Tag: Culture and Current Events

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Running Away, by Pat Gourley

“I don’t make history. I am history”
Joan Baez

As with many quotes, I begin my pieces with this one is tangential. In fact, it is so tangential that I may not be able to twist it around to the topic but I liked it so much after reading it in a recent New York Times (NYT) interview with her I had to use it.

I suppose one could easily make “running away” a metaphor for staying in the closet and this may have been the case for me personally way back when. Perhaps a physical running away was what my moving to Denver in 1972 with a straight woman and three other closeted gay men was really all about. None of us on this sojourn to the Queen City of the Plains were “out” to any of the others but suspicions were running high. Give us a bit of a break though since the powerful ripples created by Stonewall had yet to make it in any big way to the middle part of America we were fleeing from.

Though I pretty much was over any running away from being queer by the mid-1970’s I have still managed to do my fair share of running away in other areas of my life. I could have for example jumped-in head first to Radical Fairie politics and I think probably have actually moved in with Harry Hay and John Burnside or at least hitched my wagon to that trip in a much more intense way than I did. Harry ever so subtly over the years was always encouraging me to do more implying that I was not living up to my queer potential.

Running away though may have its advantages at times. For me in 1980 falling in love with the man who would be my loving companion until his death in 1995 had many advantages. This choice of staying in Denver rather than picking up and moving to L.A. to be near and much more involved with Hay and the Radical Fairies worked out well. And let’s face it I think I made a much better nurse than I would have made a full-time Queer Activist even one in the orbit of the mercurial and prophetic Harry Hay.

I could go on about other areas where I have turned tail and headed for the hills but enough about me. The newspaper the Wichita Eagle first reported this past week the death in Wichita Kansas of Adrian Lamo at the age of 37. Yes, I will be quoting from the Wichita Eagle which will probably never happen again though remember the Koch Brothers are also from Wichita, with Koch Industries based there, so never say never.

Lamo was a very adept hacker. Most notably he hacked into the NYT and Microsoft among others in the early 2000’s and was convicted of computer fraud in 2004.

His greatest notoriety though came from turning Chelsea Manning into the Feds in 2010. Manning had shared with him that she had turned over to Wikileaks a large trove of classified documents pertaining to the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan including clear evidence of American war crimes.

Manning had reached out to Lamo as someone she thought she could trust admiring, I suppose, his brazen hacks into very powerful organizations. And perhaps and I am speculating here she felt she could trust someone with clear ties to the LGBTQ community. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors had in 1998 appointed Lamo to the City’s LGBTQQ Youth task forcefile://localhost/. https/::www.wired.com:story:adrian-lamo-has-passed-away-at-37:

Lamo testified against Manning at her trial in 2013 and she was subsequently sentenced to 35 years in federal prison. This was the harshest sentence ever for a whistleblower. Barack Obama though commuted her sentence in 2016. A full pardon with honors and recognition as a true patriot would have been more appropriate but we’ll take the reduced sentence.

Quoting a friend of Lamo’s, one Lorraine Murphy, from the Wichita Eagle piece of March 16th, 2018 she described him “as someone who bounced around a great deal… He was a believer in the geographic cure. Whatever goes wrong in your life, moving will make it better.” http://www.kansas.com/news/local/article205629184.html

The “geographic cure” is something synonymous I would say with “running away” and engaged in I suspect in a disproportionate manner historically by queer folk everywhere.

Lamo was quite open apparently about queer aspects of his life but he seems to have been a poor soul often running away from something. I certainly do not know enough about the man to speculate what sort of ghosts were chasing him. Unfortunately, he is now dead and Chelsea Manning is alive and thriving and running for elected office in Virginia. Maybe the better part of valor is to face things head-on and not pick up and run away.

And though she may think she is no longer making history Joan Baez has never as far as I can tell ever run away from anything and neither did Chelsea Manning. Both women are heroines I can try to emulate in my own life and invoke when the temptation to run away presents itself, as it certainly will again.

© March 2018

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

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Escape, by Gillian

The thing is, you can’t. Not completely. You can perhaps escape your current location and situation, your lack of money, to some extent your social status; even your family. But you can never escape who you are. You can perhaps escape some of your character traits, your paranoias and phobias. But you can never escape the basic YOU. You cannot escape being male or female, straight or gay. You cannot escape the color of your skin, or your ethnicity.

I have read that the average male thinks about sex every seven seconds. Whether or not that is true, I wonder if there have ever been studies of how many times a day I think of being a woman, or of being a lesbian. How often does Carlos register that he is Latino, in all circumstances.

Sadly, these frequent acknowledgements of who we are are most often, at least in my case, brought about by negatives; not directed at me, but at a woman, or women, a lesbian or members of the LGBT community. My tribe. You attack members of my tribe, you attack me. Or as Jesus said it, (depending on which translation you choose), ‘whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do also unto me.”

It took me a long time to get over the Orlando nightclub mass shooting; if indeed I have. 49 people died and another 58 were wounded for no other reason than that they were members of, or friends of, the LGBT community. It was ME that man was shooting at; ME that he hated enough to kill.

I saw a news video of blood-lusting ISIS men tossing a man from the rooftop simply because he was gay. I fell with him. It was MY body bursting as it hit the ground like a watermelon fallen from a truck.

The #metoo [Twitter] movement has brought much recent attention to the emotional and physical pain suffered by an appalling number of women in this country. But world-wide the treatment of, and attitude towards, women is frequently so much worse. I feel the pain of every woman forced to marry a man against her wishes, or forced to hide her shameful body in clothes she hates. Crimes against women, rape in particular, are rarely prosecuted or even illegal in so much of the world. In Hungary I met a young woman whose grandmother had been raped many times in World War Two, first by the Germans going East and the by the Russians battling West. Rape has always been a weapon of war; indeed of brutal men everywhere, in all circumstances. I feel for, in every possible sense of the words, those tragic Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boca Haram and forced to live as nothing less than sex slaves to big, angry, violent men.

In February of this year, Rodrigo Duterte, the mass-murdering president of The Philippines, issued a new order. He reportedly told his soldiers to specifically target women rebel fighters, and not to bother killing them but to shoot them in the vagina because then they will be useless as women anyway.* You could write a book, a whole series of books, about that statement. Except that I am way too angry, and it hurts too much even to address those terrible words. What you do to them, you do to me.

Just last month I read about the neo-Nazis in Australia. (Maybe I would sleep better if I went back to my old favorite Winnie the Pooh books!) They sing a delightful ditty, those modern-day Nazis, the refrain of which is, we will get the seventh million yet. Those words sickened me. But I am not Jewish. Yet I know how very much black lives matter, as I hide here in my white skin. And I am forced then to realize that my tribe is not women; not gays and lesbians. I am stuck with feeling the pain of the whole damn world: the entire bloody human race, all the freakin’ people everywhere. And, given the pattern of man’s inhumanity to man, I don’t see the pain going away any time soon.

But I know, somewhere very deep down, that I welcome the pain; the anguish I feel for every hurting member of my huge tribe. It assures me that I am capable, indeed all too capable, of feeling empathy. And for

that I am indeed grateful. Without it I would be some kind of sociopath; pain free perhaps, but we all know that it’s the old story of the yin and the yang, the ups and the downs, and no joy without pain. We see that lack of empathy every day in the Orange Ogre’s behavior. We hear it in his words. And being like him is somewhere I never want to go; someone I never want to be.

* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/13/philippines-rodrigo-duterte-orders-soldiers-to-shoot-female-rebels-in-the-vagina

© April 2018

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

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The Drain, by Gillian

Searching Google, as I so often do, for inspiration on this topic, I was surprised to see one of the first things to come up was a pop music group of some unknown (to me, at least) variety called The Drain. This has happened amazingly often with our topics. There are apparently, for example, groups called Magic, Guilty Pleasures, Culture Shock and I Did It My Way, all topics on which we have written. There is also one called Horseshoes and Hand Grenades. We have only written on the first part of that, so maybe we should tackle Hand Grenades one of these days.

Tricky things, drains. In the northern hemisphere liquid rotates clockwise as it disappears down a drain; in the southern hemisphere it circles in a counterclockwise motion. We all know that this is simply a function of the rotation of the earth, and yet everyone seems to be fascinated by this one fact of life. Anyone, going for the first time to the other hemisphere, just can’t wait to gaze raptly into the bathroom sink to see the water draining in that unaccustomed direction. Yes, it suckered me too, though at the moment of truth, all I could come up with was ‘huh!’

So; tricky things, drains. Like many things, we only recognize the true value of them when they cease to do their job. They are designed to consume material, but on occasion they refuse , or even regurgitate, instead. We’ve all seen times in Denver when the storm drains, blocked by fallen autumn leaves or overwhelmed by the occasional gully-washer downpour, simply refuse to digest the requisite amount of water and leave it to flood intersections and underpasses, and many people say much more than, ‘huh!’

There is little more nauseating then the indescribably disgusting gray goo which has to be extricated from the bend in the pipe when the sink drain refuses to absorb anything further.

Did that stuff really come from me? Huh! The horrors from which our drains habitually save us!

At the time that I left the U.K. in the early ’60’s, the whole country was suffering from what was termed a ‘brain drain’ – so many with higher education left for other countries as Britain offered so few opportunities. One arm of that drain, however, has always run the other way. In the Britain of my youth it seemed as if almost every doctor was from India, and on once again checking with Google, I find that the situation has not much changed. Those from India still provide the largest number of non-British-born doctors and health professionals in Britain, and, in fact, the National Health Service is currently actively recruiting doctors from India. The current fear, however, is that since the Brexit vote with it’s associated real or imagined rise in xenophobia, doctors from India and indeed any other country will be unwilling to commit themselves to a move to the U.K. With a mere 37% of all doctors in Britain currently being British-born white, this does not bode well. Tricky things, drains.

Since the recent U.S. election, many of the same concerns are being voiced here, where more than 25% of all doctors are foreign-born, again, incidentally, with an incredible 10% of all our doctors being from India. There are roughly a million foreign students in our universities, many of whom will remain to contribute greatly to the country. But with the new atmosphere of just about every kind of ism and phobia imaginable, will students from other countries still want to come? Will they feel safe? I can only suppose probably not. This would almost certainly be true of many other potential immigrants except for those sad souls driven by an even greater fear of life in their place of origin. Trump talks of limiting immigration and deporting many of those already here, but if he reverses the flow of that drain, blocking the incoming and increasing the outgoing, our country will be sadly poorer for it. Tricky things, drains.

Now our future leader talks of ‘draining’ the swamp of the Washington establishment – something many of us would not find discouraging. Cleaning up the quagmire of dark money and general corruption and lies, to replace it with clean fresh honest air, who would argue? Sadly, any vision we might have had of an outward-flowing drain was swiftly dispelled. No, the drain flows in.

And with it it brings a new level of homophobia, racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism the likes of which most of us never saw coming in our worst nightmares. But we can stop the flow. We can reverse it. With constant vigilance, not to mention a lot of hard work, we can do it. Just don’t forget, Donald – tricky things, drains.

© November 2016

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

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I Call It Bullshit, by Pat Gourley

“I have talked so much in the past few days that sometimes I feel like I might have used up all my words and I’ll never speak again. And then I hear someone say something really stupid and I can barely keep myself from snapping in two.” 

Emma González from Harpers Bazaar 
February 26th, 2018

Our topic for today is “Your Favorite Childhood Hero”. For some inexplicable reason I wrote on this topic back in January of this year. I must admit though that being off a month or two is not all that unusual for me these days. So I’ll just chalk it up to the vapors of early dementia perhaps and rather write on my current heroine.

That would be the 18-year-old dynamic self-identified bisexual woman of Cuban heritage, Emma González. The opening quote of this piece is from an article Emma wrote for Harper’s Bazaar in late February of this year just a few short weeks after the deadly shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas (MSD) High School in Parkland Florida where she is a student.

That this woman is someone to be paid attention to and emulated was further cemented yesterday at the Washington D.C. March For Our Lives. She held the podium for a few short minutes and the last four of which were in total silence with tears rolling down her cheeks. Leading over 800,000 thousand Americans in 2018 in four minutes of reflective silence is powerful medicine indeed that must be reckoned with.

There were many moving and heart-wrenching speeches yesterday, including a few here in Denver. I’ll admit it may be a sign of my own poorly evolved sense of “identity politics” but the fact that Emma identifies as bisexual has me attracted to her and her bravery even more strongly – no apologies.

The vile and psychotic vitriol being directed her way from the slimy corners of right wing nutville is only further proof for me that she is totally right-on in calling bullshit. Attempts to photo-shop her tearing up a copy of the Constitution is so desperate as to be truly pathetic. It is a doctored photo taken by Teen Vogue where Emma is holding and then tearing up a shooting range target. It is hard to pull off this crap in this day and age of instant response and in particular trying to smear a woman with 1.44 million twitter followers as of March 23rd, 2018.

I attended and participated in Denver’s March For Our Lives yesterday in Denver. As with the recent Women’s and Immigrant Rights Marches I have found these events to be very invigorating and they do seem to be prompting me to get off my ass a bit more. Yesterday’s event in particular seemed to be a great example of “intersectionality” finally becoming part of the overall progressive movement though much work needs to occur for this to become an actualized reality.

Intersectionality is a relatively new concept to me, admittedly a bit late to get on the bus here, and I think to many since it has yet to make it into my spell check. It is defined though as: “the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage: through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better acknowledge and ground the differences among us.” Credit for this concept and analysis goes to a woman named Kimberle Crenshaw an African American civil rights activist and academic who developed it in the late 1980’s. She is currently a professor at UCLA.

I have been impressed with many of the MSD High School student activists urging the mainstream press to talk with kids of color from urban areas where gun violence is endemic and a 24/7 daily fact of life. The intersectionality of race, class, gender and so often gun violence is so striking as to be beyond doubt.

The diversity of people and their often-poignant signs at yesterday’s march were ample evidence of the reality and power of intersectionality. Let me close with my favorite sign from yesterday as proof positive that we are all in this together. A woman a few feet ahead of me in the march was carrying a sign that read: “If I put a gun in my uterus will you regulate it then”.

That women’s reproductive rights and health are so ardently regulated and guns are not is truly bullshit.

© March 2018

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

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Evil, by Gillian

I’m just sitting here gazing blankly at an equally blank page. I can’t seem to get started with this one. The basic problem is, like all of you I try to relate the topic of the week to some personal history, and I have none regarding evil. I can’t say I have ever met, or even had a passing remote acquaintance with, anyone I could ever see as evil.

Sure, I know of people who are frequently described as evil – Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Osama Bin Laden, Charles Manson, Kim Il-sung and now Kim Jong-Il, Saddam Hussein; on and on and on. I have on not so rare occasions called The Tangerine Tyrant, and all who sail with him, evil. But I do not know any of them personally. Neither, come to that, do I want to. I must have been touched, at least indirectly, by Hitler, but I was too young to connect the dots.

And, just as I write this, it occurs to me that evil, and/or the direct results of it, seem to be creeping ever closer. With madmen on both sides of the Pacific, some kind of horrific confrontation between The U.S. and North Korea looms ever larger. Meanwhile, our country drifts rudderless on international waters with no-one at the helm. Our military, overburdened with the weight of international policy, now abdicated by Trump, in addition to traditional military decisions, flounders. While here at home the evildoers threaten ordinary hard-working law-abiding citizens – the vast majority of us, in fact – with cruel and unusual punishments: worsening working conditions, decreasing environmental protections leading, quite probably, to increased sickness at a time when they are taking away our healthcare. Utter madness. Or evil.

I suspect they are frequently entwined.

And does it matter? It is what these people we choose to call evil do which is evil. Whether the perpetrators are evil themselves, or just crazy, or have a belief system very different from our own, is not important; at least, not unless I need, for my own satisfaction, to judge them. In that case, what it is which causes them to do things which I judge to be evil might be important. I might be robbed of my righteous anger, or seething hatred, of the Orange Ogre if I had to accept that he is mentally ill, or was severely traumatized as a child. Personally, I have no intention of going there. I know, from long experience of trying, that I am incapable of getting inside the heads of those who hold attitudes and beliefs very different from mine. I no longer try. For whatever reason, they are what they are. I cannot change them. All I can do is fight back, not against the person but against the evil that they do. As Edmund Burke so famously said, all it takes for evil to triumph is for the good to do nothing.

My second responsibility is to myself; my own sanity. I must not allow anger to take over. It will destroy me. It’s a completely negative emotion with no positive outcome. Buddha said many wise things about anger, as he did about so many things.

You will not be punished for your anger, he says, but by your anger.

He also says,

Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

Someone – other than Buddha but apparently anonymous, maintained,

Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

Evil, alas with greater odds than the peace which passes all understanding, will probably be with us and remain with us always. If I fight it every way I can while keeping myself free of the clutches of anger, I will say I have done my job. And, seeing that I have fallen once more into quotations, as I so often do to save further effort of original thought, I will try to keep Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy in mind –

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.

© June 2017

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

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Will O’ the Wisp, by Louis Brown

I was a little surprised that so many of our authors were not familiar with this expression. When I was a child, the Will o’ the Wisp was in the category of Jack o ‘Lantern—which originally meant pretty much the same thing, flashes of light seen over swamp land—and pumpkin. It was a Halloween word. One of our authors offered “mirage, rainbow and lightning bug” as synonyms. Exactly, they all capture the idea of a fleeting beautiful object or state of affairs that you reach out for to make real, and then frustratingly it disappears or flies out of your reach.

I would offer as synonym the pop song, “Abra cadadbra, I want to reach out and grab you.”

When I was in the eighth grade, I went to science class taught by a Mr. Schiff. I blushed when I saw him. He was tall and handsome, and I wanted him to notice me. He didn’t. He was beyond my reach, a will o’ the wisp.

I am still dazzled by the John F. Kennedy White House. A handsome well-educated Irishman from liberal Massachusetts, and the beautiful, soft-spoken well-educated Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Mrs. Kennedy promoted French studies and literature. She redecorated the White House with a French accent. It was Camelot, a “Utopia,” it was perfect. Then a jerk with a rifle blows him away, and Camelot disappears. A will o’ the wisp.

Now our Republican friends insist that our presidents be ignorant, backward and hostile to public education.

Mirage is more for the west (where we reside now). Betsy lived in swampy Louisiana for 3 years. I hale from College Point which is a small hill surrounded on 3 sides by swampland, where some interesting wildlife used to reside. The rather vast wetlands up and down the coast from Charleston, S. C. If you tour them, along your path you will discover little cabins that used to house the slaves that cultivated rice, another big cash crop back in those ante bellum days. Of course, nearby cotton was king. The tour guide will point out the very shallow ponds where the rice used to grow. The cypress trees, the flowering shrubs make the area even more beautiful and mysterious.

St. Elmo’s fire is a bright blue or violet glow, appearing like fire in some circumstances, from tall, sharply pointed structures such as lightning rods, masts, spires and chimneys, and on aircraft wings or nose cones.

St. Elmo’s fire can also appear on leaves and grass, and even at the tips of cattle horns.[5] Often accompanying the glow is a distinct hissing or buzzing sound. It is sometimes confused with ball lightning.

In 1751, Benjamin Franklin hypothesized that a pointed iron rod would light up at the tip during a lightning storm, similar in appearance to St. Elmo’s fire.

2 or 3 years ago, I did a report on male or masculine dancing, and I referred to a porno flick that I now remember the name of. The porno flick was called “Males in Motion.” Actually, it was not a porno flick though it was produced by a porno flick maker.

Actually, I was wrong, I treated masculine dancing as a brand new genre. In fact, Chippendale and Hollywood in general had male dancing pretty well developed and popularized.

We can develop the theme of disappearing aspirations when it comes to establishing an international organization with enough power to impose international peace based on a fairer economic system and cooperative governments. That is not the current situation so that we have perpetual war, in part thanks to our government’s neo-con pointless bellicosity.

© 25 March 2018

About the Author

I was born in 1944, I lived most of my life in New York City, Queens County. I still commute there. I worked for many years as a Caseworker for New York City Human Resources Administration, dealing with mentally impaired clients, then as a social work Supervisor dealing with homeless PWA’s. I have an apartment in Wheat Ridge, CO. I retired in 2002. I have a few interesting stories to tell. My boyfriend Kevin lives in New York City. I graduated Queens College, CUNY, in 1967.

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Empathy, by Lewis T

History is replete with examples of leaders who may have been brilliant empire builders but whose lack of empathy made them brutal tyrants whose legacy was one of despicable cruelty–Genghis Khan, who was responsible for the killing of 11 percent of the world’s population; Tamerlane the Great (aka Timur, who is believed to have beheaded 90,000 people and built more than 1000 towers out of the rotting skulls); Vlad the Impaler; Ivan the Terrible; Belgian King Leopold II; and Pol Pot of Cambodia—to name but a few.

Compared to those tyrannical lunatics, our President is, thankfully, a consummate underachiever. He does share one trait with the aforementioned, however: he is totally lacking in empathy.

Empathy is a more powerful emotion than sympathy. While expressions of sympathy signify the speaker’s awareness of someone else’s emotional pain, empathy suggests that the individual shares that pain. Lesser animals than humans clearly are capable of feeling a sense of loss when a mate or offspring dies. That feeling may linger for days, weeks, or even longer. But I have never known or heard such a creature to demonstrate empathy for the loss of another of its species.

Science and art are the manifestations of humans’ great intellect. The limits seem boundless. Generation after generation, we humans achieve greater and greater means of advancing civilization. Leonardo de Vinci, who was both a scientist and an artist (and a genius at both), has expressed what I consider the most moving example of how empathy is a connection between the human and the Divine. Having created Man and Woman and seen that they were both good, the God of the book of Genesis extends his index finger to a reclining Adam in what appears to be a blessing, a sign of empathy between the Loving and the Beloved.

My gut feeling is that our current POTUS may never have felt thus blessed by his father. His older brother, Freddy, “who died at the age of 43 in 1981 of alcoholism, was apparently unable to conform to a family dominated by a driven, perfectionist patriarch and an aggressive younger brother”, Donald. [Citation: Jason Horwitz, New York Times, Jan. 2, 2016]. Instead, Donald learned that pleasing father meant being tough, never touching alcohol, and always—ALWAYS—coming out on top.

For our President, a person’s worth is determined by their wealth, fame, and influence. There is no place for empathy, the payoff for which cannot be measured in those terms. Showing empathy will not improve your golf score or get you seated at the best table at the Gramercy Tavern but it can do wonders for your human relationships and—who knows—it might even get you into Heaven.

© 27 Nov 2017

About the Author

I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn’t getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth. Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband’s home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.

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Changes I would like to see, by Gillian

There are plenty I’m reminded of every time I look in a mirror! This scraggly old turkey-neck could lose some wrinkles to start with. The bags under the eyes could disappear along with the gray hair, and there could simply be … well …. less of me. Many pounds less of me. But I have no intention of buying overpriced skin cream nor coloring my hair, and seem quite incapable of taking either diet or exercise too seriously, so I suspect the changes I see in the mirror will be those I would rather not see. On the other hand, the things I don’t see in the mirror, those things which make up my inner self, my soul, however you choose to think of it, I am pretty happy with. My psyche seems to be doing OK and actually going in the right direction, and I provide as much spiritual help as I can give it. I think that is why I don’t worry much about the negatives offered up by the mirror. They just do not seem important.

Looking out at the world through plain glass, however, is a very different matter. Perhaps because I so love taking photographs myself, some of the memories burned into my brain come in the form of photos I have seen over a lifetime. And they mostly represent things I hope never to see again. For humanity, that is the change I would like to see; simply never to see such things again. Never again to see photos of beautiful old cities carpet-bombed in the way The Allies punished Dresden, managing to kill an estimated 135,000 people in one nightmare nigh. I hope never again to see photos of thousands of refugee children, as in post World War Two Europe. The photos were posted in the hope that someone would recognize these poor tattered, shattered, bodies and souls, and return them to someone who loved them. I would like to see a world where we don’t look at photos of a little naked girl running from the napalm destruction of all she knows. The Siege of Sarajevo’s 20th anniversary was memorialized in 2012. Empty red chairs were set out in the main street, symbolizing 11,541 victims of the war. 643 of the chairs were small, representing the slain children. On some of them, during the day-long event, passers-by left teddy bears, little plastic cars, other toys or candy. I hope never to see a picture like that again. At one Storytime last year I passed around a photo I think says it all about the horror that is now Syria; a tiny little child, obviously near death from starvation, being eyes greedily by a hungry vulture. I won’t inflict it on you again today, but it still haunts me.

I very much want to see a changed world in which such terrible photographs represent an awful past from which we have recovered and moved on. Somehow I doubt that. In fact at this time, with two madmen with their fingers on red buttons, it seems less likely than ever. Being a political pessimist ain’t easy. And so, I’m back to me again. I started out saying I was pretty happy with the way I feel inside. But should I be seeking to change, at the very least, my political pessimism? No, I don’t think so. If I were a real true pessimist that might be different; it must surely be depressing always to expect the worst from life. But being a political pessimist I really believe brings me peace. It’s very much the philosophy of hope for the best but prepare for the worst which I find to be very practical political advice. I found a wonderful quote from Thomas Hardy, who said, “And as I am surely approaching that infamous stage of life, second childhood, I’m sure I’m much better off sticking with child’s play.”

© January 2018

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

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Patriotism, by Lewis T

· “See the USA in your Chevrolet.”

· “See America first.”

· “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.”

· “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and Country.”

· “Duty, honor, country.”

· “Loose lips sink ships.”

These are all valid expressions of love and loyalty to our native or chosen country. It is natural and normal and expected that we feel some sense of obligation to the people and places that nurture and sustain us. That is why we sometimes refer to the United States as our Mother Country. It is why we usually react more strongly to reports of patricide, matricide, and, especially, infanticide than to other murders. How could anyone do harm to those who have given so much to us–freedom, opportunity, sustenance?

· “Love it or leave it.”

· “My country, right or wrong.”

· Manifest Destiny

· American exceptionalism

· Genocide

· Religious intolerance

· Prejudice

These are manifestations of extreme forms of love and loyalty to those places and people that have nurtured us. There is a flip side to that coin. Just as we love the nurturer (and, perhaps, question how worthy we are of that love), we tend to distrust the stranger, who may not be disposed to see us so favorably. In long ago times, it was the tribe to which we owed our loyalty. It was Arian against the Jew, the Montagues against the Capulets, the Hatfields against the McCoys. All others were with the favored tribe or against it. The “Other” was deemed less than human, disdained by God, fit only to be slaughtered and their bodies left to rot in the sun or be picked clean by vultures.

Thus, America can wage a geopolitical war on Viet Nam or Iraq on the pretext of threat to the homeland while counting only the American dead and wounded and ignoring the order-of-magnitude greater losses on the other side. We systematically and mercilessly brought the Native population of the United States down by 95% over 400 years–an estimated 11-3/4 million people, almost double the number of Jews murdered during the Nazi Holocaust. Every year we hold a celebration in honor of the white man who “discovered” America but about the near extermination of an entire race of humans we are silent. During World War II, we built concentration camps for 110,000 Japanese-Americans, 62% of whom were American citizens.

What constitutes a “tribe” these days is changing. Some Americans have figured out that there is a lot of money to be made by exploiting the very human capacity for pitting “us” against “them”. Thus, the NFL has become a multi-billion-dollar industry which uses human beings as the raw material, violence as the lure, and attachment to a geographical place as the motivator. Only within the past ten years or so have we begun to understand the toll that “cash cow” has taken on its gladiators.

Homo sapiens is almost unique in its capacity to devour its own. No wonder so many are unwilling to acknowledge the fact that we evolved from the primordial slime. How, if true, could we then think of ourselves as the “chosen people”? How, then, could we call others “gooks”, “slopes”, “niggers”, “redskins”, or “chinks”?

In the final analysis, we have to ask ourselves a few questions. Why is it so important to engage in countless hours of tedious research to be able to show that our ancestors came over on the Mayflower or, still less likely, Noah’s Ark? Wouldn’t it be more worthwhile to really get to know our relatives in order to understand whether they were worth giving them the time of day? What I want to know about a person is what they are like on the inside, not the outside. What things were like for them growing up, not where they grew up.

What does their soul look like, not their skin. What makes us unique and wonderful cannot be seen with the eyes or learned from examining their DNA. If you must classify something, measure the temperature of their heart, the depth of their compassion, and the breadth of their wisdom. If these things measure up, then I don’t care if they come from Uranus.

© 11 November 2013

About the Author

I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn’t getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth. Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband’s home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.
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Hooves, by Pat Gourley

“That horse has left the barn”

When I hear the word “hooves” in nearly any context I think of horses though many different mammals have hooves. My early days on the farm never involved horses so I may have made the association of hooves with horses after watching Gene Autry and Roy Rogers on 1950’s TV.

I remember that the often ridiculous and blatantly racist TV westerns seemed to distinguish between native American horse-hoof prints from those of the always white settlers, American law men and cavalry by noting whether the horses had been shod or not. Native horses had no shoes where as those of the white folk always did, a simplistic view since many native tribes were quite adept at acquiring horses from settlers and others who shod their horses. On these TV shows blacksmiths were often shown dramatically forging by fire while shaping the shoes and then nailing them onto the horses’ hooves. This really is the extent of my connection with the word hooves, though I do vaguely recall older male relatives on occasion playing “horseshoes”. That was a game though that never caught on for me personally.

Another memory of hooves was the apparent use of fake cows’ hoofs being used by moonshiners wearing them to throw off federal agents chasing them during Prohibition. Not sure exactly how this worked since cows have four feet and humans only two. However wasting time on thinking about this application of hoof-foot-wear as a means to sneak to one’s moonshine still in the woods will do little to address any real world problems these days I am afraid.

I can though make a tangential leap from hooves by way of horses and cows to the phrase: “That horse has already left the Barn”. This implies of course to the after-the-fact reality that it is too late to do anything about whatever. If one adapts this as a world view these days there are many things that seem too late to do much about whether we want to admit that reality of not.

Climate change sadly is one reality that it may very well be too late to do much about. That horse seems to have galloped away and kicked the door shut with both of his back hooves. Still in my more optimistic moments I can’t help but think that if we were to embark on a Manhattan Project to save the planet that salvaging an at least livable, though probably less than desirable, planet might be doable.

Laughably perhaps I can hope that the recent hurricane evacuations for both Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and Rush Limbaugh’s beachfront properties in Florida might turn into teachable moments. That however does not seem likely.

My go to person around all things climate change and how this is intimately tied to capitalism specifically is Naomi Klein.

I highly recommend her two most recent works: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate and “NO is Not Enough” subtitle “Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning The World We Want”. Here is a link to these works and Naomi in general: http://www.naomiklein.org/meet-naomi

It isn’t that the Donald Trump’s and Rush Limbaugh’s of the world don’t believe in climate change, I actually expect they do. It is that they realize better than many of us that the only effective possibility for addressing this catastrophe is a direct threat to their worldview and way of life. That their greedy accumulation of goods and capital will save them from the resulting hell-scape in the end is truly delusional thinking on their part.

I feel the only viable solution being an acceptance of the socialist ethos: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

© October 2017

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.