Semi Colon

Three years ago today, after three days of increasingly more painful abdominal pains, I had my partner Brian take me to the emergency room at about 2:00 or so in the morning. After several hours of tests, I was admitted to the hospital early Saturday morning and was told I’d be in overnight for a couple nights while they did more testing. It turned out I had a stricture in my colon that was causing a blockage. The doctors didn’t see anything indicating anything more serious, but wanted to schedule an operation to deal with the stricture as soon as possible. A biopsy was done just to be sure, but again they didn’t seem worried.

Because of my heart medications the operation had to be delayed to give time for the blood thinners to get out of my system. The operation was moved to Wednesday or Thursday. On Tuesday morning, I woke up to a doctor I didn’t recognize standing at the foot of my bed. He casually mentioned that the biopsy results were back and that I had colon cancer. After his abrupt announcement he left the room and left me alone. Perhaps a cancer diagnosis didn’t mean much to him, but when you’re the one in the bed and the diagnosis is about you, that’s a heavy message. It turned out to be stage three colon cancer.

When I was younger, cancer was about the scariest word in the English language. My first mentor, an old woman I admired, died of cancer when I was about 12 or 13 and losing her was incredibly difficult. Back then, people spoke of cancer in whispered tones. It was something to be feared and was almost always a way to face your own mortality. By the 2020s things had improved so much that mortality rates had dropped significantly. I did some online research at the time and found that the five-year survivor rate in the 1960s was a little less than 50%. By the time of my diagnosis, it was almost 80%.

Shortly after the doctor left the room several nurses came in and asked if I needed anything. They let me know they had been informed of my diagnosis and wanted to make sure I was okay and said to call if I needed anything, even if just to talk with someone. Nurses are the best and their humanity in that moment meant a lot to me. So did the love and support of family and friends.

The surgeon visited me and assured me that while they would be removing part of my colon it was something he felt would go well. He explained they would take out the cancerous section and then reconnect the colon. He said it would be likely that they would have to give me an ileostomy which may be temporary but could also be permanent and they would not know for sure until they were in surgery. The idea of living the rest of my life with an ileostomy bag was certainly not appealing, but I made my peace with the possibility.

On Thursday I went into surgery and that appeared to have gone well when I came out from under the anesthesia. But then things went awry. I started bleeding profusely and it continued for quite a while. Several units of blood had to be replaced. I could tell from the looks and the tone of the medical staff that what was happening was not normal and not good. It took several hours before I was finally removed from the recovery room to ICU where I stayed for several days.

Brian and my friend Jackie had been waiting for me to be wheeled to my room, but hours passed before someone informed them about the situation. This was also during the height of the Covid pandemic, so while I was hospitalized only one unique visitor a day was allowed and they could not stay overnight. That first night in ICU with no one by my side was the loneliest night of my life and the first time–even after a major heart attack years before–that I thought I was going to die, and die alone. I was filled with existential dread.

Once I got moved into a regular hospital room I started feeling better about things. I even joked that I now had a semi-colon. Once I made that joke, I knew that I had come through the worst of it. The hospital stay ended up being over a month. The bleeding continued for a few days and there were other complications. I did have an ileostomy and I had four drains in my body for weeks even after I was released. I was as weak as I have ever felt. But as I have done so often in my life, I survived. I’m a lot tougher than I look. Physical therapy helped. The drains eventually came out. After about eight months the ileostomy was removed, and little by little I started gaining my strength back. It’s been three years, but at times I still feel like I’m recovering.

I knew it before this happened, and before my heart attack, and before other significant events in my life, but facing this kind of thing brings it back home again–life is precious. Each day is a gift. Each moment is a gift. And no moment is promised. Cherish it. Show your love. Do good. Experience what you’ve wanted to experience. Live. While you can. Love. With all you have. Don’t wait for tomorrow. Live it to the fullest. Now.

Why I Self-Publish

The likelihood of a self-published book becoming a runaway best seller is slim. There are about four million books published every year and three-quarters or more are self-published. A handful of the releases become big sellers, and very few of those are not from traditional publishing houses. There have been several success stories in the self-publishing world, but they are rare.

In our era, self-publishing is so easy anyone can do it, which is also one of the problems, as anyone can throw a bunch of words onto a page, go online, and send it out into the world. It may be full of spelling and grammatical errors, have no structure and no rhythm, and still sell some copies. It could also be an eloquent treatise or a gripping novel.

Self-publishing is not new. Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass, one of the greatest books of American poetry. Mark Twain self-published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust, among others, published their own books.

There tends to be a snobbishness about self-published books, an assumption that the finished product is not good enough for a traditional publisher to take the risk, but there may be many good reasons to do it. The publishing industry today can be very difficult to break into, unless you are already well-known and respected as an actor, politician, sports star or famous in some other way. Publishers clamor for books by stars and superstars, America’s royalty. Others can struggle to get noticed.

It used to be that writers could send unsolicited manuscripts to publishers and possibly get the work read and accepted. Today, most publishers will not accept work directly from authors. An agent is a necessity and they can be as difficult to accept an author as the publishers used to be. Publishing houses and agents want a fine-tuned sales pitch–despite marketing themselves being something artists aren’t always good at doing–and they want the author to provide a marketing plan up front, proof of the number of social media followers the writer already has, and more.

I spent a couple years trying to get my first book, My Queer Life, accepted by either a publisher or agent. It was finally accepted by an online magazine that had a fairly new book division. The editor and I were just about to start working on editing the book when the organization decided to drop the book division. At that point I thought about self-publishing. I was disappointed, but I realized the book had been good enough to be accepted, many of the pieces in it had already been published in print and online and, to be honest, I did not want to spend another two years or more spending time trying to get it placed elsewhere. I decided to self-publish through Amazon’s CreateSpace.

One of the positives about self-publishing is that you do not have to expend great amounts of time and energy trying to get the book published. You can go online, upload the book, submit, and have it on Amazon for sale within a few days. The royalty percentages are much better than with traditional publishers. The trade-off is that you have to do your own marketing, again something that many artists are not comfortable doing. Publishers will get your books into stores, they have contacts and can publicize it for you, and they are known and people will expect their releases to be of a certain quality.

I was fortunate, at least locally, that I was already a known entity in my city of Madison, Wisconsin after having written two dozen plays for Broom Street Theater, the award-winning monologues for the Wisconsin Veterans’ Museum annual cemetery tour, Talking Spirits, and articles and essays in several publications locally and nationally. Because of that, the press releases I sent out garnered press coverage for the book. It didn’t sell a million copies, or even thousands, but it did okay and brought in my first-ever royalties. It did well for about a year, then started tapering off.

For my second book, Empty Playground: A Survivor’s Story, I tried again to find a publisher or agent. Again, I spent a couple of years at it. The book was a memoir about surviving child sex abuse. I received several personal notes back telling me the writing sample was good, the book was important, but alas, we do not think there is an audience for it. This despite the fact that one of three girls and one out of four boys is sexually abused. I knew there was an audience for it. After getting one too many of those rejections, I decided to publish through CreateSpace again. There was an audience for it. I knew it. The book was released nine years ago and it is still bringing me royalties every month.

After that, I decided to self-publish all of my books, which now number eleven. I have not sold a million copies, or even close to it, but I have gotten my writing out into the world and earned a bit of extra money from royalties. If I ever did sell a million copies, with the royalty percentage I get, I would be a multi-millionaire. A man can dream, right?

Self-publishing has worked well for me, The energy I would spend on shopping a book around can be used toward my creative work. The royalties are fine with me. My most recent book has brought in the best royalties so far. I don’t have to be stuck in a certain genre or style. It helps that I can write a decent press release and already have a name locally. One of the best things for me is that self-publishing gives a writer complete creative control. Some may say that is not a good thing because a second eye is important to improve the end product. But I don’t like thinking of my creative output as product and I have never liked “art by committee” as I think that dilutes the artist’s vision.

For all I know, if self-publishing was not available–and free–the way it is now, I may have still been looking all these years to get any of my books published. But they are out there, and anyone who stumbles across them can buy them and add them to their collection. My career goal since I was a little boy was to be a writer and that dream has been realized. There is little in this world more satisfying to me than to hold a book I wrote in my own hands, to see it on library shelves, or to hear from people who read it and liked it. Self-publishing has given that to me.

The Muslim Boy

There is so much wrong in the world today. The Russian incursion into Ukraine continues. The war between Israel and Hamas rages. Murders are so common in the United States they are almost not news, unless a large number of people are killed at once or there is something so heinous about the murder that the media find it of particular interest.

Despite these horrible things and more, the story that I simply cannot shake the last week is that of a six-year-old Muslim boy stabbed to death by a 71-year old Christian man who, like so many right-wing Christians, is filled with hate instead of the love of Jesus. Apparently, he was upset by the situation in Israel and his Islamophobia got the best of him when he went downstairs to the home of his Muslim neighbors and attacked the mother with a knife. She survived and hid in the bathroom and so the man found her six-year-old boy in his bedroom and stabbed him 26 or more times and left a knife in the child’s abdomen. In the name of Jesus.

And so, the question must be asked: How is that man any different than the Hamas terrorists who killed so many innocent people at a music festival and beyond, or the Israeli military that is hitting the Gaza Strip so hard in retaliation that many, many more innocent civilians are dying? How is his, or any right-wing nationalist Christian in this country, any different?

Hate is hate whatever its guise.

The boy’s mother, when confronted by the old man, suggested that they pray for peace. In response he attacked her and then killed her son. Because her prayers are so different from his? Because she was some kind of threat to him? Because he truly loves her and wants her to be saved?

Because he and others have corrupted the religion they profess to believe, as have many Muslims and Hindus and others. The right-wingers who use so many different religions to achieve political goals in different places around the globe are not true believers. They use religion to get what they want. They bully and terrorize others into believing that they are the true interpreters of whatever holy book they hold in their hands–not to achieve everlasting life or nirvana or to be reincarnated on a higher plane, but to advance themselves and their agendas while redefining those religious belief systems to their own ends.

What it leads to is violence, to innocent people dying for no good reason. The image of the Muslim boy being violently attacked by a person with so much hatred over a difference in beliefs will not leave my mind. I can’t help but think that a boy that age would not even have an understanding of the religion in which he was being raised. Now he never will, and what he and his mother knew of Christians was permanently altered in that awful moment.

It is time to reclaim Islam, Christianity, and other belief systems from reactionaries who have co-opted them. It is time for all to promote and work toward peace and the end of division over religions, race, or anything else. It is time to stop killing children or anyone over tribalism and time to return to peace. It is time for love. For Wadea, and for no more Wadeas. Peace.

Bath Time

There is something elementally satisfying about taking a bath.

On most days, I take a shower, following a regular routine to wash my hair, clean my body, dry off, and get dressed. Once in a while, though, I feel like taking a long, hot bath instead and it is always such a pleasurable experience compared to the shower.

I have always been drawn to water. Perhaps a bath is closer to the safety of the womb, and sometimes even older adults need to feel that comfort and protection of a mother, even when they are no longer here. Maybe, especially when they are no longer here. Also, our ancient ancestors, if they bathed at all, it would have done so in a stream, pond, or larger body of water (or, for those lucky enough, a shower under a waterfall). And, of course, water is our sustenance. We cannot live without it and being enveloped in it satisfies some kind of yearning and gives a feeling of safety, familiarity, and comfort.

Tonight’s bath did not go as expected. I had thought I would fill up the tub with a nice hot bath, light a couple scented candles, turn off the lights, turn on some classical music, and bask in all of it.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to recline on the rubber mat with dozens of bumps like cysts sticking out from it, so I started to pull it up when I realized it needed to be pulled all the way up and the bathtub underneath scrubbed thoroughly, so I put it back in place, noting that there was work to do tomorrow. I closed the drain and set the water to a nice hot temperature.

As the water was filling the tub (I also love the sound of running water), I found the perfect candle. I looked in the cabinet where I’ve always found matches before and they were not there. That started a search for the fire starter we use to light the fire pit out back. I searched several places and it was nowhere to be found, though I know it is somewhere to be found–I just don’t know where. I turned several drawers inside and out and no luck. There would need to be a Plan B. Plan B was to turn on the hall light and turn off the bathroom light and use that as ambient light for the experience.

In the bedroom next to the bathroom, I turned the television to the classical music channel and turned the volume up so the sound would carry into the next room to soothe me along with the hot water and ambient light.

Stepping into the bathtub I realized the one thing I got right was the temperature of the water. It was hot, but not scalding and I sunk low into it. As I did, the overflow started gurgling and wretching like someone with a smoker’s hack or a strange lung disease as I had filled the tub too high while I was looking for fire to light the candle. It was not the most pleasant sound for relaxation.

I could still hear the classical music from the bedroom over it, but when the overflow stopped draining I realized that the radio in the kitchen was still on and during the pianissimo moments of the symphony when the violins and pianos and other instruments went almost silent I could hear Joni Mitchell singing about “Both Sides Now” out in the kitchen.

It could have all been irritating enough to drain the tub and go sulk somewhere else in the house. Instead, I took a breath, concentrated on my breathing and the warm blanket of water washing over me and my emotional connection to it and thought about how much I like both Joni Mitchell and symphonies.

Symphony No. 1

As I lay in bed in the middle of the night, my thoughts accompanied by Schubert, my mind flashes back to a revelatory moment of my youth. I was playing with my radio, tuning in distant stations as I was fascinated by the idea that I could listen live to voices coming from faraway places like Little Rock, Arkansas or Denver, Colorado, that their voices could be carried through the air in sound waves and somehow be translated back into words that I could hear through a little box with a set of numbers on a round dial.

It was afternoon, as I remember sunlight sifted by window curtains streaming into the basement of our house. Turning the dial, I stumbled across music I had never heard before. Upstairs, my mother regularly tuned into a nearby radio station that played the likes of Dean Martin, Wayne Newton, Frank Sinatra, and popular songs like “Somewhere, My Love” by the Ray Conniff Singers. In the living room she had a small collection of records that included The Singing Nun and several albums by Nat King Cole, her favorite.

What I had found that afternoon was classical music and I had never heard anything like it before. There were more instruments than I ever thought possible and they were mixing together in exciting and beautiful ways–violins carrying the bulk of the work, but also flutes, and instruments I later came to know, such as oboes, French horns, timpani, and more. It wasn’t just sound. It was feeling, emotions.

My child’s mind was transported to faraway places and it was if I were wandering through a forest with birds singing and animals wandering in and around trees and I was living in a landscape in my mind. It was like walking through a portrait of a place I never knew existed until that moment in time. It opened my mind and my heart in ways that nothing else in the small town where I lived had ever done before, with the exception of books that also let me travel to distant places I would otherwise never know. It was like reading a book with my ears.

I must have listened for an hour or more until the program ended and then I made a point of remembering the number on the dial so I could come back to it again and again. I did not want to lose this new joy that I had found, and I have since come back to it throughout my life, still with the same wonder in its ability to transport me to distant realms.

On Dying and Living

Let’s start with the basics. You need death to come into your life to know about mortality. Once you accept your own mortality, then you understand you are dying. And with the knowledge of your own movement toward your final breath, you can start living fully. I believe you can only start living then. You can become completely engaged in this thing called living. You can have the fear of the unknown but the experience of joy. You can be fully alive. You don’t have to have a near-death experience to appreciate life in all its fullness, but it helps. It can serve as a reminder of all the lessons that have been laid out before you and forgotten.

It may sound morbid, but it helps if you learn that you almost died as a baby, if your father was gone before you had shaped memories, if your elderly mentor dies when you just become a teenager, or the little girl across town is hit by a car and doesn’t survive, your math teacher and one of the school’s favorites dies of cancer as a young man, a schoolmate’s mother kills herself, or your cousin is killed in Vietnam.

It may sound weird, but it helps to know that one human on one planet in a vast universe which itself is a small speck in the whole of creation is a miniscule molecule of dust that can be swept away at any moment. It helps to know that being a human is a miracle—that this one tiny human in this one present moment of time is real and alive and can feel and think and create. Whoa. That is amazing.

These things affect you. They shape you. They make you aware that life and everything in it can fall through your hands like sand at a beach. Everything is tenuous, tentative, transient. But everything in this moment is in your hands and you can keep it from slipping through and you can grab it and be. Your being is a miracle, and you can let that miracle slip through your hands and go to waste or you can make something of it. You can experience so many things in life. You can give of yourself in so many ways. You can love.

This is important. You can love, and that is the most amazing thing of all. That is one of the few things that will outlast your tired body when it is ready to depart. It is the thing that will stay with those you leave behind who meant the most to you. It is the thing that will stay with those you touched emotionally throughout your life, even if your paths only intersected for a day, or maybe even just a minute.

Likewise, you can also leave negative energy behind. You can be so afraid of the vast unknown beyond this life that you resent that you are even here. It is up to you to make that choice between positive and negative, love and hate, but I can tell you that love is the better choice. You can wrap yourself in it like a blanket and it will warm you when you need warming. That blanket can be shared with others and even when you are gone those who shared in your love will still hold it and pass it on and keep making the world a better place. The more love you give, the more of it you get back. Far better to be a millionaire in love than in meaningless dollars or things. Far better to leave behind positive energy than an estate that will crumble and fall as the years and decades pass.

Does anyone who ever lived really want to spend their lives working away day after day in a job they hate, or at the very least one they don’t care about, making money for someone else who doesn’t share it in any kind of equitable way? It’s different if you’re doing something you love and getting paid a decent wage for it, or if you’re working for yourself. So few of us get to do that. We spend the better part of our lives trudging through a work week just to pay the bills. What kind of life is it to work eight hours a day, come home and eat, watch inane programs on the television, and then go to sleep so you can do it all again the next day? So you can do the things you really want to do on the weekend or on the two-week vacation you are given to escape it all for a brief respite?

Is this all that we aspire to, and no more? How many people do this for decades and die before they can even retire to enjoy what little may have been left had they survived? Look around you. There are people experiencing life in the here and now and not waiting for it to come to them, not waiting until they feel too old to do it. And there are those who despite their age are living more fully than those who are decades younger. It is a matter of choice.

It is because they understand that life is precious. They understand, and they have understood for years, that it could slip away at any moment and they do not want to be on their deathbed with regrets. They don’t want the “but if I had” or the “I should have” or any of those kinds of epitaphs on their tombstones. They want “I lived and I loved” to be carved into their markers when they are gone. They want those words in the hearts of those who knew them when they are gone.

It is truly not that difficult. It is not a task to live, to experience the world around you. It is a path of joyous discovery, and it is open to all who want to pursue it, regardless of wealth, ability, or anything else. Some of the most alive people out there are in wheelchairs and some are among the healthiest among us. Some are anxious and some are assured. Some are scared and some are fearless. It is simply a matter of deciding that you want to experience life.

I speak of this from some experience. I learned of death and the sacredness of life at an early age. At two years old I almost died after contracting scarlet fever, meningitis, and the mumps in a two-week span. My mother told me of this years later. My father died months before this, just after I had turned two. I have no memories of him. I have no memories of my grandparents, who were all gone before I was old enough to formulate memories. I have no memories of my oldest brother who died before the rest of us were born. I lived with the specter of death as a child, and in a strange way it was a gift.

The earliest memory that I’ve always had was being carried to the bathroom by our neighbor, Dr. Garland. I don’t know if it’s a real memory, recreated from things my mother told me, or if it was something based in reality, but altered in some way. Memory can play those games. Dr. Garland was the town doctor and he lived across the street from us, so it was no problem for him to walk across the street for a house call. I know that he visited regularly during that sickness, but I don’t believe I ever went to the hospital, so maybe it wasn’t as bad as my mother feared. Still, childhood diseases such as those could lead to complications or death if uncaught or untreated. At the very least, I was at serious risk and at some point recovered and went back to being a curious toddler.

In third grade I was in the hospital again and one of my classmates sent me a hand-made card with pictures on it of my nurse, flowers, and my grave. Yes, I was aware of mortality, both mine and others, at an early age, and it shaped me. It made me realize that there is nothing guaranteed in this thing called life, and that was one of the greatest gifts I have ever received. Because, really, once you realize that, and only when you fully realize and accept that, can you start living.

This is not to say that every moment has been filled with wonderful experiences and that there have not been days of drudgery. It is not to say that every moment has been happy and that there has been no depression or anxiety. It is to say that the existential realization of one’s own grip on life is slippery at best can help you to make choices that lead you to fulfilling moments here and there, that lead you to positive emotions, and that lead you to take some chances on adventures and new experiences that you otherwise may have been too afraid to try. If we don’t know—which I don’t, and you don’t, and nobody does—when we are going to leave this sphere of existence, then why not take that trip that you’ve always wanted now, why not jump out of an airplane now, why not write that poem or paint that painting, or whatever it is that you have always wanted to do but were afraid to, because honestly, you may not get the chance to do it tomorrow. That is the realization I’m talking about.

I have survived a great deal in my life. I’m a tough son-of-a-bitch, and I am stubborn, and I have a strong will to live because there is so much I want to do yet, because there are so many things I have not seen or done that I would like to, and because I don’t want to get to the end of this phase of my existence without having experienced what there is to experience and without having lived at all.

I am a survivor. I survived my childhood illnesses. I survived almost eight years of childhood sexual abuse, I survived car wrecks, and alcoholism, and desperate attempts at suicide when I was not ready to live. I survived a massive heart attack with 100 percent blockage of my left coronary. I survived stage three colon cancer. I am proud of being a survivor of so many obstacles thrown into my path. But I wouldn’t be proud of it if I let it all go to waste. I wouldn’t be proud of it if surviving all of those things did not lead me to a fuller life, if I hadn’t moved from surviving to thriving. I am thriving.

The thing is, you don’t have to almost die to start living. You can do it now. You can decide that your life as it is right now is not enough for you. You can decide that you want to start doing things you may have been afraid of before. You don’t have to wait for death to knock at your door to open it, walk past your brush with death, and start walking a new road.

I jumped out of an airplane after my heart attack. I took a helicopter lesson and actually flew it for several minutes. I sang in front of a thousand people at a rally despite a life-long fear of singing. I wrote a book, and another, and another. And I did a lot of other things before that heart attack, like acting in plays, driving over a hundred miles an hour, waking up in a tent with snow on the ground in the mountains of Colorado and more.

But I am not you and you are not me. Decide what it is you want to do and do it. Find another job and quit the one you hate. If you want to learn to crochet, by all means, learn to crochet. If you’re no good at it, who the hell cares? Do it because you want to do it. Go back to school and get a degree. Try out for a play. Go camping. Stand out in the woods in the middle of the night and listen to the sounds of night creatures. Adopt a pet. If you’ve always wanted to travel, figure out a way to do it. You can travel in your own town if you want to—it’s amazing how many of us don’t even know the incredible things that we can experience right where we live. There are tiny towns that have city bands—join one, or go listen to it if playing an instrument is not for you. Learn something new. Do something new. For God’s sake—for your sake—live before it’s too late. Don’t waste every precious day you have.

Most important, don’t forget to love. It will outlast you. It will affect those you loved and they will affect others and those people will affect others and in that way you will never die. I believe we will all die and leave this plane, but I also believe that we are energy and energy doesn’t die—it simply transforms—and in that way, too, we will never die. We will move into Heaven, or be reincarnated, or become part of the light and energy of the entire universe. Our bodies will decompose and become nutrients in the soil and help trees and other living things grow, and in that way also we will never truly die. Death is nothing to be afraid of, and once you know that, too, you can live more fully.

Love, also, is truly everlasting. It will move through generations and it will never die. We are mortal, and we are immortal. We are small beings and we are larger than we should be. We are dying every day of our lives; we are moving toward that inevitable end of life as we know it. But in our dying we are living still, we are giving still, and we are loving still. It is what we have in this moment and there is, indeed, joy in that.

The Time to Act is Now

On Wednesday, an electronic traffic sign in Orlando, Florida was tampered with and the electronic message was changed to read “Kill All Gays.”

This is America today. This is what Florida Governor (and soon-to-be Presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis and other fascist politicians around the country have unleashed. When I was growing up, gay people had no rights. We could be fired for no cause, harassed by police, arrested for gathering together, targeted for violence, and more. Little by little we fought–not for special rights–but for equal rights, to be treated like our fellow citizens. We gained ground but have never been fully equal. And it is equally difficult or more so to maintain progress as it is to make progress.

Tampa and one other Florida city just cancelled their pride parades because of Florida’s new anti-LGBT laws. Tampa’s event has drawn about 20,000 people a year. We shouldn’t be cancelling Pride events. We and our straight allies should be showing up to march and gather in larger numbers than ever. The last thing we should do is return to the closet. I will not go back in the closet. I will fight to keep what rights we have gained and I will continue fighting to gain more until we are truly equal, for my fellow queer friends and especially the transgender part of our umbrella, as they are being attacked more than the rest of the rainbow umbrella.

The same story can be written about our black friends and other minority communities. Gains have been made, but they are tenuous. With so many radical right-wingers in positions of power, with a Supreme Court farther right than we have ever seen, with so many of our fellow citizens following their lead, no rights, no liberty, no security is safe. We must fight to keep what we have gained in all of our communities and fight harder to gain more ground until all are equal. We are in this together. Those in the privileged classes must join in as well. We have to work together to do this. One community can’t fight for its own rights and ignore the struggles of others or we will all lose and the haters and fascists will win, and none of us can afford that.

Signs proclaiming death to any group of people are unacceptable and cannot be tolerated. But the fight can’t start when those signs appear–that suggests it may already be too late. The fight needs to be in the city councils, school boards, county governments, statehouses, and Congress where conservative right-wing draconian policies and laws are introduced and passed. We have been lulled to sleep and we have let the fascists set the agenda. We need to take that power back immediately. Each law that is passed against gay people, that strips civil rights away from the African American community, that dehumanizes immigrants, that takes power back from women and others gives haters the signal that it is okay to unleash violence upon those groups. If it isn’t stopped now, we may not only lose what rights we have gained, we may lose much, much more.

The New Wild West

Wow, Texas. Such progress. A bill just passed out of committee in Texas because two of seven Republicans either have a conscience or decided that right after another mass shooting in their state they didn’t want to risk losing votes from the large majority of citizens who want some kind of common-sense gun control. Whatever their reasons, they should be encouraged to do it more. As a result, with an 8-5 vote, the bill advanced out of committee to the Legislature where it will undoubtedly fail.

The bill does three things. First, it does not ban the sale of assault style weapons; it just bans anyone under 21 from purchasing one. What will the 18-year old Texans do if they can’t get their assault weapon upon their 18th birthdays? Second, it prohibits the sale of firearms to intoxicated individuals. This at least will prevent someone from getting drunk and angry and then buying a gun to kill someone in a drunken haze. Of course, they can probably use the weapon they already have on them with no permit necessary and worry about buying a shiny new gun later. Third, it bans firearms sales to those with a protective order against them, one of those common-sense gun laws.

Should it do the impossible and work its way through both houses of the Texas Legislature and get signed by Governor Abbott (excuse me while I stop laughing here) it would at least be a step in the right direction as the state has continued to pass pro-gun legislation after every major mass shooting in the Lone Star State. The reality is that Abbott will veto it if it gets to his desk. The reality is the Senate will reject if it comes to the Senate. The reality is the House will kill it quicker than a gunman with an assault weapon can kill fellow citizens in another random attack.

To no one’s surprise, the NRA’s legislative division immediately released a statement portraying the bill as an attack on the freedom and rights of 18-year olds’ right to bear arms. They can serve in the military; they get to vote–why can’t they buy a weapon designed to kill a lot of people at one time? Give me a break–there is no need for anyone to have these mass killing machines. What about everyone else’s rights? What about the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? These crazed assault rifle attackers are depriving others of their lives, liberty, and happiness.

We are so far beyond thoughts and prayers in the dystopian landscape we have created. Owning a pistol for one’s one protection or owning even several hunting rifles is one thing. Most people, even if they don’t like guns, would not argue with that. Owning a weapon that is not used for hunting animals other than humans is so far beyond what the Second Amendment intended that it’s embarrassing that we even consider the argument. The old West was not as wild and lawless as Hollywood would have you believe, but if Texas wants to be a modern lawless wild West where their own citizens are under assault every day, it is their choice. We can only hope that other states and the federal government care more about us than that.

All Decorum is Gone

This is bullshit, Tennessee, and everyone knows it. Your actions on Thursday exposed the fact that there is no such thing as decorum anymore. You did not expel Justin Jones and Justin Pearson from the legislature because they broke the rules of decorum in your statehouse. You expelled them because they are two powerful, eloquent young men who conscientiously represent the district that elected them. You expelled them because they are young and what you might refer to as upstarts, or uppity. You expelled them because they oppose your radical conservative agenda. You expelled them because they spoke out against the proliferation of your beloved guns and your warped perception of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. You expelled them because they were elected from Nashville and Memphis, cities that have gotten too liberal for your tastes. You expelled them because they are black. You expelled them because you are still beholden to your slave-holding ancestors and your own racism.

You also expelled them because you are afraid of losing your own power, because you know that the slew of draconian laws you continue to pass are unpopular with the public and you are trying to force as much of your right-wing neo-fascist agenda through the legislature as you can while you still have that power.

You failed to expel Gloria Johnson, who participated fully in the same way in the same protest because she is white. It should be noted, though, that you failed to expel her by only one vote. It’s clear that those who voted for her expulsion did so despite her being white because she is a woman. Your misogyny and your racism have been laid bare for all to see.

In 1866 six representatives were expelled for tying to stop the passage of the 14th amendment, which granted citizenship and equal protection to African Americans. A representative was expelled due to a bribery scandal in 1980 by a 92-1 vote and in 2016 a representative was expelled for inappropriate sexual interactions with 22 women by a 70-2 vote. That is it. That’s the entire history of expulsions in your history and never before has anyone been expelled for violating house decorum rules. This is bullshit, and you know it.

What you didn’t know and are coming to learn quickly is that despite the threats to our democracy in the last couple decades, Americans know when they have been gerrymandered. We know when politicians are acting out of self-interest and maintaining power. We know political retribution when we see it, no matter how ridiculous the narrative behind it. We know when it is time to react and to protest more fully than anything you have seen before. We know when it is time for a backlash not only against the legislature in Tennessee, but against all the Ron DeSantises, Donald Trumps, Sarah Huckabees, and scores of others who have snaked their way into positions of power in order to shove a far right-wing agenda down our throats. We know when it is time for rules of decorum to be thrown out the window. We know when our backs have been pushed so far back against the wall that there is no choice but to push forward. We know that every action has an opposite and equal, and sometimes greater, reaction.

You inadvertently made heroes out of the Tennesse Three and particularly out of Jones and Pearson. Your time is running out. The young people coming up will not tolerate your racism, sexism, and extremism and some of us older folks will be happy to join them in that struggle, as long as we have, and as long as it takes.

The Little Bloody Schoolhouse

The earliest recorded school shooting in American history was at the University of Virginia in November of 1840. A law professor was shot and killed by a student.

The first incident in which more than one person was killed by gunfire in a school was in 1893 when four people were killed due to a fight.

Most deaths from guns in schools in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century were the result of fights or students’ anger at teachers or headmasters.

That changed in 1940 when a South Pasadena principal, Vernon Spencer killed five of his co-workers in two different locations, perhaps the earliest mass school shooting by an individual in our country’s history.

Between these incidents were many others where one or two people were killed in school settings, including an incident in Harford City, Indiana in 1960, in which another principal killed two others and then killed himself.

Things changed forever in 1966 when 12 people were killed and 31 others were injured by a sniper in the clock tower on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin. The shooter, a student named Charles Whitman had earlier killed his wife and mother, then shot and killed three people in the main campus building before positioning himself in the tower and firing down upon passersby.

And it just keeps getting worse. The following doesn’t include any in which “only” one or two were killed, and there are more of those than the tears that have been shed about this violence.

Rose Mar College of Beauty. Mesa, Arizona. 5 killed, 2 wounded. 1966.

Olean High School. Olean, New York. 3 killed, 11 wounded. 1974.

California State University-Fullerton. Fullerton, California. 7 killed, 2 wounded. 1976

49th Street Elementary School. Los Angeles, California. 3 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), 12 wounded. 1984.

And it keeps getting worse.

Spanaway Junior High School. Spanaway, Washington. 3 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), no wounded. 1985.

Moses Montefiore Academy. Chicago, Illinois. 2 killed prior and 3 killed at the school (including the shooter, by police), 2 wounded.1988.

Cleveland Elementary School. Stockton, California. 6 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), 32 wounded. 1989.

University of Iowa. Iowa City, Iowa. 6 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), 1 wounded. 1991.

Indiana University. Bloomington, Indiana. 3 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), no wounded. 1992.

Lindhurst High School. Olivehurst, California. 4 killed, 10 wounded. 1992.

A reminder this doesn’t count incidents with “only” one or two deaths.

It keeps getting worse.

Frontier Middle School. Moses Lake, Washington. 3 killed, 1 wounded. 1996.

San Diego State University. San Diego, California. 3 killed, no wounded. 1996.

Pearl High School. Pearl, Mississippi. 1 killed prior, 2 at the school, 7 wounded. 1997.

Heath High School. West Paducah, Kentucky. 3 killed, five wounded. 1997.

Westside Middle School. Craighead County, Arkansas. 5 killed, ten wounded. 1998.

Thurston High School. Springfield, Oregon. 2 killed prior, 2 at the school, 25 wounded. 1998.

Keeps getting worse.

Notice the time between them keeps getting shorter.

Columbine High School. Columbine, Colorado. 15 killed (including the two shooters, by suicide), 21 wounded. 1999.

Appalachian School of Law. Grundy, Virginia. 3 killed, 3 wounded. 2002.

University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona. 4 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), 0 wounded. 2002.

Red Lake Senior High School. Red Lake, Minnesota. 2 killed prior, 8 at the school (including the shooter, by suicide), 7 wounded. 2005.

Shepherd University. Shepherdstown, West Virginia. 3 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), 0 wounded. 2006.

West Nickel Mine School. Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. 6 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), 5 wounded. 2006.

Getting worse.

Virginia Tech. Blacksburg, Virginia. 33 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), 23 wounded. 2007.

Louisiana Technical College. Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 3 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), 0 wounded. 2008.

Northern Illinois University. DeKalb, Illinois. 6 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), 21 wounded. 2008.

University of Alabama-Huntsville. Huntsville, Alabama. 3 killed, 3 wounded. 2010.

San Jose State University, San Jose, California. 3 killed (including the shooter, by suicide). 0 wounded. 2011.

Chardon High School. Chardon, Ohio. 3 killed, 3 wounded. 2012.

Oikos University. Oakland, California. 7 killed, 3 wounded. 2012.

There are so many we tend to forget all but the worst.

Sandy Hook Elementary School. Newtown, Connecticut. 1 killed prior, 26 at the school (including the shooter, by suicide), 2 wounded. 2012.

Hazard Community and Technical College. Hazard, Kentucky. 3 killed, 0 wounded. 2013.

Santa Monica College. Santa Monica, California. 2 killed prior, 4 at the school (including the shooter, by police), 4 wounded. 2013.

Marysville Pilchuck High School. Marysville, Washington. 5 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), 1 wounded. 2014.

Delta State University. Cleveland, Mississippi. 1 killed prior, 1 at the school, 1 later (the shooter, by suicide), 0 wounded. 2015.

Umpqua Community College. Roseburg, Oregon. 10 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), 9 wounded. 2015.

UCLA. Los Angeles, California. 1 killed prior, 2 at the school (including the shooter, by suicide), 0 wounded. 2016.

North Park Elementary School. San Bernadino, California. 3 (including the shooter, by suicide), 1 wounded. 2017.

It’s amazing how many of these cowards take their own lives after wreaking their destruction.

Rancho Tehama Elementary School. Rancho Tehama, California. 6 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), 18 wounded. 2017.

Aztec High School. Aztec, New Mexico. 3 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), 0 wounded. 2017.

Worse.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Parkland, Florida. 17 killed, 17 wounded. 2018.

Santa Fe High School. Santa Fe, Texas. 10 killed, 13 wounded. 2018.

Saugus High School. Santa Clarita, California. 3 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), 3 wounded. 2019.

Oxford High School. Oxford Township, Michigan. 4 killed, 7 wounded. 2021.

Robb Elementary School. Uvalde, Texas. 22 killed (including the shooter, by police), 18 wounded. 2022.

Central Visual and Performing Arts High School. St. Louis, Missouri. 3 killed (including the shooter, by police), 7 wounded. 2022.

University of Virginia. Charlottesville, Virginia. 3 killed, 2 wounded. 2022.

Michigan State University. East Lansing, Michigan. 4 killed (including the shooter, by suicide), 5 wounded. 2023.

Covenant School. Nashville, Tennessee. 7 killed (including the shooter, by police), 1 wounded. 2023.

And this doesn’t include the many shootings at schools when less than three were killed. It doesn’t include shootings at stores, churches, malls, movie theaters, and any place where people may gather. And it’s going to keep getting worse UNTIL WE DO SOMETHING, AND WE NEED TO DO IT NOW! We can “thoughts and prayers” our way to heaven or continue living in a hellscape where no person is safe. We need to petition, vote, march, write letters, make phone calls and not stop until some kind of sanity is returned to this culture of violence in which we try our best to live.

Sources for the events/numbers listed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(before_2000)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000%E2%80%93present)

Trans Position

Every day, every single day, a different right-wing politician introduces yet another bill in yet another state (or federally) that will in some way take away the rights or dignity of transgender people and make life harder for a group of people whose lives are already too hard. Every day another ignorant politician tries to gain points with their holier-than-thou electorate by introducing legislation to criminalize drag in every form. And every day I weep for my trans and drag friends who must suffer the indignity of yahoos who profess to be Christians but who have no empathy and no trace of the Christ they profess to love and follow.

This has to stop. Come on, people. Trans people have been with us forever. We just didn’t have the means for thousands of years to treat them in the ways that we do now to help them become fully who they are in God’s image. Now we do, and we have for decades, and suddenly there is a backlash because our society could deal with a handful of people they considered freaks, but can’t deal with the possibility that their own sons might be their daughters or their own daughters might be their sons. It’s more important to force people to live their lives as a lie than to be their authentic selves because it makes too many people uncomfortable.

Every day, every single day, trans people, especially black trans women, are already in danger of getting maimed or killed because they have the courage to step into themselves and be themselves with pride. These inane, hurtful bills, make that possibility even graver. Trans people and drag queens are not out to seduce children. Anyone with a brain who is awake in the least knows that the vast majority of child sex abusers are straight white males. While the right-wingers would have you believe that transgender people are taking over the world like battalions of aliens attacking from another planet, the reality is that there are not that many trans people in our midst and certainly not enough to fight these battles on their own.

Those of us who are allies must do what we can, as loudly and boldly as we can, to stop the hateful rhetoric and dangerous legislation that is aiming to eradicate those trans souls among us. Call or write your legislators, join a march, publicly declare your allyship, speak up against hateful and damaging speech when you hear it, reach out to the trans community and ask what you can do to help, be a friend. But for God’s sake, don’t let these assaults continue without doing something–anything–to help stem the tide. Every trans person I have met in my life has been a gentle, beautiful person who is just trying, like all of us, to live, to love and be loved, and to be as happy as possible. In a world such as this, it is all any of us want and it is our duty to help protect the minorities in our midst from the tyranny of those who attack them.

Wishing peace and love to all.

The McCarthy Fiasco

The reality of the fiasco that was the election of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House comes down to this–McCarthy wanted power and control, but also wanted his name in history as his legacy. It was about ego and little else. Instead of a legacy in a long line of influential and powerful Speakers his legacy will more likely be that of one of the weakest Speakers in history. He will mostly be remembered for the fifteen rounds of votes it took to secure the position and it will be shocking if he is able to wield any kind of influence on the intransigent activist wing of his party.

By the time it got around to the final round of votes, it wasn’t about what was best for the country or even for McCarthy’s own party, which has devolved into a dysfunctional group of insurrectionists, clowns, anti-government activists who got into government positions to destroy it from within, and a handful (maybe?) of civil servants who actually do care about the needs of the people. He didn’t care. He stubbornly insisted on continuing the fight until he had given up almost everything. It was a classic Faustian bargain, provided he even had any morals left to bargain away.

While the Democrats and those who did not like McCarthy or want him to be Speaker ate popcorn and enjoyed the show as he lost round after round, in reality it was not that funny. With each round, McCarthy had to give up more and more, until he essentially promised away the power of the position he wanted so badly. He will be nothing more than an impotent figurehead and caricature as a result. The real winners were the radicals who want to upend the government and held him hostage until virtually all of their demands were met. Matt Gaetz was smiling much more broadly after it was over than the new Speaker. One can only wonder what promises were made to secure the final tally.

The losers will be the American people. This will lead to a handful of extremists determining the course of the next Congress. If McCarthy does anything they don’t like, they can now easily remove him or block anything they don’t like. Expect virtually nothing to get done and what little does get done will not be to the benefit of the majority of the nation. McCarthy gave up his power and he sold his soul. What he bought is infamy.