Tag: Personal essay

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The Truth Is, by Pat Gourley

The truth is I am a very lazy writer when it comes to putting fingers to keyboard and coming up with something for our weekly SAGE topics. I genuinely feel that my story, at least from a historical perspective, has pretty much been shared with the group. The format we use though has been very stimulating for remembering many past events and antics from my past particularly it seems from the 1960’s and 1970’s.

The truth is though I have much less to write about particularly from the mid 1980’s to the present. I seem to have experienced a diminution of involvement even in activities that seem to land right in front of me and ask for active participation on my part.

The truth is I am not exactly sure why this has happened but I can speculate I suppose. Maybe it is just a matter of getting older. I am getting older like it or not. As I rapidly approach my 70th birthday the truth is … that seems quite amazing to me. I know I am speaking to many folks here quite a bit older and am perceived by some of you as just a youngster. However, I do appreciate how remarkable it is really for someone infected with HIV in the early 1980’s to still be around and often griping about what are really first world problems. An example of a very vexing first world problem for me would be my bemoaning the fact that my neighborhood Whole Foods Market closed last fall and moved to LoDo. I mean really how I suffer so having only a King Soopers, a Safeway, a Trader Joe’s and a Natural Grocers all within easy walking distance.

The truth is I have been infected with HIV for at least 33 years, having tested positive in the summer of 1985. I strongly suspect though I came in contact with the virus and it set up shop in early 1981 making it 37 years, more than half of my life on Earth.

What is my secret to this longevity you may ask? Well the truth is I have no fucking idea. Beyond just maybe being one lucky son-of-a–bitch I can quickly rule out a few reasons right off the bat. It was most certainly not any sort of strong religious faith or conviction. I am an atheist and a half-assed Buddhist practitioner on my best days. Diet and exercise have always been important to me at least on an intellectual and philosophical level if not in my daily eating habits. Saturated fat and high dose sugar input in the form of gourmet ice creams indulged in freakishly often have done little I suspect in keeping my immune system in tip-top shape.

There is no doubt the HIV meds are the main reason I am still here and I do take them religiously. The truth is though that they are slowly accelerating many of the health problems driven by the dietary-fueled metabolic derangement so endemic in American life today with diabetes, stroke, dementia and heart disease being several prominent ones.

One possible current saving grace when it comes to my many dietary indiscretions is that the grocer closest to me is Trader Joe’s and their absolutely crappy ice cream selection. Talk about a first world problem, hey?

The truth is really when looking at my long-term HIV/AIDS survival that it is clearly related to my privilege. I am a white guy in a part of the world where the problems I face are really first world ones. I have been the beneficiary of many forms of privilege that have allowed me to coast for much of the past 37 years with relatively easy access to cutting edge HIV treatments and medications. That white privilege does unfortunately still play a huge role in HIV disease even today in the United States as reflected by the disproportional rate of new HIV infections. African American gay and bisexual men face a one–in-two chance of being infected in their lifetime. The same risk for white gay men is one in eleven. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/magazine/americas-hidden-hiv-epidemic.html

The truth is I am skating on pretty thin ice needing to continue toxic but necessary HIV chemotherapies and having numerous metabolic derangements undoubtedly accelerating my inevitable demise. So what keeps me going? Well not to in any way be pandering this group has been one. I find great solace in participating in a group whose existence is facilitated by the same organization I became involved with in 1976. The truth is where would I be without you?

© April 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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Bumper Stickers, by Betsy

So, why do people put stickers on their bumpers? The reasons probably vary from person to person. In my opinion most do it for identity reasons. They want the rest of the world to know who they are. Rather than putting a sticker on their chest or bum they put it on their bumper. After all, signs are specifically made for car bumpers and are readily available for purchase or for making a donation or showing support.

Another reason I think some people sport bumper stickers is that they think it will help to bring about that which they are promoting For example, the election of a particular candidate, or a more peaceful society (War is Not the Answer, Life is Short, Pray Hard, Close Guantanamo, better gun control, etc. ) You name it, there is a bumper sticker for just about any cause. But again, I think a cause soon becomes a part of one’s identity. And if you have a bumper sticker promoting your cause, you better stick with it because it ain’t comin’ off any time soon

Traveling in the northwest many years ago I saw this one: an image of an erupting volcano inside a circle with a line through it. I wondered who put this out. Could there be a movement starting dedicated to stopping volcanoes from erupting? Another one I saw in our travels also on the west coast somewhere. This one is even better than the one that addresses the volcano problem: STOP PLATE TECTONICS. That one was hysterical. I assume the people driving those vehicles want to be funny. I don’t suppose they actually think they can stop……..hmmm, I wonder. No, surely they don’t think they can…………….?? Now wouldn’t that be the ultimate in arrogance. I think they just have a good sense of humor.

Personally, I don’t like bumper stickers because they are impossible to take off the bumper once you put it on. There are solvents that will take off the residual adhesive. The down side is they also remove the paint. So I think twice before sticking the thing on there. One day you feel strongly about a cause. The next day you change your mind about whatever you are promoting. Or let’s say you want to change your image. It’s very hard to get rid of the old labels be they in people’s minds and perceptions or on your bumper. I would like some of the adhesive that is used to stick on bumper stickers; that is, I would like to have a supply of it at home. It’s stronger and longer lasting than super glue.

I guess the lesson of the bumper sticker is: be sure who you want to be or at least who you want to appear to be before you take on a label.

© 5 January 2015

About the Author

Betsy has been active in the GLBT community including PFLAG, the Denver Women’s Chorus, OLOC (Old Lesbians Organizing for Change), and the GLBT Community Center. She has been retired from the human services field for 20 years. Since her retirement, her major activities have included tennis, camping, traveling, teaching skiing as a volunteer instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled, reading, writing, and learning. Betsy came out as a lesbian after 25 years of marriage. She has a close relationship with her three children and four grandchildren. Betsy says her greatest and most meaningful enjoyment comes from sharing her life with her partner of 30 years, Gillian Edwards.

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Springtime, by Phillip Hoyle

I knew the childhood chant, “April showers bring May flowers” long before I learned, “In Time of Silver Rain.” Langston Hughes wrote the poem; I learned it as a song when I was twenty-one and newly-married, an undergraduate studying theology and music. It seemed the springtime of my life. The Poet said it this way: “In time of silver rain/The earth/Puts forth new life again.”

For years I was amazed that the church’s celebration of its main stories—the death and resurrection—were so attached to geography. I’m not thinking of Jerusalem in Israel but rather of Earth’s northern hemisphere. Easter symbols were springtime symbols. Lenten preparation took place at the time of lengthening days. Easter symbols sported flowers and eggs and sunrises. Of course, that made a kind of sense to me, but what would religious life in the southern hemisphere make of the shortening of days leading up to the same events preached and celebrated in the north? What effect would Easter in the fall have on its meaning down there? (I saw a postcard from Brazil of Santa Clause riding a surfboard.) The questions seemed real to me.

In springtime I now appreciate most the warming trend, the eventual return to wearing shorts and sandals, eating out of doors, and playing in longer daylight hours. I don’t look forward to the rebirth of weeds I’ll have to pull or Japanese beetles that will go to war in the vines, flowers and garden, or the squirrels that will eat the tomatoes and winter squash. But still there is a kind of positive magic in longer days, green grass, shade trees, even suntans.

Yesterday I was trimming back some bushes that had barely begun to leaf out and raking up leaves deposited in hard-to-manage corners of the yard. Jim has been at it for weeks. I don’t do much yard work but do have my specialties, and I’m back to work—applying sunscreen, getting out summer clothes, packing away the flannels, corduroys, and sweaters. It’s spring. Enjoy the great out of doors or just the backyard. Clean it up. Invite over the neighbors for grilled specialties. Talk over the fence where it’s not too high. Socialize. Bring things alive. Yes.

Yesterday I walked in my Birkenstock Arizona sandals, ones I had not worn for months. They began irritating my feet and I remembered I hadn’t worn them long last fall. They weren’t really broken in. Then my left knee—the better one—started screaming at me like the right one often does. I realized here in spring I am deteriorating. And we need more, much more silver rain and soon. I wondered if when my knee quits, will I get one of those electric buggies. (One friend called his the electric chair.) If so, I’m sure I’ll decorate it with flowers and carry my rainbow colored umbrella holding onto the hope for silver rain and new life.

© 16 April 2018

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

 
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Birds, by Gillian

What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird?

David Attenborough

I have always loved birds. I love their colors: their grace: their amusing antics: and , in many but not all cases, their melodious voices. I love the effortless way they ride the airwaves. I love the way they cock their heads to look at me through curious little black eyes.

I first learned to appreciate them, and many other things in our natural world, through my aunt and my mother. Then in elementary school I learned to identify a dozen or so of the most common local birds from pictures. From there we progressed to coloring in outline shapes of these same birds, and thence to drawing them ourselves freehand and then adding crayon or paint. I am happy to say that none of my efforts have survived, as I’m sure my attempts were pretty dismal. But never mind – I learned so much from trying.

I don’t know the details of the current British Elementary School System, but I seriously doubt that bird identification looms large. In my day, before the advent of TV and expensive trips to distant places, with little more than the occasional radio program or book to divert us, I think we paid, and were expected to pay, much closer attention to the world immediately around us.

Anyway, between family and school, I formed an early fascination with birds. Somewhere along the lines my parents gave me a bird book for Xmas, and I began trying to identify some of the rarer birds I was not so familiar with. I kept this up for most of my life, always taking a bird book with me on vacations and even on business trips. The birds don’t care why I’m there, after all. I was never quite sufficiently serious to succumb to the tyranny of that ‘Life List’ which all ‘real’ birders carry. Some of them become utterly obsessive to the extent of making special trips to likely places at likely times to see the birds without a triumphant X beside their names on ‘The List’. They go out at four in the morning in the pouring rain, accompanied by cloud of excited mosquitoes, in the hope of glimpsing the Crested Weewee so they can legitimately add that definitive X. No! I’m never going to be one of them. If I had a Life List I’d most likely cheat, anyway. I’d open one eye at the crack of dawn, see rain streaming down the window and imagine all those mosquito bites and snuggle back under the blankets. ‘Let’s not and say we did,’ I would shrug to myself, and probably put down a big firm X regardless. Or, on the search for the rare Lesser Spotted Peterpecker I would claim the sighting while knowing full well that in fact I had seen the much commoner Greater Spotted Pussygrabber.

I did go as far as trying to photograph an unfamiliar bird and check it out in the bird book when I eventually got the photos developed, but really! Can you even remember what it was like before zoom lenses? To snap a tiny bird with an old Box Brownie you’d have to be about two feet away and glue its feet to the branch! With a zoom lens chances were better, but still I wasted a fortune on blurry shots and/or too many versions of the same bird because I wouldn’t know until days or weeks later whether the previous dozen shots were any good.

Then along came the true gift to all photography, digital cameras. At first I admit I was a bit obsessive, snapping away at every bird I saw. But, you know, it was almost too easy! So I took to photographing birds in flight; much more challenging but still relatively easy with a good camera. After all, it only takes one good shot. The other fifty cost nothing and just go in the trash. And that’s the digital trash, of course, so I no longer even end up with a plastic bag full of 4 x 6 visions of blurry flapping wings or, more often, an empty sky.

My next obsession was with online printing. I found discounts for wall-size prints, prints on metal, on glass, on wood, and made to look like paintings. I gave gifts of them until everyone cringed and no-one chose mine in any gift exchange. I covered the walls of our house with them until my poor Beautiful Betsy howled enough!

Then I turned to digital photo books, which I devoted not entirely to birds but they usually featured prominently. These books greatly thrilled me at first but now languish under dust in the bookcase, rarely opened.

Finally, I am free! Free to enjoy birds as I once did. I still look up the occasional one in the bird book, but mostly I don’t bother because I shall immediately forget what it was, anyway. I simply enjoy the sight and sound of them. I watch in delight as the magpies play their silly games with the squirrels, as the chickadees flit so effortlessly from branch to branch, as the seabirds soar. I listen with joy to the trill of the robins and finches as they greet the spring. I am no longer driven to do anything more. Sometimes, growing older can be such a blessing!

© 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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Springtime for Hitler, by Ricky

It is written that in the springtime a young man’s heart turns to romance and love. Who are we kidding? It turns to sex. Romance and love may follow, but not always. To be completely honest, once puberty strikes, a male’s mind (not heart) turns to sex all year long. Any season is highly conducive for the activity to be sought after.

Unfortunately, I am no longer young enough or my heart strong enough to enjoy springtime in the Rockies, except for the 1942 movie. So instead, my heart and my mind take flights of fancy. I fancy this or fancy that or just fancysizing that I am young again revisiting the happy times and events of my past. Or, perhaps I should say my way way past.

Nonetheless, it really is spring and if my autumn, if not winter, memory was any better, I would probably be making a fool of myself while walking down the sidewalk. How? By fancying that set of broad shoulders, those tan legs, cute faces, kissable pouty lips, and gorgeous blue eyes (no offence brown and hazel eyed people, it is just that I like blue) and flirting with a tall, dark, and handsome server at the Irish Snug. Oh. Wait a minute, that last one I actually do. So maybe my memory is still a summer memory, but I am just as foolish.
© 16 Apr 2018

About the Author

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach. Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I began living with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966. After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com

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Maps, by Ray S

I believe that along with counting all the fingers and toes and necessary plumbing each one of us is issued a map. This is a map that charts out the many roads we may or may not venture onto. There will be the inevitable dead ends, forks in the road leading to where? Most of we dreamers look for the legend marking the Yellow Brick Road, and occasionally it is found. Then there are a good number of us that don’t study our map or perhaps never open it. We just head for the dark woods and wander aimlessly through life gathering rosebuds where we may.

If there is a goal, it just happens as we trudge on through the expedient trail or path.

It can happen to a fortunate select group that broke the seal on their maps to plan their routes to health, wealth, and of course, happiness. We’ve all met one of those hims or hers.

All of the roads on your map will lead to great and small adventures, and ultimately end at the same destination.

© 25 March 2017

About the Author

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Clearly, by Phillip Hoyle

My writing teachers are still trying to teach me to write clearly. That seems like quite a challenge for a teacher to take on. While most of my instructors really have liked me—I am easy to get along with—they have had little clue of how my mind works, its story-laden way of expressing truth, its constant internal argument about what this writer wants, believes, and cares about, its strange logic, and its confusion over things spatial. Now that’s a special-education brain if there ever was one. I’m neither proud of nor ashamed it, for it’s the only one I have. Many teachers have set out to set me straight. Obviously they failed to do that although they have taught me many helpful and creative processes, ideas, and the like.

When I was first given a contract for a write-for-hire curriculum resources project and sent in my first draft of the first session, it came back to me looking very sorry, dripping in red ink and words of encouragement. I made the required changes—the ones in red ink—and thought through all the suggested comments—written in blue pencil. I didn’t have to make all these blue changes. I quickly typed in the red comments and found out that my editor took my awkward, unclear sentences and with a few red-ink changes made them say exactly what I meant. I was impressed and wondered where I was when they were handing out brains. What did I ask for? Perhaps I just wanted to have a good time which might not necessarily mean to think clearly.

My patient teachers have had to slow me down, to make me read and reread everything about a hundred times, over a time period lasting several months, sometimes several years. Of course that never works in write-for-hire jobs; the editors have deadlines to meet. I gave them things on time and looked forward to their corrections to make clear just what I was trying to say. I guess for them my being on time was a higher value that first-try clarity. They kept using me for ten years. Then I was done with that kind of writing.

Unfortunately, SAGE of the Rockies “Telling Your Story” program doesn’t give me enough time. I mess around in my early morning writing and scratch a few lines or run to the word processor and peck away hoping not to compound my lack of clarity with too many typos. It’s fun to write these stories, and I hope no listeners or readers spend too much time trying to analyze my logic or even common sense. If I have logic I’m sure it’s not common. If you hear or read something funny, just laugh. If I’m around I’ll smile with you. It’s all just another story to me. Did I say that last clearly enough?

And thanks for being as patient as have been my teachers and editors. 

© 20 November 2017

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com

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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.