little sounds that fill the silent moment.

After you have been sitting for a while pulling your attention repeatedly back to the gentle sounds of silence, then open your eyes and look at everything. Look as thoroughly and as completely as you possibly can look. See colors, shapes, patterns, textures, reflections and shadows. Look at the moment with as much attention to detail as you possibly can. Allow the present moment to give you a rest form the mind’s time travel into the past or the future. Give your mind the comfort of being focused on the present moment. Let peace come.

When I became an adult, after I had finished graduate school, I mentioned to my grandmother that I had witnessed her getting angry, then going away for a while and coming back in peace. She told me that when she went out to the farm, she walked the fence rows looking to see if any repairs needed to be made, and she also said something profound, “I realized that every time I got angry, my stomach got upset, and I knew if I didn’t learn how to stop being angry, I was going to make myself sick.”

How many of us have the awareness that our minds can have such a significant influence on our bodies? My grandmother realized things that later research came to prove. The body is affected by, and directed by the mind. Of itself, it is nothing. Our thinking, even the deep subconscious thoughts we don’t think we think, can have a profound effect on our health and wellbeing. This is one of the reasons prayer works. When we align our mind with peace, our body responds with health.

My grandmother lived in a mini hell of a home life until after my grandfather died. My grandfather and my uncle were never happy. They seemed to be set on misery, and making others around them miserable as they could. They did this until the day they died. It was rare to see even a glimmer of a smile from either of them, and they both died within a year of one another. After that, my grandmother lived many years by herself, and was perhaps the happiest I had ever seen her during that time. Prior to that time, she had determined that she would find her happiness and peace anyway. She determined that she was not going to let frustration drag her down into the mire where my uncle and grandfather wallowed in anger and resentment. She found a way to let it go, and in so doing, gave me an example worthy of following.

Everywhere I have lived, I have found a way to my peaceful places. Even when I lived in apartments, I took walks or found places of refuge. Sometimes I had to drive to them. Sometimes, I had no choice but to create the mindfulness within my own little cubicle of an apartment. When I was in Nashville, I walked down to the Cumberland River late at night and sat by the river with my guitar. Sometimes I pulled sounds from the guitar strings. Sometimes I simply sat and listened to the city when almost everyone else was asleep. The Cumberland is little more crowded there these days. When I lived in Missouri, I had a wraparound stone porch on the front of my Victorian farm house. I lined it with hanging flowers, sat on the porch swing, listened to my wind chimes, and watched the humming birds. Now on the coast of Texas I have found that there are places where I can slip away from the usual paths, and sit unseen by the water’s edge while I listen to the gentle waves of the Gulf of Mexico. Wherever I live. Wherever I go from here, I will find my refuge, or I will create a place where my mind can rest from the weary drudgery of life’s stresses. No matter where I am, I will find my moments of peace.

June 16, 2016

I grew up with guns. My grandpa had rifles and shotguns hanging on the walls. They were propped on ten penny nails driven just far enough into the paneling to support the weapon, and keep it out of the reach of a small child. Every year rural schools actually let the boys off a day for deer season. They were likely to skip school to go hunting anyway. In the late 1960’s the girls protested that they got no day off. So the schools gave the girls a day closer to Christmas as a shopping day. I didn’t occur to school officials, in those sexist times, that some of the girls might also like to hunt. Guns and hunting were so much a part of the culture that every boy begged for his first rifle long before the age of ten.

I was twelve or thirteen when I got a single shot, twenty-two caliber rifle for my birthday. I was as proud as any boy to have it. At first I did target practice shooting at tin cans propped on a fence post. Eventually, I took to shooting bull frogs around the edge of the ponds. I would bring them home, and Grandma would fry frog’s legs for dinner. One day I was hunting frogs near one of our muddy ponds when I heard a bird singing beautifully nearby. I stopped, searched the tree line, and finally spotted it on an oak limb hanging near the pond. A bright red cardinal was happily singing, bouncing around on that limb, either trying to attract a mate or bragging that he had found one. I watched the bird for a minute and then, a thought ran across my mind, “I wonder if I can hit it.”

Carefully, I took aim at the bird, with the wooden stock of the rifle sitting smoothly across the palm of one hand. The finger of my other hand caressed the trigger in anticipation. I found the bird firmly in my sites, and gingerly squeezed that trigger. The beautiful singing immediately stopped. The bird fell with a thud onto the shaded gravel beneath the tree, and my heart broke. A swell of guilt came over me, and flowed out my eyes as grieving realization hit me. The bird’s singing was forever gone. I went back to the house, hung my rifle on the wall and never fired it again.

I didn’t join the military when I turned eighteen, although I had cousins who did, and my father, a Marine, had been a Japanese prisoner of war in World War II. Neither did I get drafted, but they probably would not have taken me anyway since I had visual problems from birth that do not allow me to see in three dimensions. Nonetheless, it was during the final days of the Vietnam War, and I had grown up with a terror of being drafted and sent to die in southeast Asian jungles. I went to college instead.

I know there are times when it becomes necessary to kill another human being, such as someone sent to war, and placed into a kill or be killed situation. Whether they go by choice or the order of government, it becomes a probability they may have to kill in order to come home. When someone is attacked by someone whose intent is to kill them, it may become necessary to kill in order to survive. When one witnesses an attempt to kill another person, it may become necessary to kill in order to protect the innocent. However, it broke my heart at thirteen years old to kill a bird. I have no idea how I would feel, or what I would do, if I was ever forced into a situation where I had to kill another human being. I’m sure I would defend my life if necessary, but I pray that is a choice I never have to make.

That being said, I also understand [see “Hate (My Story)] what it is like to have enough anger and rage to feel murderous. Unfortunately, too many people in our society struggle with that kind of anger. Whether the anger is fueled by abuse, a struggle within themselves, or feelings of gross injustice. It would appear inherent in human beings that we contemplate the elimination of others as the answer to our woes.

It is a significant illusion to believe that we can eliminate an internal struggle by destroying something outside of us. The name given to the struggle is irrelevant. Whether someone is struggling with sexuality versus religion, sin versus religion, religion versus religion, ideology versus ideology, racism, jealousy or simple fear and shame, none of it can be resolved by murder. It is the assassin’s illusion. It was the illusion of James Earl Ray that he could silence the message of Dr. Martin Luther King by killing him. Yet the message of Dr. King not only survived that brutal attack, it is stronger and more poignant now than it ever was. There are few cities of any size that do not have a street named after Dr. King. His message of peace and justice for all resonates through every oppressed community, not just the black community. You cannot kill truth, and you cannot kill justice. Yet, to this day, some people try.

Regardless of speculation as to motive, the only person who really knows why Omar Mir Seddique Mateen walked into the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, and opened fire is Omar Mir Seddique Mateen himself. Ultimately, his motives are irrelevant. He was suffering the assassin’s illusion. Whether he was struggling with his own sexuality, religious belief or both is irrelevant. He somehow believed that killing people could eliminate some perception of evil. Regardless of influences he may have had from birth to the day he died in his own atrocity, he alone is responsible for his own perceptions and his own beliefs. The only choice any person can control is their own.

You see, beliefs are chosen. They are not inherent. We are not born with what we believe. We develop it. We may have been taught what to believe from the time we were able to think, but there are those who go against their upbringing, and change their beliefs. Sometimes we develop beliefs out of our own experience. We draw conclusions from our experiences, make decisions based on those conclusions, and then firm up our belief based on those decisions. We develop beliefs about everything including religion, sexuality, marriage, race, money, life, love, our worth within society, our rights and more. All our beliefs are erroneous. We may convince ourselves that they are true, but belief is a perception about something. It is not something itself. We may have a belief about truth, but belief cannot be true, for truth is that which is irrefutable. It cannot be argued. Since all belief can be argued, no belief can be truth. All conflict comes out of belief, whether it is a child whining because he believes he got the smallest cookie or a government sending its citizens into war over differing ideologies.

It was belief that killed all those people in the Pulse Nightclub. It was belief that killed the children at Sandy Hook. It was belief that killed every human in every murder ever. It was belief that killed every soldier in every war that was ever fought. Sometimes beliefs are personal. Sometimes we share them as a group. However, nothing changes the fact that conflict arises over what we believe, not what we know to be true. Some might have believed gay people deserved to be killed in that nightclub. Thankfully, belief in the value of life appears to be gaining some popularity. What so many people have not yet come to understand is that we don’t need to kill each other over what we believe. We only need to spend time with each other and offer logical reasons for our beliefs. If the other accepts what we believe or does not accept what we believe, killing them does not change what they believe. It only stops them from thinking. Perhaps the most insane of all beliefs is that truth and justice can be silenced by killing. It never has been. It never will be. It is the assassin’s illusion to believe that love and truth can be killed.

That being said, why do we make it so easy for them? How is it that anyone who is not strictly vetted is able to walk into a gun store and buy anything remotely like an assault rifle. The one and only purpose of an assault weapon is to slaughter human beings. The object itself was created out of a belief that life deserves no honor or respect. It was created out of the belief that the possessor of the object is allowed to play God and determine who will live, and who will die. The purpose of an assault weapon is in the name itself—Assault. The purpose is to kill as many as possible as quickly as possible. The purpose is murder. It is not a self-defense weapon. It is not a hunting weapon. It isn’t even a target practice weapon. It is a weapon that allows criminals to do things like what Omar Mir Seddique Mateen did to the people in Pulse. When will we say, “Enough is enough.”

I am not against guns. I’m against murder. I am against the belief that anyone has the right to defend their belief by killing others. I am against the belief that anyone should have even a moderately easy access to weapons designed to do what Omar Mir Seddique Mateen did in Pulse. Maybe, just maybe, if it is not so easy for those who harbor insane beliefs to access means by which they might act on those insane beliefs, they could have enough time, and opportunity to consider that there is another way of looking at it. All we need to do in order to find truth is to suspend our belief long enough to consider that there is another way of looking at it.

The most insane of all beliefs is that you can kill truth by killing those who speak it, and live it. Truth does not determine that anyone should die because of sexual orientation, gender identity, race, religion, culture, appearance or belief itself. Truth knows better. Truth knows that any attempt to impose your belief on another is like trying to hold beach balls under the water. It never has worked for long. It never will. The right to freedom cannot be suppressed. Love cannot be killed. Truth cannot be killed. Countless saints, sages and philosophers have proven this over and over. It is the assassin’s illusion to think that popping a balloon will destroy the air within it. Yet they seem to persist, and do not recognize that a terrorist attack is like a wasp sting. Although it may be very painful, it does not kill the host. It only makes the host more determined to find the nest and destroy it. So long as belief in an eye for an eye exists, this will seem to be human nature.

Yet, I hope for a day when we all will realize how truly precious and beautiful every person is. I hope for a day when all people respect themselves and others equally. I hope for a day when everyone realizes that no belief is worth killing for, and all belief, ultimately is only illusion. Until that day comes, I comfort myself with the words of Mathatma Gandhi who was himself killed by an assassin’s bullet.

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it—always.”

Three words came to mind the first time I saw her –weird, strange, and goofy. She was older than the rest of us. She had a minimum of ten, perhaps twenty years on us, but there she stood among college students ranging in age from eighteen to twenty-one. Her hair was auburn, almost more red than brown and she had a floral bandanna wrapped around her head that was tied beneath her hair in back. Her hair was straight and neck length, falling thick over the folds of that bandanna. She was not at all what one might consider an attractive woman. She was overweight with broad hips. She had dimples on either side of her round little mouth. Her eyes were big and green, and she seemed to love rolling them into the middle toward her nose to make a fish face with her cheeks sucked in and her lips protruding. Her laugh was loud, more like an animal call than true laughter. I imagined it to be somewhat like the sound of a monkey calling from the thick vegetation canopy of a jungle.

The first time I saw her in the hallway outside the choir rehearsal room where we were all waiting for the choir director to open the door, I made a mental note to myself, “Stay away from that woman. She’s weird!” However, staying away from her was easier said than done, especially if she took an interest in you, and she took an interest in me.

The questions began, “Are you a music major?”

“No”

“Really? How did you get interested in choir?”

“I thought it would be fun.”

“Why don’t you major in music?”

“Because there is no future in music unless you become a rock star, and not many people can pull that off.”

There is no way of recalling exactly how the conversations went, but I found myself becoming more and more fascinated with her. Over time, we became friends, and I learned her story. She had lived in a converted school bus with her husband for the previous four years, working to support him while he finished his PhD in psychology. The deal was, she would support him through graduate school. Then, when he got his first job after graduate school, he would support her while she went back to finish her degree which she suspended to marry him. He had gotten a job as clinical director for the local community mental health center, and had kept his promise to support her in finishing her degree.

Before she met him, she was in a pre-med program, but decided to switch to a degree in music when she returned to school. She was brilliant and would have made an excellent doctor with the exception that the stress of being a doctor could negatively impact her fragile health. She had been born with some type of autoimmune disease and had been told that she would never live beyond the age of 35. She was almost as old as that when I met her and she seemed to be quite healthy. However, looks can be deceiving.

She had taken steps to counteract the predictions of pessimistic doctors, and had connected early on with the Edgar Cayce Association for Research & Enlightenment (A.R.E.) in Virginia Beach, Virginia where she learned alternative healing techniques such as meditation. She swore the techniques were what kept her alive. One of those techniques was gratitude and the importance of staying focused on the present moment rather than regretting the past or worrying about the future.

While her husband had studied for his PhD, she read every textbook he brought home, and by the time she went back to college, she was almost as familiar with different psychological theories and therapy techniques as he was. While she was working to put him through graduate school she had also connected to, and had been initiated into Wicca. This was a far cry from her Arkansas Baptist upbringing and something she did not confess to me for some time, as I too had grown up in fundamentalist Christianity where any such thing was automatically considered to be of the devil. As a general rule, she told everyone she had converted to Catholicism which she had, in fact, also done. She felt that being Catholic was a better cover for being a witch than some other Christian religions might be.

She found me at a time when I was confused, frustrated, and angry. She took me under her wing, began to mentor me and would lovingly tease me about my “fumes” as my anger was my most evident presentation at the time. I tended to be more sullen than raging, but rage was the alligator that lay beneath the surface of my petulant swamp. She never seemed to take my anger as seriously as I did, although she never discounted my feelings. My furious demeanor was something she could quickly convert into a smile. She found my wounds and gently began to teach me how to heal them. I wish I could say those wounds have been totally healed, but even when a deep wound heals from the inside out, there is still a tender scar, and at 60 years old, I realize that I am not as self-actualized as I would like to be. Anger has been perhaps one of the greatest challenges of my life, but she could somehow take my anger in stride, and guide me to calm me and reason.

Long walks with her on autumn days were my favorite, along with just sitting beside her on a bench or a porch swing with her hand wrapped firmly around my own. She reveled in life. She had learned to do so. Maybe that was something she learned from A.R.E. or maybe it was something she learned from Wicca, an ancient nature religion that focuses on the cycles of time and the beauty of nature. Regardless, she could milk more joy out of the color in a maple leaf than most people can draw from the birth of their firstborn child. She found ways to compensate in life, ways to work around the ticking clock that threatened at any moment to run out if her body failed to fight off some illness that the rest of us take for granted, or if some cancer took hold because of increased susceptibility.

Every day was a challenge to live her life and appreciate it, because of the threat that death might be looming in the next moment. As she aged, she became increasingly ill. She developed Meniere’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the inner ear that can cause nausea and vertigo. If that wasn’t enough to go through, nature decided to add diabetes to the list. She made a joking comment one day, “I was so happy to find out that I have heart disease. That way if all this other crap gets to be too much, I just won’t take my heart pills, and I’ll run around the block a few times.” She never did that. In fact, if anything, she reveled in every precious moment of her life. Despite the fact that she had been told by medical professionals that she would never live past her mid-thirties, by her mid-forties, she has been widowed twice. She never married the third man in her life because that would have meant giving up her widow’s benefits from having been married to a Vietnam Veteran in her second marriage. However, the third man in her life was to spend twelve years with her and see her to the grave even though it meant that he got nothing out of the deal except to have been in her life and to have loved her.

Past college and graduate school, my life moved on. I moved to Nashville, Tennessee where I lived for fourteen years. None the less, she was always my family. She believed with all her heart that she had been my mother in a previous life. In this life, she adopted me as her own, adopted others she mentored, because her body would not allow her to have children. After seven miscarriages, she finally gave up. We were her family, those of us who were fortunate enough to have been adopted by her. Those of us who were pulled from abuse and neglect to finally find the one who could take us on down the road to our destiny. She was that, Mother Mouse, her nickname lovingly assigned because of her passion for collecting mouse memorabilia. She made us believe in ourselves. She made us believe that life is more than a body, more than the petty interactions we have, more than angst and anguish over things that don’t really matter in the first place. She was a teacher of truth to the very last moment of her life.

Over time her autoimmune illness finally got the best of her. At the age of fifty-seven she contracted hemolytic anemia, a precursor to leukemia. Her doctors, with all good intentions, prescribed steroids that caused un-diagnosed diverticulitis to rupture. A trip to the emergency room and a failed diagnosis meant that she had horrible pain and over twenty-four hours before it was diagnosed, fecal matter had been leaking into her peritoneal cavity. The intervention for this was to open her up from the top to bottom of her abdomen, repair the breach in her intestine and keep the incision open under a tent so her peritoneal cavity could have regular lavage with sterile saline.

There she lay under a tent in the hospital room on about the third floor, unable to turn from left to right, only able to lay flat on her back while debris and infection were cleansed from her abdomen. Of course I had come to visit. Of course I was going to be there with her. She was my spiritual mother, my guide and my mentor. Several of us who loved her were in the room on one eventful day. We sat over to the side chatting, and in some ways ignoring her. We were pulled into our own concepts of importance when she simply said, “I just love my magnolia tree.”

In my mind, I went to her house. Mentally, I scanned round and round her house, checking my memories of the back yard and the front, even mentally checking the neighbor’s yards. I saw no magnolia tree. There were many different kinds of trees around her house and in the neighbor’s houses, but none of them were magnolia trees. Finally, I said, “Magnolia tree? What magnolia tree? You don’t have a magnolia tree.”

“Yes I do.” She replied simply, with a matter of fact tone.

“Where?” I questioned.

“Out there.” She said, as she pointed a feeble finger toward the one window in the hospital room.

I got up, went to her bed, leaned down next to her head, and looked in the direction she was pointing. There between the corridor of two buildings standing side by side was a magnolia tree in the distance, and it was in April bloom. Suddenly I realized this was her magnolia tree. In that moment when she could find nothing else to be grateful for, she found that magnolia tree. In that moment when she was facing what was likely to be, and in the end was indeed her immanent death, she found that magnolia tree, one little thing in all the fear, one little thing in all the distraction, one little thing in all the hurt to be grateful for. It was her magnolia tree, and although she could not touch it, although she could not smell the fragrant blooms, she claimed it as her own. She claimed it as one brief moment of gratitude in her experience of hell.

After that visit, I went back home. I had to. I had my own obligations, my own work, my own life requiring me to be present there. I could not stay by her side, I had other things to do.

In a few weeks, my spiritually adopted sister called and said, “If you ever want to see Mother Mouse alive again, you better get down here.”

I packed my bags, threw them in the trunk of my car and headed for Little Rock. I drove along half in a daze. It had only been about a year earlier that I lost my grandmother who was the only other person besides Mother Mouse who had such a profound influence on my life. My life was in upheaval yet again. The time had come for me to step up to the plate, to stop being the student and become the teacher. In just one more day, my life would transition as I had never dreamed it could.

Just after I passed he Missouri border into Arkansas a hawk flew down in front of my car, flew directly toward my car and swooped over the front windshield as though it had been a diagram of wind shear in a computer simulated test of aerodynamics. In my rearview mirror, I saw the hawk continuing to twirl around the road in search of prey or road kill. That moment lodged in my mind and somehow spoke to me that Mother Mouse would be gone soon.

When I walked into the hospital room in Little Rock, there sat her third partner of twelve years who she had never married, her step mother who was a former Nun, and my spiritual sister who had called me to say she was dying and that I better get there. Mother Mouse lay on her side in a dark first floor room. She had been brought back from “exploratory” surgery with the admonishment that there was nothing more they could do. She had practically every medical device for the preservation of life protruding out of her. I walked in, took one look at her, turned to Frank, her life companion and said, “Frank, does she have a living will?”

“Yes,” he replied quietly in his suppressed grief.

“What does it say, Frank?” I insisted.

“It says, no extraordinary measures.” He replied.

“Frank,” I said firmly. “It looks pretty damned extraordinary to me.”

Her step mother stood up and exclaimed, “We can’t kill her!”

To this I responded, “Killing her would be putting a bullet in her head or a knife in her heart. It is not killing her to take her off artificial life support and allow her to die the way God intended.”

Her step mother sat back down. She and Frank whispered to one another, and decided to go out into the hall to talk. In a few minutes they came back with the decision that they would grant permission for medical staff to take Mother Mouse off artificial life support.

It took about two hours for all the legalities to be addressed and for the actual life support to be removed. When at last it was removed, Mother Mouse did not live even five minutes more. She died, at that time, only two days after her fifty eighth birthday.
I have no regrets for insisting that her living will be honored. I have no regrets that she was taken off artificial machines and allowed to go the way of nature. I am eternally grateful for all that she taught me, right down to the last few weeks of her life in which she clung to the one thing she had to cling to, the one thing which might bring her even the faintest hint of joy. Somehow, knowing that the worst was bound to ensue, knowing that her brief life would soon be over, she found one little thing for which she could be grateful.

Those words will forever ring in my ears. “I just love my magnolia tree.” Forever and always a symbol of true gratitude, “I just love my magnolia tree.”