Now, Y'all

Let Freedom Read -- Banned Books Week

2026-10-10T19:03:55.128-07:00

Once upon a time, Banned Books Week was fun. Back in college, I was a member of Sigma Tau Delta, the English honor society. Banned Books Week was a big deal to us. We celebrated the books that had offended somebody somewhere, challenged conventional thinking, or simply dared to tell stories that made people uncomfortable.

There was something wonderfully rebellious about it. We were readers, writers, and lovers of literature. Of course we wanted to read the forbidden books!

Somewhere along the way, the conversation changed. What once seemed an amusing exercise in literary defiance has now become a profoundly serious struggle over who gets to decide what the rest of us are allowed to read.

According to the American Library Association, 4,235 unique book titles were challenged in 2025. This isn't simply a matter of an occasional offended parent questioning a book. Organized censorship campaigns are targeting entire collections.

Whether we agree with the ideas in those books or not, that censorship should concern every single one of us. The freedom to read isn't about agreeing with every book on the shelf. It's about protecting everyone's right to choose what they read.

October 10 is Let Freedom Read Day, the culmination of Banned Books Week 2026.

I still believe in the joy of discovering a book that challenges everything you thought you knew. But these days, I'm not laughing quite as much about banned books. Some freedoms are simply too important to take for granted.

Let Books Be. Protect the Freedom to Read.

Artwork courtesy of the American Library Association

Banned Books Week

This article was composed with the assistance of ChatGPT.

Shootings, Hate-Mongering, and Political Violence

2024-07-14T17:27:00.000-07:00

By Regina Pickett

I'm troubled by the shooting of our former President Trump, and I know that I am not the only one. It’s not just the shooting. The hate-mongering rhetoric that spews from both political sides in this country, and sometimes from outside it, has been troubling for a while. At a certain point, it overflows. We are at that point. People get violent. Others die and suffer injury.

Hate-mongering is like that. We are inundated with hateful memes on social media, politicians who spout anger without regard for facts, and pundits who spout more. You have to dig to find unbiased news reporting on much of anything these days, and that is at least part of the problem.

I firmly believe that most people on both sides really are good and decent people who are trying to do the best they can every day of their lives. But the hate-mongering becomes a serious problem when people who may not be quite as well balanced as they could be fixate on the hateful rhetoric and end up with a version of events that has nothing whatsoever to do with reality, and a whole lot to do with hate. And one more time, we have one more nutcase with a gun.

This is not a one-off. It is unrelenting. Hateful rhetoric has been spewing from both sides since the shooting. The thing is, violence and hate-mongering rhetoric have no place in our politics, and there has been too much of both lately. The January 6^th insurrection was about as wrong on the rhetoric and violence as it could get. The violence toward Nancy Pelosi’s husband was heinous, and the hateful rhetoric that spewed after it was worse. The random and methodical mass shootings are to the point of evil. It’s never-ending, and they have been politicized too. The shooting of our former President Trump was wrong. Despicably wrong. He survived, but everybody in the crowd didn’t.

Did the country come together in prayer and contemplation? No, it did not. People spewed hate and conspiracy theory on top of conspiracy theory, as if that would solve a thing.

Sometimes, just sometimes, folks need to clean their wounds, cool the rhetoric, and figure out what really happened before bumping up the hate-mongering one more notch. Although it is still being debated, and the spinners are spinning for all they are worth, from what we know at this point, the assassination attempt was made by a member of Trump’s own Republican party. I sure do wish I had an answer, but nothing makes good common sense. I am not sure out-of-control hate and violence ever do though. Crazy doesn’t either, and that is what you get when people who are not that well-balanced end up too wrapped up in all the political rhetoric and hate-mongering. The hate-mongering feeds the fringes of both sides, and not in a good way. Be that as it may, there have been times when I had a pretty good idea that is exactly what some of the politicians intended.

This country needs a good old-fashioned coming to Jesus on all this hate-mongering and the violence it perpetuates. It needs it bad. The words of the day used to be love and peace; Now it is hate and violence. People need to quit feeding into that hate, and they need to vote out the politicians who fuel it. They are not doing the country or the people in it a lick of good.

We all know folks who would like things a whole lot better if we only had one or the other political party. However, that is not how this country was founded. It was founded on the idea that the two parties should work together and balance things out without going too far in either direction. Now, instead of working together, a whole lot of the folks in both parties would just as soon do away with the other completely. That is not how democracy works; for the folks who like to argue semantics, it is not how a democratic republic works either. The thing that worries me is that if things don’t start to get better on this one, they are going to get a whole lot worse. Y’all know that’s true.

Change such as this is a one-person, one-vote at a time process. We do not have to feed into that hate-mongering. We don’t have to put up with it either. We really do have the choice to say no to such when we take our turn in the voting booths on election day. I’m not calling out a single politician on this one today. Y’all know your districts and you know who the problems are. Taking it one vote at a time, we can solve this problem in this country.

The AOC Debate and Old School Feminism

2019-08-18T15:10:00.002-07:00

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

By Regina Pickett Garson

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (affectionately known as AOC) has made the Times' List of Most Influential People for 2019. Now, that is something.

I know folks on both sides who both do and do not like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. To support her or not is a big debate. She is young, intelligent and outspoken, and she has been elected to the House of Representatives for New York's 14th Congressional District. Good for her.

I am proud to see young people getting involved in politics and getting elected to office. Being real, I think it would do this whole country some good if we had more young people involved in politics. Mostly though, I think it is good when all kinds of people are represented in our political system: all colors, all religions, all ages, all genders. You get the idea.

Also though, I am an old school feminist. I am not quite as old school as my Grandmother Cash was though. Back in the day, if a woman was on the ballot, Grandmother would vote for her. It did not matter which party that woman was from, if she was on the ballot, my grandmother and other women from all over the country would turn out in droves to vote for her. There were very few women in government back then and they all knew that it really was important that women's voices be heard in the decisions made by our government, most especially the ones that impacted them the most as women. Those are my feminist roots and I surely do understand that it took a whole lot of effort from a whole lot of folks for women to get the rights and representation that we have today.

Even after all this time though, there are still times when I know good and well that certain decisions would have been different if more women had been part of the decision-making process. We are not there yet. And I know it.

Years ago, on my first trip to DC, for a Women's Equality Summit, I talked a while to some of the older feminists who were there. I was offered funding if I would consider running for office. At the time, I knew that I could not cut it, being real, I was in no way ready for such. There was also the minor detail that "I inhaled," and I never did make much of a secret about it. I discussed that with them too; it would have knocked a woman out of the running in an instant back then. Times change though and I am actually pretty glad to see that. I do not do a whole lot of "inhaling" these days either. And I did eventually find my name on the ballot when I ran as a Democratic Delegate for the last presidential election.

But anyway, one of the core values in the fight for equality that I learned from those older feminists was that you can fight for folks to have equality, equal rights and fight hard for change that you know has to be, but no matter how hard that fight and how hard you work toward those changes, the one thing you cannot do is to tell folks what to do with those rights and that equality. Equality is not about control. It is about each and every individual having the same rights, the same right for their voice to be heard and the same opportunity for a place at the table.

I am well aware that the young folks today may not look at things the same way we did. In fact, if they did, I would think that we, as a generation, had failed to teach them to think. Grandmother would have voted for a woman no matter which party she was in. I do not doubt for an instant that she would have voted for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I am also pretty certain that she would have loved her outspoken candor. Grandmother did not have a whole lot of choices though. Today, we have the privilege of women being represented in both parties. That is progress. Real progress.

The young women today might not give a second thought to things that we thought were vitally important. Given the opportunity, they might not do anything that we ever even thought about doing if we had a seat at that table. However, one of the most important things is still that we all get a seat at that table. That we are represented.

That said, I am not saying that I agree with or support every single thing that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has ever done or said. I am not even going to go there. At the end of the day, I am an old school feminist. I am also old enough to have mellowed out in my expectations of youth. I love to see the raging young who question the system and are willing to roll up their sleeves and work toward the changes that they believe in.

AOC has made a lot of waves. She is young, intelligent, outspoken and brash. Being real, I am well aware that she has a lot of things to learn. I will not join in on that debate either. She is new at the job and finding her way. I do not fault her on that one little bit. She got in there, fought the good fight and she got that job. I am not going to trash talk her one little bit. From the best I can tell, she is making an effort to do a good job and to learn the ropes. One thing that she may be dealing with more so than some of the others is that instant fame has a way of doing a number on your head and it could be that she is dealing with some of that too. I am pretty confident that she is going to figure that one out too though.

I am well aware that, if they are lucky, even the youngest and the most outspoken among us eventually grow older. Despite some folks' fear of her hot headedness, I also realize that, at the end of the day, she only has one vote, just like everybody else in the House of Representatives.

With all of the above considerations, it does my heart good to see that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a seat at the table. I think it does the country good too. Before she is done, I think that she is going to do some good. I for one love to see the questioning youth, the ones who stand up and shout and question the system when they see things they do not like. The ones who work for change.

It could be that a lot of folks on both sides really are afraid of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and for what she stands for. It could also be that her raging youth is a reminder to some that their own youth is quickly fading. I do not see that as a threat at all; I see that as a promise that there is hope for the next generation in this country.

Make no mistake, the torch will be passed and her appearance on the scene is a good indication that the next generation is getting ready. They are moving forward to take their place at the table, to take their turn at working toward the things that they think are important for this country. We from the boomer generation are starting to slow down a little and I for one am looking forward to seeing what she and her generation can do.

That is my two cents on the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez debate.

Also see: Time 100 Most Influential People for 2019 for the rest of the folks who made the list.

Labor Day and the Folks Where I Come From

2018-09-03T11:27:00.000-07:00

By Regina Garson

"Remember the workers and thank the unions."

Labor Day is one of those days that I never really thought much about. But Labor Day is about the working folks and their rights in this country. It could be that Pea Ridge, where I grew up, was more important in that than I will ever know. I picked up tidbits from my granddaddy, "Bill Pickett," when I was a kid but kids do not really have the understanding to comprehend such until they are a whole lot older.

Pa Bill used to tell me about work in the coal mines. Those were some hard times and after working to the bone, poor as dirt the whole time, trying to feed his family, he was disabled with Black Lung. Now, after all those years, Black Lung is showing up again among the coal miners. I just heard that the other day. That is not a good thing.

The stories Pa Bill told me about life and work in the coal mines was what got me started writing in the first place. Before it was done, it had me thinking pretty hard about politics too.

Pa Bill was involved with the United Mine Workers of America and so were a lot of his family and friends in the Pea Ridge area. Sam Littlefield was among them. He was an important union leader and he is buried right there in Macedonia Cemetery. President of the United Mine Workers District 20 in Alabama, Sam Littlefield was shot and killed under very dubious, "supposedly random," circumstances in a hotel burglary, in Washington DC.

Although I could see that happening with some of the DC hotels that I have been in, he was up there for some important meetings to discuss some of the workplace issues that the coal miners were facing. A lot of the powers that be were not wonderfully happy that the coal miners were standing up for better conditions in the mines and their rights as workers. The circumstances of Sam Littlefield's death were never properly resolved in much of anybody's eyes, except maybe those of the folks who represented the coal mine owners and operators who also had an interest in those meetings. They were apparently quite happy that it was "declared" a random burglary.

Knowing the things that Pa Bill told me and where I came from, what our people went through, and then Sam Littlefield giving his very life working to make things better for the coal miners while others flat out died or worked until they were completely disabled and could not work another day in those mines, I have a real hard time when folks do not understand that unions and the rights of working folks are important. Blood was shed and lives lost when folks started trying to improve the conditions for the workers in this country. They were working to the bone and still starving.

It was not just on Pea Ridge though, it was all over the country. Those old union members did a lot of good toward improving the rights of the workers in this country and some of the ones from Pea Ridge were right there leading the fight. Give them a thought and a little bit of thanks as you fire up the grill. Remember the sacrifices of the good hard working folks who came before us. And that's my two cents on Labor Day.

Image Credit: Pixabay

Abortion Politics in Alabama

2017-12-10T09:58:00.000-08:00

Logic, rhyme and reason have all left the state when it comes to abortion in Alabama. And I don't mean abortion per se; I mean "abortion politics." Make no mistake: None of this is honestly about abortion and it surely isn't about seeing to the rights and well-being of newborns. Both our laws and our record on such things as childhood poverty, infant mortality, healthcare and education all prove that one.

People in these parts get so riled up about abortions, they can't see straight. Some politicians, we are going to call them "abortion politicians," most notably the ones who don't have a logical platform to stand on, can't tell you one good thing they are going to work toward, and have a past that would make Mae West blush, routinely use the abortion issue to get people riled up against opponents to whom they can't hold a candle and don't have a chance beating this side of Hades in a real debate on real issues.

Not a platform to stand on? No problem. Yell, "Abortion!" Abysmal record? No problem. Yell, "Abortion!" Questionable behavior? Not a problem. Yell, "Abortion!" Really seriously questionable and abysmally immoral behavior? Yell, "Abortion! Abortion! Abortion!"

The special Alabama Senate race has taken the whole thing with abortion politics to entirely new levels. These abortion politicians have been keeping that abortion ball rolling, Kayla Moore, Roy Moore's wife, coined a brand new abortion term, "full-term abortion," just for her husband's campaign against Doug Jones. Not that it had any basis in reality, but it was surely a good play. It got folks riled up real good and they are still talking about those full-term abortions, which still don't have any basis in reality.

Not to be outdone, a copy and paste post flooding social media began by stating, "Doug Jones is not just pro abortion ... he is pro-late term abortion .... up until the time that the baby is outside the womb."

Let's take a minute here. If the baby is outside the womb, it has already been born. There goes that logic and reason again. In addition to federal standards, set by the Supreme Court, the different states also have guidelines. Ours is Alabama Code Title 26. Infants and Incompetents § 26-22-1

I am not a lawyer, but from my understanding of that code, it is illegal to perform an abortion in Alabama if the fetus is to the point of viability. Different states set that point somewhere between 20 and 24 weeks. One point is clear though and that is that if the fetus is able to survive outside the womb, it is an illegal abortion.

Doug Jones said that he believed in following the law when it comes to abortion and he was clear on that. This thing about full-term and outside the womb abortions and twisting his words in a knot is at its very best a pile of abortion politician malarkey.

The Real Opponent

So what is going on here? In the current special election in Alabama, we have Roy Moore and Doug Jones running for the U.S. Senate seat that was left vacant when Jeff Sessions accepted the position as Attorney General under President Trump.

Roy Moore is mostly famous for not quite believing in equality for all. Since this discussion is abortion politics, I am not going to go into all that here. A nutshell is that he has made national news repeatedly because he did not think that some group was entitled to equal rights under our laws. That includes discriminating against folks who have religions that are different from his, not believing that women deserve the same opportunities, not believing that those in the gay community deserve the same opportunities, including same-sex marriage, serving in the military, and the list goes on to include matters of racial equality.

Regarding all of these things, this has absolutely nothing to do with whether I might agree with any single person's choice of a lifestyle. However, one thing that I believe very strongly in is that we should all be treated equally under the law. That is a core American value and that one little detail is where I, along with a whole lot of folks seriously do not agree with Roy Moore.

If you are going to take a job in which you swear to uphold the Constitution and equality for all, then you need to be upholding the Constitution and supporting equality for all. If for some reason or other, you don't believe in equality for all, then you need to be getting another job, which is pretty much why he lost the jobs that he had in the past that related to upholding the law with equality for all.

The other thing that is very curious about all this is that, as a judge, for reasons that are perhaps now obvious, Moore has a very soft record on prison sentences for sex crimes. In the meantime, he was sending people to prison for refusing to obey whatever given law while he was breaking his own set of laws regarding equality. So what do you when questioned on such a matter as your belief in equality and upholding the laws that you have sworn to protect? Much less why you are breaking them. You yell, "Abortion!"

As to Doug Jones, the best I can tell, he never has made a whole lot of noise. He is not a grandstanding kind of person. He is a lawyer and served as a federal prosecutor, most famous for bringing the Klansmen to justice who were responsible for bombing a church and killing four little girls back in 1964. I have never heard a single thing that would come close to a smear on his character. Nothing. Not one iota. Just a smart hardworking man who not only believes in but also will work for equality for everybody. Coincidentally, if you hurt little girls, he is going to put you in jail. And he has spent his career doing just that.

So what is Moore to do when he is running against Jones, his integrity is questionable and his ability to uphold the law has been shown many times over to not be exactly where it should be? He yells, "Abortion!"

This happens repeatedly in Alabama. At the very least, it changes the subject, which is very often the only reason it was brought up in the first place. Things get mighty uncomfortable when you throw in the part about Moore being a mall stalking pervert that hit on teenage girls. I don't blame him for wanting to change the conversation.

And the thing is, it works. At the mention of abortion, people forget all about those very serious and important issues that were once part of the discussion.

Real Issues

Now, I am not saying that abortion is not a real issue. I am just saying that it is to the point that abortion politics are more an issue in Alabama than abortion ever was.

A recent headline, "Moore using Abortion to Shame Conservatives into Turning out to Vote for Him," nails it. That is exactly what he is doing and what so many politicians have done before him. If there is not a logical reason why anybody in his or her right mind would vote for you, play the abortion card. And these folks have it down to an art.

I am not buying any of that. Anybody with half a lick of sense knows that the best way to do something about the number of abortions is to nip it in the bud, before there is ever a problem. Make damn certain that every single person who is old enough to even halfway consider making whoopee has access to good, dependable and affordable birth control and that they know how to use it.

Do Something Real about the Abortion Rate

With today's wealth, technology and infrastructure, we have a real opportunity to reduce the number of abortions, not just in Alabama, but throughout the entire world. However, every time real progress is made on that, somebody starts lamenting that some poor woman somewhere might be making whoopee on somebody else's dime.

Folks get all riled up at the very thought that a poor person who has no means to afford birth control might engage in sexual intercourse, and they cut the funding and pull the access to the birth control, which increases the number of abortions all over again. You can't have it both ways. Either you do something about the abortion rate or you don't. None of this, but, but, but… poor women ought to be buying their own birth control. I am not even going to argue that they should be buying their own birth control, of course they should.

Put Up or Shut Up

What I am saying is that if folks honestly wanted to do something about abortion, they would. Cut the highfaluting hoity-toity moralizing. You either do something real to cut down on the number of abortions by putting birth control where it is honestly needed or you shut your mouth. It is way past time to either "put up or shut up" when it comes to abortion.

I don't see that happening any time soon though. How could these abortion politicians convince folks to vote for them when the abortion card is the only thing they have going for them? And I do mean the only thing. The most ridiculous thing of all is that it works and now we have a mall creeper pervert arguing the abortion card. Everybody in town knew that he was a mall creeper pervert. I used to work at a mall. No. Just no. I sure know better than that malarkey.

That's my two cents. What's yours?

Gone Political

2017-12-04T14:49:00.000-08:00

The blog here, formerly named Regina Garson’s Blog has gone political and renamed to accommodate My Two Cents (commentary on politics, social issues and life). My original blog is not gone though. It has been updated,upgraded, expanded and moved to my ReginaGarson.com domain site, which used to be my author page and writing portfolio. It’s all still there. It has merely been rearranged and this Blogger Blog site will now be the home to My TwoCents, political and other commentary.

In the meantime, I’ve definitely been busy.

Connect with Me!

I have a brand new writing group on Facebook, Writing in the Digital Age. Writers at every level are welcome.

What used to be my author fan page on Facebook is now a hub for networking and talking shop for writers, editors, and social media influencers. Drop by to chew the fat if you take a notion.

My Y’all Facebook page focuses on Southern life and culture. It’s just to kickback and have a little fun, share a laugh.

Twitter is rocking and there is a little bit of everything there. I do follow back. My handle is @ReginaGarson

Although I lagged behind some, I am now on Instagram as well. Be sure to follow me there, my handle is reginagarson.

Like just about everybody else who loves to cook, I'm pretty active on Pinterest too these days. Feel free to check out by boards. In addition to recipes, my various musical involvements tend to pop up there. ReginaGarson on Pinterest.

That is it for now.

Also Visit:

Don’t forget to check out my new blog site: Regina Garson’s Blog.

Short of a Political Resume

2017-03-14T20:33:00.000-07:00

By Regina Garson
Short of a resume, this is a brief overview of my political related experience. Why I suddenly feel the need, I don't know. But I do.

My first experience going deeper into politics was after I had finished my last degree (BS Behavioral Science and BA English, double major), at Athens State College, now University (my first degree was in Advertising/Communications from the University of Alabama).

Anyway, early on, I had the opportunity to do some writing for one of the major minority publishing companies. I actually did some writing for a couple of them. My Behavioral Science curriculum was a split between sociology and psychology, so it was right in line with what I had been studying in school. With the way things were in the area where I grew up, which was just south of Birmingham, Alabama, during the Civil Rights Movement, I was excited to be able to do some work covering race issues. It was at this point that I started to go deeper on both social issues and politics and I also started to learn how the media worked on the coverage of the various social and political issues as well.

One of my regular assignments was to pull the news from the wire service. We had a set number of stories that I would pull every day on a given topic. My area was women's issues (employment issues, pay, benefits, sexual harassment, related political issues, etc.). So I'd go through and see what the news service had on that topic and pull the ones that I felt were the most important for the site.

One of the first things that I learned was that no matter how important a story might be, we could only run so many stories a day and sometimes things that I really did think were important would not be run because they didn't precisely fit what I was supposed to be pulling or there were no more news slots that day. So you always had to be thinking about which was the most important story to cover. I learned real quick that there is a whole lot more going on than people get in their daily news. That is true even when they try hard to keep up. There is more than one reason for that though, which I will not go into at this point.

Also, on both the writing and as a managing type editor, I covered various worker related political issues, a lot of Department of Labor related, race issues, women and minority equality issues. I had the Asian American beat for a while, which has its own group of race issues entirely. Race issues aren't always what immediately comes to people's mind. We did some major work on WWII related race issues as well, things like the Japanese Internment and the Nanjing Massacre.

Oh the things you learn along the way, how about that camp they had in Tennessee, just in case they needed to exchange a few Jews for US POWs. Whatever work you do, you learn a thing or two that you never would have known if you hadn't been doing that work. A lot of mine had to do with politics and social issues. I went through stacks of books and articles on the subject and, of all things, ended up auditing a course on Chinese history for background before I was finished with one group of assignments. Another time, I audited a course in Southern Sociology for some stuff I was writing. That is in addition to working toward my degrees and whatever other research I had to do to write a story or figure out what needed to be written, since I also assigned out stories.

During all that, I was mostly a pretty conservative Republican, but after a certain amount of time spent working with and covering all this stuff, I slowly migrated to the other side. Kind of like a know too much to go back kind of thing. I spent too much time way too deep in those issues. I am surely not the first person who has ever changed their mind on a political party.

Along the way, I took a trip to lobby in Washington on women's equality and workplace issues, at the Women's Equality Summit. I made it to a couple of those famous DC parties and I even got to hear Hillary Clinton talk, now that was something. I am not certain if I was more amazed at her or being in a a situation to see how all that security comes together for somebody at that level. Anyway, it was all an experience to start to get my toes wet on how at least a few things work in DC. I surely do love that town, any chance to go back and I have always been ready for more.

My main feminist area of interest had to do with childcare issues, especially regarding the hard time young working women and families have getting by with the cost of childcare. A lot of countries actually do a whole lot better than we do in the US on that one and young families especially do a whole lot better financially as a result. For a while, that was one of my areas of major political effort and coverage. I always felt like changes in that area would make a lot of difference in a lot of people's lives, but it has never been a trendy issue. Preaching about issues that aren't trendy and nobody wants to hear about no matter how much good some changes would do is something else. Oh well. Ivanka Trump is interested in that issue, hopefully she can get somewhere on it.

Although I have done other along the way, my next major political focused writing was with Forward Progressives, mostly covering national politics (see Regina Garson at Forward Progressives). Although I have slacked off on the writing credits somewhat lately, I pulled a lot of my daily commentary to Facebook instead. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I am not so sure. I still have my own blog though, and I have been transitioning this one into more of a political focus.

In the interest of consolidating, day jobs and all that, I had meanwhile pulled a lot of my daily commentary to my personal Facebook page. That might not have been such a good idea either, since I really did try to welcome and encourage bipartisan discussion. The discussions can get quite lively at times, you are welcome to follow me there if you are so inclined. It's a mixture of politics and personal and a lot of people follow me there for the politics.

I am also politically active on Twitter. https://twitter.com/ReginaGarson

In addition to the above, I have also done a fair amount of writing on issues relating to the war on drugs and marijuana prohibition. some amount educating folks on the war on drugs in general as well. My off line efforts in this area included an internship/practicum at Bradford Parkside Outpatient Addictions program. I have done just a little speaking out on marijuana prohibition and the drug war related issues as well. Back in the day, I also took training and certified as a paraprofessional counselor, volunteered for a while with our local crisis services. That was in addition to the online resources that I developed and maintained for years. So I have various perspectives on the related issues, politically, as a writer/publisher, in the community and in my daily life.

After a tech writing gig in support of the NASA Ares program, my interest in space and space development continued to increase and I have done a pretty fair amount covering politically focused space issues as well. I was involved with Huntsville Space Professionals for a while and made it to DC for some space related efforts as well.

In the last few years, I decided to take my political involvements beyond writing and have been involved in area political efforts. If there is a town hall, forum or other political meeting nearby and I can make it, I am generally there.

Well aware that as hard as you try, you can't learn everything you need to know about life from books or even the Internet, I also felt the need for some face-to-face training. In the last couple of years, I have attended political training in Montgomery, Alabama, a couple different political training sessions at the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB), and I took some local political training in Huntsville as well.

In the meantime, I also wanted to learn more on how things worked from the perspective of a campaign, so when the opportunity presented itself, I ran for a position as a district DNC delegate this last year. It was my first political run and I didn't win but I got out there, got my feet wet and learned a lot of stuff about how campaigns work from the inside, which included more training. At the end, I didn't do that poorly, and did well in my category. So it's all good.

At this phase of my life, I feel confident enough in my combined politically related work experience, education and life to get out there and get more involved. I also try to read and keep up with what is going on in the news, with the media with the various as well.

Anyway, that is a quick overview of some of my political and social issue related experience. It seems that women continually confront the issue of when is it time to blow your own horn, at what point have you turned into a narcissist braggart, and at what point do you say, hey folks, I have significant related experience, this is what I have been doing for the last ever how many years and I am not into being minimized because I have reached a certain age, I am a woman, or whatever. It could be that some of all of that is involved.

It could also be that it was a mistake taking so much of my commentary to Facebook. You never quit learning though, or hopefully you don't, and I have been very active on social media and a lot of politics does indeed happen on social media, so I'll chalk that up to lessons learned because I also know that the minute you blink you eyes on some of this stuff, you have missed the boat. I sure don't pretend to know it all, but the analyses I do have are a combination of the background of my experience, both education and work, and just being out there and involved. I also try to keep myself informed on an everyday basis and I learn new stuff all the time through my editorial work as well. I'm done.

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Personal Musings On Trump's Inauguration

2017-01-20T19:18:00.000-08:00

About the time that I went from being a Democrat to a Republican, one of my work tasks was to go through the news feeds of one of the major news services and pull a certain number of articles on a given topic, to be published every day. In addition to the articles that the publisher had us write in-house, this designated number of national stories was included as the day's news.

One thing that occurred to me, more like perplexed me, was that no matter how much you thought that certain things should or should not be covered, you were limited by the number of things you could publish and your topic area. Therefore, there was always a certain amount of stuff that you very much knew about and that in your soul, you knew really should be out there and that people really did need to know about but that never made the news.

That was just with the national news stories; in addition to that, on the various beats and such, any one writer can also only write so much and that too is governed by the slant of the publication for which you are writing or reporting. The things that I learned in the process had a significant influence on the change in my political leaning. Everything related also has to do with why I went independent on my own blog. Between work and other obligations, a certain amount just has to settle for Facebook. So follow me there if you feel like you are missing something with me.

Even though I don't produce nearly as much of my own stuff in the process of paying bills and such, it was what I needed to do. For all the years that I spent working with, writing, editing, pulling and publishing the various, along the way, I read stacks of books, and articles to educate myself in the related social and political areas that I was covering.

It absolutely amazes me that folks who have also spent ever how many years gaining experience in whatever their field somehow assume that a person who spends the same amount of time working with and studying the various social and political issues somehow crawled out from under a cabbage leaf with a poke bag full of smoke and that is how I/we whoever came to our political ideas.

Sorry folks, but I came to my political perspective from twenty some odd random years of experience, writing, editing, studying and covering the various as well as involvements in various doings on the local and state level.

I do understand that my side lost the election, but when you have as much experience in whatever field and your opinions are considered nothing more than hot air, there are not a whole lot of words for that. Most especially if people somehow expect that they should be respected for their own level of expertise in whatever field. After this recent, I don't have a clue why anyone would expect such at all, at least not from the likes of me.

People would understand what I was saying if I suggested that they go to a mechanic who decided to be a mechanic yesterday instead of twenty years ago. They would think that I was off my ever-loving rocker. Give the gal a chance. How about a plumber? Or how about a doctor? Why would you even consider a doctor's experience being of any kind of importance at all?

I feel that really heavy on a personal level, but it could be that is what was going on in this election as well. It's going to be an interesting four years and make no mistake I have enough experience in the field to know that without any kind of doubt whatsoever. Y'all have a good day and buckle up. We're all going to need our seat belts on this one.

Political Blogging: A Transition

2016-05-12T12:56:00.000-07:00

Life is change, sometimes what we expect, and sometimes not so much. Y'all know, a while back, I was gleefully, or more like painstakingly transitioning this blog, and other as well, to a blog at my own domain - ReginaGarson.com/blog. Thinking, it would all be one blog. And I did that - sort of.

At the time, it didn't quite click why it wouldn't necessarily be such a great idea to write about road-trips, poems and politics all on the same blog.

Meanwhile, this little blog is still sitting here, thank all you kind readers who kept coming back and kept reading, despite the fact that I was somewhere over there, on Regina Garson's "new" Blog.

It's still there, but "lessons learned," I'm moving the politics back over here, which best I can figure is mostly why folks are still coming back to this one. However, if it's the other stuff you prefer, not the political at all, or at least not going forward, click here for Southern style road-trips, a little bit of poetry, my writer's take on writing and life.

In the meantime, if you missed anything political, my more recent posts, in reverse chronological order, include:

My Stump Speech
Legislative Forum: Marijuana Prohibition, Medical Marijuana and Mass Incarceration
Let's Run: My first campaign and first time on the ballot anywhere. I ran as an "uncommitted" Delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

On The Road – Solo And 60

2015-06-02T14:58:00.000-07:00

Change – It could be that “change” is the definition of life. Whether you like it or not and whether you are ready or not, change is going to happen. I'll be 60 in a couple weeks. I was the one who was never going to retire. I was going to work until I died, and I had my life planned out to the minute.

One thing I never considered though was that mortality might get in the way and make some changes that I didn’t expect. Things that were not on my list.

It’s not like I took my health for granted. I have worked out all my life, starting in high school. I learned Tai Chi instead of getting surgery when I first had back problems, and I kept at it. I learned about nutrition and I ate right. Started that in high school too.

I was as healthy as a so called horse, and then I choked on a handful of junk food. Talk about karma or poetic justice – or something. I didn’t just choke. I spent upwards of a month in the hospital, living on tubes, and then I went back. A couple times. Change. Unintended. Unexpected. And a doozey. On a brighter note, thinking positive and all that, the doc said if I hadn't been in such good shape, I would not have survived. There is something to be said for survival. Change too, I suppose.

The thing is, in a so called blink of the eye, I went from right near the best shape of my life, to the slow doddering woman that takes way too much time at the front of the grocery store line. Just like that. In one instant.

This was not a slow progressive aging process. This was a blink of an eye and everything changes process. To say I was not prepared for the change would be the understatement of the millennium.

I’m not dead yet though and I’m still at it, huffing and puffing and tweaking those workouts one more time. Dreams and ambitions, I got plenty. Always did, but sometimes they need some rearranging along the way. Change and all that. You’d think I was the only one who had been in such a boat.

Despite the fact that I have no diseases, and I am still as healthy as a proverbial horse, I am a mangled mess. Kind of like a healthy, hobbling, rickety, but still running jalopy. Can’t get far at a whack, and my work outs these days are more a candidate for a meme gone awry than a fitness show. But as the saying goes: “I’m in really good shape for the shape that I’m in.”

I’m still working too, but to say it has been a challenge would be another great big understatement. The various surgeries and repercussions from the internal injuries left my digestive system a dubious mess, not to be discussed in polite company. The inordinate length of time I spent on an inordinate number of IVs left me without the full functionality of either hand. That cut my typing speed considerably, actually I had to learn to type all over again. I’m still pecking though. And my hands are a lot better than they were, but still nowhere close to as good as they used to be. See above about the grocery store line and trying to open your wallet when you are suddenly down to three fingers on each hand, still trying to figure how to do things all over again, with your current state of ability, and you got a line of people standing “patiently” behind you.

Could be all that sounds like too much information, but I, like many others, live by what they call the spoon theory. I have to pace myself, what can I do and what is realistic. How long is it really going to take?

If we are going to be blogging about going on the road in our elder years, which I’ll get to in a minute, every one of us in that boat has got something we got to deal with. If I go three days without eating right, I feel it. And if you are going on the road and you are not in the best of shape, unless you want the whole thing to turn into a nightmare, spend your time in the hotel room, or your tent, or your camper, if not the nearest ER, you are going to have to be prudent, and as the saying goes – act your age – at least on the health front.

Despite it all, I have mostly worked most of the time. Except maybe the five months that I was completely bedridden. I am not going to be quitting any time soon, but if I had any sense, I’d have put up a help wanted ad for a husband. A roommate. Or something. Could be I should have done that before I got to the shape that I was or am in now.

Actually, though, I am pretty happily single, so there is that.

I sure got side tracked.

But anyway, somewhere in the middle of all this, I get the idea, as many budding senior citizens have before me, that what I really need to do is to get some kind of RV, a camper of some sort and take to the road. Never mind the fact that I am flat broke, count it a blessing that I can now make it successfully through a grocery store line, and have to plan a year in advance to make it three hours away to visit family. I can get a fixer upper camper and fix it up. And wherever I park, I can sit a spell and write, do my work while I check out the scenery. And while I am at it, write about the world from the perspective of barely making it but still on this side of the daisies, a la the fantasies of a Lonely Planet existence, a world to see, not as young as I used to be and all that. It’s not just that. But it sure would be fun.

Convict Laborers around 1915, Florida.

I write and edit too, but back when I first decided that writing was what I wanted to do, it was things my granddaddy (William Joseph "Bill" Pickett) told me about the coal mines and convict labor that really touched my soul. Whatever else I did, I wanted to write about the things that I thought were important, about real people and the real story of things, real life stories that tend to get left out along the way. I always felt that way. And I have always tried to include what I could to inform people in my work as well. Stories and the side of things that needed telling.

There was this one poet in particular that I met and loved her work. She really influenced me in the way she thought and did things with her writing. Her name was Lucille Clifton. Although she was an activist type, she had her own style. She loved to travel and she’d visit all these plantations, which are a trendy tourist destination all over the South. None of that reminiscing about bygone Southern glory for her, she was African American, and she would go on these tours and ask about the slaves who built the place and did the work, and why weren’t they mentioned on the tour.

Saturn SA-5 launch, January 29, 1964.
NASA Photo.

It was always about the grand life of the plantation owners, not about the slaves and what they went through to build and keep the place going. Anyway, Lucille Clifton kept pushing at the plantation tours, until folks started including both sides of the story. And actually, that was progress. I always admired Lucille Clifton, her poetry was awesome. She inspired me and there is no doubt about that. I wouldn’t mind revisiting some old places too, getting down to the other side of some of those old stories.

There is always another side of the story to what you get on the tours. Like in Huntsville, with Von Braun and the space program. Everybody loves the Space Museum, at the US Space and Rocket Center. I’m a space geek for sure. But talk about slave drivers, what in the world does Von Braun have to do with slavery? Wasn’t he German? A Nazi at that. The way they talk about those old plantation owners, you’d think they were the only ones, or hopefully, at the very least, the last slave drivers in the South. Does Peenemünde ring any kind of bell? We’ll be back to that another day. I still love all things space, but reality is reality.

What about the old mills?

Those old mill buildings have intrigued me since I first moved to Huntsville. There are several in the area. Lowe Mill, also in Huntsville, is now one of the most trendy arts centers in the South, but another side of the mill history was that way back in the day, a photographer traveled through the area and took pictures of the kids working the machines. To say those pictures caused an uproar was an understatement. Those pictures were instrumental in drawing attention to/and ultimately the push toward changing the child labor laws in this whole country. Those were some pictures. Huntsville was actually pretty important in the history of children’s rights and the child labor laws in this country. Bet you didn’t know that about “Rocket City.”

Closing hour, Saturday noon, at Dallas Mill. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.
Department of Commerce and Labor. Children's Bureau. (1912 - 1913)

In the meantime, I have a tent, and I have been checking out options. Pop-ups, campers, RVs, etc., the pros and cons of them all from the perspective of a 60 something single solo, somewhat rickety, female traveler with Lonely Planet fantasies and for whom a three hour journey is a monumental undertaking. But more on all that later, including each and every option you look for when you get the itch to hit the road and you are a single woman of a certain age in fair to dubious condition.

People are always writing about how to travel with the kiddos. From the beginning of time, college students have been taking to the road, but what about the oldsters? I know a few who have. But to say they have their own set of travel issues is another one of those understatements. And it’s not like I haven’t hit the road on my own before, but that was before the accident and although I am in a whole lot better shape than I was (when I was on various and sundry life support systems), I am not in anywhere close to the same shape I was in before that fateful handful of junk food.

So there’s that.

We will see where it all leads. I had many good years of good physical ability. I learned some things along the way, about the outdoors and such. At various times, I led Cub Scout and Girl Scout groups both. Things are most definitely different now. But I am not the only one on this planet to reach a certain age and realize that. The difference, I mean change. Even if we do the best we can with our health and our workouts, eat right, and really think we got it right, we are all subject to the whelms of nature and the reality of our own mortality. That doesn’t mean that life stops, or that we can’t get out there and enjoy it. It does mean that we might have to do a little more thinking and planning, but we’ll touch on that along the way too. There was a time not too very long ago that I never honestly thought I’d ever hit the road again to go anywhere, much less see 60, and now, as they say, my feet are itching.

I am not actually there yet, my birthday is June 12. Still got a few days to go. It’s going to take some doing to get on the road again too. You’d think I’d be lamenting the passage of years. Not me. It is a miracle on top of miracles that I am still walking this earth. If you want to talk about counting blessings, I got plenty to count.

Now let’s see what we can get into next.

The Call!

2015-05-22T17:36:00.000-07:00

The last few years have been a time of intense change for me. Not exactly what I expected in the direction of my carefully plotted life. Nowhere close. A random choking incident and a month and counting of too many weeks that started to turn into months back and forth from the hospital, bedridden, living on various and sundry tubes, changed my world and everything in it. I just recently saw the third anniversary of the accident. In the last few years, a whole lot of days that turned into months, I did not honestly expect to see another day, much less the three year anniversary from the accident. It sure leaves one with a lot to think about. Reevaluating. Counting blessings. Thinking about the detours, the paths of my life.

One thing that hasn’t changed is that I still publish MagicStream. I started it in 1994–95, not sure of the exact start date, but at any rate, it’s been online right at twenty years now. It could be it is time for a celebration for that too, or something.

When I first started Magic Stream, I am not sure I knew exactly what it was supposed to be. The Internet was just starting to move into the area of what would come to be known as the World Wide Web, home pages were new back then. The way it was presented to me, the Internet was going to be a place where everyday people could publish and even compete with the big publishing companies. Looking at it from that perspective, I did a whole lot of thinking; what would I publish if I could publish anything I wanted.

Back then, to get anything published, get started as a writer, you sent submission after blind submission. Likely as not, you also collected stacks of rejection slips. Some writers seem to gloat on how many rejection slips they have collected over the years, such as that never quite appealed to me though. I wanted to publish, not just “be” a writer, I wanted to be involved in whatever and any way I could in the publishing and media industry.

One thing that stuck in my mind. At that point, back then, when I first learned of what would soon be the World Wide Web, it maybe seems insignificant now, but back then it was a very big deal and that was the fact that information wasn’t so easily available like it is today. There is a very real reason this age we live in is called the information age.

Anyway, somewhere in that time, I had been to the doc and given a diagnosis, which we all do sooner or later. That was definitely my turn, long story short, PTSD, that would be post traumatic stress disorder, and a doozey of a case, probably an understatement on the diagnosis, but that’s enough on how crazy I am. The thing is, it is treatable, not to be confused with 100% curable, but I did get help. And if I have a problem, I try to stay on top of things. Really upsets me to realize all these homeless veterans suffering from PTSD, when it really is treatable. Getting the treatment you need is another story though. Coming back from war without the support and treatment they need is another story still. Get me going on that.

Anyway, at the time, I was overwhelmed with trying to find out what was going on with me. I’d go to the doc, okay, I’d go to the shrink, and he’d go yada yada, and the next shrink would go yada yada, “Leave it to us. Don’t worry your pretty little head.” And I’d head off to the library trying to find information on what I was dealing with. If you have ever taken a nose dive, and a detour to Flashback City, tried to find your way back out and you know exactly what I mean. Somebody saying, “Trust me, don’t worry your pretty little head,” doesn’t cut it. By the way, “never trust anybody who says trust me.” You can quote me on that.

Long story short, I’d spend hours at the library and never seemed to get very far. Part of the problem really was most likely the state of mind that I was in while I was looking for the information, which wasn’t wonderful. Don’t ask me how I made it through it all, including finding my way back out of Flashback City, but I did.

With those considerations, given the notion that I could publish anything I wanted, I thought about that time of frustration in finding information on mental health issues. And that was really only part of what I was dealing with at the time. We all have to deal with something though. Mine just happened to be the PTSD. That is a reality of life. And life does go on, but what could I do to make things better in the meantime. Make no mistake, for just about every diagnosis you can get, there is something you can do on the self-help level as well. Maybe not a cure, but there is always some little something that you can do to make yourself more comfortable, make things better and more bearable along the way.

Given the possibilities of the World Wide Web, I wanted to do something along the lines of self-help information resources, and making it easier to find everyday medical information, focus on mental health information. At the time, I did not have a clue what I was dealing with or where to start. I remembered vividly my own lapse into PTSD, the journeys through Flashback City. The hours spent in the library, never seeming to get much of anywhere. Wanting more information about what was going on with me and not being able to find it. Thinking hard about that time, when I realized the implications of what was coming with the World Wide Web, I decided that what I would like to do was publish a self-help and wellness information resource that focused mostly on mental health issues, helping people to connect and find the related information they needed, also the physical, and the spiritual, because in some kind of way, it is all related. Mind – body – spirit. You really do need it all.

That was the seed of Magic Stream. Other interests at the time, I had really wanted to get certified in bibliotherapy, which is the use of writing and literature for healing, started into it, but the certification is not recognized in Alabama and an unrecognized therapy certification is not worth much of a dime if you got bills to pay. So much for that, somewhere along the way though, I had written a fairy tale, by the name of “Magic Stream”; it is kind of gory when it comes to fairy tales, definitely not of the Disney sort, but the concept was people reaching out to each other for healing. None of us can honestly go it alone. So all that combined together was the start of Magic Stream.

This got long for a short little blog post about a calling. Over the years, I had a lot of ideas that came and went with the changing times of the Internet. Magic Stream was among the earliest, probably first dozen or so, self-help and wellness sites on the Internet. And being as it is still up, it is now one of the oldest continuously published, still up and running, self-help sites on the Internet. Through thick and thin, good times and bad, I’ve managed to keep it online.

There were times when I honestly thought about shutting it down, but at the end of the day, how do you build a mission and close the doors while people are standing there. When all was said and done, it really is a mission, always has been, and a mission to which I have devoted much of my life. And how do you build a mission, and close the doors while people are still coming there for help.

In my mind, and the way I’ve tried to live my life, it’s like crossing a bridge, it was a rough journey, the paths of my life, but if you look back and there is somebody behind you that all they need is a steady hand to get across, how can you not take one little moment to reach back. I always felt like in some kind of way, we should all do some little part to give back to the community as we are able. Magic Stream was my giving back. And so it continued. It was never anything grand, never the highest traffic site on the net, just a place where people went for mostly mental health and wellness information, to find what they needed to get on with their life. Sometimes teachers and counselors go there for information as well.

I never did make a lot of noise about it. There is something about mental health issues, people really aren’t into a lot of noise on that. We all have our little red wagon as they say, but blasting it all on a loud speaker is another matter. And I had no inclination toward being a professional patient. And we all know some of those. But I kept Magic Stream going, published it, maintained the site, and wrote the code. I have published a whole lot of really awesome people along the way, no way was it ever a one person project, never has been. I am really humbled at the caliber of people who have shared their writing, their own journey, and their stories on Magic Stream.

I’ve thought much at different times about where to go with it, and like others who work for a living, have often found myself severely limited in what I could realistically get done with it, especially after the accident. Talk about slow. Nonetheless, sometimes absolutely despite myself, Magic Stream is still there.

Funny thing is. I don’t know how as I got on this, what a rambling circle. I don’t generally talk a lot about Magic Stream, even to people I am around a lot. Some people have worked with me for years and never heard me say a thing about it, other than maybe passing mention of some kind of web publishing, they didn’t have a clue how I would know such. And I know I got some raised eyebrows over the years when in the middle of some meeting or something, some web issue or question would come up and I would have much feedback and people would be rolling their eyes, like where is this coming from and what does she know about the Internet, twenty some years’ worth of publishing actually.

I was never much into that part about blowing one’s horn though, could be that has been one of the big mistakes of my life. Could be I wouldn’t do that much different if I had it to do again. I’ve been building web pages since you pretty much had to write your own code, I still mostly do, old fashioned like that. Anyway, it is something I have always done on the side of whatever else I was doing. Folks who know me, and the site, also know there is a spiritual side of it all, it has always been there as well. Funny how things happen.

Lately it seems that things spiritual and ministerial have been on the brain and popping up here and there in various ways. Others have mentioned ministry related issues as well. Spiritual outreach very similar to what I have been doing with Magic Stream all these years. The mission has been open for a very long time, twenty years, and counting. It really is a mission, never was much of anything else. Could be I went about it in from a completely odd direction, bass ackards as they say, but the minute it was in my head, I knew it was right.

I went ahead with a Universal Life Church ordination. Nobody wants to get married, that I know about, but I can do it too. It is a non-denominational type ordination, although the term would seem to mean no denomination at all, from my perspective it is an inclusiveness thing. Magic Stream is very much about spiritual inclusiveness. Anyway, it is true that some people use the Universal Life Church ordination route for ceremonial purposes, to be licensed to perform weddings and such. I am not looking for a church or a congregation either, but the Magic Stream mission has had its doors open for the last twenty years. It is non-denominational in philosophy, not to be confused with lacking in spirituality or religious values. It is very much welcoming of religious diversity, especially the healing aspects. And interestingly, some of the earliest things I published were written by ministers.

It is the same old Magic Stream, but going into the ministry will allow me to extend some of the resources in various off line ways, into the community, and lend the resources I have already developed and sitting there to support various other of the causes and efforts that I already believe in for the common good.

After publishing Magic Stream for all these years, I actually have significant background and self-help type resources to pull from. It is way past time for a ministerial type, more spiritually focused presence at Magic Stream. And no I am not quitting my day job, nothing much is changing on the day-to-day, just a different direction for what I have been doing all these years.

Growing up as a preacher’s daughter, over the years, I remember when various stood up in church and said that they had “been called.” Called to the ministry that is. One doesn’t however always talk about everything they do. Could be I was called the day I decided to build the Magic Stream website. However, such that it is, the non-denominational ministerial ordination route, lends me to move in a new direction with some of the Magic Stream resources, more focus on the spiritual aspects of healing, which after dealing with my own especially, I really do feel is so important. I also think is very much needed in the world today, and timely, and coincidentally in the process, I am already ordained.

My mission is the same as it has been for the last twenty years. It won’t be over night, there is however going to be a change in the spirit at Magic Stream. This is after much consideration as to how I would commemorate the twenty year mark of Magic Stream. Coincidentally, I can also perform weddings, and funerals, and various such, licensed to do everything that goes with it, which I have actually done in some capacity for many years, I just used to be the piano player. Namaste, Amen and blessings to all.

Also visit:

The Religion, Rage & w(R)iting Blog Tour

2014-12-13T07:55:00.000-08:00

Hi, and welcome to The Religion, Rage &w(R)iting Blog Tour for Authors, Shirley-Harris Slaughter, Rhani D’Chae and Harmony Kent. (Click on each author’s name to be taken directly to their Author Page at 4WillsPublishing, where you can learn more about them).

Shirley Harris-Slaughter

Rhani D’Chae

Harmony Kent

These three authors are wonderful clients of 4WillsPublishing, a publishing House dedicated to helping authors put out the best written, and marketing products for their literary work, possible.

This tour is a surprise tour, which means the authors knew nothing about it until it started! This is our gift to them to show our appreciation of their work, their dedication to putting out the great written word, and also a big THANK YOU for allowing us to showcase and promote them.

This is a 3 Author/7 Day/40 Blog Tour! Yes, for 7 days, The Religion, Rage & w(R)iting Blog Tour will sit on 40 blogs! And for 7 days, on 40 blogs, you will get a tiny tid-bit of something related to Religion, so that you never forget OUR LADY OF VICTORY, the rage of people, such as that displayed in SHADOWOF THE DRILL, and w(R)iting tips to help you POLISH YOUR PROSE! (Click on each book title to find out more about it)

OUR LADY OF VICTORY

SHADOW OF THE DRILL

POLISH YOUR PROSE

This will be a fun tour, an inspirational tour, a delightful tour which has been designed to enlighten you, entertain you and help you overcome those feelings which bind us daily and keeps us from growing from point A to point B. Each day as you stop by each blog to find out what bit of inspiration is being shared, we ask that you take the time to leave a comment for the authors, visit their blogs, Follow them on Twitter and FB, and last but not least, please PICK UP A COPY OF THEIR BOOKS! They are all 5 star reads! And this tour wouldn’t be complete, if you didn’t check out The Religion, Rage& w(R)iting Book Trailer! (Please note: these bits and quotes were not taken from the author’s books).

The Religion, Rage & w(R)iting Author Blitz Book Trailer

Before we forget, we’ve included another of our authors, Nonnie Jules. Although she’s a partner in our firm, she is STILL one of our clients! Her books, THE GOOD MOMMIES’ GUIDE TORAISING (ALMOST) PERFECT DAUGHTERS, Daydream’s Daughter, Nightmare’sFriend and Sugarcoatin’ Is For Candy & Pacifyin’ Is For Kids! are also very interesting and entertaining reads!

THE GOOD MOMMIES’GUIDE…

DAYDREAM’S DAUGHTER…

SUGARCOATIN’ IS FORCANDY…

On this stop, we want you to dwell on this:

“Being a good writer is 3% talent, and 97% not being distracted by the internet.” ~ Anonymous ~

Thank you for joining us on this stop of our tour. We are grateful to our host for allowing us to share with this audience and we hope that we have left you wanting more! To follow this tour, please visit the 4WillsPublishing EVENTS page for the complete tour line-up and to also register to win a SURPRISE pack of books as well as a stint on WHO’S ON THE SHELF WITH NONNIE JULES! Now, on to the next stop!!!!

Our Children Need Us: With Shirley Harris-Slaughter

2014-08-18T06:39:00.000-07:00

Mentoring in the Oak Park School District.

I am very excited to welcome fellow author Shirley Harris-Slaughter as a guest on my blog.

Our Children Need Us
By Shirley Harris-Slaughter

Our Children Need Us: I found that out when I got involved with four freshmen girls in a mentoring program sponsored by the Oak Park School District. I volunteered to be a mentor in the Winning Futures Program conducted by the district. I have to admit that I had an ulterior motive for signing up. I was trying to get more exposure for my book.

I was surprised to have gotten so much more than I bargained for. I was assigned to four girls, which should have been three, but they didn’t have enough volunteers. Right away I realized the girls were jockeying for a seat beside me every week that we met. The leader of this program pointed that out one day, as part of a lesson on the dynamics that play out with these children in these mentoring programs.

I didn’t know that I had a gift when it comes to children and how that gift would bond us together and see us through the program from beginning to the end. Most troubled kids are not able to do that because they have so much drama going on in their personal lives. The fact that my girls did make it through, was a testament to my skills interacting with them over the entire semester.

Other team leaders with their mentees didn’t fare as well. Some of the children dropped out of the program. They were looking to me to see what it was that I was doing and how they could learn from it. I felt so good about myself that I was able to successfully make a difference in these girls’ lives and they really listened to what I had to say.

Each week they were presented with a project to help them be more successful in life. The first week was “Career Day” and the mentors had to present their job careers. I presented a visual display of what I do as an author. I displayed my book along with poster boards, post cards, and business cards. Just like putting on a display at a book event. I went around the table and pointed out things that I did when putting on a presentation or speaking engagement.

"Career Day"

They learned about grooming, how to set goals, how to write a resume and look for jobs; they also learned how to decide on what college or university they wanted to attend. They learned how to play games and how to lose with dignity and grace while congratulating the winner. The biggest benefit was that they would be able to use this program as a referral when applying to colleges, looking for employment, or to add credits to their high school curriculum for graduation; showing how grounded they had become.

This program was a stepping stone to all that they could be. But the key was to get through it—to stick it out. And they did! I had certificates made up for them to be presented at the banquet put on by the school district. City council was there; the school board, some public representatives and most importantly, the parents.

I don’t know what my girls told their parents about me, but they sure wanted to meet me. Apparently, I was all their girls talked about and so these parents were anxious to see who I was and grateful that I had mentored their daughters. We took pictures and the girls were called to receive their awards. All of them got one because I felt that being in the program and not missing days, was worthy of an award. We have to praise children for everything so they can feel good about themselves.

In another instance, as a member of the Knights and Ladies of St. Peter Claver, a Catholic organization, I served as a chaperone for our Junior Daughter division at the conference in Mobile, Alabama. Again, the parents obviously got a good report card on me.

So, I am grateful I was able to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. Our girls and our boys need us. I love them all because they are so innocent and so close to God when they are young and it is up to us to keep them that way.

About the Book:

Writing this book was a natural outgrowth of my community activism. Thus, Our Lady of Victory, the Saga of an AfricanAmerican Catholic Community was born. Besides, no one else was going to do it. I didn’t understand initially that I was the chosen one.

Little did I know the “can of worms” I was about to unleash. But I needn’t have worried…no one was ready to challenge my findings. They just pretended like there was nothing to be concerned about. And so I was ignored for the most part with the exception of a few close friends. And then Nonnie Jules crossed my path and I joined RaveReviews Book Club and excitement for the book was re-ignited.

I am a proud member of Rave Reviews Book Club—the place for Indie Authors!

I tried to fight the ebook craze but gave in finally. I don’t think that is good for history and all that implies because you want to hold that kind of book in your hands. I feel the same way about Sci-Fi Fantasy thriller books now that I am a fan. Fortunately, I still have a remedy for you book lovers who cherish putting these kinds of books on a shelf. You can get your limited edition hardcover autographed copy of this precious book, OUR LADY OF VICTORY. Just click here: http://rememberourladyofvictory.com/about-the-book/

Once these gems are gone, they’re gone!

Book Trailer: http://youtu.be/aF3ZBZFn3AY
Five Star Reviewof Our Lady of Victory by Nonnie Jules “Seal of Approval”

All Authors Blog Blitz

2014-06-14T13:04:00.000-07:00

This week, I am doing something a little different with the blog, participating in an All Authors Blog Blitz. We are all authors, and we are all hosting another author on our blogs. C-Desert Rose hosted me and I am really really excited to host Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli, of Italy. As if that isn't exciting enough for this Alabama girl, we share long term interest and involvements in the space industry as well, and we all know what happens when you throw space geeks together. We talk books and space both, what could be better! I am so excited to have her here. With that, I introduce:

Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli

You’ve maybe noticed that I have a long name. Well, this is my real one, not a pen name. I’ve decided to keep it all because it’s something unique, but all my friends just call me Carla.

I’m an Italian independent author, a literary, technical, and scientific translator, and a biologist. Actually I’m not working anymore as biologist, but I’m using my education in the field in both my translation and writing work. I worked as researcher and professor’s assistant at the University of Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy) until 2004, then I started my own business, called Anakina Web (the name coming from me being a huge Star Wars fan), in the remit of which I currently take care of my writing related jobs, including translation, as well as web design.

My work time is almost evenly split between creative writing and translation, though I’m currently focussing a bit more on my writing career. I’m the author of a successful science fiction series in Italy, titled “Deserto rosso” (Red Desert), including four books. It is a character driven hard science fiction series about Mars colonisation, thanks to which I’ve been mentioned on Wired Magazine as one of the ten best Italian self-publishers. It brought me to be a guest at the Salone Internazionale del Libro in Turin, the most important Italian book fair.

I’ve also recently published a crime thriller titled Il mentore (The Mentor), and I will publish my next science fiction novel in November.

My science fiction series is also going to be published in English. The first book, Red Desert - Point of No Return, is due to release on June 30th. I’m currently arranging an eventual publication in Spanish for the next year.

On Space:

As a biologist, my specialisation is ecology. This branch of biology is about the connections and interactions between living and non-living elements in nature. That applies to our planet, of course, but not only. In fact, it has a lot of points in common with astrobiology for what concerns the origin of life and the conditions that allow life to spread. The two branches are tightly interwoven. Lately I’ve taken some online classes on astrobiology and I’m currently trying to improve my knowledge in the field.

That fact and my interest in astronomy and aerospace, which I’ve had since I can remember, is partly the reason why I like science fiction too, brought me to become a space exploration enthusiast, in particular for anything that concerns Mars. The Red Planet is the nearest celestial body being similar to our own planet and potentially having the conditions to host life (in the past, in the future, but even right now). I’ve followed and am still following with great interest all the robotic Mars exploration missions.

My name is one of those brought there in a chip on board of Curiosity (yes, it sounds like I’m fan of her, but actually I am!). I’m eager to see more missions being able to discover more about the past of the planet, when it was covered by oceans and maybe gave origin to life. But I’m even more eager to see humans get there and colonise that new world.

On Space and Writing:

Both aspects of my interest in Mars drove me to write Red Desert. The triggering factor for me was reading Dr. Robert Zubrin’s books, in particular The Case for Mars and his novel First Landing. I started toying with the idea of an astronaut driving all alone on a rover in the Martian desert, in the middle of nothing, and I wondered why he/she was there and where he/she was going.

I started from that image in my mind to tell the story of Anna Persson, a Swedish exobiologist (an astrobiologist specialised in speculating about life on other planets) and a Mars coloniser, who at the crack of dawn leaves the safety of Station Alpha and secretly escapes with a rover into the desert with enough air for a little more than two sols (Martian days). Why is she escaping? Where is she going? Does she want to kill herself?

The story is about Mars exploration and colonisation, so there’s a lot aerospace science in it, but also about exobiology, as it speculates on the possible existence of some very simple (microscopic) life forms in the Red Planet, how and where they might exist. It’s hard science fiction for a great extent. I tried to be faithful to actual science, though the story is set 50 years in the future so it left a lot of room to the imagination concerning technology.

This is surely an entertainment read, but one of my ambitions is to leave something in the reader when they close the book, even to instil some interest on Mars exploration. I’m an Italian representative of a non-profit association called Mars Initiative, whose purpose is collecting funds to be given to the first project that is going to put humans on Mars. I hope my book will increase the interest of my readership on the importance of this topic for human progress. And I hope to do so by letting them get closer to the Red Planet, feeling its calling, and understanding why it is important that humans get there soon.

But, of course, there are other appealing aspects in the series: there’s a lot of adventure, suspense, characters’ feelings (including love, of course), even social topics, like the respect for diversity applied on a various range of fields, from religion to race … and more.

Finally, it is characterised by my favourite theme that you can find in all my literary work: the subjectivity of good and evil. In my stories aren’t real heroes nor villains. Everything is mixed, like in real life. Everybody thinks for themselves and those they love. In fact the protagonist is an anti-heroine, heavily flawed and not willing to become a heroine. Whenever she does something dangerous that may seem heroic, she never does it for “saving the world” but just to save herself or someone she needs (because that person is just useful to her or she loves them and therefore can’t do without them), and this is what makes her human. This is what made most of my readers like the series, even if some of them disliked her attitude.

Available on Amazon

Anyway to appreciate the characters and the story, you need to read the whole series.

Red Desert - Point of No Return is a novella, a two-hour read, but it is less than ten per cent of the whole series. It follows Anna’s journey in the Martian desert. While she’s driving the rover aiming to a place we don’t know, she recalls her past and through her memories we understand who she is and why she is on Mars.

The novella ends with a cliff-hanger urging you to know more. Fortunately the second book will be published in September and it’s a real novel, which shows different point of views on the story and unveils a part of the mystery upon which Anna has stumbled during the mission and which was the reason of her escape in the first place.

So all you have to do is put on your own suit, lock your own helmet and get into the rover with Anna. The journey will start on June 30th.

Excerpt:

I linger to admire the sky that’s turning from salmon to a dirty, pale blue, as the sun drops into the canyon. Its light has become so feeble that I can stare at it without being blinded. I begin to distinguish some stars eastwards. Deimos, the farthest satellite, shines a little bigger than a star just over my head, whilst Phobos seems to come greeting it.

As the solar disk crosses the irregular horizon of Valles Marineris, there it is, a little higher and westward. An azure star sparkling in the twilight. Earth.

I can’t be too specific about this excerpt for avoiding any spoiler on the story. Anyway, I think this one is the most moving part of the novella. It was moving for me to write it. We find Anna watching the sunset in Valles Marineris, in the canyons. She is alone in a very difficult situation, yet she is overwhelmed by the beauty of the sight. Her nerves break when she finally recognizes Earth in the sky. This is when she starts regretting her previous actions and wishing she could change them.

Anna is a very uncertain woman. That’s partly due to her past, which is slowly unveiled all over the series. She changes her mind continuously in normal conditions. And now she is alone in a desert planet for two long days. That’s bringing her to the limit.

While focussing on her feelings in the attempt to make the reader identify in her, I take this occasion to show science and try to imagine how a sunset would look like on Mars, based on the videos and photos coming from Opportunity and Curiosity.

I think these two paragraphs show well the two souls of Red Desert, the scientific and the human one. If you want to know more, you will just have to read Red Desert - Point of No Return.

As said, it’ll be out on June 30th on Amazon and all major retailers, but it may be pre-ordered on Barnes & Noble, Kobo and iTunes. I’m launching it at only $0.99.

All updated information about the series can be found on my blog under the tag “Red Desert”:

http://ladyanakina.blogspot.com/search/label/Red%20Desert

My official English website is www.anakina.eu, where you can get in touch with me via social media, read my blog or subscribe to my newsletter and be the first to know about a new release.

See you on Mars!

To connect with Carla on social media:

Facebook: www.facebook.com/RitaCarlaFMonticelli
Twitter: www.twitter.com/ladyanakina
Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/anakina
YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/ladyanakina
Google+: plus.google.com/+RitaCarlaFrancescaMonticelli
Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/ladyanakina
Smashwords: www.smashwords.com/profile/view/anakina
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/anakina
Amazon: www.amazon.com/author/ritacarlafrancescamonticelli

Alabama Woman -- Blogger Interview

2014-06-04T16:17:00.001-07:00

One of the things I have really enjoyed as a writer has been getting to know other writers. This interview is my "Getting to Know You" interview for Alabama Women Bloggers. It is a group of women bloggers from all over the state.

1. Name & Birthday

Regina Pickett Garson.
Born June 12, a Gemini, which just about sums up my life. I am into everything, and even I don’t have a clue how many personalities I have.

2. How long have you been blogging?

I started blogging in 2005, but I’ve been involved in the Internet and online publishing for right at 20 years. Blogging came later and suddenly it was the thing, I started my first blog to provide a discussion area for Magic Stream, my first web site, which is a self-help and holistic wellness literary zine.

3. What is your favorite part of being a blogger and why?

I’m a word smyth. I like reading and writing and I have been a writer in some way all of my adult life. I’ve written articles, poetry, web sites, news reports, political analysis, technical papers, it’s a long list. I’ve covered everything from social issues to rocket science. Blogging is its own style though and it lends to more personal discussion of everyday life than some of the other writing styles. That is what I love about blogging, as both a reader and a writer both, I like the more personal aspects of blogging, the connectedness in the writing that makes us all human.

4. Why did you start blogging?

I had been involved with online publishing for a while when the blogging craze hit, I hate to say I jumped in because everybody was doing it, but I jumped in because everybody was doing it. Not to be flip, but if you are active at all in online publishing, you have to keep up with the trends and what is going on in the industry. If you work online and you spend too much time blinking your eye, you are toast. Since then though, blogging has been a whole lot more than -- well I really need to do this. Blogging is here to stay, if fills a need for readers and writers both.

5. Tell us a little about your family.

My family is from Alabama. At least some of them have been here since before the state became a state. Like many Southern families I have a very rich and diverse heritage. My mother’s family, the Cashs, were from Scotland and my Dad’s, the Picketts, were from England. The Picketts were among the early colonial settlers. Members of both families married Native Americans along the way, Cherokee on my dad’s side and Choctaw on my mom’s. So when I say my family has been here a while, we go way back. Like most Southern families, there is, of course, a lot more, I’ve got Jewish heritage, a strong French influence, and a few Dutch, but that is just a nutshell and I am certain I have left something out. I have a very mixed and wonderful heritage, a large extended family on both sides.

6. Where are you from?

I was born in Birmingham. My parents moved out in the country between Montevallo and Pea Ridge when I was three, and that is where I grew up. The area was so remote when I was a child, my dad put in the first running water in our area. There was no city supplied water service back then, so he dug a well and put in his own water system, and did the maintenance. When I was a child, I loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, reading those books, I always felt like my upbringing was kind of like being a pioneer. And it probably was. The closest community was Pea Ridge; they only had 650 some people at the time, and we were out in the country from there. I always loved that area, the people and the land, beautiful.

7. What is your greatest achievement?

That is a hard one. I think every phase of our life we have to have something that we are working toward. Goals are important in many ways. I was very serious into the piano for the first half of my life. I remember hearing the “Warsaw Concerto” and the way people talked about it, I had to play that song. I don’t remember how long it took, but I worked on it until I could play it. The thing is, it had nothing at all to do with a great love of that particular song, it had to do with the way people talked it. Like that was something if you could play that song. And I wanted that something. I wanted to be able to play it too. If I heard it this instant, I am not certain I would even recognize it, it was a pure “I have to do this” kind of goal.

Then it was like, been there, done that. But the thing is, it taught me to set a goal and work toward it, and that is why I think it was so important. Somewhere in us all, we have to have something we are working toward. That is important our whole life, every minute of it. That makes life worth living, it is not the destination, it is the journey. And that is why I rate that song as among my greatest achievements. It wasn't the song itself, it was what I learned by learning to play it.

MagicStream.org

Other accomplishments, my website Magic Stream has been in publication for twenty years this spring. I am pretty happy with that. At the time, I was aware a lot of people got rich and famous online and I was off building what amounted to a mission, providing self-help information. I don’t have a clue how many times I started to just fold it up because I never made anything on it, but people were still coming, and how do you build a mission and lock the door while people are standing there. So I keep it up. I feel like in some way, I was supposed to do that and I am glad I did and I still maintain it.

Whatever we do in life, I think it is important to give something back to the community, as we are able and whatever our talents. We are all different and we do different things. Magic Stream is my contribution. People come there for information on addictions, mental health, various emotional issues, how to help somebody who is suicidal, aging, depression, end of life issues and the list goes on, if it has to do with some kind of emotional or mental health issue, I have probably either covered it on Magic Stream or I can refer you to somebody who has.

8. If you could live anywhere -- where would it be and why?

Alabama, hands down, it’s my home. My family is here and has been for a couple hundred years at the very least. It is my home and my families’ home, I have no desire whatsoever to live anywhere else.

9. Favorite Movie?

Beetlejuice. If I am going to watch a movie, I want to have a good time, none of those tear jerkers for me. I totally love Beetlejuice.

10. Favorite Music/Song?

I love all kinds of music. My early piano training was in the classics, and for years I was totally fixated on Mozart, I didn’t want to play anything else. This was in the years of rock and roll, and more than one person has been dumbfounded that I didn’t know much of anything about the major groups of the time. But that wasn’t what I was into then. I totally love the blues too, not the loud new electronic blues, it’s not bad, it is just not what I am saying I like when I say I like blues, I like the old stuff, like B. B. King, music so mellow, you can hear the smoke.When I listen to the blues, I want to hear the smoke. And if you love the blues, you know exactly what I mean.

11. What are your hobbies?

Continuing on from the music, in the last few years, I discovered Sacred Harp music, and I was hooked on that too. I should have put this under my greatest accomplishments, I think the more you know about music, the harder it is to get your head around Sacred Harp, it’s a good time, participatory music. But I really had a hard time learning it. You don’t go somewhere to listen to Sacred Harp music, you get together with other folks who love it, and you all sing.

Also, as to hobbies, I am only two hours from Nashville, I love country music too. After all the years of music, only in the last few, I got interested in writing it, so if I had to list a hobby, I’d probably list writing music, not that I’m any good at it, that’s just what I do when I want to kick back and do something just for fun. And for all my early years in the classics, I have now gone country! Totally love it, there is nothing better than getting together with a bunch of country songwriting musicians, or any other kind of musicians for that matter.

12. What inspires you?

People inspire me, everyday people. Friends and family. I love to see what people do and hear the stories of their life. Their families, their dreams, their work, things they do, their projects, and their pets, their kids. Their ailments, dealing with their ailments. Life is not easy for much of anybody, but the sharing of the journey is awesome. I love it all. Politics inspire me too, I love getting out there and trying to work toward making things better. I guess what it boils down to is life – life inspires me.

13. Favorite Color?

I have a new favorite color every other year. Right now it is red, it makes me want to move and get things done.

14. What is your dream job?

I am a word smyth and I love my work. I write and edit both. I’ve been writing long enough and have enough bylines, I love helping others along to their writing dreams and ambitions just as much as I do fulfilling my own. Sometimes I think if I had it to do over, I might do something else, I'd probably pick mechanical engineering, but the thing is, I am doing the work that I love now and it allows me the opportunity to support causes and efforts that I think are important. Especially political and social causes, I definitely get political at times.

Also, word smyths never stop learning. The hardest part about college was I wanted to take everything and learn everything. I love that about my work, especially with my editing, I work with a lot of different people in a whole lot of different fields, learning about their work while I help them with their editorial needs, like even when I was over at NASA writing, I got to learn about rocket science, now that is something, I totally loved it. My editorial work has given me the opportunity to learn a lot different things that I would have not been exposed to and learn otherwise. And I love to learn. It gives me a good solid background in knowing what is going on in the world around me too, but I have a good time too. I also take an occasional creative binge, and that too is part of the word smyth business.

Available on Amazon

15. What are you looking forward to most in 2014?

Speaking of creative binge. Of all the writers I know, it probably took me the longest to finally come out with a book, and I’ve been writing all my life. I am on it now. This past April, I debuted my first fiction on Amazon Kindle, that was really exciting to me. It is part of a series of short, stand along stories, like the saying “art for art’s sake.” They are all very different in genre, mood, and style, a painting if you will in words. The first, “Journey,” is a mashup, a surrealistic excursion into madness. Everybody who reads it comes away with a little something different, reads it different, kind of like an abstract painting. What do you see in it? It's available on Amazon, but I leave the interpretation up to the reader.

My next upcoming is back to my Southern hill country roots, “Moonshine Revival or Justice in Possum Tree Gulch.” What could be better than a good strong drink on a hot summer night? It will be out in the middle of the summer and I can't wait.

If you'd like to connect:

“Fight Hitler While You Still Can”: An Interview with Screenwriter Arik Bjorn

2014-05-02T20:43:00.001-07:00

Arik Bjorn

Arik Bjorn is a friend and Forward Progressives writer colleague. Given the political nature of so much of our writing, and his own personal interest in/and everything related to The Viking World, I was very interested to learn that he also has a purely creative side, as if the other isn’t creative enough. This is different though, one that digs deep into little known histories and issues of social historic interest.

It also surprised me to learn that Arik was also a screenwriter, and was actively marketing a script. But more than that, the story he was trying to tell is that of Hans Litten, one of the first prisoners in Hitler’s concentration camps. At that point, I had to know more. I didn’t honestly know a thing about screenplays, and even less about Hans Litten, nonetheless, he agreed to the interview. First, take a look at the teaser clip from the screenplay and then, we will proceed into the interview.

Litten's Passion: a screenplay teaser from Palmetto Pictures on Vimeo.

Can you give us a little background on the story?

The tagline we’ve decided upon for Litten’s Passion is “The Forgotten First Victim of the Holocaust.” Litten’s Passion is one of those stories, kind of like a snake nut can—the second you pop off the narrative lid, this unbelievable story emerges. It’s one you can’t put back in the can once you’ve heard about it.

In short, Hans Litten was an intellectual German attorney who interrogated Hitler in court two years before he became Fuhrer. Litten humiliated Hitler during the trial and nearly changed the course of history by exposing the criminal activities of the Brown Shirts. In the end, however, the Nazis ducked and dived and forced their way to power. And Hitler arrested Litten (and several other main political threats) the night the Reichstag burned down in February 1933.

Hitler still hated Litten passionately for being humiliated before the entire nation in court. Remember, this was years before the Final Solution, and he told Litten: “You were the first to be arrested, and you’ll be the last to be released.”

But that’s just the beginning of the story—a story almost altogether forgotten outside of Germany. The book Crossing Hitler was published two years after we registered the screenplay, but I’m fine with that. The story should be remembered in multiple ways and from multiple perspectives.

Anyway, even though the general public now has some broader access to information about Litten’s life, there’s much more to the story than even has recently been divulged—which certainly adds to the recent publications about Litten’s life.

How did you come up with the idea or even learn about the first Concentration Camp victims?

We often forget that Hitler came to power in 1933 and that the Final Solution was a plan—I hate to use such a benign term to describe it—that evolved over time. World War II itself didn’t begin until 1939, remember.

The first wave of political prisoners, which included Litten, were originally held in Spandau Prison in Berlin. (Spandau was finally razed in 1987 after Rudolf Hess died there.) To my understanding, the camps evolved over time as Germany ran out of prison space to hold all of the political prisoners—then became almost a macabre cottage industry of ridding German society of “undesirables.”

Litten was a famous political prisoner and was transferred to many different camps, including, if I remember, Brandenburg, Papenburg-Esterwegen, Lichtenberg, Buchenwald, and finally to Dachau. I think there were others. At Dachau, he was finally made to wear the “yellow spot,” he was Jewish. He was murdered at Dachau on February 4, 1938.

As to how I learned about Hans Litten, well, that’s the catch. I came upon Litten’s life accidentally. At the time—and this was back in the early 2000s—no one outside of Germany knew who Hans Litten was. Then I stumbled upon this buried archive. I contacted some famous historians who were shocked to learn what I had discovered about Hans Litten.

I immediately realized I had discovered a narrative lost treasure. My background is in history, but ancient history. I had been to Yad Vashem and had done some reading on the Holocaust, but World War II and Holocaust Studies were an ocean of unfamiliar literature for me. Nothing to do but dive in and sink or swim.

At any rate: the catch is, once I make public what the “secret” part of the story is, it’s fair game in storytelling land. So I’ll have to hold that somewhat close to the vest for now while we shop the script to studios.

So you learned of this story and you decided to write a screenplay?

Yes, I immediately started researching the story. I had just finished a novel that I had spent seven, eight years writing. So I was ready for a new project. I created an outline and storyboard and started building scenes and crafting dialogue. Then, almost by miracle, I stumbled upon two screenwriters in Louisiana who were also writing a screenplay about Hans Litten. I introduced myself to them, my project—and, most importantly, the “other” part of the story that no one else knew.

It was a leap of faith. But we were all shocked that there could be two such projects in the world. We decided to join forces and united my screenplay to theirs. It felt like fate.

What kind of research did it take to write this?

Well, I’m a librarian by training. This was the easiest part for me. Or at least the most fun.

I read everything, from Mein Kampf to biographies of all the political prisoners Hitler rounded up in the aftermath of the Reichstag burning. Men like the socialist playwright Erich Muhsam. Carl von Ossietzky, who actually later won the Nobel Peace Prize while a concentration camp prisoner. Human rights leader Kurt Hiller, all of these knew each other. Most of them were severely tortured and murdered in camps.

I also spent a lot of time just staring at period photographs and reading news clippings. It’s important to know things such as, in 1937, Snow White was released, The Hobbit was published, Chamberlain became the British PM. And in the same year Litten was transferred to Dachau. It puts the story in a narrative context.

I have this remarkable Picture Post newspaper clipping that I acquired, with a photo of Hitler in the courtroom the day he was interrogated by Litten. Hess is in the background of this photo.

Source: Picture Post. Hitler during the 1931 Eden-Palast Trial.

I also spent a lot of time emailing historians and archivists as well. We credit one of the researchers at the Holocaust Museum in Washington who helped us wade through some tricky information labyrinths.

One of the early hard decisions was limiting the number of physical sites in the film. Litten was in so many camps, but for a film, you have to narrow down scene sites. It’s just a part of that craft, but the researcher in me hates things like that.

I like your question, though. I look back on that period now—I was definitely obsessed with the subject. I could do that kind of work forever.

I notice there are several other writers involved in the project. Can you tell me a little bit about the other people involved, your cohorts?

Sure. My two co-writer colleagues are Debi King McMartin and Evelyn “Lyn” Morgan. They’ve been working together as a screenwriting team for years. Debi and Lyn have partnered on several optioned and produced screenplays, including the book and screenplay titled Stone Justice, the true story of the only woman ever executed in the electric chair in Louisiana.

At first, I wasn’t certain what it would be like to write with other writers. Writing for me is a very private—almost hermetic—craft. But they’ve been a pleasure to work with, and they both sure know a heckuva lot more about the film industry than I do.

Is there anything else you would like to add about this project?

Wow. There are so many things. But I can probably narrow it down to one.

Early in my research, I purchased a book by Irmgard Litten, Hans Litten’s mother—it’s one of the few books ever published about Hans Litten. It’s entitled A Mother Fights Hitler. While the rest of the Litten family fled Germany after Hans’ arrest, she stayed behind to fight for her son’s freedom. Irmgard is one of the main characters in the film, by the way.

Anyway, when the book arrived, I removed the dust jacket to place it in a preserving wrapper, and I noticed that the endpaper was inscribed by Irmgard. The inscription reads: “Fight Hitler while you still have time. Irmgard Litten. July 22, 1942.” (That Picture Post clipping of Hitler I mentioned earlier was in the book, too.)

It’s little moments like that that make you feel like a story is simply destined to be told to a broader audience. Irmgard did everything a mother could do to keep the story of her son alive. It felt like a message out of time to me.

And in 2014, with the world as it is, the story of Hans Litten remains incredibly prescient.

A description of Bjorn’s manuscripts, including Litten’s Passion, may be found at his website The Viking Word.

420 to the Blackboard: It’s Time for a Lesson on Cannabis (Medical Marijuana)

2014-04-20T15:20:00.001-07:00

By now, most people in this country are starting to have some kind of awareness that there have been some serious misspeaks when it comes to marijuana/cannabis/hemp/weed/pot, whatever you want to call it.

However, with the way the media coverage goes, it is not surprising that some areas are not yet aware of the misspeaks. At this point, 29 states and Washington DC have legalized the medical use of marijuana (number updated April 20, 2017).

We are not talking about getting high. We are talking about doctor prescribed, cannabis based medications. It is typically prescribed for things like cancer, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, arthritis, gastro-intestinal disorders, movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s, also HIV/AIDS, and conditions related to aging (Americans for Safe Access, ASA) and dementia, such as Alzheimer’s.

Cannabis is also regarded as one of the best anti-nausea treatments in the world, including the nausea from invasive medical treatments such as with cancer. In addition, for some children, suffering from some forms of childhood epilepsy, nothing else seems to work. It is also effective in end of life palliative care. That is merely a start.

So what’s the deal? As informed as I pride myself in being when it comes to the War on Drugs, I didn’t know much about medical marijuana until very recently (Garson, 2013). If people who make an effort to inform themselves on the issues are relatively uninformed on medical marijuana, it should come as no surprise that there is still a dearth of information in the general public.

This is not about getting high, this is about the fact that for thousands of years before marijuana prohibition, cannabis based medications were an important part of our pharmacopeia, as in a valued and trusted doctor prescribed medicine, and it is time to bring that doctor prescribed medical option back to our people.

Background: Marijuana Prohibition

Marijuana prohibition was a combined political/money grubbing maneuver by Harry J. Anslinger, who made his career enforcing alcohol prohibition, and thought marijuana prohibition would be a good replacement when it ended, and William Randolph Hearst, the media/newspaper magnate, who was also openly racist and thought that it would be financially beneficial if instead of making paper out of hemp, it was made out of timber, of which he owned much land and stood to make quite a fortune. Andrew W. Mellon and the DuPonts were in on it as well. Just about anything that could be made from hemp could also be made from petroleum, and they stood to make a whole lot of money from that (and you wonder why the environmentalists keep wringing their hands, much less what our soldiers have been really dying for).

Somewhere in the process of ensuring job security for Anslinger, coming up with a new form of prohibition, with new laws to enforce and more people to arrest (most especially Blacks and Mexicans, the KKK was lightweight in comparison to Hearst), creating a viable market for petroleum by taking hemp off the industrial map of the country, cannabis was also, pretty much coincidentally, made illegal (not much worry about those medical patients either).

The weed scam

Hearst pulled the scam off (and continued to implement it) via a massive public relations campaign, which he was easily able to implement since he owned a large number of the major newspapers and magazines of the day. While much of the general public depended on his publications for news and information, he published a steady stream of what came to be known as reefer madness propaganda, with the sole intent of convincing the American people of the evils of marijuana and the people who used it. Never mind, that at the time, cannabis was one of the most commonly prescribed medications in the country (the fact that they were in the same family of plants and would also be made illegal under the new prohibition was somehow swept under the media rug along with the use of different words at different times and in different contexts).

Anyway, cannabis medications were very affordable, very effective at treating a number of ailments, and had fewer side effects than just about any other medication ever in the pharmacopeia of the world. Its use was so common at the time, chances are good that if you had ever been to the doctor and brought home a prescription, you very likely had at least one bottle of cannabis-based medication in your medicine cabinet. In addition to its other uses, it was a common prescription level painkiller, and in comparison to most of today’s counterparts, it was safe, effective, non-addictive, and had very few side effects.

So what happened?

When they passed the new prohibition laws, marijuana, hemp, and cannabis were all made illegal at the same time. Whereas they are all in the same plant family, and the words are frequently used interchangeably, different strains are used for different purposes. Until the law was already passed, most people did not have a clue that it was also going to affect the availability of certain prescription medications on which they relied. The doctors of the day were in for a big surprise as well.

Bad news for the medical community

The American Medical Association had a conniption fit. Even though it was already a well-known, proven, and beneficial medication, many in the medical community felt that with additional research, they would learn that cannabis had even more uses and more benefits than was then known. For thousands of years, cannabis had been just about as close as it comes to being considered a miracle drug, and the consensus of the medical community was that the future would prove it even more beneficial than was already known. There is no doubt, its use was well regarded and well respected.

In response to the change in the laws, “In 1937, the U.S. passed the first federal law against cannabis, despite the objections of the American Medical Association (AMA). Dr. William C. Woodward, testifying on behalf of the AMA, told Congress that, "The American Medical Association knows of no evidence that marijuana is a dangerous drug" and warned that a prohibition "loses sight of the fact that future investigation may show that there are substantial medical uses for Cannabis." (Americans for Safe Access, ASA)

The damage done

Needless to say, from the prospective of medical care, this change in the law was a big problem for a lot of people, and it continues to be a problem to this day. In the meantime, in the ignominious tradition of the Hearst legacy, we have been inundated with generations of blatantly false and misleading media spin to convince us that what was once considered the miracle drug of the ages was actually an evil weed. In the process, seriously ill individuals have been denied access to doctor prescribed medications, and others, who were just as seriously ill, have been imprisoned because they dared to reach for the cure.

These laws have done major damage to communities, families, and individuals across this country. There has been so much needless suffering. Countless numbers have lost their lives because effective treatments were deemed illegal, and not made available to them.

As active and involved I have been in so many issues, for so many years, until very recently, I flat didn’t know what was going on when it came to medical marijuana (Garson, 2013).

I too thought these medical marijuana folks were a bunch of stoners looking to have a legal high, and if they couldn’t get it any other way, they were going to go the medical route. Anybody who knows me is aware I am on the liberal side of things, as in who cares anyway, but on this one, my liberal attitude really got in the way of me seeing the truth when it comes to the medical use of marijuana.

Whether we are liberal with good intentions or conservative with good intentions, both sides of the aisle have been fed some serious misinformation when it comes to marijuana, most especially when it comes to its medical applications. On a certain level, that can be life or death serious.

Nonetheless, when it comes to marijuana and the news, we have had such a constant, one-sided story, for so long, a whole lot of people don’t know up from down on this one.

We get a constant stream of arrest numbers, and reefer madness hype, and little mention of how many lives these laws are destroying, or how many of these media portrayed criminals are either seriously ill patients or have seriously ill family members who seriously need a cannabis based medicine.

A while back in Georgia, a seriously ill man was convicted for growing his own cannabis, the catch was, although he had been prescribed Marinol, which is a cannabis derivative, he could not afford it, and so he was growing his own, natural form, which is marijuana. He got probation instead of jail time, which would seem like a good thing, except he is not going to get by with growing it now, and in this case, I am not sure it is a blessing at all.

Why is this even such an issue? Why is it illegal? Why do we bother to call this country free? This seriously ill man was convicted of growing a plant that was bringing him some level of relief. He can’t afford the medicine either. So where does that leave him? Define torture. He would have been better off and suffered less if they had sentenced him to waterboarding every day, because then he would have at least been able to keep his food down. Exactly what is cruel and unusual punishment? How the fuck can this country continue to get by with doing this to good people. Denying a sick person the medication that would bring them relief is about as heinous a crime as I can imagine. But they are torturing sick people, and doing it in the name of the law. Call it what is it.

Marijuana prohibition laws have destroyed more lives than marijuana ever will. Despite the damage of marijuana prohibition, in the course of human history, marijuana itself has saved many more lives than these very recent laws have destroyed. So what is going on here? Where is up and where is down?

Why don’t we hear more about this? Things are changing, but things like that guy that was just convicted, he was past the point of too sick to make a lot of noise. And we seldom hear their story.

We are starting to hear more though, and even Alabama recently passed Carly’s Law, but there is so little coverage of the medical uses of marijuana, people don’t even know it is there. And that law has the supposition that the only ones suffering who would benefit from the cannabis-based medications are children with epilepsy, and that is nowhere near the truth. Progress is progress though.

Mostly if we hear about it at all, it is likely a joke some stoner is making because they really would rather be getting high. Although that was a big so what to me, it really was part of my own problem in not understating the bigger picture on this one.

Things sure look different when the truth starts coming out.

Dr. Sanja Gupta made some major news and then he made it again when he came out with a very public proclamation that he had got it wrong when it came to marijuana. He issued a very public apology because, in his writing, media work, and medical reporting, as have so many others before him, he had played into the same media cog that Hearst started and that he too had helped to spread the mis-information. He is a surgeon among surgeons, one of the most respected medical professionals in this country, and he too had been mis-lead when it comes to cannabis and its medical applications. The point is not to blame people, but to educate them. It takes some doing to get to the truth. When Dr. Gupta realized that he too had been duped, and he too had believed the lies, he had a few things to say about it. He also set out to set the record straight (Garson, 2013).

Dr. Gupta did a documentary in an attempt to start correcting some of that mis-information that we have all been fed for so long. Then he made another one. Since then, there have been hearings on state’s rights when it comes to medical marijuana laws; there have also been other hearings on the sentencing and what these laws have done to our people (Garson, 2013).

Changes are most definitely being made (Garson, 2013). Despite the fact, it is still illegal at the federal level; state after state has been reaffirming their state’s rights and passing legislation to make these medicines available to their citizens once more. When I say once more, I do mean once more. Records vary somewhat, but some say that marijuana/cannabis based medications have been in use for as long as 12,000 years. It is one of the 50 fundamental healing herbs in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

There is no doubt that Big Pharma stepped in to fill that gap. As much as we all like to yell about them, on some things, they have truly done a good job. Many medical and pharmaceutical advances have been made in the last decades. However, on other things, medical science has reached a dead end. You can’t throw away thousands of years of best medical practices and make up for it in a day, or even a few generations. Marijuana/cannabis was one of the earliest cultivated herbs on the planet. For almost that many years, it was among the most frequently utilized medical herbs on the planet.

New studies, old ways

New studies and transcriptions of the Old Testament books have led etymologists to believe that “kaneh-bosm” was accidently translated to “calamus,” when it should have been “cannabis” (Bennett, 1996). That is still being debated. Others question whether it was used in some of the healing oils that Jesus used in his ministry. Not to take a thing away from his miracles, but he was undeniably a physician, a healer, and at times, he sent his apostles out with oils and preparations to heal as well. Because of its wide range of uses in healing, the time-frame, and some of the things it was used for, questions are now being asked as to whether what we now know as cannabis was perhaps in some of those anointing oil preparations as well (Chris Bennett cited in BBC,2003). If so, that would surely put a different spin on a whole lot of things.

With the perpetual lies we have been fed about marijuana in the last generations, it is very easy to dismiss that notion. However, for the thousands of years before marijuana prohibition made it illegal, marijuana/cannabis was one of the most effective and widely used medicines on the planet.

The War on Drugs is not just about the right to get high, or that we have the biggest prison population in the world, it is also about the fact that these laws have seriously influenced what is available by prescription in this country. It was not an accident or a fluke of nature that this so-called evil weed has for most of recorded history, been one of the most widely prescribed medications in the world. Many times over, marijuana/cannabis has been shown to have been one of the most all around beneficial, for more medical purposes, with less side effects than any other medication known to humankind.

Changes are being made

People are catching on to the truth. That is why, in state after state, the citizens are changing their laws. They have had enough. They are tired of watching their loved loves suffer while the cure is deemed illegal and just out of reach. Others watch helplessly as their loved ones die shackled to a prison bed for daring to have reached for the cure. Or, like Peter McWilliams, they die soon after being refused the medication that could have saved their life.

When we throw away the wisdom of the ages, we all lose. It has been a long time since the US had the best medical system in the world, and doing things like arbitrarily (it was all about the money) making one of the most all around beneficial medicines in the history of the world illegal to our people is just one of the things that is wrong.

People are working hard for change. But most people don’t honestly know the difference until a person in their own family has a health problem for which there seems no answer, and then, doctor after doctor, pill after pill, and the same story of hopelessness, nothing working, then they too hear a whisper, maybe cannabis will work. And sometimes it does. It’s not a guaranteed miracle. Like the base of so many other medications, it is simply an herb of the field, but it is also a serious and proven medicine, and sometimes it really does work.

All these things take on a completely different light when you realize there is a possible cure for you or your loved one, but the cure is illegal. What do you do when you realize that the real reason certain treatments and even cures are not available is not that we don’t have the medical know how? It is not even because of a lack of availability or difficult manufacturing processes. It is for no other reason than the greed of certain individuals that cannabis based medications were ever made illegal to our people. Too many people have already suffered and died to feed that greed. This is not something that good people in a good country will put up with for long. There is a growing number of people working for and demanding change on that one.

There have also been major migrations of families into areas where medical marijuana is legal, for children suffering from epilepsy, others with cancer, and other diseases. Clearly, more studies are needed, but there is also no doubt that there are already way too many cases of healing for it to be coincidental.

This march to legalize medical marijuana in the states is not a march of the stoners. People are fighting for their lives and the lives of those they love.

Many look at the weed as evil, as if it were all a joke, as if it is evil to even suggest there might be a cure in the green leaf. It is not about the high, or maybe it is. But more than that, it is about healing, about ensuring that the people we love and the doctors who care for them have the option of a cannabis-based medication, if it is deemed, by their doctor, to be needed—on a prescription basis.

The things we don’t know about these laws have in some ways hurt us all. Until the need arises, or it somehow affects us or one of our loved ones personally, most of us don’t have a clue as to the truth. Medical marijuana is not about the high. It’s about the cure. Ending the war on drugs is about the most basic of our rights, it is about freedom; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Updated April 20, 2017

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Hot Dogs, Yellow Dogs, and Political Predilections

2014-04-18T15:17:00.000-07:00

"Hot Dogs & Yellow Dogs"
Hosted by Jeff & Pam Miles
April 17, 2014
Madison, Alabama
Yellow Dog Courtesy of Frank & Sherry Weaver

One thing has been sinking in for a while, I really thought about it hard last night. I’ll get to that in a minute. Despite the fact I ended up working late, and then showed up late, last night I was able to make it to a local political meeting, Hot Dogs and Yellow Dogs, out in Madison, Alabama, at the home of Jeff and Pam Miles.

I went with the mindset that I was an interested citizen, not planning to write at all, big mistake, I write. And as many times as I think I am not going to be political and write more poetry or be creative, or something, and I do try, but I always end up back at politics. Anyway, since I had no intention of writing about it, I didn’t take pictures either. Lessons learned.

This was a mostly local, as in north Alabama, gathering, but politicians from throughout the state showed up. I am not sure the exact count, but there were around 25-30 politicians who showed up, and an estimated 130 attendees. I felt like I must have parked a half-mile away, but in reality it was probably only a quarter of a mile away. At any rate, the place was packed beyond any expectations of a Democratic political meeting in north Alabama; it could be that I am not the only one who is ready for change.

It was definitely a lively crowd, and I had a good time for sure. But I do so love a good political meeting.

Parker Griffith Ate Crow

Parker Griffith was there eating crow, I missed his speech, and wished I had got to meet him, but I did catch it on YouTube. I know he is eating a whole lot of political crow these days (something about swapping parties and then swapping back, waiting for those open arms), and I don’t even know what my opinion is on it all, but I do know we need a change in the governor’s office.

I am absolutely appalled that our current Doctor Governor absolutely refuses to sign off on the Medicaid Expansion, while we are one of the poorest states in the nation. I know, what does being poor have to do with Medicaid Expansion? A whole lot actually.

Although intellectually what Bentley says makes sense about hard working taxpayers not wanting to support lazy no account scum who are unwilling to work. Most of the poor in this state are poor because they don’t make a lot of money, not because they are lazy, not because they don’t work, and certainly not because they are scum.

Even Huntsville, where I live, which is considered one of the top economic areas in the state, if not nation, if I had to rename the place, I would call it Layoff City. Compound that with the fact that losing health care coverage happens to a whole lot of people during these layoffs; from that perspective, the ostensibly vile and repugnant Obamacare Act is very likely the best thing that ever happened to the workers in this area, especially since it is particularly prone to layoffs.

Most people don’t seem to realize that until they too are in that layoff line. You would think that the people in an area that is so reliant on the ups and downs of government contracts would be savvier on that issue. But they are too busy listening to folks they shouldn’t be listening to instead of thinking with their heads and looking to the well-being of their people.

So smack in the middle of the biggest Layoff City in one of the poorest states in the nation, Doctor Governor Bentley is bound and determined that Alabama will not have that Medicaid Expansion, which would provide coverage for the poorest of the poor in this state. We all hope we don’t hit that category, but the reality is that a whole lot of those folks were pretty hard working and not doing bad at all until they too ended up in those layoff lines.

So with all that, and back to what do you do about health care after a layoff, which this state has its share of, Bentley epitomizes the death panels that some said would come out of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and he is a freaking doctor. I could at least understand that attitude from a banker, sort of. Anyway, those death panels didn’t come out of the ACA, they came out of the ones who were so vehemently against it, that they would rather watch the citizens in their state die for lack of care than do what needs to be done to get them to a doctor.

I meme’d it before and I may well meme it again. I think the whole concept of death panels is morally repugnant and a blasphemy against everything that I and a whole lot of other people believe in.

And that is why I am going to support Griffith on this one; we need to get our folks covered. No matter how logical, rational and moral this Bentley philosophy about lazy takers sounds when he preaches it, a bed ridden person is not going to be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. At a certain level of sick, they are not going to dependably make it to the doctor either. And that is why we so desperately need the Medicaid Expansion in this state. We got a lot of sick people and we got a lot of poor people.

At the very most basic level, Griffith understands that sick people probably do not make a lot of money when they are sick, and they may very well need help getting to a doctor. Oh, Griffith is a doctor too, imagine that! A doctor who understands that people who are very sick are probably not going to be very productive while they are very sick, and they actually, may honestly, need a hand up during that time. That is what the Medicaid Expansion is about, getting poor sick folks to a doctor, not handouts for lazy player scum. And what if you weren’t poor when you got sick, but you were sick so long, you ended up poor and you still needed to go to the doctor? What happens then?

I understand that there are other issues and other candidates, I wish I could have heard them all, and anybody who knows me knows I have been very active in medical marijuana issues and efforts to end marijuana prohibition and the war on drugs, but at this point, especially with what is going on at the national level with the Affordable Care Act, I personally think that the Medicaid Expansion would very likely have the most immediate and a greater impact on the over all well-being of this state and the people in it than any other current issue or opportunity before us (everybody from the lives of the people needing the care to the people with jobs providing that care), and we all have our predilections.

I actually voted for Bentley last go around. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the way he acts, it is like he went in with bipartisan support, but he sure doesn’t have it now. And he acts like he doesn't know that people from both sides voted for him. Best I can tell, he pretty much had the support of the whole state. That is no longer true. Despite the fact I am not honestly a yellow dog, his behavior during his term in office is very likely sending me, and a whole lot of others to the yellow dog ranks. And this is despite the fact that I have always voted for the likes of Richard Shelby in every single election where he was on the ballot and I was voting. Word has it he too was a party changer. But I always voted for him anyway.

All considered, I probably can’t blame Griffith too much for going back and forth on the parties; I have done my share as well. I have always felt like we should not be so divided by party, but I am very disillusioned these days, there are a whole lot of politicians in office these days who are more concerned with their own agenda than the good of the country, much less the people they represent.

Mark Bray

I did spend a little time at the get together meeting talking with Mark Bray, who I knew previously from my space involvements. He is running as an Independent, and although I am not certain we actually agree on all the issues, one thing we do agree on is the importance of the space program to this country. Aerospace, both private and government (NASA), is vitally important to the future well-being of our country. It is vitally important to a whole lot of people in this area too, and I think he has a good grasp that a balance is needed between all related government and commercial efforts. For no other reason than he could do some honest good for the space program, I will support Mark Bray’s efforts. He still needs signatures on a petition to get on the ballot though.

Reggie Hill

One of the younger candidates I was able to spend a few minutes talking to was Reggie Hill, also an Independent. Although he is very young, he impressed me because he was keyed into some of the issues that I think are really important not just to the well-being of the people in this state, but to the long-term good of this country. He didn’t just stand up and say that we need change, he talked about the issues that he felt were important and he demonstrated a pretty firm understanding of those issues. Hill’s issues included mass incarceration and the war on drugs. Anybody who knows me knows how I feel about those issues, which is precisely why I am mentioning him here. I surely wish him well and will try to lend support to his efforts in these areas.

Speech by Horace Clemmons

The Attendees

I want to take a minute and list the attending candidates who were on the roster. There were a couple no-shows, and maybe a couple who did not make the roster. This is what I got though, and then I have my own concluding remarks.

Parker Griffith – candidate Governor
Kevin Bass – candidate Governor
James Fields – candidate Lt. Governor
Joe Hubbard - candidate Attorney General
Miranda Joseph – candidate State Auditor (no show)
Doug Smith – candidate Commissioner of Agriculture & Industry
Mike Curtis – candidate State Senate District 1
Earl Gardner - candidate State Senate District 1
Angelo "Doc" Mancuso - candidate State Senate District 4
Rose Gaskin – candidate State Senate District 7
Mitchell Howie – candidate State Senate District 7 (no show)
Horace Clemmons – candidate State Senate District 8
Randy Money - candidate State Senate District 8
Darrell Turner – candidate State Senate District 13
Patrick Jones - candidate State House of Representatives District 21
Anthony Daniels - candidate State House of Representatives District 53
Patrick Douglass – candidate Madison County Tax Assessor
Lynda Hall – incumbent/candidate Madison Tax Collector
Tim Clardy – candidate Madison County Sheriff
Sheriff Mike Blakely – re-election Limestone County
Mark Bray – Independent candidate for Congress District 5
Reggie Hill – Independent candidate for Congress District 5

A Wrap

Since I was finishing up on a work assignment, I got there later than I would have liked and did not get to hear all the speeches. And I went with no intent whatsoever of writing. One thing really sank in though, even when I am in groups where I know that there is a lot of common ground, I am probably not going to agree with everybody there, and I am not going to support a candidate who is not firm in their beliefs as to why they are going into politics or running for any given office.

Wanting to be a politician is not good enough. I want to know what they are going to work for. I want to know what they believe in. We don't need more career politicians in politics; we need more citizens who understand real life problems of everyday people in politics. We need people who are honestly working toward change in politics; that is what we really need.

Nonetheless, I was impressed with a lot of what I heard. It gives me hope to see new people stepping into the political arena. Being real, there were also a few that I already marked off my list, and just because they were not mentioned here doesn’t mean they are marked off, it meant I got there late and didn’t get to hear, much less talk to everybody.

For a long time, with various of my editorial assignments, I was really more involved and aware on a national than a state and local level, I am not sure if the last months haven't been a coming home, as much as an awareness that if you don’t have good roots, that tree is not going to be standing for long. I’m from Alabama, it’s my home. It is also the home of my family. We’ve been here for a very long time. We’re not going anywhere.

My Take

Some things sound one way when you talk, but the reality is very different. I guess I’m back on Bentley, and he wasn’t even there. Talking the talk about the lazy takers on welfare, when the reality is that most of the ones on assistance are working, or at home bedridden, but the takers really do get the attention. It could be because they can be so very loud and we know one or two of them. But now that attitude has transferred to Medicaid Expansion, and that is chilling, we are talking about denying people in serious need of health care the care that they need to get back on their feet, physically, while our Doctor Governor declares sick people lazy. How can a doctor not know better than that?

I am aghast what this has come to. That people in real need are put to such incredible shame. It could be that they are not so visible as the players and takers, probably because they are working all the time, if not flat out bedridden. That attitude hurts every person in our state. It surely hurts the ones who suffer in humiliation because they really are in need, when it would have cost so little in comparison to get them back on their feet.

But on a greater scale, it costs the taxpayers a whole lot more than it ever should have, because instead of increasing our ranks of healthy prosperous tax-paying citizens, we are kicking them while they are down, and being kicked when you are down does not lead the way to prosperity, it leads the way to ever greater poverty and despair. I don’t care what you call it or how you label it politically, that is what Bentley is doing. And it’s doesn’t work. Not only that, it’s wrong, and any person with a shred of moral decency knows that.

We got a long way to go in Alabama, and to get there, we really are going to have to work together and look toward the health, education, prosperity, and well-being of every single citizen in this state. This is not about being liberal or conservative, Republican, Democrat, or even Independent; it is because for every one of our citizens who prospers, the whole state does that much better. That should be a no brainer. When we all work together as a people, we all as a people do better. Instead of taking from the table, many of the ones who are now sick and poor among us would also be able to contribute to its abundance. It is not about entitlement for the few, it is about health, prosperity and well-being for us all.

PS: Two years ago as of this get together, April 17, 2012, I had a freak accident, choking, torn esophagus, landed me in the hospital for right at a month, went back twice, bedridden for months. I don’t actually know anybody who has spent that much time on that many tubes and lived to tell it. I was going to write something philosophically uplifting to commemorate the two year survival anniversary that I am still alive. I went to a political meeting instead.And this was my take-away.

Freedom is Everybody's Job

2014-04-01T15:04:00.000-07:00

It seems like lately, every day there is something else in the news about some case, some injustice, that tears our heart out. The recent case, where the man who raped the little girl was deemed a man of such stature that he didn’t belong in jail. Not him. What does that mean? If one who would harm the least among us doesn’t belong in jail, who does?

The country was reeling when the Wall Street Bankers, who decimated the world’s economy, usurped the savings, and ruined the lives of untold numbers of hard working citizens, they too were declared of such a stature as to not belong in jail. Countless numbers who dared to protest those injustices were locked up instead.

The teenager who got drunk and went on a killing rampage with his car, he was declared so rich he didn’t know any better than to get drunk and go around killing people. So he didn’t belong in jail either.

The prosecutors who go bat shit crazy putting as many people away for as many years as possible, for unimaginably trivial reasons, they don’t belong in jail either. Even when they destroy the lives and take away the freedom of innocent individuals, when the evidence was there the whole time that they were innocent, they don’t belong in jail either.

So who exactly belongs in jail? At this point in history, the United States of America has more people incarcerated for longer lengths of time, for less serious infractions, than any country on this planet. I don’t just mean countries on the planet today, in 2014. We have more people locked away for longer lengths of time for more trivial reasons than any country in the written recorded history of this whole freaking planet, since God created this earth, or whatever way you think it came into being. What I am getting at, is we have more people locked away than any other country in the recorded history of planet earth. This is not a trivial matter.The vast majority of them are locked away for drugs and other non-violent crimes. Read that, they never hurt anybody.

But a man who goes around raping innocent children does not deserve to be locked up. Wall Street Bankers who destroy countless lives are of such stature, jail time is not even a consideration for them. The kid who gets drunk and kills ever how many people, poor little rich kid, he doesn’t deserve jail time either. People who figure out creative ways to lock away as many people as possible for as long as possible, whether or not they are guilty of a thing, they don’t deserve jail time either.

So what does that leave us? Who exactly is being locked up? How in anybody’s worst nightmare did a country that is known as the “land of the free” get to this point. We are the laughing stock of the world, as we sing our songs about freedom and lock up more and more innocent individuals for ridiculous bull shit while freaking baby rapists walk free and people who destroy untold numbers of lives are deemed above the law, not the kind of person you would put in jail. Whom exactly would you put in jail?

When I was a kid, I really loved Red Skelton, he was a comedian, and I’d watch his show every time he came on TV. I loved him so much, my Uncle Raymond used to call me Clem after one of his sketches. In one of my absolute favorite sketches, he talked about the flag, actually the "Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag."

We all used to say the "Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag" every day in school. Somehow, when we said that pledge, we stood taller. It wasn’t just empty words, it meant something. When I hear these things in the news, more and more of our loved ones locked away, lives destroyed, while certain, the most well-to-do among us are deemed above the law, too important to punish, too rich to jail, no matter how many lives they destroy or how the heinous the crime. That is not what this country is supposed to be about. That is not what those who came before us died for.

“...with liberty and justice for all”

Those words either mean something or they don’t. Some of us think they still do. Quoting Red Skelton, “freedom is everybody’s job.” It is not just the soldiers on the battlefield who are responsible for the freedom of the people in this country. It is all of our responsibility. If we, as a people, do not stand up and demand justice and freedom, there is not going to be any justice or freedom left for the next generation. At a certain point, we can’t let it go, freedom really is everybody’s job—and so is justice.

If you haven’t listened to it before, listen to it now. Even if you have heard it before, listen to it again. If you don’t remember anything else, remember this, freedom is everybody’s job—and so is justice.

Guest Post: “Space Pioneer” the video game. Kickstarting and coming soon. Get in on the action. Interview with Maximillian “Max” Kovtun.

2014-02-25T05:44:00.000-08:00

Created by real world astronauts, scientists, and architects, in Space Pioneer, you will build vast colonies and cities and explore the many unknowns of our universe! Space Pioneer is best described as a space sim, with a heavy dose of real time strategy and city building mechanics. The core of the game revolves around the exploration of a virtual in-game universe via an upgradable and customizable spaceship – with the player having the ability to colonize other planets using a unique combination of RTS mechanics. The player can build Space Stations and come into contact with other sentient species. He/she can choose to coexist with said species, or compete with them. The goal is to make a game that is educational and scientifically accurate, but also deeply satisfying and fulfilling, fun.

A unique feature of the game is that not everyone will have the same exact experience; you will to be able to explore and conquer the universe the way you want to. If you want to go about destroying everything in your path, then you definitely can, provided that you have enough capital.

Currently in the Kickstarter/Development phase, there is plenty of opportunity to get in on the action from the front end. The following is an interview with one of the Space Pioneer developers, Maximillian “Max” Kovtun. At the end of the interview is a video that provides more information and an overview of the project.

With Maximillian “Max” Kovtun

Please tell us a little about Space Pioneer.

Our game is best described as a space sim RTS that’s partially developed by astronauts, scientists and architects. Space Pioneer is a conglomeration of different genres and we think that our game has the potential to become one of the best-spaced based games in existence.

Tell us some interesting facts about the Space Pioneer development team?

Well, there are a couple of interesting tidbits about our team… For one, Aleksandr Zheleznyakov wrote a book about Soviet experiments on sex in space – apparently, this was classified for a long period of time. He hasn’t published it yet, and we’re thinking of adding a reward tier in our Kickstarter that includes this book. Granted; Space Pioneer itself won’t feature express lewd acts in space…

Yuri Artsutanov was the creator of what is now the modern space lift, and inspired a lot of Arthur Clarke’s writing. They exchanged many ideas amongst themselves, and some of these ideas will be incorporated into Space Pioneer! So we have some interesting people on our team to say the least!

When did Space Pioneer start and what were the motivations behind it?

Well, as an idea, Space Pioneer has been around for a couple of years. Our motivations for making this game are relatively simple – we want to make the best space sim ever! Some of our team consists of people who have actually been in space and we feel we can contribute immensely to the space sim and RTS genres.

What contribution do you make in the project?

Officially, I act as the director for our studio, but our team’s structure is actually relatively flat. Everyone has equal say and we’re all free to steer Space Pioneer in the direction that we see fit. In other words – I don’t rule with an iron fist so to speak… I also came up with the idea of Space Pioneer.

Any tips to the young developers and creators?

If you have a good idea – don’t give up on it and don’t be intimidated by the video game industry. With the emergence of the indie scene, right now is the easiest time in the history of our industry to develop and release your video game!

How has your journey been so far?

It has definitely been a learning experience! The great thing about Kickstarter is that your backers are vocal if you aren’t doing something right and it’s relatively easy to fix those mistakes. All in all though; our experience with using crowd-funding has been overwhelmingly positive. For the most part; people want to see you succeed and will try to help you in any way that they can. The backers on our Kickstarter have given us great tips and even ideas towards making our Kickstarter better!

We see you have kept a target of $150,000 to raise at the Kickstarter.com. Why this figure specifically, even when it is such a great idea?

This is the amount we need in order to realize what we have set out to make. If everyone that reads this interview contributes – then we will have reached our funding goal. So what are you waiting for? Go to our Kickstarter and contribute! Well actually, finish reading this interview and then go to our Kickstarter and contribute!

When will Space Pioneer be released?

We are hoping to release by the end of 2015.

When it releases will Space Pioneer require high-end graphics card?

No – while we can’t reveal minimum specs just yet – we can say that Space Pioneer scales back nicely to fit mid end graphics cards.

What more will we see in the future, apart from the present ground breaking idea? Would you like to give us a few hints?

Good question! We’re always brainstorming stuff and I’m confident that our team will continue to make innovative games long after Space Pioneer is released.

For more information see: Space Pioneer, by Space Enigma Studios at Kickstarter.

“Happy Endings” – and how much are these law enforcement panty raids costing us?

2014-02-20T18:32:00.001-08:00

I keep thinking I am not going to be so opinionated, and then something else comes up – like grandiosely extravagant law enforcement panty raids. I am still not sure I got it all straight.

First, there was a big, as in major law enforcement operation in Madison, Alabama, which is a bedroom community to Huntsville. From the looks of things, Madison really is a bedroom community – an active one at that. They had this major criminal type investigation, which culminated in a raid, to crack down on the kind of crimes that people tend to do in the bedroom, with money involved. Then they plastered the pictures of the people they arrested all over the news.

I never in my life thought I’d be writing about such, but let’s get a grip here. Alabama is among the poorest states in the whole country, we are among the least healthy, the least educated, and we make less money. At the same time, we have some of the largest numbers on public assistance, which makes sense, considering the other. We are also third in the nation for the most people locked up behind bars, and this is in the nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world, that pretty much means we are number three, or right at it – in the whole world. Louisiana is number one, in the world, but it gets a little murky with us and Mississippi on the world level. At any rate, they have the second highest incarceration rate in the country, and we are number three behind them.

Not to be outdone though, Alabama has the most overpopulated prison system in the country, which pretty much means we are arresting people faster than we have jail and prison space to handle them. Alabama is already under Federal orders to do something about the overcrowding. At least we are at the top in something.

It is clear that with all those folks we got locked up in the South, we are among the most degenerate people on the planet. We also happen to “supposedly” be the most religious people in this country, the heart of what is known as the Bible Belt. Talk about some oxymorons – the most degenerate and the most religious.

The other day, I was having a discussion with some folks, who were going on about the crime rate increasing in Alabama and we needed to get tough on crime, clean things up in these parts. And we already have the most overcrowded prison system in the whole country. Where are we going to put them and what are the heinous crimes that the people who haven’t been arrested yet supposedly committing.

The light bulb is now on. First, I figured, well, maybe it was a slow news day, so that is why they got so much coverage for busting up the shenanigans between a hooker and her customers out in Madison. I somehow understood how the TV stations would cover such, sort of, but not really, and then it was on AL.com. I was scratching my head at them, mostly because they generally have a high level of coverage and this whole thing was bordering on front-page National Inquirer material. At that point, I didn’t quite realize the level of what was going on in Alabama.

It got me thinking though. I started wondering how many taxpayer dollars it actually took to pull off a raid like the one in Madison. I don't actually know the answer. You have to consider the investigation time, hours logged, equipment, etc. Also, how much money is going to change hands? How much money is that raid going to bring into the system; there’s bail that needs to be made, lawyers that take a chunk, guards, facilities to lock them up, we could probably double the prison space in Alabama and still not have enough, and they got to eat, and those prison phone calls. The FTC has already been onto that, phone calls from jail are some of the highest priced phone calls in the country. Anyway, there is a lot of money in crime, and I am not talking about what the ones in handcuffs are making.

So I tried to digest all that. Then the next time I check the news, it’s Birmingham. Our neighbors down the road were not to be outdone in their own efforts to combat crime, or to generate all the attention they could possibly generate in the process. They went after the “HappyEnding” special at the VIP Spa.

Now those folks know how to get some attention. Best I can tell, they all dressed in full gear and called every news outlet in town to come out for the raid. They probably weren’t too worried about a lot of gunfire on that one, you got to know your criminals, so everybody came out for the photo op. There were pictures galore; a crime raid in process, good guys and bad guys both, girls, actually women. To tell you the truth, I am not sure which was which, good or bad I mean, but in any case, it was the culmination of a “major criminal investigation.” You’d think somebody had been stealing from little old ladies, or robbing banks, or raping folks in nursing homes, foreclosing on people’s houses illegally perhaps, maybe a serial killer, or two.

Well, no, it was a bunch of middle-age men taking advantage of the “Happy Ending” special at the local VIP Spa. I did a little checking around, never could figure if it was a chain or what, but evidently there are other VIP Spas in other areas, and some of the others have also had a few run ins with the law, mostly about some version of that “Happy Ending” thing, for which they seem to be famous. And people can say, well, we don’t want such as that in our neighborhood, but you know what? If nobody shows up for those “Happy Ending” specials, they will go out of business and leave, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

And it is not that I condone these activities, or in any way approve, it is just that I can think of a very long list of better ways to spend our tax dollars than chasing folks who are in some way or another involved in either purchasing or providing “Happy Ending” specials. Mostly, I don’t give a rat’s behind either way. If it doesn’t affect me in some way, or nobody is getting hurt, I really do not care what other people do in the privacy of their bedroom or some back room. Most people don’t.

I do care when my tax dollars get wasted in the process though. And it is not as if we are all living the good life, for all practical purposes, Alabama is poor, kind of low on the socio-economic scale. If we had a lot of extra cash to throw around, I could understand it, maybe. Actually, I still can’t, but at this point in the history of our state, we flat don’t have a lot of spare change, and spending it grandstanding on law enforcement panty raids is just about as big a waste of our already scarce resources as I can think of.

Every day, I hear somebody ranting and raving about how they don’t want their tax dollars going to help lazy poor people, or lazy sick poor people, or feeding poor kids in school. They are all about how they don’t want their tax dollars going to help whatever poor person they are ranting and raving about that day.

I will tell you what I don’t want my tax dollars going for, I don’t want my tax dollars going toward policing folks in their behind closed doors bedroom activities, and I don’t appreciate the fact that I am now apparently paying to regulate these “Happy Ending” specials. There was some mention that trafficking might be suspected as being involved in the Birmingham case, in which case, if they were there to rescue somebody, I am not sure why they led them away with their hands tied up behind their back. That is some kind of heroic rescue. (Update: No evidence of trafficking was found and charges were filed.)

It seems to me, if nobody is being abused and everybody is agreeable as to what is going on, the government does not belong in folks’ bedroom. I do not want my tax dollars to be wasted on this kind of mess. I don’t know who in their right mind would. But somebody has spent a wad of cash on these raids, and that wad of cash is coming out of the taxpayers’ wallet, and that is just the start of what it is going to cost the citizens of this state, or the people who just had their lives turned upside down, in Birmingham and Madison both. At this point anyway, I don’t know that anybody involved was actually hurting another single person on this whole planet. And I can’t see as how any of it does much of anybody a lick of good, except maybe the folks getting a paycheck for pulling it off. We already know what the prohibition laws (alcohol and marijuana both) did for us with law enforcement types worried about their job security and looking for somebody to arrest. No wonder they were wearing ski masks. I guess I didn’t mention the ski masks.

And I know people talk about Christian values and this being the Bible Belt, but I don’t recall Jesus spending a whole lot of time persecuting prostitutes; actually, some of his best friends were prostitutes. So don’t go blaming this one on the Bible. Prostitution is the oldest profession, still going strong, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The thing is, you can do it fifty times a day if you want to, as long as no money is involved. And there are all kinds of grey areas when you get down to such, shacking up, helping each other out, payback for that lovely dinner out, and it goes on and on.

Folks aren’t always the way folks in politics like to make them out either, or the way it comes out in the news, to justify what they do to people’s lives. This one prostitute I knew way back when I was in college, looking back, no matter what a person might say about such, she was one of the hardest working people I ever knew. I don’t think anybody who ever knew her could have ever said she was other than a good person. She had kids, a husband who didn’t show up much, and she worked at the same restaurant as me.

If you think the difference in men and women’s pay is outrageous now, go back a few decades. She didn’t make near enough to support the family, so she “supplemented” her income. I didn’t think a whole lot about it at the time. I don’t think anybody else did either. Nobody I knew gave much of a rat’s behind what other people did in the bedroom. The other minor detail though is that most of her regular customers were on the local police force. That was a long time ago though. Things sure have changed, now it’s all over the news what people are doing in the bedroom. Also makes you wonder what goes on during those investigations.

I sure did some thinking when I noticed the pictures of those police officers in Birmingham, BPD's Vice and Narcotics Unit, ICE and the FBI were all there. Back in my day, criminals and bank robbers wore ski masks. You’d see pictures in the paper of some criminal that had been robbing banks, or some such, and likely as not, they would show a picture of a man in a ski mask. Now the police are the ones in ski masks, not all of them, but some sure were. Look at the gallery.

It seems to me, if they were proud of what they were doing, they would not have been putting on those ski masks. They would have been holding their head high. And I am not even blaming the police on this one; they were just doing their job, following orders. It seems to me though, the police used to be the most esteemed members of the community. Now, they are the ones wearing the ski masks.

And I am not saying that I think all this stuff is right, or that I am into it or any such. What I am saying is I don’t think it is the place of law enforcement and our government to legislate what folks do in the bedroom, or the back room either for that matter.

And don’t get me wrong, if an underage person is involved, I think you should throw the book at the freaking pimp and the person who paid for the services. If somebody has been raped, somebody needs to be doing some hard time. If children were involved, lock the ones who were behind it up for life, and I mean don’t ever let them out. *If there really was trafficking involved in the Birmingham case, that needs to be handled appropriately, the punishment harsh, and the individuals who were trafficked need to get the help they need and some social services too. But if is a matter of adults behind closed doors doing whatever the two of them have mutually agreed that they want to be doing, for whatever reason, including money, leave them alone.

This state has enough problems, I really would like to see Alabama get ahead, be the great state that some of us really do know that it is. We got too many real problems; we don’t need to be wasting our tax dollars on this mess. And yes, it’s a mess, but wasting the hard-earned tax dollars of the people of this state on such as this, especially with the way things are with the economy, and all the real problems we got, is a whole lot bigger crime than the mess they were grandstanding about cleaning up.

I’d rather see a little more money go toward education. Actually, I’d like to see a lot more money go toward education, and a lot of other things that could do the state and the people in it some good. My vote is to get the government out of folk’s bedrooms and send the bill on this one to whoever thought it was a good idea. I do not appreciate my tax dollars being spent on this kind of shenanigans.

*Update: No evidence of trafficking was found and charges were filed.

Photo Credit: Ravalejo: WikimediaCommons

The Byline Blues and My Advice to New and Aspiring Writers

2014-02-09T15:58:00.000-08:00

It’s a toss-up whether I spend more time as a writer or an editor. It varies. I’ve been writing a while now but I am also an editor and I help other folks with their writing as well, go back and forth between the two. At a certain point, whatever you do, that’s what you do though, or something like that.

I’m pretty much compulsive about my writing and editing both, moderately OCD, but only moderately, which is actually a good thing for those in the editing profession. It can do a number on writers though, those byline blues come honest. Despite the perpetual worry of what other people are going to think about your writing, most word smyths really are their own worst critics.

I agonize over every word and if I can avoid it, never turn anything in for publication without sleeping on it. Why can’t one work twenty years on each and every story? I’ve given it my best shot on more than a few. I can generally churn out a news piece or review without significant angst, but the thrill of my long awaited first fiction byline was very short lived.

Nonetheless, if you make your living as a wordsmith, whatever you write, at a certain point, you occasionally have to publish what you write. Minor details.

Maybe you only had an hour to do it, well maybe three weeks, but you knew from the start that was a ridiculous deadline, you really did have a headache, or your dog just cleaned out the cat litter box, again, and barfed all over the kitchen floor. But that still doesn’t stop the deadlines.

No matter how long I have ever worked on anything, I have never had a piece published anywhere in which I didn’t later find something that I wished I had done different. Mind you, I am also a professional editor, moderately OCD, a good quality in an editor, if I do say so myself…. Well, anyway….

Add to that though, if you write for a living, the work you do is often public, the criticism you get, and your bad day bungles, often turn out to be very public as well. Could be you came by that OCD honest.

My first published fiction: Magic Stream, The Fairy Tale, I was absolutely certain it was a creative masterpiece, I had published it first on my web site, then the publisher of a small magazine picked it up, I was ecstatically elated and my head was inflated. I was getting feedback from all kinds of folks telling me they had all taken it to their 12-step group and read it aloud. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and everybody seemed to like it in the 12-step groups.

So what if it wasn’t a New York Times Bestselling Masterpiece, it was a 12-step masterpiece and this little story was going. I was proud.

Then the day came when I got my first literary review type comments from a reader, actually there were a few. Now my head was really swelling. This English teacher had gone online and found a couple stories, of which mine was one, and she gave her class the option of reading and analyzing one of them. Since it was online, she also thought it would be a good idea and a wonderful experience if they all wrote the author of their chosen story and shared their literary analyses with them.

The students dutifully read the stories, of which mine was one! Then they analyzed them, in flawlessly perfect prose, that you would not be ashamed to send an esteemed author of Internet, who published her story on her own website fame. They analyzed the stories according to every literary device in their literature textbook. And then, as is tradition in literary analyses, they contemplated the writer and what would have possessed that particular writer to write that particular story.

Certifiably Bat Shit Crazy

They all sent me their critiques of my story, the most elegant of prose. The first line, “We read your story in our class and...” oh, how my head was swelling, and they continued with their highly astute literary analyses, as my head continued to swell. Then they continued on into the part well, “It’s obvious the writer has numerous psychological issues to work through, etc., etc., etc.” The gist of their combined and mutually agreed upon collective opinion of the story, which was written in the vein of an old fashioned fairytale was that it was indeed lovely, to a point, but what’s with the gore, whatever did she do with Disney? This writer was most clearly “bat shit crazy.” So much for literary fame and fortune.

Exactly what do you do next?

How do you handle remarks like that?

Ok, so my sweet little fairy tale was on the gory side, and perhaps not exactly what they expected from the fairy tale opening of a fine castle and a not wonderfully lovely princess. I like my fairy tales in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm. The ending was happy, I at least got that.

I know, I am rationalizing and making all kinds of excuses for why they declared me bat shit crazy, but the class obviously spent a lot of time and effort reading and analyzing my fairy tale, and writing me about it. Do you thank them for reading your work? Do you thank them for the benefit of the free psychological analysis? Do you thank them for collectively pronouncing you bat shit crazy?

I’m not sure there is an easy answer. But like it or not, that too is part of being a writer, and singing the blues isn’t going to do your writing a whole lot of good. Actually, it could be something to fall back on. But those students delighted in my bat shit craziness, and they delighted in the reading and the literary analysis that led them to that conclusion.

Despite the fact that I picture myself as an extrovert, and I really like to get out and about, the truth is, most writers are not extremely outgoing. Neither are editors and writing at least can be a very personal profession.

Soul Stripping

It’s kind of like stripping, I used to tell my own students, if you can’t take it off—you are not going to make it as a writer. We’re not talking about stripping down to your skin though, we’re talking about stripping down to your soul. All the way.

On a certain level, you have to do that, even though, if you hang with it, chances are pretty good, at a certain point, you too are going to be out there getting heckled, trolled, and variously declared bat shit crazy. To be a writer, you have to get past that and keep reaching until you grab hold of the universal, way down deep inside, you got to take it down to your soul, the tie that binds us and makes us all human.

Then you splatter your soul all over that paper. That’s what makes writers different from other people, it’s not just putting words on paper though. To be any good, you have to write like no one is watching. You really do. But once you are published, oh boy, it’s the part about soul stripping that can really get to you.

I’ve seen new writers throw in the towel when they already had more readers than every other writer in town, all because of very public and mean criticism of some minor something, like a grammar error. We get that too, but that can be corrected with time and experience. You want to be a writer, you might as well pull out that old grammar book. It’s not optional. We haven’t even got to the good stuff yet and here I have gone from soul stripping to grammar, no wonder they said I was bat shit crazy.

Anyway, if your grammar isn’t where it should be and you publish, you might as well expect somebody is going to start picking at you and your grammar both. And there you will be thinking you just wrote the most astute philosophical analysis since Plato himself, or at least Sartre, and someone will call you out and drag you over every burning coal of the Internet because you used “there” when you should have used “their” but if you had really had it together, you would have used “they are.” And they fill three computer screens yelling in ALL CAPS about your incorrect use of “there.” Whatever were you thinking?

Suck it up, that too comes with the territory. And when they finish picking at your grammar, thirty years later, you will still be having nightmares about the word “there,” except now they are tearing into your soul, or your intellect, or something. They’ll find something. One very famous poet had a whole town mad about the color of her house.

To make matters worse, when it comes to writers, most of us are already our own worst critics. That OCD thing is not actually a joke. If you think your self-criticism is bad….

So what do you do?

You roll up your sleeves and keep on writing.

You can always thank them for their feedback, that’s pretty generic. Also remember the old public relations adage, any publicity is good publicity. It may not be such a bad thing at all.

Whatever you write, if somebody writes in with comments, that meant they read your writing, they thought about what you said, and they looked at how you said it. They may agree or disagree with what you said. They may tear your grammar to pieces, even catch a spelling error, and don’t be surprised if, after serious contemplation, you too are declared bat shit crazy, and they tear your soul to pieces while they are at it. Look at it as a writerly right of passage.

If we all agreed with each other on everything, the world would come to a standstill and progress as we know it would be nothing more than a tumble weed in the winds of time (gratuitous literary devices). Nonetheless, I do believe that the most important function of a writer is to make people think. Furthermore, if everybody agrees with what you are saying, they are probably not honestly thinking.

That can be tough. We all love an occasional pat on the back. And we do so love to see those heads a nodding, traffic flowing and that “Like” count going up. But at the end of the day, that is not the point. That is not why we write. Actually, maybe it is.

Some writers make their living by deliberately stirring the pot. I’m not one of them. See above about OCD. But I’m not saying that I am completely past singing the byline blues either, sometimes a comment will get to me too. Comments come with the territory.

Also, sometimes maybe a comment is valid, and you learn from what was said. Online especially though, some folks just look for whatever opportunity they can find to shovel whatever negativity they can. And they do so love to shovel it at writers. If you write for any length of time and publish online, you are almost surely going to run into a few of them.

Fans are a lot of fun, but you can pretty much count on meeting a few self-appointed foes along the way as well. After a while you learn to recognize them for what they are, ignore them if you must, but don’t be afraid to block them if they affect your other readership. Learning to deal with such is a reality for writers today. Either way, keep on writing. Dealing with a classroom full of literary explications simultaneously declaring you bat shit crazy, can be small potatoes to the blues you get when dealing with trolls. But don’t let any of them stop you from writing.

In some kind of way, that and the blues are part of it. Vent, rant, and yell if you must, but keep on writing, even when you are singing the byline blues.

Lost Writings

2014-01-23T09:07:00.000-08:00

Lately, I’ve just had my head down and working, day jobs, bills to pay and all that.

If you haven't figured it out yet, I am right near the point of being one of those sweetly eccentric little ladies who wrote all her life and nobody knew she was writing. Actually, most everybody knows I write, but I never did a whole lot with my poetry and fiction, mostly just tucked all that stuff away in the nooks and crannies of my life, as in house, which at this point looks about like a candidate for a budding hoarder show.

I have been gradually working through it though, if for no other reason than to not leave such a mess for my kids when I am gone. Something about a bucket list after my now infamous accident, after which every day I am still alive, I am absolutely amazed to still be walking this earth. At a certain point though, one does understand, it is time to "get er done!"

Anyway, the other day, while in the process of looking for an old article that I wanted to re-purpose, I came across several of my short stories, and some poems that I had torn the house apart for several times and never could find.

Of course, they were in an old article file from one of my former activist focused writer gigs. Where else would one file their short stories and poetry?

The current plan, which I am in the process of implementing, I am going to release the series of short stories on Amazon Kindle, which is basically a computer format. If you have a Kindle, you can read them on that, if not, you can read them on your computer. The first of the series should be out in a couple weeks, still in the editing and conversion process, but I already got the cover. So it is moving right along.

I did some serious thinking about it all though, as in whether I should use a pen name. I have thought about this many times before, could be that is why some of that stuff was still in that file, never to see the light of day.

After much contemplation, and discussion with my sweet baby sister, she said that I had already shocked people plenty with my activist inclinations, one more time wouldn't matter too much and it would be right in character, as in people fully expect to be shocked by what I do, or something like that.I'm still scratching my head on that one.

Anyway, if you have ever found your mouth hanging wide open from my activist binges, who despite my best intentions, somehow apparently managed to get some kind of name, putting my own name on some of my own writing might well turn out to be the most gutsy thing I have ever done in my life. "Journey" should be the first out, in a couple weeks or thereabout. It is a short story "of sex, love and madness," kind of in a modern Gothic romance kind of genre. It is really not that naughty, but it is probably not something you will want to read to the kids.

Yep, I did that too.

The Family Ghost

2013-10-27T17:14:00.000-07:00

This post falls under the heading of what I started with on this blog, stories of life that I always figured that someday, I would get around to telling. Such as it is, I am not going to bury this one. I did save it for just the right season though.
-----

In the last year, I have thought much about my mortality and the things I wanted to get written before I was gone. Somehow, the family ghost(s) was not on the list, or maybe it was. It is not that I ever officially said, well yes, I do believe in ghosts. Somewhere along the way though, I realized that no matter how logical we want reality to be, there are some things we just plain do not understand. And ghosts are one of those things.

Most of the time, when the subject of ghosts comes up, I have avoided mention of my own. One does so love to maintain a semblance of normalcy, the illusion of sanity. Be that as it is, with all these books and stories and histories of ghosts, it’s time to fess up, this one is among those stories that I am not inclined to take with me to the grave. We have a ghost(s). And we pretty much have, since we moved into this house.

We had only been in the house maybe a couple weeks when we had our first encounter. Actually, my daughter had the first encounter. I am trying to remember her exact age, she was still in the carry her around in your arms, diaper wearing stage, less than two years old. But she had a few words, and one word that she communicated very distinctly was “Baby.”

I was walking through the kitchen with her in my arms, and suddenly, she reached for the ceiling and squealed “Baby!” almost jumped out of my arms reaching, like very small children do, when they are so excited to see another little person just like them. Except she was reaching for the ceiling, and there was nobody else around. The first time it happened, I brushed it off, didn’t think much about it. The kitchen is more like a great room, with a cathedral ceiling, and I figured maybe she saw a shadow—or something. The second time it happened, I squinted trying to make out what she was seeing. I didn’t see a thing, tried again to make out—a shadow—maybe. About the third time, she started excitedly squealing “Baby,” and excitedly reaching toward the ceiling, for something I still couldn’t see, I thought maybe I would say something to one of the neighbors the next time I ran into one of them.

Well, the next time, I am in the yard, here comes the neighbor walking over to my fence, “Did you hear about the baby?”

“What baby?”

“The people who lived there before you, their baby drowned in a swimming pool not long after they moved out of the house.”

I never met the family who lived there before us, never knew the child’s name. My own daughter was too young to have a clue what a ghost was, but after so many instances, there was no doubt, she was seeing and communicating with something that appeared very childlike to her. It was also eerie that in these early experiences, the apparition was always above us.

That was the start, but over the years, we had a number of what would be considered paranormal experiences in the house. When the kids were in elementary school, there was a while that it seemed to be a perpetual problem. And I do mean problem. Somebody was always seeing something. My son, who was maybe ten years old at the time, was in the backyard, and swore somebody was walking behind him. In the same time-frame, he had walked past me, looked at the wall beside me, which was toward the hall, and said, “There’s a dog man.” He pointed and kept going. Didn’t even stop. He doesn’t remember that now, but it sure stuck with me at the time.

Over the years, there were a number of instances in that hall. More than once during this time, out of the corner of my eye, I would catch a fleeting glimpse of a shadowy being that seemed to hurry away when it realized it had almost been seen. But it was always an almost, I never really saw a thing, nothing that I could define.

And then there was the neighbor’s kid. Late one night, one of the neighbor’s kids, she was around 16 at the time, started banging on our door to wake us up. She was terrified and had crawled out the window to come to us for help. She said somebody was in their house. Her parents were asleep in bed and she heard footsteps walking down the hall. We called their house to see if everything was okay. And her parents, of course, answered. Everything was fine. This child was an honor student; she was about as far from what you would ever consider a flake in your life. If she said she heard footsteps in the hall, there is no reason anybody would doubt her. As far as I know, she had never in her whole life had a silly little goofy incident; that was not her personality. She was rock solid as both a child and an adult. What she heard that night, we’ll never know. But at the time, it was just a late night incident with the kids. Alone, it was the inclination of teen angst, ghost stories perhaps, but in the context of the other, too close for comfort, and never to be discussed again.

Even for somebody who doesn’t believe in ghosts, and I never honestly did, but after so much of this, you start thinking, well could be we need to do something about it. So I had the bright idea of seeing a family counselor, a shrink perhaps. Whatever comes in life, I have always been of the mindset that you just deal with it. At least I felt like I was attempting to do something—the most rational think I could come up with to deal with an irrational problem. That was among the dumbest decisions of my life.

At the time all this was going on, I didn’t know about things like parapsychologists, there really are people who make their living as ghost busters, and later somebody did tell me that a family therapist probably wasn’t the best choice for dealing with ghosts. I figured that one out. I tried, I really did. Shrinks, Rid-Damp, and salt. I tried everything. For a while I wondered if a Catholic priest might know what to do, but I’m not actually Catholic. If a person can deal logically and rationally with a ghost, I gave it my best shot. I eventually tried to read and understand what I could. Didn’t deter those ghosts one bit. And the thing is, in the middle of all this, if you had asked me if I believed in ghosts, I would have still answered with a resounding “No, of course not, you have got to be kidding.”

As to the Rid-Damp, whatever you live with, you do your best to deal with it. Being the logical pragmatic person that I tend to be, who never believed in ghosts in the first place, except now I apparently had a problem with them, and no matter how crazy your problem might be, or how crazy it sounds when you try to talk about it, there are some things a shrink can’t fix, and ghosts are right near the top of that list.

So after the useless money I spent trying to shrink the ghosts away, I attempted to figure out what one does to rationally deal with ghosts. For a while, I would go from corner to corner of the house sprinkling salt. I heard somewhere that would work. It seemed like it would work for a while, and then they would be back again, so I kept at it, trying to resolve the ghost problem.

Then somewhere or other, I heard that ghosts really like damp places so if you get rid of as much dampness as possible, at least the place won’t be so enticing to them—perhaps. So how do you get rid of dampness in your house? Rid-Damp, of course. I put Rid-Damp containers all over the house. When an old friend dropped by and I was putting out more Rid-Damp, he was asking what I was doing, and I was explaining my ghost problem as I went from room-to-room and he is following me around the house as I put out more and more Rid-Damp. That was a particularly bad episode and I had Rid-Damp all over the house. Nobody questions my ghosts, my eccentricity, or even my sanity, they just nod their head, not a suggestion at all, and I continued in my mission to drive away the ghosts. And that week it was Rid-Damp.

Needless to say, the Rid-Damp was a complete waste of time, money and effort. Rid-Damp is not effective for controlling ghosts. I don’t remember who gave me that helpful household hint, but it doesn’t work.

Over the years, we had several instances that involved the family pets, when a cat or dog caught sight of something that nobody else could see, and for the cat, growling, and hair standing on end. One instance with the dog, she stood at the entrance to the hall, her hair stood on end and she started trembling, suddenly she broke out of the tremble, put her nose to the floor like she was smelling something distinct, on a trail, with her nose to the floor the whole time, she followed the trail into the bathroom and it ended at the vent. That was it, and she turned around looking, running around in circles, she clearly had the scent of something, and was going back and forth with her nose to the floor, over and over, tracing the same path. But whatever it was, it was gone just as quickly as it had appeared.

Over the years, there was also the realization that we were dealing with more than the spirit of one child. The ghosts are not an everyday or even an every year occurrence, but one can be pretty certain though that once you get complacent and you are sure they are gone, they will be back. And that is generally when you least expect it, and frequently at a time when you really do have real life problems to deal with, in the real word. The world does not stop just because you have a ghost.

The years brought acceptance though and then there was the one time, my daughter yelled out, “They’re back.”

“Who’s back?” I asked,

“The ghost,” she said. “The cat. Look at the cat. He sees something.”

By then, we were past worrying about it all. And we were no longer afraid of those ghosts. I can’t say the same for the cat though. One more time, that cat’s hair was on end and near the same area of the hall where the dog had also had an experience. Also, by this time, we had had so many encounters over the years, it was old hat, and this time my daughter went scrambling for a camera. I didn’t know what to look for in the picture, despite it all, I was never well versed in the lore of ghosts. There was indeed a light in the hall that we were able to see in the picture. I no longer have a clue where the picture is. But that was the day when the ghost went from being a problem to one of the family, or at the least a member of the household. It was there. It wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and neither were we.

The one time when the ghost actually manifest to the point of a poltergeist experience was the morning after my now ex had left. My soul was shattered at the break-up of our family and there was a horrendous storm that night, there were floods all around the area, as if the heavens were sobbing with me. In every sense of the word, it had been a dark, loud, wet, and stormy night.

The next morning, my daughter and I were sitting at the table in the kitchen, still digesting what had happened. She had a glass of something, I don’t remember what, probably juice, and one of those little toy straws like you get in the kiddy meals from MacDonald’s. It was something between a whistle and a straw, that you put together with one of those little action hero heads, then you could blow it and make noise while you drink your drink. We were sitting there and the action hero whistle straw starts blowing. And we were watching it blow, by itself. This was not a battery operated thing; you had to blow it. We were already in shock about her dad leaving and for a minute, we just sat staring at the thing. Then I picked it up and took it completely apart to stop it from blowing. A couple minutes later, the dog goes to the entrance of the hall and her hair stands on end. She stands frozen and trembles in terror for a few seconds, and then she snaps out of it, puts her nose to the floor, and begins the chase that once more ends at the vent in the bathroom, and then she runs around in circles, continuously retracing the trail of the scent, trying to find whatever it was she had both seen and smelled.

About that time the phone rang, it was our insurance man, sounding oddly nervous, stressed. My soon to be ex had already called about his car, the flood the night before had been so bad, places that had never flooded in town before flooded with that storm, and his beloved Beemer was among the damage.

Strange doings, the world doesn’t stop because a five year old ghost or any other ghost for that matter drops by. Over the years, I discussed these matters with people who knew and understood ghosts and the paranormal more than I did. With time, the fear of the unknown was replaced by an acceptance that there are some things we just plain don’t understand. In some of the experiences, it was clear that the ghost, or whatever it was, was a child and communicated with my daughter when she was too young to have a clue what a ghost was. Later, with that realization, in the times when it manifest, I tried to think maternal thoughts toward it. I really didn’t know what else to do. It is not like there is a manual on how to deal with the family ghost, or maybe there is and I just missed it.

With more time still, it was pretty clear, that not all of the encounters were with the same being. Although my daughter’s early encounters were very positive, the time in the yard with my son, and the incident with the neighbor’s child were both very frightening for everyone involved. Since, at times, the incidents seemed to involve more than the actual house, it has been suggested that perhaps the area was at one time a Native American burial ground. Since I too have at least a partial Native American ancestry, I did not find that troubling, and almost in some way felt like, well maybe I am supposed to be here. I don’t know, as frightening as it all was in the early days of awareness, with time, I have wondered what happens to the ghosts when the family moves away. Disconcertingly sad and odd thoughts.

Over the years, I have also visited other places that were supposed to be haunted. Sometimes accidently, sometimes on purpose, at which point it was as much curiosity as a search for common ground. Something I could latch onto. With time, I also learned that where there is a tendency of a ghost to manifest if, for whatever reason, that spirit is not at rest. It has been a while now since the last visitation, but if it was somehow within me, it was my inclination that my home would be a place of peace, strength in spirit, love, and respect for life in all its manifestations. I didn’t know what else to do.

The years have changed what Halloween used to be about, and we do so love a good ghost story. But the day used to holy, for honoring those who had gone before. What was really going on? I still don’t understand it all, probably never will, but could be those ancients were onto something. I have long since quit putting out the Rid-Damp.

Miley Cyrus, Banned NZ Student Video, "Blurred Lines" and Rape Culture Run Amok

2013-09-04T18:07:00.000-07:00

I was aware of the Miley Cyrus MTV Video Awards episode and I will even admit I was secretly rooting for her, but I didn’t pay it a whole lot of attention. Then I heard about a video parody some New Zealand students had made of the same song being pulled from YouTube. When you consider Miley and her outrageous butt twerking, tongue wagging performance, I started to get curious.

There is no doubt, when Miley Cyrus got on that stage with Robin Thicke, she pushed at the edge of everything we consider good, proper, and decent in the decorum of a young woman. She gyrated, she twerked, she rolled her tongue, she licked and she fondled. She did just about every raunchy thing a person can do, and still keep their clothes on. And she did it all on stage.

It seemed that just about everybody had an opinion, except me — at least until I caught wind of this YouTube video ruckus out of New Zealand (NZ). And could be I was the last person on the planet to hear about “Blurred Lines” and Robin Thicke. Not that I watched the awards show, I just caught clips of the ruckus that followed. I honestly just thought he was a Beetlejuice prop, or something. I always did love that movie.

It appears that the whole MTV Video Award thing was supposed to have been Robin Thicke’s show. He was not actually a prop. Although an expected winner with his number one hit song, he won nothing. But he had invited Miley to perform a duet with him. Some duet. They both had their own hit songs, and somehow came together in the middle. I didn’t even realize he was supposed to have been part of the show until I did a little follow-up on the NZ video parody.

No doubt that performance got Miley a whole lot of attention. Rumors were flying, and not just about it not being what was practiced in rehearsal. Leaves me curious as to what was actually practiced. Of course, if you take a minute to look at the Thicke video, think about what was going on, and perhaps what was expected of her performance, given the song…. Could be she was doing a little pushing there too, and I don’t mean twerking.

Although Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” (NSFW) was the number one hit song of the summer, the feminist community has not been particularly impressed and have pretty much been coming out of the woodwork on this one. The consensus is that the song is indeed about blurring lines—between consensual sex and rape—a misogynistic glorification of rape and sexual violence.

In a time when women all over the world are suddenly fighting to hang on to what hard won rights they do have, Thicke’s video performance took everything that was reprehensible about the glorification of a culture of rape, and the objectivation of women, and bumped it up to a whole new level. And he was laughing all the way to the bank. For 12 weeks and counting, “Blurred Lines” has been at the top of the Billboard charts.

For me though, it didn’t start sinking in as to the implications of Miley’s performance, much less the discussions going on in the feminist community, until I caught a blip about a video made by some students at Auckland University. A comedy skit, “Robin Thicke – Blurred Lines [Feminist Parody] ‘Defined Lines.’”

Although it had 300,000 YouTube hits within days of its release, it didn’t hit the news until it was pulled—something about it being derogatory toward men. Really? A parody of “Blurred Lines” is pulled for being derogatory toward men. You know if it got pulled, I had to see what it was all about. You can watch it on YouTube.

It’s obviously back now, but could be their video was indeed derogatory toward men. No doubt about it, “Blurred Lines,” of which it was a spoof, was derogatory toward women. There is also no doubt that it showed significantly more skin than the student parody, which depicted good looking men, nearly naked, existing for no other reason than to serve as sex objects for their women. It was hilarious. The whole thing was supposed to have been a joke, which the Auckland Law Revue students put together for a comedy show. It was pulled from YouTube just about the time it started going viral. Nothing like a little censorship to bring proper attention to a subject.

The video parody featured Auckland University law students Zoe Ellwood, Olivia Lubbock, Adelaide Dunn, and a few of their male friends. Here are some comments from Adelaide Dunn, who wrote the lyrics.

We just wanted to make a fun video exposing the objectification and sending out a positive message to women, also being a little bit jokey and tongue in cheek. Our intent of making the men topless and putting them in their underwear was just to expose the impact we felt when we saw topless women in a similar situation. When you reverse it, you are making a statement about it…. When you take something out of its original context, which was a comedy skit show, people are going to take it as more of a political statement than we intended it to be…. But if you can start a discourse on what it means to be a sex object, I think that is a positive thing. (Adelaide Dunn, Channel 3 News, New Zealand, 2013)

Essentially, what started as a comedy skit turned into a feminist political discussion.

There were definitely some folks who felt that the Thicke video was pornographic. In one version, the women were scantily clad; in the other, they were even more scantily clad and wore only nude colored g-strings. Thicke maintained that the nudie version was his wife’s idea.

In both versions, it was pretty clear that the women were there for one reason. That is not really that big of a deal; when you get down to biology, we are all sexual creatures. However, whether or not that sex is consensual is an entirely different matter. A whole lot of people took the message of the song as one of blurring the lines between consensual sex and rape. In a time when a convicted rapist gets 30 days while his victim gets a trip to the morgue, the flippant perpetuation of that attitude is not okay.

During my first trip to DC as an activist, one of the older feminists talked about how her generation had worked so hard for women to have certain freedoms. She also mentioned that earning those freedoms did not mean that the next generation was going to define freedom in the same way.

I have thought about her words many times. I’ve been very troubled in recent months with all the efforts toward legislation that will turn back the clock on women’s rights. Leaders are coming forward though and that is clear. Elizabeth Warren is one of them, so is Wendy Davis. It could be that the young Barbara Bush is another.

I don’t know what they have to do with Miley Cyrus, and the growing list of feminist video parodies, except momentum is growing in more than one way. Women are not ready to give up the gains they have made. If Miley Cyrus got tongues wagging, the students in New Zealand got some people thinking. Obviously, if he has a number one hit, Robin Thicke has countless fans. Everyone wasn’t shouting hooray though, and the video left a whole lot of people troubled.

As to the MTV Video Awards show, it really was supposed to have been his (not Miley’s) show. But looking at his video, it is pretty clear what he expected — a good stage prop of the scantily clad female variety. Something in the song about domesticating a good girl with an animal nature. “I know you want it,” and “You’re a good girl,” and again, “I know you want it.” Those are the lines people are picking up on.

Good family man that he is reputed to be, a whole lot of people found the “Blurred Lines” video troubling. Those students and a whole lot of others have had a few things to say about it all. Could be Miley Cyrus did too. Yes her performance was raunchy, yes it was in bad taste; but if you’ve ever watched the video of “Blurred Lines,” it was too, and suddenly you get it. Was it some kind of feminist statement or was she merely stealing the show? I don’t have a clue. Word has it, she has been known to steal a show, crash a party with a twerk. She has also sang “Blurred Lines” with him before. Things sure do look different though when it is a woman overstepping what was supposed to have been defined boundaries and aggressively asserting her sexual power in the process.

Make no mistake, when Miley Cyrus walked on that stage, she took command of her sexuality. She took command of Robin Thicke and his show too, she was not one of his “good girls” awaiting his whim. There is no doubt, she was rude, raunchy, sexually aggressive, and condescending toward Thicke. Her performance was an indisputably despicable display of onstage depravity. Could be she nailed it though. Although the vocals were lovely, his song was rude, raunchy, and sexually condescending toward women.

Miley cut the glitz, trashed the glamor and played it for what it was. The award winner for “The Most Misogynistic Video Song Performance of the Year” was righteously upstaged, turned into a nameless sexual prop, much like the women he sexualized in his own videos, and subsequently emasculated — by a twenty year old “Disney sweetheart” and a growing list of young feminists who somehow have the appearance of having been directly spawned by the implications of the lines that were way to blurred in his song. It took me a minute, but I finally got it.

Go, Miley go!

PS — Although the move did not originate with her, shortly after Miley Cyrus’ MTV award show performance, the word “twerk” was officially entered into Britain’s Oxford Dictionaries.

Originally published on Forward Progressives September 4, 2013

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