General Essays

Pontifications, pomposity and other pretentiousness

Coming Home

/ djgourdoux / 5 Comments

Last Thursday, I missed the first big spring storm of the season. It occurred without me, and it left behind a fresh layer of dark green on the grass, and gave birth to flowers that popped up from the softening earth and blossomed and bloomed. It’s an annual rite of passage, the announcement that spring is here to stay, and that the warm air and the music of songbirds will be the norm for a while.

I’d heard the rumble of its rolling thunder in the night, but I couldn’t look out my window to see its driving rain, the puddles that formed on the sidewalks, the sudden creation of backyard rivers and lakes. All I had was sound, the sound of tumult and violence, and the driving waves of rain against my window. Beyond the window was a foreign darkness that revealed nothing to me.

I was far from home, in a foreign place. According to Google Maps, the distance from the hospital bed I laid in and my home was only fourteen minutes by car.  But measured in terms of where I was and where I’d recently been, I may as well have been galaxies away from home.

Home is an apparition, a state of mind, a moment in time, longing, things lost. It’s familiarity and comfort, it’s the aggregation of all we care about and love. It’s illusory and tangible, both real and fabricated. It’s memories suppressed and exaggerated.  It’s sacred.  It’s the place we all hope we’ll return to at least one last time.

Last Tuesday, I had emergency triple bypass heart surgery, after checking myself into the ER on Easter Sunday with bad chest pains.  I came home yesterday after just over a week’s stay in the hospital. There was a period of time that I wondered if I’d ever see home again. In fact, on Monday morning, the pains were so severe that I actually had the conversation with myself, the conversation that asks the questions, what if I die, right here and now?  What if this is it?

During the operation, they cut about seven gashes in my legs, to harvest the vein segments they’d use to bypass the heart arteries that were as much as 99% clogged. The gashes in my legs look harsh and violent, but are nothing compared to the one that runs deep and wide from the top of my chest to my abdomen.  But as I began healing, it became clearer that I would recover and make it home again.

My wife took me home yesterday, in the middle of a bright and warm spring Monday afternoon.  I marveled at how, while I was away, the landscape had transformed from brown and dead winter grasses to the bright green and growing carpet that now covered the ground.  And it occurred to me that a storm that had taken place in my heart had transformed me, too, driving seeds of rebirth and regeneration deep into my moist soils.

Spring is birth and growth, promise and opportunity. Home is the place where these things are realized, where they come into fruition.  Home is the reason for spring, and the place where we rest our souls and nurture our beating hearts.

A Bun Named Amy

/ djgourdoux / 2 Comments

Last night, the writing group I belong to, the Kenosha Writer’s Guild, had one of its regularly scheduled extended critique meetings.  I submitted an excerpt from the novel I’ve been working on.  In the excerpt, there’s an early morning scene in a hospital where the main character encounters a new, minor character that I introduce with the following sentence:

At that point, one of the nurses, a thirtyish woman with thick glasses and black hair all tied up in a bun named Amy, walked past in the hallway.

Forget for a moment that the sentence’s first clause, “At that point,” adds nothing and serves no purpose.  The main problem with the sentence is that I named the bun, and not the woman.

This was pointed out to me by one of my fellow writer’s group members at last night’s meeting. We had a good laugh at my expense, and although I was slightly embarrassed, I wasn’t surprised.

I’d read through the piece many times before the meeting, and made a lot of corrections.  But for some reason, glaring as it might be, I never saw the bun named Amy.  This is consistent with my experience, that no matter how diligent I might think I am in self-editing, I always miss things.  This hasn’t been true for only my creative writing, it was also true when years ago, in a previous life as a computer programmer, I’d always miss bugs in the code I was writing or testing.  There is a natural inclination in both forms of writing to glance over what you aren’t worried about, those little pieces of housework that are simple and unambiguous, and focus on the more complex content, the parts where you put in more work.

For what it’s worth, given that it’s coming from the author of a bun named Amy, my advice to other amateur writers out there is to join a writing group as soon as possible. Not only does a writing group provide you with a mechanism to have your work reviewed by fresh eyes, more importantly, it gets you away from your desk and out with people who share your passion, who understand what it is to be driven to tell stories.

A couple of years ago, I was at a big weekend writers’ conference in a hotel in downtown Madison.  One night, I was in the hotel bar, where I met a couple of other writers.  One was a quiet young guy in jeans and a black t-shirt, in about his mid-twenties, who’d written a sci-fi/fantasy novel.  The other guy was a sharply dressed lawyer by day who’d self-published three crime novels by night.  The lawyer asked us what we thought about writing groups.   The young guy responded that he had no opinion, that he’d never belonged to one.  I started to explain that I found mine to be extremely valuable, when he interrupted me.

“I think they’re a complete waste of time,” he said.

“Why’s that?” I asked, as if I had any reason to believe he wouldn’t tell me if I didn’t.

“Because all they do,” he said, “is tell you how great you are. I need more than that.”  He then proceeded to spend the next two hours telling me how great he is, pontificating on everything writerly, from rules about dialogue to why the big time agencies and publishing houses were too screwed up to recognize his greatness.  At some point, the younger guy somehow escaped, as I looked up from my beer to his empty chair, while lawyer-writer guy droned on and on and on.

Finally, the guy shut his mouth long enough to take a sip from his goblet of wine, and I was able to excuse myself and go back to my room. The guy was a pompous ass and a fatuous bore, but a part of me understood what he said about writing groups.  They can be too nice. They can be too busy being supportive when what you might need is some harsh and blunt criticism.

But then I thought about it, and I realized how wrong the douchebag was.  The thing with writing groups, at least my writing group, is that you get different levels of writers writing in wide and diverse genres and styles, not to mention skill levels. You get so many different perspectives.  The only common denominator is a love of and shared passion for writing.  It’s people who have full lives with work and family, but are still driven by the need to express themselves, to put something down.

Critiques tend to be respectful because most of the members respect one another, and respect the investment of time and emotion that goes into creation of each piece. It’s the creation of art at its most basic and pure level:  nobody is getting paid for their work, and each member is driven to write what they write by something that’s moved them. They may be inspired by a specific artist or genre, or by events in their lives, or any number of things. The point is, nobody forced them to write what they choose to write, or to even write in the first place.  The quality of their output is secondary – that they’ve been moved to put something down is worthy of admiration and respect.

Learning to understand this is the main reason to join a writing group.  Once understood, you realize that you are not alone, that maybe this strange thing you have inside isn’t as unusual as you thought it was.  Once you learn to respect these things in others, you start to respect it in yourself. This is after all why we write – to better understand not only the world around us, but to better understand ourselves, who we are.  This not only helps us make sense of the world, it makes us better – better readers, better writers, better people.

Left and Right, Right and Wrong

/ djgourdoux / 2 Comments

A couple of questions that have been bothering me for some time now:

Why do the Democrats so consistently lose elections?  Why are Republicans in control of both sides of Congress, and why do they have a good chance of winning the Presidency in 2016?

Well, I’m certainly not an expert. I’m no political scientist. But this is still America, and I’m still allowed to have opinions, no matter how unqualified I might be.

So here’s what I’ve come up with …

In a fight, the surest way to get your ass kicked is to underestimate your opponent. The second surest way to get your ass kicked is not having a plan of attack.  It doesn’t matter how much bigger or stronger you might be, do these two things and you’ll likely lose.  And this is where the Democrats consistently fail.

The Republicans have more money and power behind them, although the Democrats have been more effective in raising money in recent elections, narrowing the gap.  The Democrats have a larger base and their values are more in step with more Americans.

So here we are, at the beginning of the 2016 Presidential campaign, and the front runner for the Republicans is Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, while for the Democrats, the front runner is former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

On the surface, and in the current poll numbers, it doesn’t seem to be much of a match.  Walker is relatively unknown outside of Wisconsin, has an unexceptional record and limited experience, is a college drop-out, and a rookie on the national political stage.  Clinton is currently clobbering Walker in the polls.

But the last thing Democrats should do is feel comfortable and relax.

Over the past thirty years or so, the Democrats have lost their largest and most powerful demographic, the white working class, to the Republicans.  How did this happen? On the surface, it doesn’t make sense. Republican policies enacted over the past thirty five years have resulted in their loss of income, higher unemployment, greater debt, unprecedented class erosion, and diminished individual rights.  Yet this constituency has become the heart and soul of the Republican Party, aligning with the very same corporate masters and tycoons who have taken these things from them.

So why has the white, working class become more conservative?  Democrats struggle to understand this and until they do, they’ll be unable to adopt an effective plan to reverse it. One thing is clear: this demographic is not stupid, apathetic, lazy, or racist, as liberals too often tend to dismiss them.  This only feeds into the Republican portrayal of the left.

The conservative movement has effectively depicted the Democrats as upper class, elitist, arrogant, permissive, and immoral.  The right makes emotional appeals based upon this and drives home the point that they are being threatened, that liberals want their guns, that immigrants want their jobs, that minorities want preferential treatment. They’re told that conservatives share their values of hard work, self-determination, and morality, and that all of these things are under siege from the left.

Elements of pop culture are held up as examples.  Rap music reinforces the image of inner city African Americans as violent gangsters to be feared.  Hollywood is portrayed as elite and promiscuous and immoral, promoting reckless values of gay rights and graphic sexuality and violence.

These messages are driven home daily by what Hillary Clinton accurately referred to nearly twenty years ago as a “massive right wing conspiracy.”  The air waves are filled with the vitriol of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Fox “News.”  It’s amazing how consistent these talking heads are in message and how strongly they stay on point, driving home whatever their corporate commanders have deemed to be the talking points of the day.

The overall unifying message paints a picture of the world drawn in black and white, without the colors of nuance or subtlety or complexity. People buy into this message because it is constantly hammered into their brains, and it installs and intensifies primal fears. Fear has no room for ambiguity.

The reaction to the film American Sniper (which I confess I haven’t seen yet) is an illustration in point. The conservative view is that Chris Kyle was a hero, that through his killings he was saving countless other American lives, and that he suffered from the trauma of war.  These are not simplistic or unsophisticated views. What seems to be lacking in any serious discussion of the movie or Kyle is any deeper ambiguity related to questioning why we over there in the first place, or what the culture of war and militarism does to the psyche of individuals and groups, or to even suggest a level of discomfort in the counting of the confirmed number of kills of human beings.  To the conservatives, to even raise these issues is to question the heroism of Kyle, and to lump you in with the bleeding heart whiners who don’t appreciate the sacrifices of our troops.  To be clear, I haven’t seen the movie, and once I have, I might feel that these issues are moot.  But I can’t help but feel that by simply wanting to have an honest discussion about them would be worth exploring, but the right immediately shuts down at the mere suggestion of deeper complexity behind these concepts.

But the right isn’t the only side that shuts down and resorts to labeling.  I’ve seen, in disagreements about other issues, left leaning people lump intelligent and thoughtful people on the right in with the radical and hysteric tea partiers, and write them off as uneducated gun toting religious fanatics.

This is where the left fails – it doesn’t take its opposition seriously. Walker goes to London and gives non responses to questions about evolution and the left eviscerates him for it.  Then, Rudy Giuliani makes some ridiculously stupid and offensive remarks about President Obama, and Walker gives “no comment” type of replies.  The left then goes nuts about Walker, and Walker replies that he’s not going to waste any more energy responding to such nonsense, and that he prefers talking about the issues, about his bold ideas and plans.

It’s an ingenious strategy, and illustrates how the Republicans are better organized and tougher than the Democrats.  Giuliani, who is even less relevant these days than Sarah Palin, takes one for the team, and throws himself under the Walker campaign bus.  Walker stays above the fray, looking serious and presidential. The bigger the fuss the left makes about Giuliani’s idiocy and Walker’s non-committal responses, the more Walker benefits.  My recommendation would be that the left forget about Giuliani and discuss what Walker pretends to want to discuss:  the “real” issues.

But before we get to the issues, let’s take a look at what seems to be the biggest component of Walker’s strategy:  union busting. Nothing is more at the core of Walker’s platform than standing up to corrupt union bosses and the “powerful” special interests of organized labor.  Never mind that it’s an easy target – organized labor has never been weaker and union membership has never been lower.  Those union bosses and special interests have been on life support since the 1980s, since President Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, and since President Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) into law.

But that doesn’t mean organized labor won’t go down without a fight. And trust me, Walker is counting on it.  It’s another example of how the Republicans have learned how to turn opposition into opportunity.  When Walker faced recall over his removal of collective bargaining rights to public employees, he used the demonstrations in Madison to his advantage, portraying the protesters as an angry mob. In his memoir, Unintimidated, clearly written to frame him as a presidential candidate, he exaggerates threats from the protesters to a degree that would make Brian Williams blush.  It’s no coincidence that now, as he begins his presidential campaign, he proposes a state budget with insane cuts to education.

Walker and the organized right are counting on two things: loud and chaotic protests from the opposition that he can “heroically” stand up against, and the left’s usual disorganized underestimation of the right.  Both serve to energize the conservative base.  Too often the left counts on their own presumed intellectual superiority, and you’ll hear, “I can’t believe that so many people are stupid enough to vote for Walker.” The left has to stop this and recognize not only that the right is just as smart as they are, but that such comments are incredibly destructive.

So if the right is just as smart as the left, why would they vote for an idiot like Walker?  And make no doubt about it, when it comes to the issues, Walker is a complete idiot.  His bold ideas consist of a couple of shallow Koch brother talking points, and when he is forced to explain them in depth, his intellect is as exposed and shriveled as a naked man’s privates in the February Wisconsin air.

When it comes to issues, the Republicans have been extremely effective at framing discussions to twist and distort their intentions.  A few examples:

  • “Right to Work” laws: This term has come to be accepted for the union busting laws being pursued across the country, when in fact they are intended to take away worker rights; primarily, the right to collective bargaining.
  • “Job creators:” At the heart of the Republican unending faith in trickle-down economics is the premise that over burdensome taxes and regulations imposed upon corporations are impacting profits and preventing their leaders from creating more jobs. The truth is increasing corporate deregulation and lower tax rates have resulted in epic job losses, as the increase in revenues has been funneled to dividends, shareholders, and obscene bonuses paid to the CEOs and Boards of Directors. The typical mantra of any CEO is “We have to deliver value to our shareholders by doing more with less.” I’ve never heard of a CEO who said, “Our goal is to hire more workers.”
  • “Big Government:” This has become an excuse for further deregulation and more corporate autonomy.  It’s been very effective, and with the current dysfunctional, do-nothing congress being so inconsequential and incompetent, it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the alternatives to “big government” have already proven disastrous, with banking deregulation leading to the “too big to fail” collapses and bailouts. What is really needed is “effective government,” government that serves people and not corporations (which, no matter what the Supreme Court says, are two disparate entities with conflicting interests).
  • “Liberal” and “Patriot:” Republicans have effectively changed the meanings of these two incendiary words. “Liberal” has come to be associated with “un-American”, and “Patriot” is associated with Christian conservatism. These words are used to define a narrow value structure that reinforces the divisive rhetoric in the messages broadcast from party headquarters.  Look at Giuliani’s comments about President Obama this week – he claims he’s never heard Obama express a love of America (not a “patriot”) and that Obama was raised by Communists (he’s “an un-American liberal”). What’s interesting is that these ridiculous allegations have been raised for eight years now, and continue even in a Presidential campaign Obama will not be a participant in. The reason isn’t that Giuliani actually believes these things, or that they are remotely relevant to anything, but that they give an opportunity for Walker to portray himself above the fray, even as old attitudes and prejudices are reinforced.

So how do the Democrats win back the base they’ve lost? I don’t know.  I’m really not very smart.  The best I can come up with is this – the Democrats need to take the fight to the Republicans, and not stay on the ropes taking punches.  The Republicans have been very effective at making the Democrats play defense.  In 2004, they “swift boated” John Kerrey, questioning his service in Vietnam, deflecting attention from the miserable failure that was George W. Bush’s incomplete service in the Air National Guard.

I observed a local example of this a weekend or two ago on Milwaukee television, on a Sunday morning panel talk show hosted by local conservative radio personality Charlie Sykes.  The topic was related to Walker and his budget proposal to cut more than $300 million from the state university budget while at the same time proposing $220 million in new taxes to support the financing of a new arena for the NBA franchise the Milwaukee Bucks. A couple of weeks earlier, after receiving pressure from the powerful Potawatomi Indian tribe, owners and operators of a large casino in Milwaukee, Walker announced his determination to deny a proposed casino that would be managed by the Menomonee Indians in nearby Kenosha, citing concerns about increased taxes on Kenosha residents.  The Menomonees responded by offering to pay the $220 million to finance the Bucks’ stadium in return for Walker reconsidering his decision, thus eliminating a glaring inconsistency in Walker’s budget.  Walker refused to even consider the Menomonee offer, fueling speculation that his decision against the Kenosha casino was in deference to the Potawatomi rather than concern for the Kenosha tax payers. When the subject of the Menomonee offer came up on Sykes’ talk show, Sykes and the rest of the panel quickly dismissed it, saying the Menomonee offer was insincere and that Walker was correct not to entertain it.

This struck me as incredibly disingenuous, because normally, there is no quicker knee jerk reaction from Republicans than when new taxes are proposed. Imagine if the governor were a Democrat instead of Walker – Sykes and his panel would have been out of their seats and through the ceiling with righteous indignation that the tax and spend liberals refused to even consider the proposal.  But instead, with a Republican governor with presidential ambitions, their principles suddenly evaporated, and the issue was quickly swept under the rug.

And here’s where the Democrats, as usual, dropped the ball.  In the ensuing days, their silence on Walker’s willingness to tax and spend on a basketball team at the expense of the state’s education system, despite an offer from the private sector to alleviate the public burden of funding the new arena, was deafening. It was the sound of another opportunity to point out the inconsistency and insincerity of the Governor’s actions being dropped and squandered.

The Democrats need to avoid engaging the Donald Trumps, Sarah Palins and Rudy Giulianis who are designated to stir things up and distract, and call the Republicans on their lies and inconsistencies. They need to hold the Republicans accountable.  They need to play some offense from time to time.

More than anything, Democrats need to illustrate how harmful Republican policies have been to this core constituency.

On an individual level, I know from experience that it’s extremely difficult to change even one person’s mind.  It’s downright impossible if you insult or personally attack his character or intellect. But that’s what happens when we discuss politics – it almost always becomes emotional and personal.  As StevenVan Zandt once said, “what’s more personal than your politics?”

Here are some ideas on how to effectively engage someone you don’t see eye to eye with in a political discussion:

  • Show a little respect. Recognize that most of the people voting Republican are kind, decent and caring, and love their families and their country just as much as you do.  Make them understand that we all want a better world for our children, and we are more alike than different.
  • Don’t take the bait – try not to engage in the emotional divisiveness from the Limbaughs and Hannitys. Don’t make things personal. You’ll just waste time and energy and punch yourself exhausted long before you get to the final rounds.
  • Stay on point – the key is making people understand how the policies advanced by the Republicans will harm them. In Wisconsin, for example, make them understand that we have one of the best education systems, at all levels, in the country, and that Walker’s proposed budget will decimate that, and how our children and their children will suffer real and long term intellectual and economic consequences.
  • Be informed. Don’t just scratch the surface of issues, go a little deeper, and check sources. Snopes is a good resource for checking propaganda generated from both sides.
  • Be capable of objectivity. It’s highly unlikely that any individual will agree 100% with everything liberal and disagree 100% with everything conservative. Be open minded. You can’t change anyone’s mind until you’re willing to change your own.
  • Remember who we’re fighting against – it isn’t the ditto head in the next cubicle who spends his lunch hour listening to Rush – even when he spews Limbaugh’s hateful rhetoric verbatim. The enemy isn’t him, it’s the rhetoric – so don’t attack him personally.  Respectfully disagree and calmly describe what you find offensive about the remarks.
  • Be patient and strong – our opponent is bigger, stronger, and better organized than we are. We’re going to have to take a few punches and stay on our feet. Nothing demoralizes a fighter more than taking their best punch square on the jaw and standing unflinched. Be tough and hang in there.  Have a little faith.

I’ve Been There, Too

/ djgourdoux / 2 Comments

I’ve been a die-hard Green Bay Packers fan for almost 50 years now, starting in 1967, which was the year of Bart Starr and the “Ice Bowl,’  Vince Lombardi’s last year as the Packers’  coach, and the year they accomplished what was never done before and hasn’t been done since – winning the third of three consecutive NFL championships.  I turned nine years old during that season, and became a lifetime fan, despite the fact it would be twenty nine years until their next championship.

Twenty nine years filled with mediocrity, incompetence and disappointment.  Then, in the 1990s, we were treated to the Mile Holmgren and Brett Favre years, years in which we won one Super Bowl but were contenders almost every season, with the most exciting player in football leading us.  Then Favre was gone and replaced by Aaron Rodgers, who unbelievably is actually better than Favre, and who, in the 2010 season, with Mike McCarthy as head coach, lead us to another Super Bowl win.

Through the years, there have been more disappointments than triumphs, and some historically bad losses.  There was the game early in the 1981 season, against the Atlanta Falcons, that the Packers went into the fourth quarter with a 17-0 lead before self destructing and losing, 31-17.  There was the 1997 Super Bowl, against an inferior Denver team with John Elway where the Packers couldn’t stop Terrell Davis and Holmgren abandoned the run in a frustrating 31-24 loss, there was the “4th and 26” playoff game against Philadelphia in 2003 when Donovan McNabb completed a 28 yard pass to Freddie Solomon on said down and yardage to put the game in overtime, which Favre promptly ended by lobbing up an interception to Brian Dawkins, and there was the 2007 NFC championship game at Lambeau, which again ended with Favre throwing a first possession interception in overtime that lifted the New York Giants instead of the favored Packers to the Super Bowl

But none of those compare to this year’s debacle, the incredible choke job the Packers executed to lose the NFC championship to the Seattle Seahawks.  There were about ten plays that the Packers inexplicably screwed up on, any one of which having been run properly would have ensured a Packer victory.  Each of these had an individual, either a player or a coach to point at.  But none was as glaring as the on-side kick.

By now, you’ve seen the play.   I don’t have to describe it.  There was just over two minutes left in the game.  All the Packers had to do was recover the kick and they’d win.  Game over. So it came down to a little used, third string tight end named Brandon Bostick, who had caught two passes for three yards ALL SEASON.  It was his moment, with the eyes of all the world on him, and in that moment, he tried to catch the kick, even though he had been instructed to block the Seahawk who ended up with the ball, so star receiver Jordy Nelson could do what he is one of the very best  at – catch the  ball.  But Bostick panicked in that moment, and leaped up to catch the ball, only for it to deflect off of his helmet into the Seahawk’s hands.   Put in simple terms – he screwed up.

After the play, after Bostick came back to the sideline, television cameras showed the Packers’ special teams coach in Bostick’s face, screaming at him.  The Packers went on to blunder their way through the rest of regulation and overtime, losing the game and the chance to play in another Super Bowl.

After the game, Bostick, who probably didn’t talk to a single reporter all season, found himself in the eye, the center, of the press hurricane.  He patiently listened to the questions and straight forwardly answered them, pulling no punches, accepting complete responsibility for the screw up, acknowledging the teammates, the coaching staff, and all the fans he’d let down for simply not doing his job.   He spoke softly, and the hurt in his eyes revealed a bruised soul.

With age comes maturity.  In my younger days, I’d brood about a painful packer loss for days.  Now I still get disappointed, but it’s rare that I yell at the television.  I find that, shortly after the game is over, I’m able to move on, and find some perspective.  The sun will still rise in the morning, and the world will continue spinning, and whatever other cliches you can find for life going on.  It’s only a game. This is easy for me to recognize.  But for Bostick, it’s made hazier by the fact that this is his job, this is what he does for a living.  Not only does he have family and fans, he has his teammates, his co-workers, depending on him to do his job.  And he’s let them all down.

Looking at Bostick as he answered the reporters’ questions, I recognized the look in his eyes.  It was the look of eyes that know sleep won’t come easy, that feel the weight of anxiety, that question the daily assumptions one makes about one’s self.  I recognized in his eyes the same story that I’ve lived, the same pressures and self doubts and anxieties I’ve felt in times that I screwed up.

It’s hard enough to face friends, co-workers and family and admit that you’ve failed them.  The most difficult thing is, in the dark of a sleepless night, to stare down your own fears and anxieties and self perceptions and admit failure to yourself.  It’s the unavoidable truth that keeps you awake and exposes the lies and illusions we tell ourselves that most nights go unchallenged.  We make mistakes every day, but normally they are unimportant and undetected, and by the time we close our eyes in sleep at night they are long forgotten, as is the fact that we’re all human and all capable of making that critical mistake at that critical time.

Then comes the day when we make that critical mistake at the critical time, when our fallibility is exposed.  How do we get through times like these?  How do we reconstruct ourselves, our self-esteem, out of the shattered pieces that lie scattered before us?  How do we ever find “normal” again?

The answer is through the grace and understanding of the very people we’ve let down – our friends, family, co -workers.  We gain strength through their caring and understanding.    The same things that make failing them so disappointing are the things we gain strength from.  It’s the bonds of love and respect and lived experience.  It’s the shared and pulsating heart of humanity.

It’s not forgiveness that Brandon Bostick needs right now, it’s recognition.  If we look into his sad and haunted eyes, we’ll recognize our own reflection, and we’ll understand.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tCC3Wffs04

Isn’t That Remarkable?

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One of my favorite moments in all of literature is the scene in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman where Biff Loman finally breaks down and breaks through a lifetime of lies and delusions and makes his father, Willy Loman, understand that he loves him.  It’s the same scene where Willy famously exclaims “I am not a dime a dozen, I am Willy Loman …” Willy’s response to the breakthrough is three simple words:  “Isn’t that remarkable?”

I’ve read only a handful of great American plays, but one theme that seems to consistently run through them is illusion versus the truth.   The Glass Menagirie, by Tennessee Williams, opens with the following speech from Tom, the younger brother of the play’s main character, Laura:

“Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”

The entire play is about the struggle between truth and illusion, responsibility versus escape.   It’s a theme Williams continues in his most famous play, A Streetcar Named Desire, which becomes an all out war between the cold and violent truth, represented by Stanley Kowalski, and the fragile dream world of illusion represented by Blanche Dubois.

We also see the same conflict in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, about a group of drunken dreamers who are awaiting the annual arrival of their friend Hickey, the iceman.   Hickey arrives, but he is sober, and honest, and he confesses to the murder of his wife.  The harshness and violence of Hickey’s sober truth shatters the shallow dreams of the drunks.   Truth is again shown to be harsh and violent and destructive, while illusion is shown to be weak and wasteful.

These themes continue in almost all great American plays.  Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf  is  about a night with an alcoholic married couple playing a twisted game of  deception and lies on their young guests until the light of dawn reveals the tragic truth they’ve been trying to hide.

Why does this theme show up so often in American theatre?  I think it might be because it’s at the center of our history, the core of who we are and who we wish we were.  The illusion of America is that it’s that shining city on the hill, where all men are created equal, and where life, liberty and happiness are guaranteed to all, and where anyone willing to roll up their sleeves and work hard can make it.  These illusions cover up an uglier truth of genocide and corruption that have, since the beginning, been at the core of our history.  It took the Pilgrims who landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, who came to this country to escape religious persecution, less than four generations before they were burning “witches” at the stake.  While the ink was still wet on Thomas Jefferson’s self evident truth that “all men are created equal,” slavery was a major part of our economy and would remain so for another eighty nine years.  Our westward expansion wiped out the natives who’d been here for hundreds of years, through a combination of disease, pestilence and war.  It was actually documented government policy to exterminate the great herds of buffalo that roamed the great plains, thus crippling the primary source of food and clothing of tens of thousands of native Americans.

The illusions and the truth of America continue to this day.  The land of the free is also the country with the largest percentage of its population incarcerated.  The gap between the rich and the rest of the country is widening to cavernous proportions, shattering any idea that all men are created equal.  There are sharper racial and class divides and deeper wounds to our psyche.  We are the most violent developed country in the world.

But we still hang on to the illusion, to its ideals, and every now and then, we make the illusion reality.  It was the illusion that allowed us to join together in World War Two and defeat the most powerful evil the world has ever known, it was the illusion that landed a man on the moon, it was the illusion that granted women and minorities the long overdue right to vote, it was the illusion that has allowed men and women throughout the country to marry who they love, regardless of sexual orientation.   Every now and then, we hold up our ideals to the mirror of reality and shame ourselves into action.  The ugliness of the truth cannot disfigure the beauty of the dream.

Isn’t that remarkable?

Breathing Lessons

/ djgourdoux / 3 Comments

I grew up in an isolated, virtually all white small town in southeastern Wisconsin.  It was the 1960s, and my world was the small town streets and the shaded neighborhood backyards.  We were buffered from the bigger cities of Milwaukee and Racine by miles of farmland, and grew up in an idyllic world of fields and woods and backyards, isolated from the turmoil that invaded our homes via the television airwaves. While city after city was burning with race riots or bleeding with anti Vietnam War demonstrations, we were playing kick the can on warm summer nights or pickup basketball games in driveways.  The economy was booming, and most families were able to live comfortably with a single wage earner.  My mom, like a lot of moms, didn’t work, while my dad made a good living as an over the road semi truck driver.  From our vantage point, it was about as close to paradise as you could get, and adults and children alike couldn’t understand what the rioters and protesters were so angry about.

About the time I turned nine years old, in 1967, I became a huge professional sports fan, starting with football and the Green Bay Packers.  Soon I became a big fan of professional baseball and basketball.  I had many favorite players, with the great Packers quarterback Bart Starr becoming my hero.  Other heroes included Willie Mays and Bob Gibson in baseball, and Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson and Elgin Baylor in basketball, and Gayle Sayers in football.  Later, I’d grow to admire Muhammad Ali and later still Joe Frazier.

With the exception of Bart Starr, all of these great athletes had one thing in common:  they were all African Americans.  I really didn’t notice that.  They were all great at what they did, and they had skills that set them apart from the rest. They all imposed their personalities on the games they played, and they were all artists in the truest sense.  Meanwhile, in my isolated small town, I grew up and graduated high school never knowing a single black person.

My mom was a big reader, and would go to the library a couple of times a week.  I’d often go with her, and check out the books in the children’s section.  I remember graduating from the animal books I’d check out in the first and second grades to the slightly older section, and in fourth grade discovering the sports section, and the book The Willie Mays Story.  I checked it out and took it home and stayed up all night reading it.  The book told how Mays was born into poverty in the south (I think it was Alabama) and how he started his professional baseball career in the Negro Leagues.  It was the first I’d ever heard of the Negro Leagues, and I remember being shocked when the book told about Jackie Robinson and Monte Irvin and how there was a time when black players weren’t allowed in the major leagues.

I loved the book, mainly for the stories about how young Mays, while playing for the New York Giants, would still play stickball in the neighborhood streets with the kids, and the patience his manager, Leo Durocher, had with him when he started his career in a massive slump.  Over the course of two or three years, I probably checked the book out and read it about ten times.

There were other books, too, like Bill Russell’s Go Up For Glory and Bob Gibson’s From Ghetto to Glory.  These books inspired in me a love of reading, and they also opened my eyes to what was going on outside my town’s limits.  I began to understand that not everyone in our country had the same advantages I had, and that there was real suffering igniting the race riots I saw on television.

About the same time I was listening to a lot of AM top forty radio and falling in love with the sweet and simple and innocent songs of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and The Temptations.  I’d see them on television and damned if they weren’t black, too.

It’s difficult to exaggerate the role that sports and music played in developing my sensibilities towards race. The fact that so many of the athletes and musicians I admired had to overcome so much was a revelation to me, and by the time Tommy Smith and John Carlos raised their fists at the medal ceremony in the 1968 Olympics, I understood at least on some small level their courage and the symbolic power of the act.

Go forward about twenty years, and two of the most powerful black cultural icons are basketball players Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley.  Jordan avoids getting involved in politics and becomes a corporate conglomerate, saying famously that “even Republicans buy shoes.”  Barkley stars in a television ad where he famously pronounces, “I am not a role model,” eloquently making the argument that parents should take responsibility for their kids and not look to sports figures to provide guidance.

Now with the events in Ferguson and the Eric Garner death, questions are being debated about whether it’s right for athletes to use their forum for political protest. I’d argue that of course it is, and I applaud LeBron James, this generation’s Michael Jordan, for wearing an “I can’t breathe” t-shirt.  Barkley may have been right that parents shouldn’t look to athletes to instill values in their children, but the truth is that athletes and musicians and actors all have a platform that reaches beyond cultural and physical and geographic barriers and touches people that wouldn’t otherwise be touched.  They can use this platform to sell shoes or to increase awareness and effect change.  Cultural battles may be waged in loud and acrimonious front lines, but they are usually won quietly and over time, when people far removed from the front lines see something they recognize in those who choose to get involved on the periphery.

There is responsibility that comes with this platform, and it isn’t limited to African American athletes.  White athletes have an even bigger platform. Imagine the impact if, for example, Aaron Rodgers wore an “I can’t breathe” t-shirt to his weekly press conference.

Just like in the 60s, the front lines of these battles are the inner city streets where violence and poverty run rampant, but real change will occur only when those who are isolated and far removed from the realities of this landscape understand what is at stake, and that there are lives in the balance, lives that they can recognize through the eyes of the football or basketball player they cheer for.  Athletes have a unique opportunity to not only increase awareness but also empathy.  With empathy comes compassion and understanding, the foundation of change.

Running Away With Me

/ djgourdoux / 16 Comments

gerard hotel

The setting for much of my second novel, and for the recent short story I posted here called “The Silence,” is the fictional Mayflower Hotel in the fictional northern Wisconsin town of Neil.  While the events I’ve written about are completely made up, the Mayflower Hotel is based upon the very real Gerard Hotel in the town of Ladysmith, Wisconsin.  I lived in an efficiency apartment on the third floor of the Gerard from August 1977 until December of 1978.  I was eighteen years old when I moved in, and had just turned twenty when I moved out.

It’s a grand old building, rising high from the tall banks of the Flambeau River, and can be an imposing and eerie sight on mornings when mist rises from the river.

I’m not sure why I’ve been drawn to write about it so much lately, why I’ve set so much of my fiction there.  I have vivid memories of what the place looked like, and how the midday shadows hung in my apartment, and how I’d look out the dormer windows from my bed and see, every night before going to sleep, the red blinking of a radio relay tower on the other side of the river, and how when I opened my eyes in the morning, the same blinking red light would be the first thing I saw.

Last week, on Wednesday morning, while I was up at my cabin, I had to run to Ladysmith for some errands.  I had a little time to kill, so I thought I’d stop by the Gerard Hotel and check it out.  Maybe I could talk to the current manager and have a look around.  I parked in front of the hotel, the same place that thirty seven years ago I’d park my first car, a green 1974 AMC Hornet, and I walked up the steps past the little stonewall and the white columns and once again I stood on the immense front porch, and I put my hand on the doorknob and tried to open the front door.  It was locked, and there was a note taped on the door that tenants were to leave it locked.  I couldn’t remember if we left it locked when I lived there or not, but it made sense, at least in 2014, that they wouldn’t want people wandering in off the streets to bother the residents.  I peeked through the glass of the door, and I was surprised at how small it looked inside.  The lobby was hardly a lobby, the stairs that I always had to climb to get to my apartment were right behind the front door, and the front desk, where the manager sat and where I’d pick up my mail, was only a few feet to the right of the stairway, and was small and cluttered.  I looked to see if anyone was behind the desk, someone who I could ask to let me in, but there was nobody.   I looked inside for a while longer, and I wondered, did the hotel show its age as much when I lived there, or was it the additional thirty five years since then that had taken its toll?  I stepped back and off of the porch, and I could see on the side a hole had rotted out of the porch’s stone foundation.  The exterior looked like it could use a fresh coat of paint.

old gerard

I found this about the Gerard hotel in an article on the web about the history of Ladysmith:

Travelers arriving in Ladysmith by train in the early 1900s were met at the depot by representatives of the various hotels. Patrons looking for the finest hotel in town most certainly would have stayed at The Gerard.
 
When it opened in November of 1901, the Gerard was regarded as “the most modern and complete hotel between Minneapolis and Rhinelander,” according to the “Gates County Journal.” The hotel featured new furnishings and steam heat. Electric lights were added after the Ladysmith Light and Power Co. plant was completed in November of 1902.  
 
The hotel was piped for running water when it was constructed, and it had its own water system before the village had a water works. Aside from these “modern” conveniences and good food, the Gerard offered something no other hotel in town could equal – a beautiful location. Situated on the high bank of the river, the Gerard commanded a breathtaking view of the Flambeau. … 
 
The hotel, itself, is both charming and stately. The white clapboard exterior and third story dormers are characteristic of buildings from the colonial era. The hotel seems more imposing than it actually is because one normally approaches it from the south and sees the long view of the building and its expansive porch. The effect would not be the same if the building could be approached from the front. The Gerard’s most distinguished guest was Thomas Marshall, Vice President of the United States, who stayed there while in Ladysmith to give an Armistice Day speech in 1920. Governors and other notables, including James L. Gates (afterwhom Gates County was named) feasted there.

So the hotel was seventy six years old when I moved in, and now is one hundred and thirteen. I was eighteen in 1977, and now I’m fifty six.  I’m still a pup compared to the Gerard, but like the Gerard, I’ve weathered and rusted, and like the floorboards of her porch, I creak and ache.

I remember the Gerard of the late seventies for its cheap rent and the collection of oddballs and misfits (including me) who lived there.  Among the tenants I remember was a middle aged alcoholic disabled veteran, a recently divorced man in his early thirties, a humanities professor from the small, private liberal arts college that used to call Ladysmith home, and a pretty young girl who’d been thrown out of her family home and disowned by her parents.  I never got to know any of these people very well, just well enough to know their situations, and well enough to germinate seeds in my imagination that I’d use to breathe life into in my fiction writing. Aside from the unique characters the place attracted, it was also old and atmospheric and spooky, and just Gothic enough for me to use it as the setting for stories like “The Silence.”

gerard from the river

So while the place has become fertile ground for my imagination, the truth is that my time there was lonely and unexceptional.  Maybe that’s why I romanticize it so much; nothing much of real interest happened to me there. Maybe I’m trying to recreate that time and make it more substantive than it was.  Maybe I’m creating my own personal mythology.

Maybe it’s because I was young and healthy then, and I’m older and broken now.  Maybe it’s because I look back at those days and long for all of the youth and freedom that I so carelessly burned up.  Maybe it’s because I know that Hotels and people wither and fade.

I’m old enough now that I look back on the days when I was eighteen to twenty with a heavy dose of romanticism.  My past is looking more and more like a bad Bob Seger song.   The truth is, while I was physically stronger and leaner, I didn’t know anything about anything.  There’s a Seger song that contains the line “wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”  What a load of crap.  I recognize that I was a complete and total idiot at age 18, and if nothing else can be said about the almost forty years since, I am happy to report that I am at least somewhat less ignorant today.

I can fictionalize my memories of the Gerard as much as my imagination will let me. It remains a beautiful, unique and spooky setting for whatever stories I might decide to tell. But I have to remember that, in the words of that great Motown group The Temptations, it’s just my imagination, and not let it run away with me. If I really think about it, and take off the romantic lenses I view the past through, I’m happy where I am, loose floorboards and peeling paint and all.

Trick or Treat

/ djgourdoux / 2 Comments

We just finished the mid-term congressional elections, and soon the political focus will center on the 2016 Presidential elections.  The current front runner for the Democrats is Hillary Clinton.  For the Republicans, former Florida governor Jeb Bush is a potential candidate who is generating some enthusiasm.

Let’s assume for a moment it ends up being Hillary versus Jeb in 2016.

Here’s one thing recent history has taught us: once elected to a first term, a president is likely to get re-elected to a second term.  Going back to 1968, five of the seven presidents elected to a first term won re-election to a second term.

So let’s assume that whoever wins in 2016, Hillary or Jeb, he/she also wins re-election in 2020 and serves out a complete second term. If this happens, it would mean that for 28 of the 36 years between 1989 and 2024, the United States would be lead by a Bush or a Clinton.

The 2010 census put the U.S. population at 316 million.  316,000,000 people in the country, but seven of nine presidential elections would be won by members of two families. When I grew up, I was taught in school that in the United States, anyone could grow up to be president.  Nothing was said about having to change your name to Bush or Clinton,

Now, about those mid-term congressional elections we just had.  In polls before the election, the public approval rating for congress was as low as 9%.  That’s one out of ten.  So how many of the bums were thrown out?”  Well, not too many.  96% of incumbents won re-election.

So we disapproved of 91 out of every 100 congressmen, yet we reelected 96 out of 100.

Huh?

What do these numbers tell us?  Well, I’m not going to discuss swings to the right or left, what’s shifting or who does or doesn’t have a mandate.   Those are all opinions.   The numbers I stated up above are fact (except for the speculation about the 2016 and 2020 presidential races). So what in my opinion do the facts tell us?

Well, I think they say that the system is seriously broken.  When only two families are in the most powerful position in the world for 28 of 36 years, it’s obviously unrealistic to say that anybody can become president. Democrat or Republican, it’s hard to believe that in a country of 316 million people, the best choice has been a Bush or a Clinton so often.

In the mid-term elections, it’s estimated that campaign donations totaled $3.7 billion.  That’s not much when you consider that $7.5 billion was spent on Halloween!  Trick or treat!   (Source:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/11/06/the-2014-election-cost-3-7-billion-we-spend-twice-that-much-on-halloween/)

But here’s the thing:  that $3.7 billion in campaign funding was donated by an estimated 670,000 people, or about .2 percent (.two, or two tenths of a percent, or .002. not to be confused with two percent, or .02) of the population.  And since money is the biggest factor in winning elections, it means that two tenths of a percent of us is determining who our leaders are.

How do we change this?

We can try and get campaign finance reform passed, try to get the Citizen’s United supreme court  ruling overturned.  Great idea, but not likely to happen when the incumbents are the ones benefitting from the current system.

The only answer is more spending from more of us.  Lets look at the numbers:

$3, 700,000,000 raised in the 2014 mid-term elections

670,000 (.002 of the population) donors in 2014 election

$5,522 average donation per donor

If ten percent of the population donated, that would result in 31,600,000 donors (compared to 670,000 in 2014)

If the average contribution for that 10% was $125, they would raise $3.95 billion, thus outspending the $3.7 billion raised by the .02 percent of the population.

Asking ten percent t of the population to participate in the political process doesn’t seem to be too much .

You say, that’s fine and well, but you’re ignoring the most important number of all:  voter turnout.  Voter turnout in 2014 was only 36%, the lowest rate since 1942.  But I’d argue that voting is just the punctuation on the sentence that money writes.  Many voters are turned off by the spending, by the negative ads.  If more of them were to be involved in what is the real political process, the funding of elections, more of them would vote, and most importantly, the votes would support the money invested.  More candidates, more challengers, would have more funds, and be able to get their message across to whatever the voter turnout would turn out to be.  I have no doubt, for example, that many candidates for many offices had great ideas and  would have made better representatives than many of the incumbents, but they were never heard, drowned out by the money donated by the point two percent.

$125 is a significant cost for many of the 10% that would be asked to contribute.  But maybe it’d be better to skip a Halloween and try a different form of trick or treating.  We might be surprised at what we get.

What I Am

/ djgourdoux / 3 Comments

One of the symptoms of my instance of Parkinson’s disease is micrographia, a disorder of the basal ganglia that results in small and cramped handwriting. Granted, in the scope of things, this is not the worst disorder to suffer from, so I’m not looking for any pity from anyone on this one.  Those who have known me for any length of time know that my handwriting was always bad.  But at least in the past, even if it was incomprehensible to everyone else, at least I could read it. Now, I can’t make heads or tails out of most of my own scribbling.

This can be an unfortunate handicap for one who’s trying to pass himself off as a writer.  It means that unless I have a computer handy, I can’t write – not in notebooks, or journals, or random pieces of paper.  Even taking down a phone number can be a lost cause. So it is that I lug my laptop with me to meetings of the Kenosha Writers’ Guild, and anywhere else that I might have the opportunity to write.

The result of all this is that I don’t have a real, true journal that I write in, where I put down my daily thoughts and ideas and experiments  For the past three and a half years, the closest thing I’ve had to a journal has been this site, “Drivel by Dave.”

What “Drivel by Dave” has actually been is beyond me.  Sometimes it’s a blog, sometimes it’s a website, sometimes it’s a dumping place. It hasn’t been very successful at one of the goals I had for it, which was to build a platform for me as a writer.  While it appears that I have a very small and loyal group of readers, the numbers haven’t grown significantly in the past three and a half years.  This is mostly because I am painfully bad at promoting myself, and I don’t have any unifying strategy or goals for gaining a large following.

But I really don’t give a crap about that. All I want to do is write, and in that regard, “Drivel by Dave” has been moderately successful.  Since I started whatever the Hell this I, I’ve posted exactly 200 tidbits to it.  DBD has kept me writing and given me a place to post whatever’s going on in that defective brain of mine.  Many of the 200 have been instantly forgettable and awful, there’s a few haven’t been too bad, and a small percentage that have actually been pretty good, that show some growth, that I’m actually proud of.  Overall, I think I’ve been pretty good at articulating what was on my mind at the time – the fact that so many of them are incoherent muck is because so much of my brain is incoherent muck.

And that’s the thing – what you see is what you get.  Regardless of the quality of the output, I think I’ve been pretty honest and open in my writing.  As a journal, taken collectively, I think the aggregate of the posts represents an approximation of the sum of the man.   To put it simply, what I am is contained in these ramblings.

When I started writing several years ago, in the first sleepless nights in the early days of my diagnosis of Parkinson’s, my goal was first to express what was going on inside me, and second to record my thoughts and memories so that my children might have a record of who their father is and was.  These goals have expanded to writing short and long fiction and maybe, someday, one or two people out there might consider me a serious writer.  But however lofty my goals and aspirations become, writing will always be first and foremost an exploration and articulation of who I am.  The act of writing, even when it produces some of the worst drivel, is always  intensely personal to me, and there hasn’t been a time that I haven’t sweated some trepidation when I’ve hit the publish button.

Earlier this year, I self published my first novel, Ojibway Valley, and I finished the first draft of my second, I Don’t Know Why.  The final copy of IDKW is a ways off, though, as it is still very, very rough and needs a lot of work.  I still think it could be pretty good when I get around to finishing it, and when I do, I’d like to take another whack at getting published via an agent or small press.  When I pursue that, I suppose I’ll have to get more serious about promoting myself, which would include figuring out what has to change with “Drivel by Dave.”  I’m thinking, before I retire the site (as we know it today), that I might self publish a collection of the best posts plus some other short pieces I have laying around.

I’d appreciate any ideas or suggestions from any readers out there …

In Distrust We Trust

/ djgourdoux / 2 Comments

To say things are out of whack would be an understatement.

The news is filled with stories about how we’re dropping bombs on radical factions in the Mideast, in response to the sick and inhuman beheadings of American and British journalists.  The right wingers were quick and vocal to demand that the president take action, that such brutal and barbaric slaughter of innocent Americans cannot go unpunished, and that if we stood by and did nothing, our enemies would be emboldened and more innocent lives would be lost.

They are, of course, correct.  We know this because of recent history.

On December 14, 2012, twenty six innocent Americans, twenty of them children under the age of ten years old,  were murdered by a madman in Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.   In the two years since, despite overwhelming public outrage, nothing has changed.  All attempts to tighten gun laws have been defeated by a small but vocal minority funded by the National Rifle Association and the mostly Republican congressmen they control.  These are the same people who two years ago threw up their arms and said, “Bad people do bad things.  There’s nothing you can do.”  The same people who   when madmen across the ocean kill, demand swift retribution and immediate action. And, of course, since Sandy Hook, we’ve only seen an increase in mass shootings.

But beheading an innocent victim is so brutal, so insane, so inhuman, that anyone with a shred of humanity would have the save visceral reaction.  This is true, but how can the same people not have the same reaction when twenty innocent children, children, are brutally murdered?

I personally know many people who dismiss the Sandy Hook killings as “the price of freedom” and are quick to criticize when the president doesn’t react swiftly and aggressively to perceived foreign threats.  They are good people, people who’d be the first to help if their neighbors were in trouble.  They’re not stupid.  The problem goes a little deeper than mere intellect.   I think the real problem is actually something that we all have in common, left and right, rich and poor, powerful and weak, the haves and have-nots, the blacks and the whites .

It’s all a matter of trust.  Or rather, distrust.

Nobody trusts anybody any more.  Conservatives don’t trust liberals, whites don’t trust blacks, religious people don’t trust scientists, libertarians don’t trust government, you can go on and on.  There are so many groups, so many labels we define ourselves by, and they are all so different except they are the same in one fundamental and powerful way:  they all have, at their core, a fundamental distrust of some other group or cause.

In many cases this distrust is warranted, in many it’s not.  I’m not so egotistical as to claim any super knowledge or all encompassing wisdom to pass judgment (although I have opinions!  Boy, do I have opinions!).  But there seems to be something in the air, something in the times we live in, that is fueling general feelings of discontent and distrust.

And where did all of these labels come from?  I’ve been called a liberal, a tree hugger, a skeptic, an agnostic, white, a 99 percenter.  I have friends who are tea-partiers, ditto heads, Christians, Muslims, atheists, black, Hispanic, Asian,  libertarians, republicans, democrats, independents, environmentalists, corporate officers, and on and on.   But  before I congratulate myself on the diversity and openness of my relationships, I have to be honest and admit that with each group or label I might use to define  my friends, there’s always at least one topic that isn’t safe for honest and unemotional discussion.

I understand why we can’t always agree with one another.  There’s nothing wrong with disagreement.  It can be healthy.  But distrust is personal, and  corrosive.

In the end, there is only one label we all share, the only one that matters – human being. Only when someone invents a way for us to recognize this will our distrust begin to dissolve.

Of course, the opportunistic bastard will probably be in it just for the money, and then where will we be?