Charles James Kirk

The murder of Charlie Kirk defines our differences, amplifies our fears and deepens our divisions. This moment in America is an object lesson in how poorly we perceive ourselves and how distanced we are from critical analysis when our ego and self-worth feel like they’re on the line. Charlie Kirk was murdered. We can start there in unpacking what America is feeling and experiencing right now. He was shot down in cold blood in a heinous act, in front of thousands of admirers, (some detractors,) and his family. I got an alert from the New York Times on my phone yesterday saying Charlie Kirk had been shot while conducting one of his recruitment events at a university in Utah. I didn’t think that much of it. I’ve always thought he was a despicable man-child, but no one deserves to be murdered, especially when all they’re trying to do is have a conversation. Later I got another alert that he had died from the gunshot wound. I felt a sense of surprise primarily from seeing Gabbie Giffords survive a political gunshot wound from point blank range to the head. (Political gunshot wound-what a crazy term, right?) Paul Pelosi had also survived a hammer to the head in another politically motivated attack. Steve Scalise survived a political gunshot wound as well, at a softball game. My initial reaction was one of sadness. I did not know Charlie Kirk was 31 but I did know he was 18 when he started Turning Point America with a benefactor who took a shine to his debate skills, and my thought was: what the hell does anyone know with any amount of certainty at 18 that would make them go start an organization through which they would change the hearts and minds of people towards their world view? I don’t like that idea-it is anathema to me. I can barely vouch for 31. Personally, I seemed to wake up at 27. 18 though? Nobody has enough life experience at 18 to be giving advice on how one should view the world or live their life. “The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.” W,B, Yeats All Kirk could have possibly been doing at that point really was parroting the views given to him by his parents and his community and his religious leaders and teachers. We should all normalize helping 18-year-olds to understand that their lived experience is inadequate. I’m inclined to mention here too, that I was a young Charlie Kirk. When I was 18 I headed off to a fundamentalist Christian college to live in the dorms and attend chapel three times a week and study the Bible, along with some liberal arts courses. I was energized as fuck. My most ardent wish at 18 was to help others get to heaven. I felt like I had found something amazing, and I had a deep need to share it. I was a natural born evangelist. I judged my friends for engaging in sin, even as I more slowly engaged in some myself. I read and studied the Bible almost ferociously. I know Charlie Kirk came from an affluent background, but I don’t know that it was particularly religious. I find for the wealthy class religion is there as a salve to apply on an as needed basis, to make oneself feel better about any number of downers in their realm of material security. For the rest of the classes, we tend to believe it. We mean it. For us everything about the Bible is real. Jesus walked the earth and was the actual son of God and he was crucified like any number of other would-be saviors, the difference being he was the real one. Ours is to live for the next world and if we just believe enough, we can get through this life smiling and comfy knowing that when this light goes out, another one will. . . Kirk had a convenient transformation just a few years ago. He had previously denounced the role of religious belief in politics but changed his mind, most likely as he recognized the odd coalition of gun lovers and anti-abortionists and fundamentalists and wealthy tech bros that had formed and ultimately elected Donald Trump. A bigger tent was at least more lucrative for Kirk and Turning Point. I did not expect the outpouring of grief that followed Kirk’s death. Trump blamed the left. Following suit so did a multitude of Trump sycophants including Kristi Noem, Kash Patel, (who doesn’t seem to realize the agenda of MAGA is to MAWA,) Mike Johnson, Jesse Waters, Elon Musk, Laura Loomer and many more. I happened to see a family in my neighborhood, a Latino man and presumably his wife, and two small children about four and six, (they were truly the cutest little family,) out on my street where overflow rush hour traffic often rolls through, with an American flag and big sign of support for Charlie Kirk. My best friend posted a screenshot of a Kirk tribute our local sportsbar put up on IG in our “4 Besties,” group chat. In response a friend expressed how sickening and tragic this murder was. The most reasonable of my three Trump supporting friends said, “So sad for young family.” He’s not wrong whatsoever. Still, I did not expect this because I had thought of Charlie Kirk as fairly fringe given the vast amount of intolerant, antisocial views he spread with all the fervor of a big top preacher covering scorched earth in the bible belt. Later in the day I went to Facebook just as I was chilling a bit before having to do some things and I came upon a response from a childhood friend to a meme I had posted which had a photo of Madeleine Albright accompanied by a quote, “There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women.” Below that the meme said, “For all the women in Congress, who vote against helping the Epstein victims.” I posted this meme because I like it a lot. I don’t think Albright is actually wishing people spend eternity in a place of fire and brimstone and wailing and gnashing of teeth. I think she is just trying to say look, men having been giving it to us for thousands of years. We’re the better creatures. We endure childbirth. We raise children. We cook and clean and because they’re physically stronger than us, they’ve bullied us and made us feel inferior and even written it into their sacred texts that we should somehow be subservient to them. “There’s a special place for those who incite hate and condone violence with memes such as this one,” he wrote. I responded, “Are you okay,” and I included a snowflake emoji. I don’t have notifications on for fb. It’s not my priority-I never have. My childhood friend responded twice. “Snowflake? Do explain.” Some amount of time later that was imperceptible on fb I think he grew impatient, so he weighed in again. “We both know your cowardice won’t answer the question about the snowflake. And it’s more than apparent that you attributed my prior comment to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The fact that you would comment with a snowflake makes it obvious that you are celebrating this murder. It says a lot more about you than it does me. The majority of Americans do not harbor this anger, hate, and mental health disorder, even on the left. The small minority of the radical left along with the one man, one gun, and one bullet has sealed the deal. Everything you wish for is gone forever. Best of luck with your memes and hate mongering moving forward.” Next a childhood friend with whom I’ve kept in closer contact through more recent years also commented. He said, “Well said, name. Sad day for AMERICA.” Was I hurt by this exchange? Yeah. It bothered me. My childhood friend and I have been going back and forth on fb for several years now and I think he thinks of it as a sort of game. He tries to best me with his rhetoric. I do the same though as you might imagine, my interest springs from my altruism and represents my honest effort typically to share a perspective not seen on Fox News or heard on the AM radio or local news broadcasts. The debate has grown increasingly acerbic, and his derision doesn’t bother me much. The comment of my other childhood friend who was my neighbor really bothered me. I remember talking to him when I moved into my house, which happens to be back in our old neighborhood. We discussed Trump and I explained a few details about Trump in response to him suggesting he liked Trump because he is an outsider in the political world. He backed down while expressing that he didn’t really follow these things. As with so many people I know he has become a more vocal supporter of Trump and all things Maga, which can be inferred from his capitalization of AMERICA. Of course, Maga is filled with people who feel a sort of hyper-patriotism, which I consider to be a faux patriotism. My friend, (both of them for that matter,) didn’t serve. I did. Their patriotism is devoid of any sense of responsibility. They don’t read up on the issues of the day. They go with how they feel, which is precisely why they are such easy targets for the proagandists of our day. If Trump disregards the established laws of our land in the name of the boats were carrying drugs to our streets, or they’re taking our jobs, or they’re indoctrinating our children with woke culture, or we can’t afford to help people in faraway lands, (but check out this ballroom I’m having built and love the tax break I’m giving to the wealthiest of my friends.) I could go on and on but the point is my childhood neighbor isn’t truly patriotic or he’d take the time to study and understand the issues he is increasingly inclined to comment on. So, when he said the original comment was well said, even though that comment was based on absolutely nothing, it hurt because I’ve always had such high regard for him. I’ve always loved him like a real brother. Four hours later or so I saw these comments on fb and I replied to both old friends. To the first I said, “Dude, wtf are you talking about? You called an innocuous meme condoning solidarity among the sisterhood in response to rape, sexual assault and pedophilia, condoning violence and inciting hate. Does “Are you okay,” while glib, not seem appropriate considering how triggered you sounded over a common metaphor about a “special place in hell?” “I’m well aware of what happened today but my comment was about your inordinate comment. Buy a vowel or something man. I’ve never been a person who celebrates murder. When I’m accused of such things though I might be the guy who calls you a dick. Your assumptions about me have never been right by the way. You’ve never been close. You concocted a whole interpretation and scenario in your brain and then spoke on it.” Next, I responded to the childhood friend who was my neighbor. “It’s not well said. It’s a wildly misguided accusation from a childhood friend levelled at another. Why would you ever think that’s accurate in any way, shape or form? I feel attacked by an old friend, you, not the other guy, whom I’ve only ever thought of in glowing terms and would typically defend, help or do anything for if called upon.” That’s where it ended for that first day, the day of the murder. Trump came out and blamed liberals and the left and Democrats sans any semblance of evidence and no one can be surprised by that. All the regular talking heads came out swinging from Laura Ingraham to Alex Jones, calling the liberals the party of hate and murder and so on. I felt sort of obtuse because I didn’t expect this. When these things have happened it seems collectively, we wait. We wait until we know. Not this time. Elon Musk had a few of the most ignorant tweets ever tweeted. The barrage of accusations at liberal members of society and support for the very idea of Charlie Kirk were astonishing. On fb I saw several friends lambasting the crass posts denigrating Kirk along with the posters. I didn’t see many of these posts. I saw one from an elderly lady I worked with years ago and I thought it was fine and in no way in bad taste. It was around this time, the day following the murder, when I decided my response would be to journal about all of this. By Day Three I began to see the retorts in social media, (primarily BlueSky and fb.) Karen Attiah posted a Charlie Kirk quote: “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. “You have to go steal a white person’s slot.” That quote identifies Charlie Kirk as a racist. He said it. There is no other explanation. Moreover, the time was right to bring it up considering the self-righteous backlash so many were perpetrating. I’m sure there were those who lacked any sort of empathy towards Charlie Kirk and his family who were left behind, who said and posted things that were inappropriate and worse. To stop congress however for a moment of silence and then a prayer however is outrageous considering who Charlie Kirk was. Congress did not pause when Melissa Hortman was murdered. Flags were not flown at half-staff and Trump did not denounce her killer or that person’s side in the American political divide as wholly evil and worthy of our collective retribution. If we are to be a fair-minded people, interested in truth and goodness, then yes, Attiah’s post was right on time. We have to recognize when we are being gaslit. Just like Trump stoked the fears and aggression of the January 6th insurrectionists, the larger Maga apparatus was engaged in a similar hoax, raising up a racist who would say Black women have inferior brains, presumably for the purpose of pushing their agenda whatever that may be. Mehdi Hasan was personally attacked by Charlie Kirk who called him a lunatic and a prostitute and demanded his deportation. Hasan responded by writing, “Nothing, *nothing*, justifies killing him, [Kirk}, or robbing his kids of their dad. “We don’t know the identity or motive of the shooter but murder can *never* be the response to political disagreements.” Hasan took the high road and deserved credit as one who was personally attacked by Kirk. Another BlueSky poster posted a picture and a story about Melissa Hortman and dubbed his account in appreciation of her for the next 24 hours. Classy, right? It’s worth noting she was a well-respected lawmaker in Minnesota who was murdered along with her husband and her dog by what turned out to be someone who arrived at their outrage and bloodlust from the right end of the American political spectrum. (My tongue is in my cheek when I add, there is a special place in hell for mother-fuckers who kill dogs.) Asha Rangappa added, “I’d think what you’d want during a highly volatile, politically polarized time marked by violence is a president who can appeal to our common values and humanity and inspire calm and unity, rather than promising revenge. “If you cared about the collective well-being of the country, that is.” Another account had this to say: “When conservatives are targeted, the language shifts instantly to existential war. Leaders rush to frame it as an attack on freedom, on the nation, on civilization itself. But when children are massacred in schools, the same voices tell grieving families to accept it as the price of liberty. That asymmetry is not just hypocrisy, it’s cruelty disguised as politics. Th refusal to mobilize outrage for the most vulnerable while weaponizing it for partisan figures reveals the true priority, power, not protection. If this country can summon declarations of war today, it could have done so for the countless classrooms turned into battlefields. It chose not to.” I think I understand why this one happens this way. Without the gun lovers the coalition risks falling apart. As it is they barely got Trump elected the first time and who even knows what happened the second time? It’s a tenuous voting block and it has no room to lose those who fear gun control will end their power to hunt or to protect their families and their property. The voices of those who came to say hey, we’re being reasonable by calling out the glut of double standards as well as Charlie Kirk’s character, rose for me around Day 3. I saw more of them, and they were so accurate and poignant with what they had to say. I saw this list of things Charlie Kirk said on BlueSky:

That’s a lot of evidence, right? If Kirk were on trial for being a racist or maybe just an anti-social prick, the court term would be a preponderance of evidence. We could convict on this-he’d be guilty. Still, from the day of the assassination right up to as I write this, the voices decrying anyone who would in any way comment in a way which might appear to be reveling in the murder or celebrating it, have been legion. I’m in agreement about that. It’s easy, like any old platitude. Several friends on fb including the woman who cuts my hair, (and will be doing so this afternoon,) expressed some hardcore aversion to anyone who would denounce Kirk, seemingly from her mama bear instinct of wanting to protect those precious two little ones Kirk has left behind. Many others chimed in along the same lines. Conversely, I have a few fierce friends as well who braved the harsh political climate and spoke truth to the dour. They did not celebrate Kirk’s death however, they merely commented on the vast irony of all the support for an unempathetic racist prick when school shootings garner zero calls for a solution anymore, when Melissa Hortman’s murder registered little more than a blip on the radar by contrast, (and by all accounts Hortman and her husband were standup members of society loved and admired by many to say nothing of their dog; Gilbert, who was well regarded as “good boy,” and was in training to be a service dog with Helping Paws,) Back on fb my childhood friend devised a narrative in his head based on absolutely nothing beyond my posting left leaning memes, on fb since the day Trump was inaugurated, on the daily. He sees these issues of the day in right and left terms. He posted some video of Canadian guy talking about how, “when Charlie died,” he thought for a moment he might have to go home to Canada due to civil unrest but then he realized everyone on the right is a saint who lives in the countryside and would never think to riot or loot. While everyone on the left is a baby-killer and so on-you get the picture. What is actually striking about this video is how clearly right-left this guy sees everyone. There’s no difference or nuance for him. Everyone on the left is bad. Everyone on the right is good. This is my primary complaint about my childhood friend. He colors everything in those broad strokes and can’t be dissuaded. For him and Captain Canada there, the world is black and white. Period. I responded by telling my friend I had not said one word to that point, several days post murder, about Charlie Kirk on fb. I shared what I had read just that day, that the murderer was a gamer who played Helldiver II, that he a groyper and that they follow Nick Fuentes, that Fuentes complaint about Kirk was that he left the racism as subtext and did not just say it loud and proud, that the story the WSJ ran about trans messaging on a bullet was false, and that the vast majority of Americans on the left politically stood down. The guy shot back that I would be proven wrong but not admit any error. Then separately he wrote, “your hate for Charlie Kirk is as clear as can be in your message. “You don’t have to say the words, we already know how you feel about his assassination.” My retort was mostly just to indicate that this narrative he concocted about me was based on nothing and was inaccurate. Why are people deep in their feels about Charlie Kirk, more so than they were about the Minnesota legislator, or Paul Pelosi, or Josh Shapiro? I think there are two answers. They see a young man with a beautiful family, and they feel the tragedy on a deep and personal level. Others prefer not to see Kirk in any way glorified given what he stood for. When so many in the public realm show more empathy for his family and his legacy, lowering flags and praying in congress, they believe it sends the wrong message to our children and lends credence and viability to his values of intolerance and hate. Charlie Kirk was murdered in cold blood six days ago in front of his wife and two small children. That is heartbreaking. Everyone should feel that. The ideas he sought to convert others to are reprehensible. Will the Trump beholden law enforcement apparatus make interviews with the killer public or will they fashion the narrative they prefer, to continue to mobilize Americans against righteousness, against goodness, against the rule of law, against fiscal responsibility, against kindness, against conservation for future generations, against truth, against accountability, against trust in international relationships, and against their own best interests? Both sides of this story are valid. While I find him an odd choice at least given his views and the work he did, Americans can choose to honor and mourn Charlie Kirk. Americans can also choose to comment on his character, (or relative lack thereof.) That choice while against the grain, is actually the more important for the health of society.

on physical love

young lover, imagine what it feels like to be in her skin. what it must feel like to be young and feminine and sexual, legs laying in wait, beneath a skirt which accents everything she feels coursing over her skin like slow motion radar blips and white noise on muscle. her body leans against itself creating sensations of pushing and pulling-her body is the physical way she experiences the world. and it sags, and aches, and forgets, and exercises, and remembers, and snaps to awareness, and emits 3-dimensional vibes and survives her. and inside, it must burst in light in some way, which you must discover. you should want it. you should want to know it. and in this way, you can know her.

how do you become a better lover? first, how don’t you? second, you can speed up the process by seeking a balance between torrent and low tide, between giving and receiving, between euphoria and the calm joy of knowing. the secret of life is clearly balance.

imagination is everything and forget about her. think of yourself in an unusually jealous way. recognize your real needs and pursue them with abandon and lust and envy and jealousy and righteous, rage-filled rapture, and you will give more than you had any idea you could. oppose your sense of urgency so that you will know the thrill of teetering in time and watch as the patient knowing and putting off, the push and pull, the aggression and waiting, the truth and the act, the tender and the brutal, the earnest and the flip, the agony and the ecstasy, the love and the disregard, the warm and the cool, the in and the out, the touch and the absence, the confusion and the clarity, all dance and come together.

my body was skinny so the muscles were not large but they were there, firm and palpable and visible beneath a young man’s skin. she must have enjoyed that vigor of the physical prime, feeling me warm and not so much soft as consistent, olive-colored and bony in places, contacting her in motion, hot around her ears and neck, cool where our feet brushed against one another, firm or collapsing.

the sensation of kissing, of having her swollen bottom lip softly between both of my lips, sucking gently, of forcefully pulling her tongue deep into my mouth, feeling the tissue beneath that tongue distended and releasing her but licking her teeth and dragging your lips, perpendicular across the breadth of her opening and tasting her mouth and thinking only of her and how sweet and brave and true and right and balanced it is of her to offer herself to you.

i think in her mind she imagined herself a sexual being, a pulsating, reasoning, thoughtful life form carrying the act of procreation further into the realm of the artistic and evolutionary. i think she thought of me as she held me, and believed in the giving, believed in the worthiness, thought herself refined for engaging in this perfect union. i think she allowed herself to lapse into the animal for moments and stretches, relying purely on impulse and embracing need and acting from instinct which of course means, fucking like a documentary, biting and scratching and yanking and hurting and teasing and fucking and slapping and tickling and exploring and pushing for moremoremore and basking in the enjoyment and forgetting about everything from breathing and sweating to responsibilities and mores and expectations and others. i think she knew the movement embodied and represented happiness. i think she knew it was real and metaphorical. i think she tried to please and she pursued her own. i think she loved. she did, she loved.

when the pace increased, i fought a losing battle, never waiting enough, never being content but struggling none the less to capture the tantric. i lifted her with tense hands. i needed to squeeze her and feel her physically as much as possible, in legs entwined, in breath on my face and lips and cheeks and noses that brushed against each other and hands that stretched out arms and splayed and let muscles run up and down each other and ribs like little waves of existence and full, firm, round and pliable breasts and bony, sweaty abdomens, and her clitoris beneath the head of my cock prodding and bringing warmth and movement and moisture and openness and entry and to feel like we acted in unison from the basest desire to the most profound agreement. the salty taste of her skin as intercourse developed was as sublime as memory. the twitching of muscles in bodies as two motions interwove and locked into pattern and sped up and tensed unto hard banging and bashing, twisting expressions and hastening the lines of character seemed of the purpose of life. the in and out was natural and real and lovely and when it all came to climax, to release together was a perfection, a moment of disbelief, a disconnection from time and reality, an achievement of two. it was fun and funny, relief and relaxation, beautiful and blind, breathless and vulnerable.

i imagine she felt satisfied from being so thoroughly desired. i hope she felt cute and feminine. i guess she felt like a woman and gathered the security of knowing the things of life one can sometimes feel insecure about knowing because the writers have exaggerated them to such a degree she might not know what is normal but in this moment, through all of this, the meeting and smiling and feigning and reciprocating to the fulfillment of giving and receiving and sharing in utter truth and dignity, shunning always the affectations and insecurities of those who do not aspire to be saints, she knows beyond any doubt that she is all that she should be and all that she wants to be and she relates to despair and hopelessness through her contentment and positive outlook and she basks in the knowing and feels equal to katherine mansfield and virginia woolf and jane austen and emily bronte and george eliot.

Open

When you divorce in your mid-40s you feel insecure. You worry about not having a partner to navigate the later parts of life. You feel less attractive because certainly, physically, you are less attractive. As good as you feel about the mental and the emotional, you still feel insecure.

Still, you engage with people and you are open and you have a variety of relationships. There was the ex who returned to ask questions about how she got left by the side of the road. You enjoy each other's company for several weeks, even spend a couple of holidays together, because it was the holidays, and you feel nurtured and desirable and she feels closure. There was also the younger girl who loved to sing karaoke and had fakies. She was sweet but you could not have found someone more unlike yourself and you lost interest immediately, even if you did not admit that for several months. There was the age-old friend from high school. You weren't on the same page at the outset but you felt like it really could have been a good thing. There was the girl with whom you had an "age gap," relationship. You let her move in with you, even while your kids were with you half the time. What a crazy year. You became intimate with your insecurities. You learned and gained perspective in that one, and you lost a lot. Confidence. Time. The last three years you have been alone. You, and the kids of course, half the time. You are doing fine. You are not morose when you are circumspect. You find meaning and value in your life.

In the middle of all that you met a girl, also of another generation. You were at the bar explaining to a couple of high school friends, (the christian high school of a young republic,) who lived near you and so formed a cohort at the bar,  how the human species is polygynous. They argued humans were meant to mate for life, it was God's plan they said, and you countered by saying, scientifically there is no way we could be considered monogamous. The girl was serving drinks in the bar and she eavesdropped conspicuously. She interjected and said she could not even imagine being with only one person for the rest of her life. Well, here is woman, you thought. You had seen signs of her rise. You understood that thing about a fish needing a bicycle. Mostly though, you had met very few revolutionaries. Maybe it was you. Maybe it was the dogma or the Air Force, all that stuff you renounced at 28. The women in your life, the partners you had chosen, had many good qualities but none of them were particularly original thinkers.

The girl laughed easily and seemed to enjoy shocking your friends. She was engaged to be married. They asked why she was bothering to get married. She said her marriage was not about monogamy. You thought the paradigm shift, for your friends, was tectonic. They asked if she had extracurricular partners even now, during engagement. She said she was interested in polyamory as a lifestyle. You were aroused by her spirit and her thoughtfulness and her ideas. 

You continued to see her at the bar. You got to know her schedule and showed up regularly because the conversation was fire. She always made a point of acknowledging you right away and then spending any free time she could make talking to you. She transitioned from server to bartender and the relationship transitioned from budding emotional intimacy to one of physical intimacy.

In all, that relationship was as constructive and positive as any love oriented relationship you ever had. You developed a routine with her. You would go in and see her at the bar. You would go home and climb into bed. She would wake you a bit later after the bar closed. You would talk for an hour or two, sometimes have a drink or a snack, sometimes atop your bed, other times in the kitchen or the living room, 

The discussions satisfied your need to evolve. The conversations were balanced. You came to know each other in a way that was patient, and kind. You nurtured an uncommon trust. You even came to know your metamor, through her. Jealousy and possession fell away from you like dry skin, unnecessary, unproductive, counterintuitive. 

Polyamory was a regular topic of conversation. How were you doing? How was she doing? How was her partner doing? It was an exploration and an adventure. The intimacy was intoxicating. It was communion and as it typically followed a deep conversation, the point was to be and to grow close. You enjoyed her selflessly. She made you happy. You were full and you came to learn how not to seek your own. 

That reationship was as unconventional as could be but you never doubted yourself about being open to it, open to her. You could feel the sincerity, the altruism, the courage, the importance of being earnest, the depth of empathy, the curiosity and the growth, the push and the pull, the rhythm and the surprise of the human condition. 

Relatively early in the relationship you did feel some insecurity. She went home to her fiance every night. The relationship was compartmentalized to the nth degree and as good as your conversations were with her, insecurities did get to you. You were nearly 50 and she was 27. You felt like you had no business while she felt like she was open to the universe. When you expressed your insecurities about the age difference she said she found you very attractive in every way. She thought you were wise. She said your sexual appetite matched her own, the two of you were sexual creatures, she said. It became enough, plenty even. On the way there though, you felt like it was not enough. You broke it off even if you did not mean to do that and she brought a friend by your apartment when she knew you were away and threw eggs at your door. 

You talked to her. She believed relationships were made better when they involved work, which was in stark contrast to your ex wife who refused to have serious conversations about the state of the relationship because she said they should be easy. 

So she worked. The two of you decided to stay together, such as it was, because you loved her and she loved you. She made concessions. When her fiance went away for a few days to visit family she stayed the night, which gave you a certain peace. It felt more real seeing her first thing in the morning. Otherwise, she made some time for you outside of the normal late night. When you got tickets to see Neutral Milk Hotel and Daniel Johnston at the Holloywood Bowl she said of course she would go. When you picked her up you could tell something was off and she explained that her fiance had been bothered. She said it was not because she was going out with you but rather that it seemed wrong in some way as he liked those artists and she did not even know them. Later, back at your place you had a bit of a disagreement about something and she accused you of holding out on having sex, which was crazy as you never did not want to have sex with her and at the same time it was so strangely new to experience that role reversal. You talked it out and spent that time being as close as two people can be after which you walked her home, two short blocks down the street, as you did on so many nights around 2 or 3 in the morning. The walk back was always good too. Monrovia, so dark and cool and quiet. 3 or 4 more hours of sleep and you would get up and get ready for work, and work the other compartments of your life.

You realize her life was hectic. She lived with her fiance. She worked five nights a week. She was involved with her family and his. She had her friends, including a couple who lived with them until some months before the wedding, when they moved to the beach. She read. You turned her on to Anais Nin and she could not get enough. Between that and learning everything she could about polyamory and the many experiences she could find documented, she was busy and involved and alive. And then there was you. 

The Saturday night you did five minutes on the seocndary stage at the Ice House in Pasadena, she was there, sitting next to your brother in the front  row laughing at the whole routine you had run by her the night before. 

She called you the Saturday morning she got married, crying. She said she understood but she was upset you would not be there for the ceremony, which took place on her front porch. You talked through it. She was not trying to convince you to change your mind. She respected you. The option to change it was real however but you could not quite get there. It was weird for you. You were okay with her husband. A few times you had even found yourselves at the bar at the same time and even exchanged a few words. You could not however, get over the mores of your time. It felt unnatural or maybe even disrespectful, though when you really thought deeply about it there was no disrespect at all. You loved her. So much in a way you loved him too, because you knew he took care of her, supported her emotionally, loved her. How could you not love him? Later she told you the wedding was perfect. She told you all about it, how she missed you but the morning talk had been enough for her and the rest of the day she was mindful and intentional and she lived in the moment and bathed in the love all around her. 

You know you're challenged when it comes to intimacy and relationships. Until around 28 you had almost no power of woo. You don't know the dynamics of how these things work, (or don't work,) but you know that growing up without ever meeting or knowing your father, and without your mother who you visited in prison affected you. You know how lucky you were to have your Aunt and Uncle take you in when you were 12 but you were keenly aware of the difference in intimacy between your relationship with them and the relationship they had with their biological daughter, your cousin who became your sister. 

From 28 on you had many relationships. Some of them lasted several years, if interrupted years, and sometimes they overlapped. You felt earnest in seeking a lasting, loving relationship. However, you sabotaged the ones with the most potential and engaged in some that were destined to fail. Why did they all end? Most likely because you had no idea how to have a fulfilling, balanced, loving relationship. The women with whom you had the best possibility of having that tried. They tried to engage with you in all the right ways but you were so inexperienced you craved more and more and you had no idea when to stop all that. By the time you decided to have children and get married it was partly because no bolt of lightning had struck you to tell you it was time for all that settling down and also because you never figured out what a good relationship looked like nor how it worked. You never sought counseling. You did not pick a partner who had much of an idea either. 

Your conversations with the girl, (who bristled at being referred to as a girl-she preferred woman,) often involved talk of work, working on your relationship, working on how to have a polyamorous lifestyle, working on ourselves. At first it seemed like much ado about nothing but in time it started to make sense to you. You came to realize she was attuned to everything external and sort of constantly modulating the internal. As much as the generational distance colored her heroic, you were impressed with the workman-like humility with which she conducted her life on the daily. She cried to you about her mother. She told you how she longed for the day her partner would have an intimate relatiosnhip outside of the two of them, how she looked forward to the challenge and all the things she would feel, and how certain she was it would ultimately increase her joy through him and for him. The perspective was so honest and real and if to be human is to be flawed then it was that too, but you could not find where.

It ended with a whimper. You wanted more. You wanted an every day partner. More, you just knew the center could not hold. A feint sense of doom eased into your psyche like a foil just off stage but clearly in your sightline. You met someone and you let her know you were interested in this person. She was excited for you, genuinely, but she was clear that you had to talk to her about polyamory and about her, which you were not willing to do. It ended with a whimper. She was  getting more adventurous. She wanted to add lovers. You wanted to scale back. You agreed to continue to love each other. You scaled back. Two years later you saw each other twice a year, texted every few weeks. Five years later you talked twice a year by whichever mode. 

Still, that relationship nurtured you in ways previously unimagined. You grew. You too felt like an adventurer on the high seas living rather than observing, participating instead of spectating, engaging instead of avoiding. When others talk about polyamory your first thought is, I know about that first hand because I am alive and because I experience.

Why I am Disconsolate at the Failure of the Bernie Sanders Campaign

My friends and acquaintances seem confused or at least bemused by my support of Bernie Sanders.  It is as if they think he is like all the other candidates in so many ways though some of them think the Senator is a socialist in ways they are not, as Americans, in spite of the numerous social institutions we, (as Americans,) support.  Some are frustrated I have not already transformed into a full-throated supporter of Joe Biden.  I am disconsolate about Sanders suspending his candidacy and supporting Joe Biden.  More accurately I am disconsolate at the results in Michigan and the other states Sanders did not win.  Here is why.

My first political icon was Ronald Reagan.  In my teens I was being raised by my aunt and uncle to be a strong, fundamentalist Christian.  At a younger age I remember there was a big hubbub over Richard Nixon getting impeached leading to his resignation.  Later I recall my uncle liking Jimmy Carter because he was a Christian.  I guess he voted for the Georgia peanut farmer. 

As Reagan ascended however, virtually everyone I was exposed to at 15-years-old adored Reagan.  In retrospect it seems strange.  Why would adults vote for a former movie actor.  It seemed like we should demand our best and brightest be dedicated to the craft of politics or legislating for decades at least.

As George HW Bush came to power I was beginning to question the politics of my community as well as my own faith.  I renounced my Christianity at 28 and over about the next five years I did a 180 on many of my core beliefs.  By the time Clinton won the Presidency, even though I voted for Ross Perot, I had concluded that the ideas of the American right were wrong. 

In the preceding years I had been impoverished.  I slept on floors.  I went to jail a couple of times for crimes of poverty.  I came to know what it meant to be disadvantaged and my disadvantage came from being emotionally stunted.  It came from growing up in several households because my mother was incarcerated and it came from fundamentalism being thrust upon me along with the responsibility for choosing my faith.  I went forward on February 23^rd, 1976, as ‘Just As I Am,’ filled the sanctuary of a Baptist church.  It came from not knowing or meeting my father. 

I was pissed off about how expensive being poor was.  I was frustrated at how difficult it was to gain a livable wage, which was complicated by the fact that I was extremely excited about being young and alive.  I used to joke when out drinking with friends that we were celebrating our youth and I felt absolutely entitled to do just that. 

I was surely trying to find my way.  I was focused on meeting a pretty girl who would become my partner and help me navigate all that was foreign to me. I was at ease when drinking.  I was able to laugh.  It was actually more about being with people.  I came to love the democracy of a bar setting, the freedom to move about and say whatever I wanted to say.  My money was as good as the next person’s and I cut my teeth in the bar on defending my newfound values which included being thankful for and defending the social safety net.   

I personally came to know what was wrong with our system of justice and our prisons. Having grown up a ward of the court of the county of Los Angeles and using Medi-Cal stickers to pay for fillings and vaccinations, I also knew the value of of the social safety net instinctively and intimately. I can attest to how ungreatful a kid can be for receipt of free hot lunches in elementary school but also arrive at adulthood in one piece and realize one day how generous and empathetic the good people of Los Angeles county truly are. 

I had little in the way of the power of woo.  I was a rube in the ways of the world.  I was a hayseed on transactional analysis.  I had moved away from a career fighting fire because I was not ready or interested in moving into the next phase of life, accepting a career I had fallen into and moving on to family life or whatever.  I was too irresponsible for all that, so I went back to school to become a journalist.  I took a series of low security, low paying, part-time jobs.  I landed in a bookstore and become an assistant manager, which was really just a title that allowed me to lock the doors at night but otherwise did not pay a livable wage. I lived in a saint’s living room for three years, rode a bicycle to work and took a bus to school. 

And I read.  I listened to Rage Against the Machine and read a biography of Che Guevara, (Companero.) I read the liberal ideas of Robert A Heinlein.  I read HL Mencken.  I read the classics: Hemingway and Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. I read Tayeb Salih and Chinua Achebe.  I read Shakespeare, Confucius, Hesse, and I read Henry Miller, like everything he ever wrote including his ‘On Writing.” I came to adore Milan Kundera, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Knut Hamsun, Blaise Cendrars-thank you Henry Miller.  I found life truth in Voltaire, Neruda, Emerson, Thoreau, and Wordsworth.  I cried at the end of Richard Rodriguez books and also at the end of Bridges of Madison County. 

I never understood how others could read these books and not be enlightened in a similar manner as me, which is to say to remain an American conservative.  In poli-sci classes I spoke up on behalf of unions by highlighting the strength of the American economy and how it corresponded with the strength of American unions.  I forensically defeated would be foes in class on subjects such as Vietnam, the war on drugs, supply side economics.  I was frustrated throughout the 90s at the inherent inequality in America.  We had become a society where shareholders were valued over stakeholders, factories moved to China as predicted by Marx, (and yes, I read the communist manifesto because I had a need to know.)  American workers were played like pawns in the grand scheme.  Did I tell you I also read John Reed, the great American writer who detailed the Bolshevik revolution?  I concluded that the wealthy class would always use its money to vouchsafe it from generation to generation as well as to capitalize their accounts.  I correlated the age of corporatism with the wealthy class and I deduced the only counterbalance the people had to the power of money was in organization, which is to say if and when the masses could get together, pool their money and vote in masse for the ideas and policies that benefitted them and against those that worked against them, only then could they realistically or effectively push back against the forces of capital. 

Mostly, considering how organized corporate America was, (is,) in terms of owning the levers of the dissemination of information, supporting an establishment of a two, (establishment) party system, as well as being more or less omnipotent the world over.  When Bill Clinton repealed the Glass Steagall Act I saw that both parties were true to the status quo.  Democrats were certainly not going to make structural changes that would actually alter the fundamentals of our economy nor our priorities in terms of policies around the climate, the social safety net, democracy as it relates to the electoral college, voter suppression, gerrymandering, or justice. 

In the early 2000s I became familiar with Bernie Sanders. He was an Independent Senator from Vermont and he could be heard on Fridays ‘Brunch with Bernie,’ on the Thom Hartmann radio show. For a brief moment there was a feint liberal voice on American AM radio and Senator Sanders espoused my ideals and my ideas as I had formulated them having read Noam Chomsky’s works including ‘The Common Good,’ and ‘Manufacturing Consent.’  He worked hard to take care of American veterans.  He recognized our inequality problem in a time when absolutely no one dare speak of such a thing, (let alone believe it.)

When I first heard the term democratic socialism I found it quizzical both because, what did it mean(?!), and also because why would the good Senator from Vermont openly identify with it.  Later I concluded Sanders did it to conjure FDR and his new deal and also perhaps almost tongue in cheek, as if to shock people into thinking about the meaning so that he could go about defining it for the rest of his career. 

In the nearly 20 years since I’ve been following Senator Sanders career I’ve watched closely as he advocated for veterans, his common refrain being that it was incumbent upon us as a nation to take care of our soldiers after they took care of us by risking it all. 

More he went across the Canadian border with diabetes patients to help them buy insulin at Canada’s significantly lower prices…(and fought big pharma every chance he got.)  He showed up on the strike lines with telecom workers in Boston.  H refused to accept the sorry state of our prison system. As a Senator of the United Stated he openly supported legalization of marijuana. He doesn’t only speak up for the Palestinians, which is again against the grain but the right thing to do, he also works on behalf of any number of underdogs. 

Senator Sanders understands the leverage of capital and he understands the masses get trounced in class warfare unless they can figure out how to band together.  He probably knows that when the masses didn't get together, (the usual,) conditions typically got so bad a violent revolution became the only recourse. 

In the end his run for the Presidency was always an uphill climb.  In 2015 I went to the Hollywood Musician’s Union to listen to Bernie speak.  He talked about all of positions he thought were important and not being addressed by our prominent candidates.  He was in Hollywood, (though far from “in Hollywood,” the way we think of most candidates showing up locally with hands out to the stars,) ostensibly to see if support existed for a candidate like him.  I think we were effusive in our support. 

When the Senator finished his speech I got up from my 2^nd row, (center aisle seat,) and reached him first as he stepped down two steps towards the audience. I told him I hoped he would run and that if he took a quick picture with me it would make my year.  I handed my phone to my friend Linda as Bernie smiled his agreement and we turned for the picture.  Yeah, I took a selfie with Bernie before it became a thing, certainly long before another favorite, Elizabeth Warren, began counting her selfies and reporting the statistics to the news.

Here's the thing.  We pooled our money in a corrupted system to elect our candidate to an especially powerful position.  That has been our primary hope these past six years. Otherwise, as much as I know the younger generation is true to their morals and values while the older generations preach righteousness and justify exporting arms, kids in cages, democracy crushing institutions, three strikes laws, the oil industry, lower and lower taxes on the wealthy class, union busting, and so on with all sorts of moral equivalencies and arguments about complex decisions, we know the system is influenced by money and the older generations have most of that.

We pooled our money because we know we can’t organize well enough to overcome the money poured into local elections and judges and abortion campaigns to win over the fundamentalist votes and against gun reform to win over the gun enthusiast voters and limit the vote campaigns and the torrent of right wing talk radio and the propaganda network that gets overwhelming ratings because their viewers lap up the fear and xenophobia and sensationalism they sell and the major US corporation owned corporate media that plays the foil to Fox News but in reality disseminates establishment, status quo views that may be in favor of some socially open or liberal ideas but protect the institutions and policies that protect the economic structure of the federal reserve and the stock market and the wealthy class. 

I don’t think wealthy Americans, and by wealthy I mean top 1-2%, are in any way bad people.  I do think they use their money to preserve their fortunes and I don’t think they should be allowed political power.  Bernie has been one of the few consistent voices against the Citizen’s United SCOTUS decision because he understands it allows the wealthy class to leverage their money to affect public policy and he knows that can crush the will of the people. 

So, we pooled our money because we thought if we could get one Bernie Sanders into the White House, we might be able to turn our country toward the light. We could have a President talking about the important issues like fixing our healthcare system, raising the minimum wage but more importantly about helping all Americans get a livable wage, transitioning away from fossil fuels in favor of renewables, and a sensible foreign policy based on fairness and collaboration instead of authoritarianism. 

We pooled our $27 contributions in hopes a President Sanders could allow more bright, young candidates to infiltrate our corrupted government at all levels.  We pooled our money in hopes of avoiding another Hillary Clinton.  As establishment candidates go Hillary was and is plenty capable but we know what the establishment candidates do after eight years of Barack Obama, by which I mean Timothy Geithner and the Wall Street bailout and drones and inaction on so many of the issues important to the quality of life of the masses of people on planet Earth. 

We pooled our money for Bernie Sanders because we trust him. He has been so consistent.  He cannot be bought.  One of the things the wealthy class pays to have said about Senator Sanders is that he has not been super successful in terms of passed legislation but we pooled our money because he changed the conversation and we wanted the conversation changed.  If he has been rigid about how he votes in the senate it is because he won’t play ball and we pooled our money specifically for that. 

Did we like the other primary candidates this year?  Well, compared to Donald Trump, of course we did.  We especially liked Elizabeth Warren because she had adopted so many of Sanders’ policies and she understands economy and fights bullies for justice and students and the economically oppressed.  We like that the establishment candidates have embraced so many policies in vogue if because Sanders championed them on a national stage first.  At the end however, Warren was a Republican and she was not there on many of the policy positions we espouse until much later.  Outside of Warren the candidates, particularly Joe Biden, are birds of a democratic feather.  They have been around the block.  They've played ball.  Their positions have changed.  They have secrets mostly associated with what they did for money to get into the gaggle of the powerful to begin with.  As vastly more fit as they are for high office than Donald Trump they could not be more underwhelming to us.  We pooled our money because we trust Bernie Sanders to not govern based on him but rather based on us.

Why am I disconsolate?  I'm disconsolate because in 2015 when we convinced Bernie Sanders to run for the Presidency we felt like a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens.  We wanted to change the world.  

What Indifference Hath Wrought

It is easy for the common man, or even a not so common man like Donald Trump, to think fixing immigration is easy.  It seems easy, right?  Citizens only.  Legal entry only. You know where I am going with this. 

The fact is it is exceedingly difficult.  What we are seeing today at our borders is what others have feared and sought to avoid.  At another extreme we might see a massive exodus from throughout the south pouring into our country with riots in the streets, though I have seen no evidence of any politician or group advocating for that open of a border.  Rather, we have children in cages, families dying in the river, a government agency gone thug, and a division of epic proportions in American society.

At the root of all Donald Trump support is our immigration problem.  Yes, the typical Republicans who are either rich or believe they will be rich and therefore want laissez faire economic policies, are mum about all the crimes, misdemeanors and indiscretions so long as the cronyism flourishes and our institutions are rendered powerless, which in turn will be used to support the idea of abolishing them.  Those who vote solely on abortion are also on board.  In their case the opposite is true.  They tolerate the border situation because they see liberal thinkers as against God and capable of killing innocents on whim or worse. 

Still, immigration is the primary wedge.  In the past our Presidents have embraced numerous policies all in the name of curbing or eliminating illegal immigration.  

• Nixon closed the border which did not impact immigration at all, only traffic.
• Carter was strict on immigration. 
• Reagan naturalized 3 million immigrants and hoped they would become Republicans.  
• George H W Bush did nothing, (for an entire Presidency.)  
• Bill Clinton required agencies to communicate in foreign languages, assured Mexico there would be no mass deportations while also asserting our right to enforce our immigration laws, opposed English as an official language and advised of an America 50 years hence when there would be no majority race. 
• George W Bush oversaw a decrease in the average time it took to deport someone of 100 days to 20, ended catch and release, and employed the use of fences and advanced technologies.  That said, on the other side of things he created a guest worker program, softened the GOP position on English as official language and worked to ensure immigrant children received the same free lunch benefits citizen children did. “We must also find a sensible and humane way to deal with people here illegally,” Bush said.  
• Obama oversaw record deportation, employed drones to monitor the Mexican border, connected xenophobia to joblessness, supported DREAMERs, instituted DACA, and sought comprehensive reform, which is complicated and has a multitude of moving parts.

These are men who made it to the position considered the most powerful in the world.  They had considered responses to the problem with varying degrees of success and failure.

What is different about Trump?  Trump sat around his tower as citizen in New York City and armchair Presidented for years.  On Immigration he imagined it an easy fix.  Build a wall.  Stop all Muslims.  Punish our neighbors for their role.  His policy is all stick, no carrot.  It is also utterly untenable.  Had the administration thought this through, like chess, not checkers-had they planned their steps, calculated the outcomes, planned how to respond to those outcomes, imagined what came of those measures, and so on, perhaps they would not have moved so haphazardly.  

Instead they considered a social experiment with the American society as petri dish.  They tested the Muslim ban in the courts, (all while trying to stack as many courts across the land as possible with judges of a similar world view, which it bears saying is not the view of most Americans.)  Trump has tried so hard to have a wall built across our southern border.  Many promises, all unfulfilled.  The President has worked hard at maintaining support, banging the drum at his unprecedented rallies and hiring advocates only to high office.  He has been unbending if unsuccessful. 

What we can know for certain is that it is a complicated problem.  Previous administrations surely considered these obtuse actions the Trump administration has enacted but they shied away from them because of the perceived risk.  The Trump administration proceeded because they are not thoughtful nor empathetic.  Now we have people in cages at our southern border, some who are malnourished, sick, alone, afraid, drinking from toilets, sleeping in disaster blankets, because it is a disaster. 

We don’t even talk about the real reason these people seek refuge in America.  Yes, they are on the run from rampant crime and violence in their countries.  Yes, they seek a better life with real opportunities to labor and reap the benefits of self-determination in the form of stability, health and safety.  The root problem goes much deeper however.  Why is the southern hemisphere dogged by instability?  Why is El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guyana, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Haiti, Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil so poor?  The reasons are myriad and the United States is implicated.  From the No Transfer policy of 1811 to the Monroe Doctrine, (1823,) we have sought to render Latin American countries militarily weak while cashing in on their natural resources. There are examples of more aggressive intervention as well, like when we aided in the overthrow of the socialist administration of Salvador Allende in Chile in favor of the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet.  In effect we have worked to keep all of our neighbors to the south relatively weak and open to our brands of commerce. Did we think of the subsequent inequality or how the poor and oppressed would seek emigration in the wealthy north?  Who knows?  (This to say nothing of the morality of our policies.)  

What we do know is it is here and it is now.  The coalition of support Trump has is marginal.  While it was enough to win the 2016 election based on the American value of all votes not being equal, (a.k.a., the electoral college,) Trump received 2.865 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, it is tenuous as many Americans have stopped supporting him based on any number of reasons ranging from 24 sexual assault or misconduct allegations to trade wars to support for murderous regimes to babies in cages.  The wall and the pursuit of the Trump administration's crude means of achieving an unattainable end are like an albatross around Donald Trump's neck.  This is the hill he is dying on.  He chose it because in his simple mind he thought this would be easy to achieve and he has chosen authoritarianism over all else, so he only knows how to double down when he is faced with a setback.  

Trump, however, is not the real loser.  We elected him.  We bear responsibility and we will suffer the effects, the most obvious and immediate one being the division in our society.  Can we overcome this? Can we heal?  I don't think either side cares right about now.  40% of those who vote in the 2020 election will vote for Trump.  When he loses they will be pissed and energized.  They will despise the next President and begin criticism and propaganda against him or her upon inauguration.  They will buy whatever the Koch Brothers and Sinclair and Fox News sells them from pizza parlor underage sex rings to hysteria over emails.

None of this bodes well for our democracy and there is only one antidote: education.  When we agree as Americans to fund the best public schools in the world, including higher education, we can have an informed electorate.  We are a long way from that, but change is always slow.  If you think of how far we have come on social issues to say nothing of the technological advances in the world, change can be scary.  

I watched a documentary movie about Clarence Avent and in it he said Obama was going to lose the election right up until he didn't, and I get that.  That is like coming a long way, baby.  So now when I think about children in cages I think it might be a reaction to the speed of change.  Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, right?  Trump's minority of fearful, white, male Americans, anti-abortion voters and those who can look past the all the indignities in the name of their own financial interests, remain energized.  They typically feel left out and marginalized by the American political process but they feel like their voice is loud and proud right now.  They matter right now and it is preferable by far to being ignored.  After all, as Elie Wiesel said, the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.  

Defeating Trump in 2020 will not be enough to restart the advancement many of us strive for where we left off.  The Supreme Court is unbalanced. Trump appointed judges are being approved at alarming rates.  They're organized.  They have the Senate.  Getting back to the evolution of our kind will take time.  

It will be about education and the long game.  Let's  gain universal agreement that we have to value education as a society so much it is untouchable and always well funded.  We have to pay for it.  

Many Americans, perhaps even a majority, recognize the GOP is inclined to give tax breaks to the wealthy class in spite of the fact trickle down economics has been so thoroughly debunked.  Many Americans, perhaps even a majority, recognize the GOP is the party of fear, xenophobia, the stick, authoritarianism, austerity, white men controlling women's bodies, favors for favors, gerrymandering, private prisons, gutting the voting rights act...  (Why do Republicans always seek to limit the number of eligible voters?  It is as simple as what Bill Clinton said. The demographics of the United States are changing and no amount of white supremacy will stop that.  When they keep people of color from voting, through gerrymander or by census question, [fear,] they stem the tide, but they can't stop the tide.  They delay the inevitable is all.  The changes I am in favor of are coming.  I already know that.  It is just a matter of if they will happen in 20 years time or 100 years but they are coming.) These policies of division, fear and hate do not speak to our younger generations.  They are not so inclined to fear and hate.  

A truly educated society would never vote for Donald Trump.  So that is where we need to start, today.  Education will tamp down the various fears the GOP sells their agenda on.  Our youth are already less inclined to fear the other, the different.  Joseph de'Maistre said, "Every nation gets the government it deserves."  We are there.  We have been asleep at the wheel, too unwilling to pay our teachers and fund our public schools.  We valued it at one time but the GOP worked to erode public confidence in its value or that we were doing it well.  

This is where we start.  When we achieve an informed and educated society we will have one that is difficult to fool.  Education can be inoculation against the fear that causes division..

If I Could Relive a Day of My Life

I don't have a lot of memories of my mother because we were apart.  I remember visits to Terminal Island or Pleasanton.  Cold visits in cordoned areas to mingle with inmates were not memorable even when the inmate was your mother.  There was a time when i was 18 however.  She had been out of prison and trying to get her life together with a man 30 years her senior.  She was supposedly clean but her relationship with heroin and methadone was a palette of smeared colors and images, overlapping and smudging one another into a mural of indistinct confusion.  

My Aunt and Uncle told me my mom was coming to take my brother and I to Knott's Berry Farm.  It was an amusement park.  We rode the rides and she waited.  I did not know how to act.  She was my mom and I longed for her but I did not know how to be close to her.  I went through the motions.  I laughed and smiled and enjoyed the trappings of the park.  I didn't know what to say.  At the end of the night we stopped at Coco's back in town before being dropped off at our home with our Aunt and Uncle.  My mom disappeared to the restroom for a long time.  When she finally returned my brother and i had mostly finished our meals.  She apologized and sat down to her salad.  A moment later her head dropped towards the table and her face fell into the salad.  I was 18.  My mom gathered herself and woke up...some.  She drove us home.  I didn't know.  Maybe I should have but I did not.  I always believed every word she said to me.  When she said she was not on heroin I knew it was true.  Only later when my Aunt and Uncle commented did it occur to me she may have lied, even to me.  

If I could relive that day I would tell her I loved her so much she would not need heroin.  I just know she was looking for love in that drug.  I know she was looking for my love in that heroin.  I know the years and years apart had taken a toll on her.  I know she sought love in all kinds of ways.  I needed her love too.  We were both emptier from not having one another.  It was commensurate.  If I could relive that day I would tell her I love her on the ride to the park, at the log ride, in the old west section of the park, at the games and the roller coasters.  I would tell her on the ride home, too, and at Coco's, and she would feel the warmth and that thing from inside her veins that made her disappear into the ether where memories of a son's love and of bonds unattended are too hazy to know or feel would be obsolete and she would stay clean and the overdose that came  one year later would never need to happen because she would feel loved and contented.

4 stanzas from bygone days

faith, in troubled times


my flower, my friend
my ray of giddy sunshine in this place i call imperfection
you give me hope like a serum
like a shot of love to inoculate my world weary soul
you give me beer bongs of hope

my song, my lover
my breath of joyful air in this moment of truth and consequences
you inflate me like an airbag
like a jolt of oxygen to pump up my medulla obligated
you give my life animation

my companion, my poem
my funny little rock 'n' roller fronting our funky quartet
you guide me like a star
like a bic lighter of trust illuminating my night skies
i believe in you

my sparrow, my baby
you are the last sound my ears will ever hear
you are the most recent thing i ever needed
you let me give when i have nothing to offer
my heart is your heart is my heart


http://michaeljjames.blogspot.com/2009/03/faith-in-troubled-times.html