The Thinking Man

The Ironic Juxtaposition of MLK and DJT on the Same Day

2025-01-20T05:48:00.000-07:00

The Presidential Inauguration Aside...nor the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Celebrations.

One was a man of peace and humanity; the other is a psychopath, sociopath, narcissist who only plays at being a man of peace or love or understanding or—well that phase of his persona is over. He has taken off his mask numerous times since the 2020 election where he lost solidly. He then led an insurrection in an attempted coup on January 6, 2021, for which he did not take responsibility, for which his cult followers came to DC and attempted to physically overthrow the government, those gathered in the nation's capital in the people's house.

He watched the violence unfold on his own special TV, no doubt in the same room where he stuffs his gullet with Big Macs and throws ketchup against the wall, where he watched that day, where he allowed the violence he had unleashed to continue on into the afternoon of January 6, 2021, where he allowed insurrectionists to roam the building looking for Mike Pence to hang him and for Nancy Pelosi to drag her feet-first down the steps of the capitol and bang her head on each step. He allowed the blood to boil in hatred and marinated it with his inaction.

The treasonous President had never been held accountable for any of his crimes during his life...not once, not quite then at the electoral college certification of Biden as the new president, where he finally called off the rioters and told them to go home. The only compassion he chose to show that day was only to the insurrectionists and put himself in the same group..."we love you. Go home."

Will he pardon all of them on this inauguration day? Or tomorrow?

Make no mistake, Susan Collins, he didn't "learn his lesson" when you joined your other spineless Republican senators to find him not guilty in his first impeachment.

And now, he's backed by the oligarchs of America and welcomed by the dictators across the globe—especially those who took power by destroying their own government from the inside. Day 1 agenda.

Now comes the capitulation from the sheep and the unconscious (as apposed to "woke"); now comes the collaborators who will turn in their neighbors for not being compliant with the dictator, not duly appreciative of his largess. Or is that large ass?

So let's honor Martin Luther King, Jr. the offspring of slaves and the overthrower of slavery. Let's honor black lives as the dictator steps into the White House, where he will believe he is great and powerful and is nothing more than a sand storm over the country, making things gritty and rough on the surface.

Let's dishonor the man who would be dictator, let's resist, beginning on this day. Let's not say his real name. What is it the Dark One says: I am known by many names.

The party of Lincoln is dead

2023-07-18T08:24:00.011-06:00

What shall we name the new lawless party that has taken the place of the Grand Old Party?

Mr. Trump and his allies have been laying out an expansive vision of power for a potential second term. Credit...Christopher Lee for The New York Times

This new party would enslave those whom Lincoln freed. This new party would deny equal voting rights to people of color. Lincoln attempted to unite the North and South after the Civil War. His vice-president, Andrew Johnson, who took over after Lincoln was assassinated brought on the further oppression of the South, and the old Democrats eventually became the new Republicans; what remained or what was developed after this include the KKK, the white supremacists, and the extreme religious Christian bigots (Christian Nationalists) who would crucify Jesus again, rather than live by the ways Jesus taught.

Let's call it Reich Americana.

Among those who would turn our country into a dictatorship (some hope that Trump will be the first President for Life) are these people, not necessarily in any order of power or influence.

• John McEntee, a former White House personnel chief who began Mr. Trump’s systematic attempt to sweep out officials deemed to be disloyal in 2020 and who is now involved in mapping out the new approach.

• Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget in the Trump White House and now runs a policy organization, the Center for Renewing America.

• Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, said in a statement that the former president has “laid out a bold and transparent agenda for his second term, something no other candidate has done.”

• Stephen Miller, the architect of the former president’s hard-line immigration agenda.

• Stephen K. Bannon, promised a “deconstruction of the administrative state.” And he is now actively pursuing this deconstruction in the 2025 plan.

Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025. This article from the NY Times is a good starting point. If you've been listening to Trump in his speeches, as we get closer and closer to his upcoming indictments in the January 6th Coup Attempt and the attempt to steal the election in Georgia (Fanni Willis AG), Trump's speeches are becoming more and more like Mussolini and the modern Victor Orban of Hungary.

Some commentators and pundits are content to say now that Trump is desperate and is lashing out, and while this may be true, he is also deep into planning for the second coup attempt, and he has had six years of practice and dress rehearsals, and has the backing of an unseen group of conspirators, those who stay behind the scenes and work within the confines of places like The Federalist Society, billionaires who wine and dine the conservatives of the US Supreme Court, The Heritage Foundation, and other men like Roger Stone, General Flynn...

Age and Wisdom in a Chaotic World

2017-11-15T07:15:00.004-07:00

You get old(er), but do you become wiser?

I hope this isn't going to be a "think" piece. I don't want to dispense wise aphorisms about age and wisdom. Who would care? At 70 years old I find myself living in a mean-spirited, chaotic world. But at 70 I also realize (my view of history) that it has always been a mean-spirited, chaotic world, although many people fear that it has gotten worse. Those with a short view, a lack of knowledge about history, lack historical perspective and might well think that things have gotten worse.

But there have always been slaves and slave holders—even now; there has always been religious strife and wars fought over religion; there has always been a schism between the rich and poor, and even though many think that the rich today are richer than the rich have ever been also lack perspective. There have always been murderers and thieves and serial killers; there have always been rapists and child abusers and wife beaters and bullies. There have always been puppet masters and puppets, dictators and those who advise them, schemers and the fools who believe them.

In short there has always been the powerful and the powerless, and almost regularly through history there have been revolutions, civil wars, where the powerless rise up in such numbers that their sheer volume is able to overcome the power in the hands of the few.

And above all there has always been fear, throughout history. There are those who embrace change and those who fear it; there have been those who explore and wonder and have adventures and live life while they have it and those who are afraid to live. Fear paralyzes some and causes others to strike out against that which they fear. Galileo was imprisoned because he dared to look through his telescope and the Church pronounced him a witch. Men have been put to death for speaking truth to power, because those in power feared the truth. Fearful men will do evil things. And today, the fearful men are those who have the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, but they fear losing their rich donors more than they fear the wrath of the voters.

The opposite of fear is knowledge and a historical perspective. I've learned that lesson over the course of 70 years, but perhaps also that there are important issues that need to be dealt with and unimportant, petty issues to simply ignore. Maybe it's the force of realization that I'm near the end of my life, whereas when I was a kid I could not conceive of my own death. I'm not afraid to die, even though that's one of things that I know nothing about and can never hope to know. Those who are afraid to die will do anything to stay alive; those who are afraid to grow old will engage in all sorts of regimens to stay young, or at least young looking, like having their faces carved and reshaped, and tucked, and stretched, while ignoring their aging hands; men who will father children in their eighties because they fear growing old. The rich who hoard their money and can never have enough because they fear poverty (or something...who knows?).

But once you realize that the world has always been mean and chaotic and there's nothing to be done on a grand scale to make it less mean and chaotic, you realize that you, the individual, merely has to ensure that you are not mean, you do not live a chaotic life, and you work toward stability within. Think about this. Who fares better, the law-abiding citizen who seeks stability in an unstable world or the criminal who seeks to alleviate his/her own fear by stepping into the chaos with guns and knives? Who fares better, the person willing to accept and understand others who might be of a different religion, ethnicity, sexuality or the person who fears those who are different? Those who fear and act on their fear are those who grab arsenals of weapons and jump into the chaos. Who fares better, the man or woman who carries a gun or those who leave their weapons at home? Those who look to others to fulfill their needs or those who seek to be self-reliant? Those who only want to work for wages or those who try their hand at creating a business?

The secret is to be self-reliant, calm within, friendly to those who are different, respectful of anyone who comes into your life, judicious with all things, fair in all dealings, educated to the best of your ability, whether formally or self-taught. Moderate in all things, even entertainment, though fearful at times does not let fear rule.

The Keystone GOPs

2017-09-26T08:49:00.000-06:00

The Republican Party is at war with itself...

Keystone GOPs in Pursuit of
Obamacare Repeal

Until the 2018 elections, the Democrats in both houses of Congress might as well just sit back and watch the antics of the Keystone GOP's episodes as it continues its self-destruction. It was a perfect storm that actually managed to work in getting a majority of GOPs in both houses AND the presidency by a minority of voters. The leaders of the GOP are fond of saying the American people elected them to office and that one of their most important promises is to repeal Obamacare. "We've made this promise to the American People," says Mitch McConnell.

No Mitch...the American People whom you appropriate to your agenda do not want Obamacare repealed. Just the Republican part of the people wanted it back in 2008, which is a minority any way you slice it. but now, not even many of those want to lose what they have with Obamacare. The Keystone GOPs have attempted repeal and replace, repeal, skinny repeal, and all of those attempts showed the majority of Americans one important thing: The GOP is filled with mean, heartless Obama haters. No wonder even those who didn't want Trump at any cost are now completely on board with him, since his actions have been solely in line with your true agenda: take the US back to the days when the rich ruled and owned everything, when there were no brakes on capitalism, no enlightened sense of responsibility to anyone but the rich and the corporations, back to the McCarthy era.

Joseph McCarthy during the House Unamerican Activities
Hearings

The Keystone GOPs are still finding Communists under every bush, and anything that smacks of socialism is to be smothered in the crib. Currently the GOP in congress is composed of three factions: the Freedom Caucus (Ayn Rand Libertarians), the vast middle of alt-right leaning conservatives, and a tiny fraction (but just enough to stymie major legislation attempts) of those who seem to have the best interest of their constituents back home at heart. It's an odd phenomenon that those in the Freedom Caucus have been against any of the repeal attempts because it's not mean enough, and when you add the votes from the tiny fraction of those who think the bills are not fair enough, the only votes the Senate (for example) can count on are those in the big middle of the GOP, the yes men of alt-right Obama haters, the yes men of Trump, who they align themselves with, even though they tried in vain to make him lose the primaries. There are very few moderates in the GOP with enough spine to stand out from the mob in the middle, and so every attempt at repeal of ACA fails on the narrowest of margins.

Tax reform is next. The same factions will be active in this next episode of the Keystone GOPs.

Reflections of a Political Kind

2017-09-26T07:40:00.001-06:00

Or is it a choice between what makes us humane vs. the "Dogs of War"*?

* I'm thinking more of Pink Floyd's "Dogs of War" lyrics than Shakespeare's (who said everything first).

I'm not going to list all the things that our new "President" has promised to do vs. what he has not done (first 100 days). The left/right/fake/real news media have done that to the point of making it all meaningless.

Nor am I going to pin all the blame on Trump or Bannon or Ryan or the Freedom Caucus for what is wrong with the direction we're moving in this country. I just want to discuss the issue behind the political agendas, and that is the U.S. becoming the "dogs of war" rather than what makes us humane.

An Aside:

Apparently to the "originalists", the US Constitution only allows the federal gov't to raise a standing "militia" and regulate commerce and does not allow the US to fund social programs, because it's not specifically spelled out in the Constitution. I don't want to argue for any interpretation of the US Constitution, except to say that like the Bible depending on how you're already committed, you can justify anything in the Constitution. That's why we have Supreme Court Justices, after all—to apply the test of constitutionality to laws passed by Congress. Originalists like Scalia and now his successor are like those Christians who insist that the Bible should be taken literally and that there is only one meaning to be had for any passage in the Bible. Originalists will insist that if social programs that would be set up to take care of those that are poor or ill or in need of some sort of assistance were Constitutional it would have been included in the Constitution. But lets not forget that the original first ten amendments to the Constitution were added because there were those who would not ratify the Constitution without them. They insisted that inalienable rights should be listed. The framers of the Constitution had thought that quite unnecessary, since they viewed the Constitution as flexible and meant to be a guide. But Originalists insist that, no, if it's not specifically written in the Constitution or provided for by an Amendment the Supreme Court Justices cannot interpret such social and humane programs to be included as "constitutional."

Except, of course, when it comes to Corporate welfare and making corporations individuals, just like you or me.

Back to the Main Subject:

So, that conservative view of the Constitution means that we can only fund the "militia", which back in the late 1700s were muskets and bayonets and army uniforms (maybe); no one from the eighteenth century could have dreamed of fighter jets, nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, rocket launchers, and million man armies. Whenever I hear senators, representatives, and presidential candidates talking about increasing funding to the military or making it "great" again, I do have to wonder why we need even more military might than we already have. There is not a single other country on Earth that even comes close to the US Military in its strength and national budget spent on it. A single fighter jet could easily fund the National Endowment for the Arts, for example, or an After School program for children in the inner cities of the United States. But there are those loud and strident voices in the Congress that insist that the Constitution does not allow for such programs and they have been eager to defund all such programs for decades—and now they finally have their chance with the President and both houses of Congress in the hands of one party.

In other words, no amount of money is enough for our military, and yet the cost of a single jet is too much to spend on programs that help the US continue to be a humane country, a country that looks after everyone when they need a hand up or a place of refuge or a program that will help them get back on their feet.

Update September 26, 2017

And now, Trump is itching to use the nuclear arsenal on North Korea, and Kim Jong Un is ready for him to do it. Both these pigs are itching to destroy the planet. And instead of global warming we will have nuclear winter.

Modern Electoral College voters need to do their jobs

2016-11-16T17:20:00.003-07:00

Why the Founding Fathers Created the Electoral College

Don't do away with the electoral college. Use it the way it was intended to be used...

UPDATE OF THIS POST

MAY 5, 2017

I stand by the content of this post written before the Electoral College cast their votes. Donald Trump has turned out to be the demagogue I warned about, but not only that, he has blithely ignored the emoluments clause, and the Republican controlled House and Senate have turned a blind eye toward this. He has proven to be in this thing for himself and his billionaire appointees, carrying through on his "promises" to the common man that put him into office in the rust-belt states. It turns out that carrying through on his promises are only given lip service. Instead of universal healthcare and cheap premiums, the healthcare bill just passed by the House is really only for the rich. The healthcare bill creates the "death panels" Sarah Palin warned against in Obama's ACA. While there are no overt "death panels" mentioned of course, what it means is that the poor will have no coverage; those with pre-existing conditions might as well die, because their premiums will be too costly to afford. But most important, Trump's demagoguery involves saying one thing and doing another, stomping on the least able to fight back, while getting into league with other dictators and demagogues around the world. Who does Trump admire more than Putin? Duterte of the Philippines, Erdogan of Turkey, and he has even said he wants to meet with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. He also loves LePen of France. Demagogues all.

As never before, it is incumbent upon those entrusted with the electoral college vote to do their jobs—mainly to ensure that the people in a popular vote do not elect a demagogue or tyrant. The electoral college was created for two reasons, one of which was to give smaller states more measured power with the larger states in the federal election, since a popular vote only would always under-represent the smaller states. But the second and more important reason was that our patriarchal founding fathers wanted the electors in the electoral college to act as a buffer, should a demagogue rise to undo influence over the general electorate, being easily swayed by a candidate's rhetoric.

The founding fathers were afraid of direct election to the Presidency. They feared a tyrant could manipulate public opinion and come to power. The following is a quote from Hamilton in the Federalist Papers why they created the electoral college. The emphasis is mine (underlined portions):

It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass [i.e., the popular vote] will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations. It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief.

Many states have misguidedly passed legislation that makes it illegal for electors to cast their votes for anyone but the candidate who wins the popular vote in their states. They've got it exactly backward. The intent of the electoral college was for electors to do just that—to cast their votes in accordance with reasoned measure, and if it meant NOT casting their votes for a dangerous demagogue who arose and unduly manipulated the population with inspiring but usually false rhetoric, they were meant to cast their votes for someone else.

Such a candidate for president is reflected in Donald Trump. He spoke directly to the common people in a language of fear and supposed concern for them that they became entranced, doubting everything anyone else said about him, excusing his coziness with the alt-right, the KKK, white supremacists, etc., while at the same time also excusing his hateful rhetoric of immigrants as rapists and murderers, women as fat pigs, and even mocking a disabled reporter, doubting the patriotism of a muslim family whose son died on the battlefield fighting for the United States.

Trump is the closest we've come to a demagogue who is busy putting alt-right advisors in place in his cabinet and his followers are already committing hate crimes against immigrants, blacks, Muslims, and LGBT people. The electoral college voters who recognize this danger need to do their jobs and cast contrary votes against him, even though he may have won the popular vote in any number of states—for example in Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania where the popular votes were close.

So those who are electoral college voters have a duty to cast their votes for someone else to deny Donald Trump from becoming the 45th President of the United States. There is still time for the electoral college voters to choose another President. They should not be shunned for acting as a buffer against tyranny but, rather, be respected for it. This is precisely why the electoral college was created by the founding fathers. It was not meant to act as a rubber stamp.

There is no doubt that the vast majority of Donald Trump supporters are decent, hard-working people, who are not any more prejudiced or racist than other voters. The difference is, however, that they were duped by Donald Trump who exaggerated the threat to the nation if he wasn't elected, who throughout his campaign dealt in innuendo (going so far as to insinuate that Hillary Clinton should be taken care of by someone who supports the Second Amendment) and gleefully allowing his rallies to chant "lock her up" and even "kill her." And electoral college voters should remember the way in which Donald Trump announced his candidacy, by implying that the vast majority of immigrants from Mexico were to be criminal, thus relying on fear to scare Americans that immigrants would be taking their jobs, raping their women, dealing in drugs, and murdering American citizens. His inflammatory rhetoric continued right up to election day.

Common Threads in the Life

2016-09-11T12:22:00.001-06:00

A series dedicated to the common threads that run through most LGBT people's lives...

Way back in the 1960s when I was in high school in Deming, New Mexico, and lived on a farm, I felt isolated even from those who lived in town. Back then, Deming was a whopping 6,000 people, and the high school had about four hundred students. Oh, I dated early, and in the beginning, my father had to drive me to pick up the girl, drop us off at the event (football game, basketball game, City Hall dance...whatever). And later, when I got my driver's license at sixteen, I borrowed the family car and took girls out to the movies, attended the prom with a date, and otherwise cruised Main Street like all the other bored teenagers in the small town. But there was something nagging at me. I had a full-blown crush on a boy and simply didn't know that's what it was. I couldn't even speak to him in the hallways. I was afraid of him and thought about him all the time.

One day, during the summer between my junior and senior years in high school, I was driving the tractor, and singing some song (I believe part of the lyrics were "everybody loves somebody sometime"), and it hit me in the pit of my stomach as it dawned on me that I was in love with that boy. I realized it was a crush. I was so isolated and ignorant back then, I had no word to describe what that attraction was. And then a kindly uncle of mine gave me a copy of Look Magazine. He only said that I might find one of the articles in there interesting. He turned the magazine to the article and told me to go ahead and read it. He didn't hover as I read but left me alone. It was an article about the shadowy world of gay bars in New York City, where homosexuals gathered.

A lightbulb went off in my head...duh...!

I knew instantly that I was one of those, a homosexual, and everything fell into place for me. Even today, I silently thank my uncle for that little nudge he gave. He must have watched me growing up and saw what I was going through. No...people...he did not abuse me. He was just a lot more worldly and he helped out a nephew in a subtle way.

Years passed, and several boyfriends and an ex-wife later, I wrote my first novel called Common Sons. It was a coming out story. It was set in my hometown (named changed to "Common", which in my mind meant ordinary), and it was about a farmer's son and a preacher's son. I wrote about what I knew, but it was not autobiographical, because unlike my real life, the farmer's son in my novel fell in love with another boy and they became best friends and by the end of high school they wanted to be together in a close approximation of marriage. The preacher son's parents kicked him out. The farmer son's family took him in, and even when they found out that their son and the preacher's son had gone from friendship into a sexual relationship they allowed the two boys to live on the farm in a separate house. The father understood better than the mother and he made a deal with his son that if he could prove that what he and his boyfriend had was genuine and respectable, he wouldn't stand in his way.

That was the first "thread" in my Common Threads in the Life series. It was about coming out, an experience I believe that all gays experience in many varied ways; gays having to deal with their parents and their church. I set the novel in 1965. I purposely chose to set it in a place in the middle of nowhere, so that the two young men would have to invent their own life together. Unlike today, the Internet was not available to isolated young men and women who realized they were gay, and it was unusual, back then, for such isolated young people to move off to some big city where they could be a part of the gay life, no matter how sordid and shadowy it might have been. Instead once they were out of school and on their own, many of them drifted to the bigger cities, but many others stayed in their hometowns, and this was another common thread I wanted to include.

My next novel, The Blind Season, involved other "common threads" that run through gay people's lives, particularly those gays and lesbians who want to have children of their own. Back in the late sixties, early seventies, finding a surrogate mother was one of the methods that gay couples chose; this has also been the method that barren straight couples often use. In the case of Joel and Tom and the woman who agreed to become the mother, the surrogacy part was only temporary, since in some ways the mother never completely gave up her child (but that's the subject of other books in the series). Nonetheless, parenting and how to adopt, find a surrogate, or become artificially inseminated is a common thread.

Another of the common threads that many people experience in their lives is the struggle against (usually) the religion they inherited from being born into any given family.

By 1998, when the ex-gay programs were going full swing in the US and almost world-wide, I wanted to show the harmful effects of these reparative- therapy-based programs, laced with anti-gay religious undertones. Like the throwback cures of the 1950s that involved in some cases lobotomy and castration, the modern but cruel reparative therapy methods were rampant. Maybe a small percentage of LGBTs have actually subjected themselves to ex-gay cures, but eventually these were all seen to be ultimately harmful. So I wrote about an ex-gay group that was more based upon Anita Bryant's fourteen-step program, along with throwing in a basic-training-type of tough program. I chose a new character for this book, The Salvation Mongers, whose lover of five years committed suicide after going through the Reverend Rafferty's program. Kelly O'Kelley becomes a major character in later books in the series, as well. This is an ugly, cruel book, but I consider it an important part of the common threads series, and if you have not read it because you don't want to read an ugly, cruel book, do it anyway. Your enjoyment of the next book in the series will be enhanced a thousand fold.

While violence against LGBT people has also, unfortunately, been a common thread that runs through the LGBT communities, as the 1990s gave way to the 2000s, bullying in schools, attacks on the streets, hatred from the pulpits of the fundamentalist churches against LGBTs has risen higher and higher, and so it was for Tom and Joel Allen-Reece in the fourth novel, The Gathering, where an old nemesis (also involved in the Reverend Rafferty's cure program) makes his way back to Common. This villain unfortunately reflects another common thread: quite often the homophobes who do violence to LGBT people are themselves homosexual, and it becomes even more toxic when it gets tangled up with their religious upbringing. How many anti-gay, fundamentalist Christian preachers in the last few years have themselves been caught having same-sex partners? How many anti-gay politicians, likewise, have themselves been caught having same-sex partners?

As the years passed and as my volume of novels in the Common Threads series accumulated, I realized I had to finally stopper the series, so in an attempt to finish the series, I wrote A Summer's Change, and kept writing for several years, until the single volume I had been promising my fans grew too large; so I broke it into three volumes.

A Summer's Change Book I The Runaway explores not only the many ways in which LGBT people have sought to form families (I think in some ways they call them blended families), I felt it was also time to introduce a transgendered individual, and I made the MTF individual be one of a new character's grandmother. Oh yes. Even though Granny Mackenzie (Mack) never went through the surgery, she was every bit a grandmother to Jared Rory, the runaway in this book, whom she had adopted as a newborn, when the mother died, practically in childbirth (but you'll have to read the story to find out the details). Transgenderism is a common thread among those in the blended universe of "queer" people that we have embraced, and it was with a great deal of thought that I wondered what such a character would be like. I also wondered what influence such an individual would have over a child who had never known any other family but his transgendered grandmother. Surely, he would view the world and sexuality and identity with a much more fluid eye; he would no doubt be open to Q(uestioning) his own identity. He would also wonder if he was being an ordinary boy, once puberty hit, and his sexual attractions would soon be falling into place like the pieces in a mental, emotional, and physical puzzle.

The Summer's Change trilogy, if you will, flows from one book to the next, so in A Summer's Change Book II A Season of Family, I sought to show how the core family of Tom and Joel, their daughter Shara, and Eva Reece ripples out to include not only Eva's natural children but her adopted children, their children, and their children's children. It's not only blended from adoption, but also blended because even though only Joel is the gay son, one of the adopted son's three boys is also gay, and one of Eva's adopted sons (out of three) is also gay. It is also a blended family because of the ethnic diversity that results as a result of one of the adopted sons marrying an Indian woman (ancestrally from India). By the time 2005 comes around in this series, Eva Reece is the matriarch of a family that spans four generations. It's a doggone saga by this time.

And finally A Summer's Change Book III The Rest of Their Lives takes this marvelous family all the way to the present of 2015. Just like American society has undergone immense changes since the mid-1960s and post 9/11, so does this family. Individual members are more sophisticated in this new millennium and of course everyone in the family knows what homosexuality is. I've often wondered if readers think I am just stuck on writing about teenagers and getting them involved in unlikely long-term relationships when they're still wet behind the ears. So, readers will see Tom and Joel through the years grow from eighteen and nineteen-year-olds to being in their late sixties. Besides those two, of course there is Henry (an adopted son) Reece who does not "come out" to himself until he is in his mid-thirties.

I know there is a divide among gay men (probably lesbians, as well); some gay men don't think we should be trying to pair off and form monogamous relationships as a cheap version of heterosexual marriage; other gay men want nothing else besides finding a life-partner to grow old with. Some LGBT people mourn the loss of the shadow world of homosexuality and the demise of the gay bars, the self-ghetto-izing we had until of late made our safe places where we could be ourselves and we could shut out the cisgender world of heterosexuals. Some LGBT people want to be ordinary people even though they are not straight. They want to hang out with friends in nightclubs where it doesn't matter if you're gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered. Others want this to fade away, so that our creativity is not endangered or watered down by mixing too freely with heterosexuals. There will be those who object to every book I have ever written because I come down on the side of mixing with the whole of society, while still being glad to be gay. I even realize that some of my early fans have been slightly disappointed that I didn't keep Tom and Joel young or without a child. As the series grew, I guess I grew with it. I could well see past the time when Tom and Joel would grow up, when they would not be the center of the novel. But I've come to know my characters like I know members of my extended family in real life. In fact, my characters are just as real to me as are some of my cousins and aunts and uncles that I don't see very often. Forgive my writer's fantasy that my characters end up speaking to me as I write their story.

I'm not too crazy, not too confused about what is real and what is just part of my imagination, and better this kind of hallucination than thinking that the Walmarts around the country are being readied to act as prison camps.

Historic Home for Sale

2015-01-08T11:32:00.004-07:00

MLS # 1403289

See this listing.

I don't normally depart from the socio-political themes in this blog, but this beautiful house for sale at a low price of $598,000 is something for those who want to live in a milieu of shops, coffee houses, and restaurants, dripping with history. Built in 1853, this house and the village of Mesilla was part of Mexico. A year later, following the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ceded a vast expanse of land to the United States, this house and the town became part of New Mexico (at that time a territory). New Mexico would eventually become a state in 1912.

Note the authentic vitas and latillas
in this room

Mesilla was once the largest settlement between San Antonio, Texas, and San Diego, California. It was a major stage stop on the historic Butterfield/Overland stage lines, as well as the site where the Pony Express ran. Movies have been made here. The house is just steps away from the historic plaza, teaming with tourists, shops, and history. Billy the Kid walked these streets. The people here are friendly and interesting and will embrace you. Gay and Lesbian couples are just as welcome here as are their heterosexual counterparts. This is a getaway location where the weather is mild year round. This is a destination for snowbirds, photographers, hikers, historians, intellectuals, and interesting people.

Every nook and cranny of this historic house is a delight to the eyes, a surprise to those who know quality when they see it. Click on these pictures to get the stunning full-size view. Every street and alleyway of Mesilla is likewise stunning. Don't let Mesilla's rustic appearance fool you. Behind those unassuming adobe walls on every street are lovely interior spaces, some that will take your breath away.

The house has been extensively renovated with new electrical, appliances that are only three years old, with current warrantees. The design and architectural expert who renovated this house has been the recipient of numerous awards, his antique and art collection (much of which will be sold separately to the home buyer) has been the destination of arts councils, historians, and historic register visitors. The house is fully adobe, with two-foot-thick adobe walls throughout, with original vigas. It boasts the only true courtyard house in all of mesilla, surrounded by house on all four sides. The courtyard has been reconfigured as an outdoor room with a bubbling fountain, potted plants, porch and open areas. The building is zoned residential/commercial and the current owners lease one side of the house as a commercial space. It could be part of the house or it could be made into a separate apartment. All the rooms in the house look out on the courtyard.

Note the artistic flow of the vitas, the fireplace

The courtyard is of course the center of life in this house, pleasant for outdoor dining, parties, or even sunning away those unwanted tan lines, which can be done in total privacy.

A famed Mexican architect and world-renowned artist chose
traditional Mexican colors, which is how courtyards in the
deserts of northern Mexico are painted.

Armoires, outdoor tables, and even some of the bookshelves for this house were built in Mexico by craftsmen. The house is punctuated with Spanish Colonial art, including a seventeenth century hand-carved religious statue.

More about this house can be found at Realtor.com. Mesilla and this house are perfect for retirees or even couples that want a home of stunning beauty and elegance away from the churning grind of big cities for extended stays.

This house has stood for over a hundred, sixty years, and will no doubt outlive the modern McMansions being built today.

More Gays and Lesbians Than You Think

2013-11-14T12:31:00.002-07:00

Two to ten percent as LGBT is too small—I knew that!

A new study, which attempts to correct for problems with current survey methodology (even when anonymous we don't always answer honestly), finds that 19 percent of Americans don't consider themselves heterosexual. See the article. Further, in this article we find that it's more like 27 percent of the general population, whereas the old Kinsey report suggested 10 percent. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's on a sliding scale on either end of the spectrum where one is either exclusively heterosexual or exclusively homosexual. That number for either end is smaller.

While this is a Presidential Inauguration Photo, say 100,000 people...guess what?
27,000 of them are "not heterosexual."

So, when we hear from those alarmed by all this talk about homosexuals, that someone is recruiting them into the "lifestyle," we can easily point out that such is not the case. There have always been a lot more gay people than you think. I want to add that I am not in any way ignoring transgendered individuals. In a great many cases, if not a majority of cases these individuals might be heterosexual. The point to me of such studies is that it counterbalances the claims of fundamentalists and those on the extreme right who actually need for the numbers to be small so they can claim we're an insignificant number of people whose rights don't matter in the grand scheme of things.

But the other point is that such studies as this one also found that the reason people don't readily admit to being "not heterosexual" even in anonymous surveys has to do with fear. How many garden variety mega church preachers have been caught in gay trysts in the last fifteen years? Why do you suppose they fight so hard against such exposure? It's because of the very fear that they have created in their congregants about the evils of the very sexuality they quite often (apparently) engage in. No person who identifies as heterosexual has ever had to fear the repercussions if someone else found out. It's just not even in their minds and consciousness to fear being heterosexual.

This lack of fear and having to never even be conscious of potential violence quite often leads the heterosexual to wonder why gays have to have pride parades and "flaunt" their sexuality. Heterosexuals are also not aware of how they flaunt their own heterosexuality, so unconscious are they that it's overwhelming. Both gay men and women have had their heterosexual friends attempt to fix them up with members of the opposite sex, because they assume that everyone is straight—and even this is a kind of unconsciousness on the part of heterosexuals. This is changing, though, as more and more LGBT people come out in public. For a gay person, this is a refreshing change from the closets of yesteryear, and despite the fact that coming out makes some heterosexuals uncomfortable, such action on the part of athletes, celebrities, coaches, preachers, teachers, and students is brave beyond measure.

So, yeah, perception is the key. It only seems that more and more people are turning gay. They're not. They've always been gay, they just haven't admitted it like now. Luckily, I live a small town that attracts tourists from all over the world, and when I engage in conversation with them and we start discussing our residence, which is right off the main plaza and historic, to boot, I often tell them that my partner and I live here, and so far, no one has batted an eye, even though they might feel differently inside.

Same Sex Marriage, the Civil Rights Issue of Our Time

2013-10-19T23:24:00.001-06:00

Most People in America Still Believe in Equal Rights

If I've learned anything in the last few years, since gay, lesbian, and transgender issues have finally become part of the American consciousness, it's that most people really do value equal rights for everyone. Of course in the discourse over same sex marriage (which many people refer to as "gay marriage") there has been tension over whether marriage rights are civil rights, and therefore part of what people mean when they talk about equal rights. George Bush made this distinction in 2004 when he seemed interested in a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage or an amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. It came out of the old federal Defense of Marriage Act, signed into law by President Clinton (in the dark of night) which proponents and the majority of our legislators claimed was protecting marriage, not discriminating against LGBT people. This year, however, the Supreme Court ruled most of DOMA as unconstitutional and since then, the flood gates to gay marriage have opened to sue even those states that have bans on gay marriage written into state constitutions, most put into place during the eight years that Bush was in office.

In New Mexico, which is one of only a couple of states that have no laws one way or another for or against same sex marriage, the issue of same sex marriage is on the docket of the state Supreme Court to rule on the legality of marriage licenses issued to same sex couples in many counties in New Mexico. This activity mirrors that of then Mayor Newsom in San Francisco that sparked the Prop 8 legislation there a decade ago and finally ruled unlawful by the Ninth Circuit Court of appeals and not contradicted by the US Supreme Court, which then finally allowed LGBT couples in California to wed. New Mexico is at the brink of this same legality through the courts, but so is New Jersey, and in several other states, lawsuits brought by gay and lesbian couples are making their way through the courts, arguing that banning same sex marriage is a violation of our equal rights.

And we see that the majority of those that have been polled in the last couple of years have begun to support the idea of same sex marriage, especially following the reelection of Barak Obama in 2012, as an issue of equality. There are of course those who still argue that marriage is not a civil right, a kind of backdoor way to argue that everyone is equal but only heterosexual couples should be able to marry based on their special combination of genital equipment and the special sperm-egg combination that often creates offspring. But we also see that it doesn't take "marriage" to create offspring, so it's not a particular magic that occurs only between heterosexual couples, and while it takes a man's sperm and a woman's egg, numerous heterosexual couples who are barren are still allowed to marry and, like gay and lesbian couples, they use other means to have offspring.

There are those who argue that only a "mommie" and a "daddy" should raise a child, because only a mother and father household provides the right combination to raise healthy, happy, children, and of course we all know that heterosexual parents NEVER have gay children. So there are those who argue that if gay couples raise children they will create gay children, just as heterosexual couples create only straight children.

It turns out, as well, that those countries in the western civilizations are moving in the same direction, and not coincidentally, they are the same countries where there is a long tradition of democracy. We see for example that Russia has virtually no tradition of democracy, even though they have a framework for "voting." But then, so does North Korea.

Further, once the military's ban on gay/lesbian soldiers was lifted, the armed forces have done a breathtakingly quick job of supporting gay and lesbian soldiers; and perhaps as soon as ordinary people saw that none of the dire predictions of politicians like Rick Santorum came true, it was another step to see no reason to deny that LGBT issues were civil rights issues. A side note: it is interesting that Rick Santorum never served his country as a soldier, and yet he spoke about order, morale, and discipline in the military, as if he had a clue.

Homophobia: the Lie is Hatred

2012-04-04T00:14:00.000-06:00

Anti-gay protester with his little sign...

THE ARGUMENT

It's late into the evening, not quite midnight, and I've just come off a long debate, after I started the discussion with my comments about an article titled, "Ex-'Gays' Seek Parity with Homosexual Promoters." The gist of the article was that PFOX, an organization that works in support of former homosexuals, wants to hand out a pamphlet from its organization – and says this year’s “Day of Silence” is just exactly the right time for students to hand out information about those who seek to leave – or have left – the “gay” lifestyle...The brochure says “there are no replicated scientific studies to support that a person can be born ‘gay.’ No ‘gay gene’ or gay center of the brain has been found. No medical test exists to determine if a person is homosexual. Sexual orientation is based on feelings and is a matter of self-affirmation and public declaration..."

My original comment was about PFOX and the ex-gay "ministries." It does not disparage those who want to change their orientation. Here it is:

It never ceases to amaze me how the ex-gay people seek to insinuate themselves into something as supportive as a day of silence or as supportive as PFLAG by horning in on lesbians and gays who are trying to help one another with self-confidence in the face of so much ostracism in society. The ex-gay movement tears down self-confidence. A lie is an act of hatred, and I can see no other word for the ex-gay movement but as a big lie, foisted upon a vulnerable group: LGBTs. The lie is that there can ever be ex-gays, which would imply that one can change one's orientation. The best one can do (or what I call the worst) is to deny one's selfhood in favor of something that society will love you for—or at best tolerate you for—and that is seeking a false sexuality by behaving like a heterosexual, because all you can do is "act" heterosexual. You will never be heterosexual.

HOMOPHOBIA AND THE BIG LIE

As might be expected, I got roundly attacked after this, and the discussion among the other commenters continued, some in support of what I had said, others in support of those who disagreed with me. I finally had to bow out. I've been thinking about just what being homophobic can mean.

The homophobe has an overt fear of homosexuality and homosexuals.
The homophobe fears that he or she has homosexual "tendencies."
The homophobe feels that heterosexuality is natural while homosexuality is learned behavior.
The homophobe believes that homosexuality is a choice and that it's only behavior.

The ex-gay movement (usually composed of those heavily into religion) got its start from an outdated, discredited, harmful psychiatric practice known as "reparative therapy" and promises that gays can be "cured" or can "leave homosexuality." The other side of the promise is that prayer, right thinking, right living, and avoiding other gay people and gay gathering places will help homosexual to leave homosexuality. Over the last twenty or so years, we've had several "poster boys," men and women who claimed they were no longer homosexual and went on speaking tours for this or that ex-gay ministry. In one famous case an ex-gay and an ex-lesbian (the Paulks) married each other. Later Wayne Besen, anti-ex-gay activist caught John Paulk in a gay bar; and after that, John Paulk was removed from the leadership role in Exodus International. But perhaps the most telling is the admission by John Smid leader of Love In Action, who admits:

So often people will say someone needs to “repent” from homosexuality. It is something that actually cannot be repented of! People are, or they are not, homosexual. It is an intrinsic part of their being or personally, my being. One cannot repent of something that is unchangeable. I have gone through a tremendous amount of grief over the many years that I spoke of change, repentance, reorientation and such, when, barring some kind of miracle, none of this can occur with homosexuality. Read More of John Smid's conversion to ex-ex-gay, here on the Truth Wins Out website.

The big lie is that the leaders and founders of these ex-gay ministries and the people who support them know that homosexuality cannot be "cured." They really know that the only possible outcome for LGBT people who want to change their orientation is that they merely subdue their orientation. And that's fine with these leaders. They only want to stop homosexual behavior. Therefore, the lie is the hatred. It is inextricably mixed with their brand of religion.

Class Warfare? Who's the Aggressor?

2011-10-11T23:35:00.000-06:00

Almost since the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street "movement," detractors like Mayor Bloomberg and other 1 percenters, have tried to characterize the protestors as engaging in or encouraging "class warfare." In a sense, it's true. The 99 percenters are out on the streets protesting what Wall Street represents—the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and the middle class stagnating or shrinking. We often hear that the "rich," the corporations, the banks are the providers of jobs. Without them or by attacking them (according to Bloomberg), the protestors want to destroy the very underpinnings of the job creators.

Importantly, it has also been said that by not allowing corporations to pay their CEOs a "competitive" salary, those same CEOs—that irreplaceable talent poole of Harvard Business School knowhow—will go to work elsewhere, and America will lose its competitive edge. So, it is necessary to allow capitalism to do its work, to reward "hard" work and ingenuity without restriction; to allow banks to compete in the world banking system; to allow corporations to compete globally. It is said that we must have multinational corporations in the U.S. to take business and enterprise to the rest of the world.

Let's see...CEOs in the US whose compensation is restricted will go...where, exactly?

Well, according to Steve Eder (Reuters, Sept. 23, 2009), Chairman Jiang Jianqing, of the world's largest bank in China, Industrial and Commercial Bank, made just $234,700 in 2008. Compare this to Jamie Dimon, CEO of the world's fourth-largest bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, who made $19,600,000. Chairman Jianqing's compensation is less than 2 percent of Dimon's compensation.

So, let's say that the IRS code allowed for an individual income tax on Dimon's 19.2 million at a 50 percent rate...let's just say that, not that I'm proposing it; or let's say we just passed a law to squash such obscene compensation packages and paid Dimon and other CEOs just...oh...I don't know...10 percent of their former salaries.

I can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth now. We'll lose Dimon and CEOs of American banks and American corporations to our competitors! I wouldn't bet on it. Where are they going to go? Dimon would still be making almost four times what his Chinese counterpart would make—not that I'm seriously suggesting that, either. This extreme example illustrates a point: there is no cogent argument detractors of Occupy Wall Street can make about class warfare and wanting to destroy jobs on Wall Street (symbolizing at least the too-big-to-fail banks and the two-big-for-their-britches American CEOs)

No, the class warfare is made by the banks, like Bank of America and Chase on their credit card holders, or now debit card holders (who made this switch to avoid the astronomically high, usury interest rates. BofA wants to charge a $5/month fee for debit cards, increase the swipe fees to merchants for debit cards. They want to force credit card use on the 99 percenters, rather than using debit cards. Chase wants to charge $20/month on checking accounts that don't keep a balance of at least $15,000 in the checking account. And with Congress' credit card reforms of 2009, which gave banks 90 days to set up their new weaponry, with interest rates starting at 17 percent interest, instead of the 9 percent interest before the reforms by Congress, most of the too-big-to-fail banks were able to begin grabbing even more of the 99 percenters' money and are now making even greater profits off the backs of ordinary Americans.

There simply are not enough shame-inducing adjectives to describe the real aggressors in this current issue of occupying Wall Street. It's unbridled greed, combined with lack of any real regulation on banks and banking "products" that pose the real warfare.

What I don't understand is how anyone who makes less that $50,000/year could ever fight on the side of the banks and the corporations in this "war." Talk about Ponzi schemes!

Burgeoning of the Common Man

2011-10-07T23:53:00.000-06:00

The Koch Brothers, Billionaire Owners of the Tea Party

The Tea Party is not really a "grassroots" movement. It was begun and funded by the billionaire Koch brothers—and then ordinary folk began showing up at their rallies. And it quickly became obvious that the Tea Party was a gathering place for right wingers, but yes, attendees are ordinary folk in every other sense of the word. I was present at a well-attended Tea Party rally right here in my city. Obama was already President, and it seemed that the main agenda item was anti-Obama messages on signs and in the attitudes of the attendees.

On the other hand, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which seemingly sprang up overnight and is now into its third week is a grassroots movement. As I said in a previous post, it may dissolve as quickly as it arose. There are no financiers with a personal ax to grind funding this honest to goodness movement. It runs on people power, the 99 percenters who show up with their homemade signs, not the slick, mass-produced signs one sees at the Tea Party rallies. But in three weeks the movement has spread around the world, a thousand cities and growing. People of all walks of life and political persuasion want to participate. It has taken on a life of its own.

In the United States, people are so fed up with the too-big-to-fail banks and the too-owned-by-big-business-to-do-anything-for-ordinary-citizens congress that they show up at these rallies to lend their voices to the protests. We gather energy and enthusiasm from one another—even those of us who are a thousand miles away from Wall Street. Why? Because the banks that were bailed out and have now turned around and started sticking us common folk with burgeoning fees on credit cards, debit cards, and additional fees on our limited bank accounts; these banks are everywhere, set up to grab our hard-earned money any way they can. (If you haven't already, close your Bank of America, Chase or other national chain bank to a hometown bank.) Meanwhile, Congress is catatonic. It's business as usual at the banks and no action as usual in Congress. The politicians are too afraid to act and jeopardize their jobs, lest they displease someone to whom they are beholden. And apparently it is not to the common citizen that they are beholden. Votes are done in political party blocs, rather than cast by thinking individuals with no ties to one party or another.

And yet...there is a vast middle between all the extremes, those who vote for the person, not the party, who sometimes vote Republican, sometimes vote Democratic, sometimes vote Independent. These are the ones who appear to be joining the Occupy Wall Street movement, bringing with them individual reasons for supporting this growing sentiment.

I am an independent voter. I'm a registered "Independent," but that means nothing politically, because I vote for the person of either party who I think is most reasonable, judicious, and who is actually able to see shades of gray. I sometimes support the same candidate each time he or she comes up for re-election, but only because that senator or representative has acted in good faith while in office. I might not agree with that person on every issue, but I have certain issues that must be supported by a candidate before I vote for him or her. If the candidate, once in office, sells out on those issues, I do not support that person the next time.

My single vote doesn't add up to much, but when it intersects with a million other voices, it begins to gain power. I've hit the mark a few times and the candidate I supported won that particular time for that particular office because I and a whole lot of others happened to agree when we individually stepped into the voting booth.

I believe the Occupy Wall Street movement is an effect of many people happening to agree at this time that what Wall Street represents, who Wall Street represents, has got to be changed fundamentally. How this translates into change in the 2012 election cycle remains to be seen. I do not need a litmus test pledge be signed by any candidate whom I support. That smacks too much of what the Koch Brothers' Tea Party requires in its litmus test of a candidate. And, again, the Tea Party is not a grassroots, people-powered movement, although ordinary people have joined it.

I Hereby Join the Occupy Wall Street Movement

2011-10-05T12:29:00.000-06:00

The movement afoot in the country at the moment to "Occupy Wall Street" might be too topical for it to endure, and its incoherence (what do these people want?) might make it fall apart like a sand castle at high tide. Then again, the movement's incoherence might instead be its strength. It becomes a place to air one's own grievances, gives voice to a diversity of ills, while having the focus of place and people we might hold responsible. In fact, holding corporations responsible for the country's ills, rather than "big government" might just be the right place, since corporations control our government, and the government is now really just a tool of the corporations.

I don't know if incoherence will work, but it just might. After all, obfuscation is the preferred method of confusing the masses, for example, on just who is responsible for this recession (2011). The Republicans certainly don't want the masses to think "stock market crash 2008," nor remember that the housing bubble burst just before that, or derivatives, or deregulation of the banks. Soon, voters will be thinking that Obama is responsible for all of it. I got an email just last night from the Tea Party, and even further to the right, into Separatist territory—the guys that want to re-revolutionize our Constitution—a "Declaration to Restore the Constitutional Republic." The fringe has now moved into the mainstream.

So, is the "Occupy Wall Street" a "tea party" as well? Well, no, it's not financed by billionaires like the tea party is, and the people who're out marching on Wall Street are there because...well...because they've got grievances beyond getting rid of President Obama. I have concerns, too, and that's why I'm joining the movement—albeit virtually.

Credit Card Reform?
When Congress and the President "reformed" the credit card industry, for example, they gave the banks ninety days to get their machinery into place before the reforms took place. And the banks sent out the changes to the credit card agreements while they still could. They raised the minimum interest rates to 17 percent to 21 percent, whereas they used to have rates as low as 9 percent. Any new credit card offers come with "low" interest rates of between 17 and 21 percent.

Bank of America has just announced debit card recurring fees, making debit cards less preferable than they used to be. They noted that consumers were using debit cards instead of credit cards and by imposing a new host of fees on debit cards, consumers will return to using credit cards at the grocery store to buy milk and eggs and will thereby build 21 percent interest into those consumables—as they were before the crash of 2008.

Deregulation? Here We Go Again.
How is it that the banks have virtually no interest rates that enable them to borrow money from one another, at around 1 percent, and yet they must double and triple interest rates to consumers? They do it because the government and the politicians allow them to. This keeps ordinary American in thrall to their debt.

Payday Loans
Further, there has been a rise in the loan-shark industry. You now see a "Payday Loans" company on virtually every street corner that isn't also occupied by a Starbucks. These companies prey on the least able to pay. "Payday" loans are small, short-term loans made by check cashers or similar businesses at extremely high interest rates. Typically, a borrower writes a personal check for $100-$300, plus a fee, payable to the lender. The lender agrees to hold onto the check until the borrower's next payday, usually one week to one month later; only then will the check be deposited. In return, the borrower gets cash immediately. The fees for payday loans are extremely high: up to $17.50 for every $100 borrowed, up to a maximum of $300. The interest rates for such transactions are staggering: 911% for a one-week loan; 456% for a two-week loan, 212% for a one-month loan. (Source: Consumer's Union). But is the government regulating this industry? Barely. I would be more likely to believe that many congressmen have investments in the industry.

The Crumbling of America
Our infrastructure is crumbling all across America, from bridges to roads and rail. Our government, now paralyzed by Republicans and spineless Democrats, will not address these issues.

Our public schools are falling apart and teachers can't teach in the environment that exists in the schools. The best of them fund their own classroom supplies, since school budgets no longer provide them. I know teachers who also buy books for their students.

Our politicians have no clue how to help consumers pay for the high cost of health care. Rather than figuring out how to pay for this high cost health care, they should be figuring out ways to lower the costs. But they're not. In reality, the health care providers, the prescription drug companies, and all associated corporations are the ones writing the legislation. I want health care costs brought down, not try to figure out a way to pay whatever the medical professions says the costs are. I recently had a small skin-cancer spot on my chest scraped off by a dermatologist. It took a minute. It cost over a thousand dollars. My health insurance paid a portion of it. I was left owing $300.00 on my own. I don't want the politicians to figure out a way to pay for this. I want politicians in Congress to simply lower the costs of this service. Did you know there is a related industry that supplies hospital quality furniture to hospitals? I'm not talking about the patient beds, but the chairs, sofas, drapes—anything a hospital could purchase from a local furniture store. But no, they have to pay $5,000.00 for a waiting room sofa from a hospital furniture provider, rather than buying one for $500.00. The costs are passed onto patients. You need a pain pill of OTC medication? You'll pay prescription-rate prices. The medical industry is an all-you-can-charge buffet.

Right wingers take umbrage when someone points out that health care costs in other countries is a tenth or a hundredth of the costs here in the US and that it is universal health care. They counter with the notion that our system is the best medical system in the world. Woah, Nellie! It's not even close to being the best health care in the world. Among the first world countries, the US is somewhere near the bottom. That's because our government is owned and operated by the health care corporations. Why do our prescription drugs cost so much, when in the rest of the world, the same drugs, by the same companies are so much less expensive?

Yes, the system is gamed here in the US, gamed by what Wall Street represents, gamed by the one-percent club, the filthy rich, the multinational corporations. I don't want to bring these corporations down. I want to make them live by the same rules that the rest of us have to live by—laws and taxes.

Late Night Thoughts

2011-10-04T16:41:00.000-06:00

There's just something thought provoking about being awake in the middle of the night, when the city all around me is sleeping, except for those few night owls one sees in all night diners. I don't go out much late at night like I used to when I was an undergraduate or even a little older—not when I'm most comfortable in front of my computer. And besides, I can be in my night clothes at home. But none of this is very thought provoking; like AM Coast to Coast radio, this is the time of night when my thoughts are most untethered and can head off into odd directions.

I think of all the crazy people I've known in my life, or the misled followers, or those that are credulous and quick-to-believe the outrageous. Hmmm...I guess I'm not ready to write about those people, since some of them may have been lovers, spouses, siblings, cousins. In general, though, it seems that people are becoming quicker to grasp the old beliefs that have been around since the ancient civilizations, preferring the comfort of certainty over the discomfort of these uncertain times. We still have those who consort with astrologers, even though it's based in the Ptolemaic cosmology that the Earth is the center of the universe and, hence, the heavenly bodies revolve around it. I can remember in the nineteen sixties when Time Magazine's cover asked: Is God Dead? And I can remember when people rolled their eyes if someone claimed to talk to God. Now they ask what God said. And it seems the televangelists are getting nuttier and richer and more outrageous these days. Lesbians are blamed for hurricanes, and Pat Robertson's pronouncements have to be routinely recanted. It's almost like a planned tactic. I'll say what I really believe, get the idea out there so people will believe it, and then, when I'm pushed into a corner, I'll say I misspoke. No. The plan is to make outrageous, hateful statements, let them simmer in this new believe-anything environment, and then quietly apologize—and not really mean it.

I think of myself in the mid-nineteen seventies, fresh out of the Air Force, new into marijuana, LSD, and an eager member of a cult—but not one where the leader was religion-based. No...he was teaching us to attain "cosmic" consciousness. We zipped right on past being followers of a holy man, seeking some sort of heavenly attainment, and went for the gold, expanding our own consciousness to fill the universe. I realized I was dead inside, as a result of this teaching one day in San Antonio, Texas, when I was walking home and it was raining gently, and I no longer felt a visceral pleasure in the rain on my skin or felt the sweetness of such a day. I felt nothing, and when I got home and looked in the mirror, my eyes looked glazed over. I was no nearer to attaining cosmic consciousness than I was expanding out of my body and attaining information from "all that is" around me.

It took me over a year to think myself out of this belief system. I went back to college, and one day, when I was going through the student union building on my way to class, a shaved-headed guy in an orange robe approached and asked if I wanted to attain the peace that surpassed all understanding. I looked at him, saw his own glazed eyes, looked at my watch, and back at him.

"Not right now," I said, "I've got a French class." I'm sure he thought that I was the one who was missing out on a universal truth, a comforting certainty, and that I was lost in the illusion, that "reality" was far different than what I thought it was. That may be true. I don't know. I find the comfort in knowing that I don't have all the answers about everything and never will. I take comfort in my curiosity and my doubt and I'm not ready to give up the journey to who knows where for the stasis of certainty.

A Layman's view of the Universe

2011-09-25T22:30:00.000-06:00

I was out in the back yard this evening looking up at the few stars I can see inside the city limits, and I remembered being a child on the farm back home in Deming, New Mexico. We lived out in the country, about eight miles from town, and it was easy on a clear night to see the froth of the Milky Way, along with what to my young mind were thousands of stars. I remember asking my father how many stars there were. He said he didn't know.

Nor did I have any concept of much more than the solar system, which we learned about in school. Keep in mind this was probably back in the late 1950s, so even astronomers could only wonder just what conditions existed on the nearest planets to us. And of course, popular science fiction of the day had Martians living on the red planet. Soon, I learned that all those stars I could see, and even the Milky Way were made up of stars, so far away their accumulation from Earth just looked like a brightly lit cloud—that is, with the naked eye.

It's difficult to believe that in just ten or twelve years, we would have a man on the moon. Even in grade school we got to watch the launch of the rockets that took our astronauts into orbit. It was the space age! One day we would go to Mars.

So, when I was a child, I understood as a child, and I asked the kind of questions a child would ask about the universe. How big is it? And if I were told that it was endless, I had a difficult time grasping endlessness. I hasten to add that as an adult, I only have a layman's understanding of the universe. But that understanding is well beyond what the Bible teaches—and that's totally understandable, because Genesis is based on man's understanding of the universe (creation) from only a few thousand years ago, when all observation was done through the naked eye; and to someone on Earth, it would appear and be difficult to imagine that the sun did not revolve around the Earth. It came up in the morning and went down in the evening, and to the ancient understanding, the morning and evening were the first day, etc., according to Genesis.

A companion understanding to ancient men was the idea that the Earth was actually flat, and it was not hard to conceive of a hades below the Earth and a heaven above the Earth. It wasn't until Copernicus in the fifteen hundreds that the Earth was displaced from the center of the universe, who also displaced the Ptolemaic system (which astrology is based upon) with the Earth at the center, and the planets, sun, and moon, and even the wheel of heaven (the stars) revolving around the Earth. It was a comforting, popular believe system of direct observation with the naked eye that made its way into the Bible, and it was a system that held sway for well over a millennia and a half. Even now, those who are fundamentally religious and believe that the Bible is the literal words of God don't question this scheme.

But what astounds me is the vastness of the "Universe." I simply cannot get into physics or even much about modern astronomy, nor the wonders of the Hubble Telescope and what it shows us, because I am neither an astronomer, nor a physicist, but as an adult with an adult layman's understanding I know this.

Our sun is but one star in the spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, and what I saw as a child out on the farm when I saw the Milky Way was a view of the center of the galaxy. I know that the sun (Sol) is at least ninety-three million miles from Earth, and it takes the light from the sun about eight light minutes to reach us. Light travels at approximately 186,000 miles per second, so in that eight minutes, with each second representing 186,000 miles, light travels ninety-three million miles in eight minutes. And yet Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun is four light years from us. That's the nearest star, and the light from that star takes light traveling at 186,000 miles per second four years made up of all those seconds, with each second representing 186,000 miles four years to reach us.

Artist's conception of the Milky Way Galaxy

100,000 light years across and 1,000

light years thick.

Again, this is only the closest star to us, and our galaxy is made up of billions of stars. Such vastness makes me gasp. I learned that the Milky Way Galaxy is one hundred thousand light years across. You do the arithmatic. Add up all the seconds (186,000 miles) in one year of traveling at that speed and multiply that times 100,000 years. Even your handy calculator will throw that figure into something inexpressible to most of us, at least to a layman such as myself. It would be ridiculous to even try to express it in miles.

But the implications of such distances is clear. Our own galaxy is big-ass big, inexpressibly vast, but what is even more astounding, the observable universe is made up of two hundred billion galaxies. And what of the distance of interstellar space between them?

Our Earth is an outpost planet on the outer band of the Milky Way Galaxy, just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies. I therefore find it a lot more likely than what the Bible teaches that we mammalian humans on this planet are just aliens from outer space, and it's very likely that there are trillions of planets in the observable universe in those hundreds of billions of galaxies that have evolved intelligent life.

I say...bring 'em on!

Change is the Only Constant, Part 2

2011-09-23T22:25:00.000-06:00

Change is the Only Constant
Part 2

In the earlier post, I said that change is the only constant, and yet it is what people fight the most. We become comfortable with the status quo, even with our grungy little apartments and walking the same routes to work, going to the same theaters, cafes, and having the same discussions with friends. We like settling into our couches and don't want to trade them in for spiffier models—that is most of us. There are of course those who need constant change, different friends, different places to live.

I'm of the first type. I really don't like too much change too quickly, and yet I am also a first adapter of new computers and software, but not so much new phones. At any rate, to make this more personal, this is what I miss in the way things used to be...

If I could go back in time and could tarry awhile, I'd go back to the farm in Deming, New Mexico, when I was sixteen years old. I thought nothing would ever change back then. I was stuck on the farm, stuck doing chores, like coming home from school and immediately having to jump in the pickup and check on the irrigation, maybe even move the syphon hoses to the next "set" and start those up. Then I had to head to the cow pens, or behind them to last year's mountain of dried field corn and strip the kernels off the cobs and fill two, five-gallon buckets with corn. One to be filled with water to let it soak for the pigs and one for the milk cow. But during those times between school and supper, coming on dusk, it was a time of dreaming of what would come in my life. At sixteen, I only had two years of high school left, and out on the farm, I was lonely and dreamy, and couldn't wait for things to change. Dusk seemed to last hours instead of minutes, and yet, when I look back on those days, I wish I could have that same sense of security, the sense that Mom would always be getting supper ready—a supper of cornbread, "goulash" (not really what is meant by that), pinto beans, and salsa, polished off with a glass of iced tea and for dessert peach cobbler—that Dad would be watching the news, drinking a cup of coffee in the living room, would always be there on the farm, his age frozen in time, younger than I am now.

By age sixteen, my two older sisters were already married (a change that had taken place only two years before) and were living on other farms. My sister Libby and I and our younger brother and sister were all that were left at home. Libby had her friends and was dating, and I had mine. I liked the high school dances, the ball games, and as I look back on it, the sweet ache for the guy I had a crush on, who sent me into a state of nervousness whenever we were in close proximity.

Even that uninitiated longing for something from him, some way to actually go out with him, to share my feelings and not be rejected—even that is frozen in time, but I'm no longer there in high school, except in my memories, and life and I have moved on.

Those last two years in high school were gone so quickly that, two years later, I was in college, loved it, felt like I was on top, but that went quickly by, as well. Change...the only constant.

It also seemed back then that the United States was the moral center of the world, to which the rest of the world looked, the good guy, the country that had taken the right stand in WWII, but with more perspective, I just have to remember the 55,000 young American men dead in Viet Nam. The average age of the Viet Nam soldier was only nineteen; 1961 to 1973. I only served in the last days of Viet Nam, never got out of Texas, tested urine for drugs that the soldiers were using, but if the soldier smoked or drank a lot of coffee, the test results were ruined, just a long brown streak up the glass plate sprayed with silacagel. Heroin would have shown a light lavender streak up the plate, but that was covered with the coffee and the nicotine stains. Later, after I left the service, they began to use electronic equipment, like the colter counter. Back then we tested 30,000 samples a day, from all branches of the service, every soldier. It was an ambitious program—and utterly deficient. That's one situation I was glad to see the end of.

The years flew by, and it seemed that the changes came faster and faster, relentlessly, from one national crisis to another, from one personal crisis to another, from one lover to another, from one job to another, and bam! I'm now on social security, as well as retirement from my last job. The only constant...change.

Change is the Only Constant

2011-09-22T23:33:00.000-06:00

Change is the Only Constant

If you have any perspective in life at all, you will know that the only thing we can count on is change; but if you know anything about human nature, it's that we fight change more than anything else. That's pretty generalized, I realize. But pick any subject. Let's say how long does a country last? And how much does a country change throughout its history? A quick and easy example is the Roman Empire, which spanned a few hundred years before Christ and a few hundred years after Christ...some say it lasted a thousand years. But the early Roman Empire was hardly like the Holy Roman Empire. I don't know how many Caesars there were, but Rome went from being a country that conquered the known world, to one that persecuted Christians, to one that became Christian and persecuted non-Christians.

Again, this is all very generalized and oversimplified. But eventually Rome fell to the newest barbarians, and when it did, boy did the world go into a tailspin! Along came the dark ages (the middle ages) and over the centuries, people forgot about ancient Rome, lost all track of the prior great civilizations, and soon knew nothing but the life of serf and master and the Church.

It really wasn't until the printing press that a glimmer of light shone in the darkness. The printing press was invented in the Holy Roman Empire by the German Johannes Gutenberg around 1440 a.d. That's one thousand, four hundred, forty years after the death of Christ. Since then, only 571 years have passed. But look at how much things have changed since then. Countries formed in Europe out of the ancient tribes. In fact, countries rose and fell. Britain ruled the world at some point during this time, when it could be said that "the sun never set on the British empire," but in the measurement of time, it ruled a very short time. The New World was discovered in the fourteen hundreds, but by the early 17th century, Europeans began settling the new world, led first by Spain in the late fourteen hundreds, followed by France and England in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds, and in the new world (mainly North America) we had a period of colonization that lasted from 1607 (Jamestown) to the late seventeen hundreds, when part of North America lurched into a country. The colonial period lasted about three hundred years—longer than the United States of America, which is now considered to be about 235 years old.

Long introduction, but the point is the United States of America is a toddler by world country standards, and yet it is changing rapidly. America's century was the nineteen hundreds, which followed the westward expansion in the eighteen hundreds. Our Constitution is only from May 25, 1787 till today, makes it only 224 years old. And yet, in the twenty-first century, there has been a nefarious movement by mainly fundamentalist Christians to claim and teach that the Constitution is a Christian-based document. There are even those (sorry to say) that claim that the "Constitution" under glass in Washington, DC, is a forgery. There is a movement to undermine this greatest of all man-made and conceived documents, to muddy the history of the Constitution, to claim that, of all people, Thomas Jefferson was a Christian. While it is true that he was a Diest and no doubt nodded respectfully to Christ and Christianity, the whole point of the religion-based colonies was to escape religious persecution in Europe, and the founding fathers were adamant about framing a document that separated Church and State.

So we only got a couple hundred years of our unsullied Constitution before its very founding principles are being systematically used to tighten a religious grip on it.

And in our 225 year history, we've gone from holding slaves to freeing slaves, and in just the last fifty years, we've gone from being an industrial nation to being a non-industrialized nation. We've gone from importing our goods to making our own, and back to importing our goods. Everything, it seems, is made in China and, now, we can't even make our own toothpaste. Oh, we can, but we've gone from having American companies based in the United States to global companies, with some based in the United States but no longer beholding to the United States. These global corporations have become "too big to fail," too big to be loyal to the United States, alone; and if they don't like the labor climate in the United States, they simply shift their work to cheaper markets elsewhere. We invented television, but we no longer have an American television manufacturer—unless it is a foreign-owned company with a factory in the United States.

So, if someone has enough perspective, it is easy to see that what made America, America, is not what it is today. And it is not inconceivable that a great convulsion can make the United States come to an end. No country is immune from falling. If you have enough perspective, you have to realize that there might come a day when what was the United States splinters into regional countries, as the Soviet Union did. Let's see, Rick Perry could become President of Texas, Michelle Bachmann could become President of the United Midwest States...New Mexico could be reabsorbed into Old Mexico (that's not a very far leap of imagination, since most people in North American think it's not part of the United States, anyway). And for sure, Alaska could become it's own country. It certainly has enough resources to industrialize.

And as Linda Ellerbee says, "And so it goes..."

ANIMAL FARM democracy

2010-02-03T11:26:00.000-07:00

I just finished editing a book about super women...yeah, literally super, like Super Girl. But it was a unique and hilarious handling of the subject, which could be, like, a metaphor for the Modern Woman, and as a comparison, the modern Man, the pig, who can't think except with his little head. The male writer and his alter-ego narrator are brutally honest, while appearing to try being dishonest about his own assets (height, looks, penis...). So the narrator comes across as very likable, all the while completely in awe of the super women he meets, and horny as hell.

My next editing project is not due until mid-month, so I have some time on my hands. So, why not write here?

The Prop 8 trial in SF is over until the judge's ruling. I can't find evidence that they addressed the fundamental issue of denial of rights to a minority group by another larger group. Really, should the majority be able to decide the rights of the minority? I thought in America, all men (and women) are equal; but have we now come down to Animal Farm politics, where all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others? To me, this was the crux of the issue in this trial, and yet it was not addressed in great depth. Instead, the plaintiffs allowed the defense to set the agenda, where they cross-examined witnesses about whether being gay is caused or a choice, whether it is an immutable "condition," whether children raised by gay couples are really as good as children raised by one man and one woman...stuff like that, stuff that the Prop 8 supporters used in their campaign.

I honestly don't hold out much hope that Prop 8 will be declared unconstitutional. I am glad to say, however, that the idea that one group of citizens shouldn't be allowed to vote on another group of citizens' rights.

Everybody: go read Animal Farm by George Orwell. You want a civics lesson in true democracy and the dangers to which it is subject? Read this book. It's not a children's book, although it is deceptively simple.

This is the copy I read in high school. It had a lasting impact on the way I view equality and the way we've constantly had those who would impose less than equality on others if they could. Remember that when blacks and whites were not permitted to marry? Even then, it was never put to a god-damned popular vote. At no other time in our history has the rights of one group been allowed to be taken away by another group—except the freedom to marry by same-sex couples.

To me, it all comes down to the god-damned religious, who really really don't want separation of church and state. We're one of the rare countries in human history that doesn't have a history of being ruled by priests, caliphs, or other religious leaders. We really should keep it that way. Otherwise, we're fucked. Yeah, sure, presidents should look for religious guidance and prayer, if they so feel the need, but we saw in the last administration a little too cozy relationship between the president and the religious right, and it was to our detriment. Let's keep religion in the churches and secularism (and respect for religions) in our public institutions and in our government. I know it insults some people for me to make the statement that every country in the history of the world, either past or present, that has been or is ruled by a strong priesthood (or other religious arm) has been an oppressive country. Our latest example is Iran; a near recent example is Afghanistan; a distant example is Spain, during the Inquisition; another example is the Holy Roman Empire; etc.

The Antichrist, Revelation, Editing

2010-01-17T22:44:00.000-07:00

I work for a publishing company as an editor. Over the past four years, I have edited around 300 books, most of them fiction. I've edited everything from a book of poetry gleaned from an email dating couple, who eventually got married, to excellent fantasy and scifi novels, to thrillers of international political and terrorist intrigue, to novels with gay content—but I have never edited a book like the one I'm working on now—a book about End Times, a survey of the various interpretations of the Second Coming, the Tribulation, the Antichrist, the beast, the horsemen, the apocalypse...that stuff.

I'm not religious, although I hesitate to claim I'm an atheist...maybe agnostic...but really just disinterested in a field of thought and way of being, concerned with, what? The afterlife? I live as though, when I die, I will cease to exist, completely, with nothing beyond. That's what I've come to after sixty years of being a sentient being with a consciousness. It's been a mighty good life. I like being aware of being aware, of knowing that I (this me consciousness) am mortal and that I have a body that carries around my brain, through which I interpret data from my five physical senses, attempting to "make sense" of what it means to me to be a live, sentient being.

Do most people ever give this much thought? It seems to me that if one is religious and believes in God and believes in heaven and hell, and God and the Devil, that there's no reason to think any further than that. But I've also noted that people who are religious and who profess to believe in all this stuff often live as if they don't. Look, I mean, if there is a heaven and a hell and you're going to end up in one place or the other, it seems that you'd be catatonic with fear of ever doing anything that will get you sent to eternal hellfire and brimstone. Wouldn't you rather get those 72 virgins? The white robes, be on the right side of God at his big Judgement day dinner? What do the saved eat? Do they eat or just sing praise songs for eternity?

For a little perspective on Religions, it seems that in these times, which I'm kinda sure are not End Times, the religious seem to be most concerned about how their religion is right and the rest are wrong. Is there REALLY going to be the Rapture? Are there really going to be only 144,000 sent to heaven? What...didn't God plan for the billions and billions of people on Earth?

The book I'm editing makes me think about these things, but the writer is definitely convinced that the Bible, the Christian Bible, is the real thing, and he's not concerned with whether or not it's God's word, but just that his interpretation of all that stuff in Revelation is the correct one. I'm just as likely to get a book about Islam, next, which is just as strongly worded as this one, the writer convinced that when Jesus returns, He will install a Caliph to rule the world.

Anyone?

I think when I finally die, I'd rather just blow away as dust. If I wake up after that and I'm standing in front of the anthropomorphic deity, and he's got a long beard and is sitting on a throne, calling me to judgement, I think I'm probably gonna shit my pants, if I happen to be wearing any.

First entry. The new year

2010-01-05T22:37:00.000-07:00

I've never been one to make and keep New Year's resolutions. It's not that I don't think I have room for self-improvement—sure I do. But like many people, I think there is something fresh and significant about the dawn of a new year. For one thing, spring is on the way, which is more than symbolic renewal. It's earthy and organic and real. And so I look forward to the warmer days, the greening of the lawns, the budding of the trees, the scents of the new blossoms. So maybe, instead of resolutions, I want to bud out, to throw off the coats of the old year, throw open the windows and let in that first light's chilly air.

And to my way of thinking, too. I consider myself a thinking man, which means that I don't hitch my emotions and feelings to some particular group or political party. I don't have a preset bunch of buttons that can be pushed to make me react automatically (even though I do have those buttons and I do react automatically to some things).

I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Democrat. Although I keep up with the news and vote, I'm just as likely to split my vote, sometimes even voting for independents, who usually don't stand much of a chance of winning. But I don't get involved enough to lobby for a third party. I'm not sure the multi-party systems of some countries, as in Northern Ireland for example, is any better than our two-party system—or should I say what evolved into our two-party "system." The tension between the two parties is always there, like the north and south poles of a magnet; and we seem to have this back and forth and incessant tension between those who want less government (who really don't want less government; they just want our government to have big defense budgets and small or non-existent social budgets) and those who want more government (who really don't want more government; they just want our government to have big social programs and small, lean military budgets).

I really didn't like George Bush, the second one. He was unwise going into Iraq, when he could have gone full-tilt boogie after Osama bin Laden. And I really don't care for Obama. He seems almost catatonic. ¿Sí se puede? And just when is this supposed to occur? Ok...I know, "yes we can" as soon as the Democratically controlled congress gets some backbone to really pass that health care overhaul, rather than being enthrall to the medical lobby, the insurance lobby.

And I really don't like the "conservative" radio talk show hosts. I listen to Rush Limbaugh say things like the "four corners of deceit" in which he includes SCIENCE! He knows he has a flock of sheep (duh, duh, ditto Rush!), and he knows the best way to control the actions of sheep is to get them to voluntarily lobotomize their thinking capabilities and to react automatically, to have buttons that can be pushed at will by the leaders. Ever noticed the talking points that these talk show hosts seem to have agreed upon for each broadcast day? They have the same take on each issue, and they pound away at the same talking points. But I'm not letting the "liberal" talk show hosts off the hook, either. Same scenario, same tactics.

Ciscero said that you should know your enemies better than they know themselves, which means I have to listen to both sides "conservative" and "liberal" and when an issue comes up that I'm interested in, I know the arguments of both sides and then I can look at my own thoughts and decide. That is if I have to decide. What these talk show hosts want—both ends of the pole—is for their listeners not to think, not to listen to the other side, to react in a programmed way.

Abortion.
Bam! You had a gut reaction.

Gay Marriage.
Another gut reaction.

Illegal Drugs.
Ditto...

Do you know that there are people who can label Obama as both a Communist and a Nazi at the same time? That makes my head hurt. First you have to know what communism is all about; then you have to know what Naziism is all about, and then you have to realize that "socialism" is not another word for communist. At least I'm old enough to know that Joseph McCarthy, the communist hunter, was not good, and hence we got very close to being a police state in the 1950s. This after we fought a war that saved the Jews from extinction, and after we invited Joseph Stalin into the peace process, to carve up Germany, this after we carved up parts of the Middle East and helped birth the state of Israel. This after we carved up Korea, this after we installed dictators in several countries.

We're seeing a return to the divisiveness that allowed Joseph McCarthy to ruin the lives and careers of hundreds if not thousands of people. We're beginning to see "socialists" under every bush, around every corner.

What I don't like and am sad to see is not that there are conservatives and liberals, but that there are few thinking conservatives and few thinking liberals. We're carving up our own country into opposing camps. We leave no room for moderation, for compromise, for thinking. I don't know, maybe we've always been mean and nasty to those with whom we disagree. Maybe there have always been people who are willing to assassinate abortion doctors, who feel an overriding need to bash gays, who absolutely must go to the polls and vote away some group's constitutional rights.

Ah ah ah! You see me leaning to the "left," don't you? Then how about this: I believe that we should choose the victim over the criminal. But I also believe the punishment should fit the crime.

I believe that we should put the education of our children on the fast track, and that the budget for education should be bigger than the budget for war. I believe that all children should have the same quality of education, that getting an education should be our children's jobs.

I believe that we should pay as much attention to what happens to a child that is brought into this world, as we do to the issue of abortion. Nope, I'm not saying that abortion is a good thing. It's really awful. It says a great deal about a country that allows convenience abortions. But abortions should not be outlawed, sending women back to the coat-hanger, either. But look at what parents are doing to their newborns, their children, once they've been born. How easily can you stomach all the abuse that children suffer? Although the religious right has declared war on women who abort their fetuses, they pay mere lip service to the children that are born into poverty, born to single mothers, and pay hardly any attention to orphans. Oh, yes, there's the Christian Children's fund. But they advertise for donations for children in other countries. How much do they concentrate on America's children? Someone, please educate me on this issue.

Meanwhile...here comes spring, renewal, the burgeoning of sunlight and warmth.