thetexastart.org

At 16 she didn’t mean to get pregnant. Her boyfriend pushed her too far one night. She wasn’t one of the lucky ones who got away with it. All she knew is her parents would kill her if she told them. And abortion was illegal in her state.

Walking around the neighborhood, she saw a small sign: Pregnant? Contact Maria. Afraid someone would watch her, she memorized the email address and string of numbers.

Back home, in her bedroom she pulled out her phone and called.

“Hello, how may we help you?”

In tears she tried to pull herself together: “I’m 16 and pregnant and live in Texas,” she tried to say.

“OK. How far along?”

“Two months,” she said, her voice breaking, her body shaking still from disbelief in her fate. “The first pregnancy test was negative,” she said, trying to let the woman with Maria know she checked early enough, that she had good intentions and didn’t mean for the pregnancy to go this far along.

“All I need to know is the town and state where you live. We can pick you up.”

“I live in Dallas. Texas.”

“Tomorrow at 7 a.m. you need to be at Milburn and Scott. Can you locate that intersection on your phone?”

“Yes. Who do I meet?”

“A car will pick you up. The driver will roll down the window and say they’re Maria.”

“How much will this cost? I don’t have any money at all. My parents cannot know about this. They would freak and hit me or something.”

“Cost is taken care of. You just need to get to a state where abortion is legal,” the woman replied.

“Where are you taking me?”

“You will told more details in person by Maria tomorrow. You can bring someone with you, or we will take care of you before and after the procedure. You will be gone more than 24 hours. You need to figure out a plan, something to tell your parents or others who may be looking for you. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said, still crying about her predicament, having to lie, having to travel with strangers far away for what used to be a choice no matter where you happen to live.

“Don’t you worry. Just be prepared. You’ll be well taken care of. Be at the intersection tomorrow. It’s a bus stop with a covered area where you can sit. Try not to look upset, or others may begin to talk to you and get suspicious. Tell no one unless you can totally trust them. Be careful. Goodbye.”

Funny, her name was Maria, also. She’s Catholic. She could not tell anyone, not even her boyfriend Elias. He’d want her to have it. He’d want to marry and start a family even if they’re still in high school.

Maria didn’t want to get married at 16 and then have a baby. All her life she had plans for her future. She didn’t want to raise a child, not now. She didn’t want to have a baby to give up for adoption either. This used to be her choice. A private decision no one would have to know about. She was hurt and felt betrayed somehow. What other rights can be swept away so suddenly without the people being heard or requiring the people to vote – something that directly affected more than half the population of a country as big as the U.S.? Abortion is now legal in Mexico, she thought, baffled.

She thought of telling her best friend, but she was a blabber mouth. She loved Serena but didn’t trust her with the biggest news, the biggest mess, the biggest mistake of her life. She could tell only one other person.

“Grandma!” she thought with a smile.

Grandma Dona would keep this secret. She knew because when she was a young girl, she had an abortion back when it was legal. She believed the new law overturning a woman’s choice was wrong.

Maria took a train to Grandma Dona’s house in a nearby suburb. “Hi Grandma,” Maria said, greeting the old woman, a recent widow, with a smile.

“Maria! I wasn’t expecting to see your pretty face today!” Grandma exclaimed happily, then looked deeply into her granddaughter’s brown eyes. “Something’s wrong? Tell me.”

Maria cried as Grandma embraced her and walked her inside the house. “I’m pregnant and having an abortion. I have to leave tomorrow to go with some people who’ll take me out of state.”

Grandma closed her eyes and looked up as if in private prayer. “You’ll be fine. I will tell no one.”

Maria kept crying as Grandma stroked her long hair. “Now it’s not that bad. It’s not your fault either.”

Then she held onto Maria by the shoulders and looked directly into her face: “You shouldn’t feel ashamed of yourself. This is not a baby, not yet. Very far from it.”

Then Grandma walked Maria into the kitchen. “Let’s think of a story to tell your parents,” she said.

“You don’t need to say nothing to nobody. I’ll take care of that,” Grandma said. “I’ll call them and say I contacted you because I was feeling poorly and that you would stay with me for a couple of days as I adjust to a new medication.

“How’s that sound?” she said brightly.

“It sounds good, Grandma. I’m so, so sorry,” Maria said, starting to cry again.

Grandma prepared a couple of tortillas, filling them with roasted chicken. They ate together, Grandma smiling at her granddaughter. “You’ll be fine.”

Grandma asked about who’s taking her out of state, but Maria didn’t want to say. “I see. I guess this is how it’s going to be from now on unless this state allows the people to vote on this issue or a lawsuit overturns the latest decision and allows women to make these decisions in the privacy of their own lives and families,” the old woman said.

“You sound like you’re mad at me,” Maria said quietly.

“No, not at all!” Grandma insisted. “It’s the law that now puts women in such dangerous and costly situations to get an abortion if they want one. It’s bullshit.”

“I’ll tell you something,” Grandma began. “When I was a young girl of 17 and terminated my pregnancy, it was the best decision of my life, not the worst.”

“Grandma!” Maria exclaimed, not believing the words she was hearing.

“Now I didn’t think that for many, many years. But I’m at an age where I understand life a lot better. Young girls having babies is just wrong. Especially if they don’t have their own parents supporting them or the young man who’s becoming a father when he doesn’t want to.

“I’ve seen a lot more trouble with babies having babies, young people who have no business having babies, than I’ve seen with young women who have had abortions.

“You live long enough, you start to see how life comes full circle. You won’t think of this as a mistake when you’re my age. You’re doing what is right for you,” Grandma said, “or you wouldn’t be doing it. I know my Maria.”

“Yeah, but Mom and Dad would yell at me, first for  getting pregnant, second for having sex, and now for having an abortion,” Maria said.

“Maria, they’ve not lived as long as I have,” Grandma assured, chuckling with a twinkle in her eye, “You’ll see when you’re an old woman like me.”

Grandma sent a text to Maria’s mother about her staying for a couple of days. No suspicions were aroused.

The next day Grandma Dona drove Maria to the meeting place and waited until she saw her get into the stranger’s car. She wrote down the license plate, just in case something went wrong.

Maria was taken to another vehicle and then given an airline ticket and told to meet a woman at a certain terminal section. She has red hair and will be wearing a flannel jacket. The two met and boarded the plane quietly, sitting together. Maria sometimes wept. Her companion looked at her with a comforting expression, saying, “It’ll be all right.”

“Can we talk?” Maria asked.

“Sure. What do you want to talk about?”

“Have you ever had to do this, you know, have an abortion?” Maria asked, then rephrased, “I mean, guess I’m being too nosy. It’s none of my business.”

Her companion would not say, just maintained a sympathetic look. “She’s not judgmental,” Maria thought, then understood why.

“Well, maybe you can tell me why you are involved in this new underground railroad to help girls like me get an abortion,” Maria said.

“I shouldn’t tell you too much about myself, you understand. But I just support a woman’s right to choose. That’s all. I grew up in a time when it was our option, our business.

“There were always large groups of protestors, even doctors killed, stabbed and shot, their families harassed, facilities burned.

“I knew they were wrong, just as wrong as they think women who undergo this procedure are, which is ironic, don’t you think?”

Maria smiled a bit. “Yes, you’re right.”

The Maria confessed, “I never thought I’d have an abortion. But things change when it’s for real. I know I can’t have a baby, that my boyfriend and I aren’t ready to be parents, not now, not for many years from now.”

The companion suggested Maria relax. The plane ride was short, a couple of hours. The less said, the better.

Maria, tired, closed her eyes. She was in a dream: A fetus on the floor looked up at her angrily, saying, “You never wanted me.”

Maria was jolted by the plane touching ground. She was haunted by the dream.

“You’ll go off by yourself, and a man in a plaid jacket will meet you,” the companion told Maria. “His name is Rudy.”

“I won’t see you again?”

“No. You’re in a state where you can now talk about this openly,” she said, “and no one will turn you in and people who help you in like Texas.”

Maria stepped out of the tarmac and saw a man in plaid. She walked up to him, and he smiled at her, saying, “Maria? I’m Rudy. Just come with me. You’re in a safe state now.”

He took Maria to his car where his wife was ready to drive them directly to a women’s clinic.

“Hi Maria! I’m Sara. How was your flight from Texas?” the driver asked.

“Fine, ma’am,” Maria answered, her mind still shaken by the angry fetus of her dream.

The couple sat in the waiting room as the procedure was performed. While Maria was recovering, Sara knocked on the door. “Maria, it’s Sara. I’m right here if you need me. Take all the time you need.”

“You can come in. I’m fine,” Maria told her.

After dressing, she turned around to Sara. “So, I guess it’s over. Except for the flight back home.”

“Yep, you can return to Texas now. We’ll get you back there in a few hours. You got a place to stay, someone at home who knows what’s going on?”

“Yes, my Grandma Dona.”

“Give her a call on your phone, dear. Let her know you’re all right,” Sara said.

Maria called Grandma. “I’m so happy to hear from you,” Grandma Dona said with relief. “When shall I pick you up? At the same place?”

Maria didn’t know, but Sara said it would be a different spot, this time outside of Dallas just to be on the safe side. “Grandma, I’ll have to call you when I get back to let you know exactly where they’ll drop me off,” she said.

Sara interjected: “Your driver in Dallas won’t just drop you off. They’ll wait until your Grandma picks you up.”

Maria was told she needed to wait at the clinic to ensure no signs of infection and was given a prescription just in case.

Before she knew it, she was whisked back onto a plane, traveling with a different companion, a much older woman named Chantall. “Have you had an abortion?” Maria asked, just wanting to hear from another woman who’d been through the same situation. Chantall said yes. “It was legal when I had it.”

“You were lucky,” Maria said. “This is so ridiculous, having to fly all over the country. How expensive. How does Maria raise money?”

“So many people support what we’re doing—and I mean people who have beau coups of money, honey!” Chantall assured. “Money for this is no problem, baby.

“It’s just all them states that restrict abortion, they’d love to do something to stop us. Underground Railroad,” Chantall said, put out. “I never in my life thought I’d be involved in something like an Underground Railroad—and this being the middle of the 21^st century. Seems we’re going back in time.

“But here I am,” she said, folding her arms around herself as if determined to win a battle.

“Proud to volunteer for this civil rights movement.”

The biggest generation America ever produced, the Baby Boomers, is dying out in typical grand and noteworthy style: 5,000 every day. What can we say? Our idols always were the late Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. Death, I can hear the older Boomers say now, is the greatest trip.

Though technically I am a Boomer, born at the end of the generation spanning 1946 to 1964, I never felt like I was one of them. In many ways, we don’t have a lot in common. But from afar, I always admired the hell outta the original Baby Boomers: those who remember the 1950s; duck and cover; the JFK assassination; The Beatles; Woodstock; the Vietnam War; integration; free love; psychedelic design; the peace sign; expressions like ‘groovy,’ ‘far out,’ and ‘sock-it-to-me’; hippies; rap sessions; all the drugs; and all the protest marches. What a happening—yet of which I wasn’t apart as a teen, joining them, like a late-in-life sibling, in the ’70s.

But I got an eyeful, thanks to TV (reruns) and shows watched in real time like “The Monkees” and “Laugh-In”—and some older cousins, the epitome of cool, Original Boomers, electric rock musicians since the Beatles. They grew their hair long and wore it in a ponytail. One wore John Lennon glasses.

My sub-generation of the Boomers thought our elder peers too old—like the kids confronting the hip young congressman in “Wild in the Streets.” [I saw the flick on video.] We laughed at their yearbook pictures featuring wild clothing and bubble words, the influence of acid trips we were told. There was a distinct difference in the drugs of the older and younger Boomers. Ours were less LSD, uppers, downers, and needles yet pot and cocaine a bonding staple.

The Boomers ushered in the most liberal era in American history. And you wanna know why? Because they were born into an uptight suffocating hypocritical joyless generation, their parents and authorities after World War II. After a lot of growing up, naturally the older Boomers saw the error of their presumptions. Someone has to be the adult.

Adulthood was a long time coming and a whole different meaning for the Boomers. Staying young (the long hair, the short dresses, the don’t-give-a-damn attitude, the hippie vans) was the way to be. Disrespectful was how shocked parents saw their offspring.

The reason I admired the Boomers when I was a kid was their … nerve: one, to experiment with drugs. This generation expresses no regret in past drug use. They knew some people would develop an addiction, not unlike their alcoholic parents or uncles. But not everyone who smoked a joint or tried LSD and other drugs would turn into an addict. They knew it and were right, for the most part.

I admired other liberalities of my older Boomer colleagues: sex before marriage & living together; more seriously, organizing and protesting the government; burning draft cards; demanding the voting age be lowered to the age fit for military service (18); millions of young people demanding social and legal change in laws regarding abortion and marriage—but mostly to end the draft. By the time the smoke cleared, I consider this generation most brave to fight against norms they didn’t believe in. One being war, any war, all wars. Many of the older Boomers became teachers of the rest of us, the younger Boomers.

Their music reflected their times … and in our days was played only the months when popular. There were no oldies stations. And when the oldies stations were created, they played the music of our parents: early rock-n-roll, pre Beatles, no ’60s. So there was a whole decade of the coolest music ever heard that I was unaware of. It wasn’t until “Soundtrack of the Sixties,” a radio retrospective in 1981, that I experienced listening to the great music of the older Boomers: full of innovation, talent, studio effects, sincere message, social significance. Let’s forget about the popularity of Tiny Tim and any weirdo who came along, which was a feature of the ’60s. The Boomers were … open minded. They gave everyone a chance.

For decades the adult Boomers dominated innovations in American culture, from the acceptance of jeans and halters to new ideas in raising children (sans spanking) and schooling (at home), vegetarian cooking, health food stores, holistic medicine, and even automobiles. Boomers demanded government change for clean water and air and better living conditions for everyone everywhere. They gave us Earth Day. Many Boomers went into sociology and government, to help people. They wanted to make the world a better place. Boomers were idealistic. From decade to decade, elected leaders became younger and younger and more ‘with it,’ able to talk with regular working people. When Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992, the first Boomer to hold the nation’s highest office, there were many who felt he was too young, though he was the age of John Kennedy.

There are criticisms, too, of the Boomers. That they were bad parents, producing kids who got into drugs and sex too young, producing teens with STDs and pregnancies. That they were too liberal with alcohol and drugs, rarely attended church, questioned the existence of God, left cable TV to teach their children and grandchildren to be cynical about life, to listen to music with profanity, to cuss aloud, to divorce, to allow their kids to get into so much trouble they ended up in prison—to want to be their child’s friend instead of their parent. So the Boomers are blamed for poor parenting and even worse for society providing no structure or morality for young people who desperately need it. The Boomers and their all-important freedom-loving trek through life turned our society into the array of filth it is today. Some say.

Let us not forget the Boomers were the Love generation. They loved freely and honestly … and they wanted to avoid ‘hang ups’ of their parents like racism and prejudices. Freedom was their mantra. Movies and music of their generation reflected their era.

And now, as a generation, they (and the rest of us) are coming to an end. This time for real.

As to be expected, the Boomers have prepared all their lives for leaving this world. They are more spiritual than their parents realized. As a generation, they lived their lives with purpose—and most notably—with joy. That is the old hippie adage. They were, and in old age, still are, a very beautiful people to observe.

The deal, U.S. Supreme Court, is, see, white America hasn’t totally changed their views on the races since the 1960s. The dominant, or domineering, race of this nation is still white. And not surprisingly to nonwhite Americans, racial prejudices and bigotry still exist. That’s why government programs like affirmative action used in considering employee hires and college admissions were created. The program was fundamentally necessary when created in the early 1960s. White people, time and again, have shown they cannot be trusted to … do the right thing when it comes to treatment of Blacks and other ethnicities.

Yet since the 1980s, a growing white segment of the U.S. population decided they are being replaced by other races in employment and college. Race consideration in college admissions was to be fair toward minorities by giving them a leg up, a gigantic break. Even so, nonwhite families still have far fewer members who earn college degrees. Affirmative action was a small way to open doors for nonwhite families who historically were treated like third-class citizens in their own country.

But the issue that made young white people cry foul was the college admissions’ practice of weighing applications including race: more points for the candidate who is Black or other minority, or simply not white. If two candidates presented the exact same credentials such as high GPA and exam grades, more points would go to the nonwhite student. That’s the simple theory thought to be unfair and the same method understood and overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. Surely more thought was placed into college admissions than just race. After all, the intent among colleges and universities was to strive toward racial inclusion and diversity whereby all students would gain from each other in course lectures, studies, research, and class discussions—all the way to the locker room and dorm.  

Reversal of fortune

Reverse discrimination is what white college candidates claimed when they received an unexpected rejection letter by a desired university while a Black or nonwhite student received a warm welcome. This is the part that, repeated loudly through the decades, brought on the U.S. Supreme Court review. And, not surprisingly, the Court voted a firm no on this type of affirmative action.

I don’t or won’t claim to be a victim of reverse discrimination. But once as a job candidate, I was told point blank by a hiring authority that if the choices were me, a white, and a Black candidate, the Black candidate would get the job. The business was under the gun to hire more Blacks. I was shown the door and understood as a white person, I best seek work elsewhere. I didn’t file a lawsuit or yell discrimination. I accepted affirmative action. Always believed in it because I am well aware of white America’s bloody mean cruel not-so-distant past against nonwhite people. I also realized, no, I knew, as a white person, I would get a job and achieve my goals easier than someone who goes through life in this country with dark skin. I don’t know if today nonwhites think the same given our entwined racial history.

The move to reverse college affirmative action and diversity programs was called out during the Obama administration. Remember back then how everyone said, almost as a boast, we’re now living in a ‘post-racist’ society with the election of our first Black president? Hah. Seems many Americans forgot: The political pendulum swings hard conservative after a relatively liberal administration.

So with the Court’s opinion, now the ‘many’ white students who cried “Unfair!” when they were not admitted into the university of their choice may apply and surely be accepted. Time will tell. College is so expensive to most Americans, enrollment numbers have been dropping significantly—no more realized than statistics for white males. What’s that all about? And isn’t the high cost of college a much bigger issue than banning college affirmative action?  

Affirmative action was one way this nation showed we care about helping nonwhite people achieve what many of us take for granted: employment, housing, education. This program was created to make up for centuries of white treatment toward Blacks in particular, from slavery to racial discrimination, segregation, bigotry, economic deprivation, intimidation, harassment and lynching. Doing away with affirmative action and related civil rights laws such as the Voting Rights Act by the predominantly white U.S. Supreme Court says racial discrimination—whether whites are consciously or unconsciously aware of their actions and deep-seated prejudices—is a thing of the past.

Not in this country. Not this century. Still.

The FBI will tell us white-on-Black crime continues to escalate and remains the largest percentage of hate crimes in the U.S.

A college education was perhaps the best opportunity white American society could deliver, promote and encourage among minorities. But, no, we had to take that away, too. We never countered against cries of ‘reverse discrimination’ by self-important students who minorities see as winning the racial lottery, that is the great fortune of having been born white.

For more than 50 years, affirmative action did far more good than bad to Americans white, Black and other. I hate to see all that generational progress forgotten and played down—like it wasn’t important or vital to this nation’s well-being and survival.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with women who want to pastor a church. They should not be suspect as man hating, radical leftists or politically liberal. Their desire to walk with God publicly and lead others through life’s heartaches and hard times is sincere and noble. And women whose love of the spiritual life burns from the depth of their souls should be honored, encouraged, supported, and permitted. Instead, these few women are made out to be shamed, as if they should feel ashamed of their consecrated service.

The big news coming out of this summer’s Southern Baptist Convention was the reclarification that women are to remain silent in the church. Nothing new here, considering the organization once proclaimed its annual mission was to convert all Jews to Christianity. ‘What Hitler couldn’t do with The Holocaust, the SBC tries to finish.’ Isn’t it the same thing, just perhaps less cruel—destroying God’s chosen people? No, converting a whole people to Christianity has always been cruel one way or another.

And the same principle is involved in banning women from pastor positions. It’s more sinister than clarifying church policy.

What the ban on female pastors means is: women are sub human, a part of man yet never to be man’s equal. A teaching by the Apostle Paul is used to prove the point. According to the Bible, Paul once instructed a specific Early Christian church to keep their women silent in church matters. Through the centuries, however, other Christian denominations didn’t interpret the teaching as a must-do for women in order to keep them suppressed in leadership matters and in so assuming silent in family, home, finances and politics. (Why couldn’t women vote or hold elected positions from the beginning of this nation? Because women were considered air heads with no significant thoughts or ideas.)

What some men don’t get about women (or Blacks and other subsets of humanity) is women know they are human beings. Some men, given our collective history and goings-on today, seriously don’t agree. For a couple of centuries, the South used Bible to maintain slavery, saying according to scripture some people are just meant to be slaves. There isn’t a human being on God’s green earth who is meant to be a slave, an unpaid brutalized servant.

Great falling away

There is one solution to the SBC policy against women pastors. Change denominations. A few females may shed some tears in the process of tearing away from a church that has brought a life of joy and comfort, one that for the most part provided solutions and answers to every question. It’s as familiar as Christmas, grandma, fried chicken, banana pudding, dinner on the ground and singing old-time gospel hymns like I’ll Fly Away and Fill My Way Everyday with Love.

But when a branch of Christianity still believes half of humanity cannot serve as official church leaders? That’s just plain wrong. A study of Christianity will show major changes in thought and customs in the past 2,000 years. Let’s call these huge changes what they were and are today: a reality check. Times change us, often for the better.

The beauty is Christianity remains a major world religion. It is one that teaches spiritual faith in circumstances we don’t understand, kindness toward all people especially strangers, and (my personal favorite) loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.

The red words in the Bible should be considered the final say on matters of controversy. The red words say nothing about man’s superiority to women, women’s subservience to men, homosexuality, or abortion.

The problem, it seems, is what was not said in red.

[Psst. I’m thinking Jesus wouldn’t have a problem with women pastors. Seems so insignificant in the Big Picture.]

Another writers strike catches us without a lot of season finales, daily shows like The Daily Show, and weeklies like Real Time. Ugh. We’re already deep in re-runs from the current television season and bored to death. Gonna be a long hot summer, made longer by the spring writers strike.

The issues, however, were bound to come up in the dawn of AI (alternative intelligence? No, artificial intelligence). Yeah, there’s something now to contend with called Artificial Intelligence, and it’s leaving everyone anxious about their careers, work, and value. Nothing projected but a bleak future for us all. High-tech Orwellian society come to pass … in our lifetime. Please, make it go away! No, this is the real Twilight Zone. This time, we get to see how life turns out after the big scare. We’ll be living through this ordeal for years. We Americans once were told: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Well, if humans can’t get a job to pay for housing, food, family, and health, what’s the use (of living)?

Wanna be sedated

It’s funny the many films about the future depicted this age when robots and computers would do everything, yet humans in these scenarios still exist and have jobs. Worth, I don’t know, but jobs usually dealing with computers: large as a room with lots of very wide tape. The funniest one was Woody Allen’s Sleeper. It takes place 200 years in the future from 1973. In the early 1970s, Allen as usual plays himself: neurotic hypochondriac Dixieland clarinet-playing, flirty, bawdy joking New Yorker who finds himself alive in the future. There are many scenarios that we now see coming to pass: robots, the biggest industry, which are somehow male or female, gay or straight, sassy or all-business and do the housecleaning, cooking, and mundane chores of humans past. All cars are bulbous and driverless. There’s an orb for getting high and, well, an empty water-heater shaped unit used for creating a self-gratification of sorts in mere seconds. Woody looks drunk after staying in it too long while hiding from the law who’s after him.

The police in Sleeper are depicted as incompetent, ready to shoot, and unable to capture Woody. But they do eventually. He’s placed in a morgue-like sliding bed instead of a hospital room and is assigned a friendly supervisor who introduces him to their great society, one that is more efficient and capable of providing all human needs.

Allen’s great society has a world leader resembling the pope. TVs are wall screens, and each night the great leader speaks to the people who in turn wave back as if he can see them. There is a rumor that a political underground has killed the great leader, leaving only his nose … which will be cloned to become the leader again. There is a funny slapstick scene in a garden of gigantic fruit and vegetables. Woody runs into a still-operable VW Beetle with a bumper sticker that reads: Register commies, not guns.

It is eerie how many of Allen’s predictions are coming true now only 50 years into the future of the making of Sleeper. A sleeper, by the way, is a person loitering often found sleeping on a park bench or a public spot where he does not belong.

Allen’s computer rooms now fit in the palm of our hands. Reels of computer tape are unnecessary thanks to the microchip. Driverless cars are here featuring hands-free driving and self-parking including parallel spots. And let’s face it, who can’t wait for robots that clean our homes and do all the cooking? We already don’t have to shop for food anymore and can order anything from anywhere anytime and have it delivered to our homes.

Back to the writers’ strike. Writers are artists. They use their imaginations for a living. They want the responsibility to develop their own series and movies, themes, jokes, characters, dialogue, conflicts, and endings. Their strike is a collective effort to put their foot down, by God, and stop producers (who hold the money) from going the cheap AI route. Just because AI can do everything a writer can do in seconds without a salary or human need or complaint doesn’t mean our society should allow it.

It reminds me of what was said about TV back in the 1960s: that there are scripts passed around with the same premise, and all the shows use them. That would explain the episodes from almost every show about beatniks or hippies. The Flintstones did it with ‘bug music.’ Gilligan’s Island with The Mosquitos rock band. My Three Sons with a friend of the boys who is unrecognizable after growing his hair long, wearing a wild hippie shirt and love beads, and flashing a peace sign. The hippie episode even infiltrates Green Acres and the Beatniks in The Munsters featuring The Standells—the Beatniks at the rock party accepting the Munsters for whatever they are, no fear or judgement.  All of these episodes are my favorites. But, yes, it was done to death. And these shows were written by humans.

I suppose writers may have written themselves into a corner. Management is all about the bottom line (money and cost), and layoffs are going to happen during this painful transition. Not sure how the latest yet righteous rift between artist and management will mend. But the truth is they’ve always needed each other. Perhaps that’s the past. The problem with AI is it may not be a novelty. Humans may be fooled by art, written or visual, produced by computers. Humans created AI and programmed everything it can do.

Humans are sort of in control of AI for now. But no one can predict the future, even the future of AI. Knowing humans, however, I’d bet on a lot of AI systems being literally manhandled, physically blown away. History has shown that humans tend to destroy things that threaten us. Not sure if management’s gotten the word.

Dear parents:

As an American, I am concerned about all the movements across this nation to ban books. My own state of Texas is going full ban with forthcoming laws that call on communities to play librarian and approve all books, especially for adolescents, that will be permitted in public school libraries. There are laws that throw school librarians in prison for six years if a banned book is found on the shelves.

There are proposals to ban books, some even American classics written long ago, that have been part of required reading in elementary, junior and senior high school classes for generations.

This time around, the reason for all the book bans (a pretend Christian populist craze that, like a brain virus, spreads across this nation every few decades) was initially due to sexually explicit material found in books written for today’s young people. First off, parents, I hear kids and teens use profanity and speak jokingly of genitalia and sex almost every day and have heard such talk starting when I was a kid and teen myself. Bawdy talk among kids and teens is a part of growing up. In other words, many young people already know a lot about sex. They gather information from blatant rap and some pop songs, music videos and cable TV where language and adult content are unrestricted. And let’s not forget what all they see on the internet.

What I know about book bans is that at some point, every book ever written eventually makes the list and is thrown into the community fire. The most ironic book called for banning is Fahrenheit 451 which is a novel about banned books. The title is supposedly the fire intensity necessary to thoroughly burn a book … out of existence.

Ban a book, ban a thought

Free thought is the ultimate ideal book banners want to control. Everyone thinking the same, feeling the same (hating gays, Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, girls, women, Muslims, etc.), believing the same.

The human masses are never going to believe the same.

This is because every person has a different story to tell. Their stories are based on their life experiences. Everyone’s life experience is not beautiful and free of ugliness. But … everyone’s story is interesting.

Readers love to read in the first place to escape their own lives, the good and bad, wholesome and horrible, loving and hateful. Our society should be encouraging reading instead of banning it. And that’s what book bans do.

Don’t forget, kids are more influenced by what they see and hear than what they read or think. Seeing and hearing is real. Reading is cerebral, not their real experience. And kids/teens know the difference.

To point out how ludicrous the latest ever-expanding book bans have become, these are some of the listed books as of today:

Charlotte’s Web     The Dictionary      To Kill a Mockingbird     The Scarlet Letter

Beloved                 The Bluest Eye      The Catcher in the Rye    And Tango Makes Three

Of Mice and Men  The Hate U Give   The Color Purple            Brave New World

All Boys Aren’t Blue        The Call of the Wild        An American Tragedy

Speak                    Animal Farm        A Child Called “It”         The Kite Runner

Two Boys Kissing  Bless Me, Ultima   Lady Chatterley’s Lover  This One Summer

Beyond Magenta   Gender Queer: A Memoir         Flamer        Lawn Boy

Out of Darkness    Crank          Me and Earl and the Dying Girl          Sold

Soon there’s something offensive in every book ever printed. Why isn’t the Bible on the ban list? It’s full of nasty stuff. Stories about incest, male body fluids, nudity, lust, sex, marital affairs, homosexuality, virgins, beheadings, murder, war, crucifixions. Even a talking snake, and I mention that because ‘talking animals’ is one of the issues with which some people take issue in the children’s book my mother read to her 4^th-graders every year, Charlotte’s Web. Those offended by the book maintain only humans talk, not animals. These same families will let their children watch the Muppets, animated cartoons, and travel to Disney World to hug Mickey Mouse.

Like the ban on rock music recordings in the 1990s, which resulted in Parental Advisory stickers—ironically making the recordings even more desirable for kids and teens—the latest cry to ban books and save the children, in the end, is a moot point. Parents, how about reading the books your teens read and talking to them about it? Good parents watch shows and movies with their kids and discuss scenes and situations if not censoring them. If it’s too sexual (and so much these days is sexualized), you’re the parent; parent.

We adults need to realize (or remember) young people tend to be curious about things that are banned, restricted, prohibited & illegal. Book bans always create an opposite but equal reaction: attracting young people to find copies to read one way or another.

I object to book bans. It’s puritanical and unAmerican. I’m a reader of banned books because I prefer nonfiction. Many banned books have to do with real-life stories whether experienced by the author or other people. More importantly, reading about other people’s lives, whether fiction or nonfiction, makes us empathetic. We pause to imagine. We become better people. Isn’t that what we want for the next generation?

Sincerely yours,

T3

All I was doing was talking and laughing aloud in a line with my 2^nd grade classmates. Then a teacher with tight lips, sprayed hair and buttoned-down dress stomped toward me in an instant meaning to stop the noise. She grabbed my arm and paddled me a few times on the butt. Whack. Whack. Whack. WaaaAAAAaaa!, was my little girl response as I recall. Looking back, what the hell?

In my school days, paddling was the ultimate corporal punishment. And through the years, I’ve been surprised to find that in Texas, it’s still legal. In this Texas Legislative session, a bill to ban the old 20^th century practice was voted down. Texans, the wealthy ones that make all the rules every two years in Austin, like to think unruly kids need a good whack on their bee-hind. That’ll learn ’em.

[Shh. We’re not supposed to counter with studies that indicate corporal punishment only reinforces the behavior adults are trying to control—like, say, talking too much or smarting off.]

Ever since Dr. Spock’s post WWII book about taking care of babies and raising children, who were the Baby Boomers, modern American society has turned away from adult anger with kids that leads to cutting a switch from a tree, grabbing a belt or spatula or brush or paddle or trusty hand for spanking, hitting, whipping and hurting.

But now it appears to society most parents simply don’t have the stomach to discipline kids at all—not like our parents, teachers and principals of yesteryear. Is it loss of energy? Is it a consciousness of empathy? I hated it whenever a fellow kid got licks. Emotionally, I felt I was being hit, too. Still, today why aren’t more parents spanking or whipping their kids? Is it easy to ignore bad behavior? Do parents want their kids to be their friends? Kids who don’t know how to behave at home are going to get in trouble in school.

Society thinks kids are more and more out of line in public places. One little boy in a check-out line was inadvertently whipping me with a new belt. I tried to move away from his lashes but was trapped. He was hitting my bare legs in summer. I told him to stop, not wanting to make a scene. But he smiled, and I realized this was intentional. After another painful lash on my legs, I sternly used my adult chest voice at him to stop. That’s when his mother got involved and told me off. No reprimand for her son in a line of people using his belt as a whip. What the hell?  

The current Texas Legislature countered the proposal to ban licks in our schools by claiming kids these days are way outta line, you know, with all the mass school shootins’ and other evil doins’. What those boys need is a good red bottom whereby when they try to sit down, they’d think twice about what they did to get licks. Texas, our Texas. How far behind, pardon the pun.

Gee, fellas, I don’t know. A kid, usually a teen, who would bring a loaded rifle or two to school and shoot everybody may have been the product of a violent upbringing. The bottom line is teens who are that angry (and really, suicidal) are dealing with mental illness, something they are incapable of comprehending and perhaps stopping or controlling. Whether their parents or principals whacked them in order to punish disobedience is not the issue at the heart of teen-age mass shooters.

Have paddle, Will travel

Teachers and administrators for the most part do not support corporal punishment. We’re trained that inflicting pain on a child who broke the rules is inappropriate in a civil society. [Hear that Texas Legislature?]

The Legislature’s ‘get tough’ policy to support corporal punishment on school children is nothing short of sick. An adult would have to be sick to hurt a child for disobedience. But we can’t agree on discipline. Yes, bad behavior by a child or teen who knows better must be dealt with and given a consequence. Paddling a teen at some point isn’t going to work. Any man will tell us this. They learn to be tough. They’ve built a resolve to not cry or let on like licks hurt.

Our Legislature cites the old Bible scripture ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child,’ and I’ve seen the point many times as a teacher. What I’ve seen are kids who know no meaningful consequence will come to them if they purposefully misbehave and break the rules. Detention is another consequence of the past. Parents have to be notified to arrange a day with the school when their child can do detention as a consequence for a string of misbehavior and disruption.

The issue of corporal punishment has been studied to death. It may work on some kids but not all, perhaps nowadays hardly any. And it’s pretty easy, Texas parents have found, to whip kids in anger and cross into child abuse. School teachers and administrators must report any marks, welts or injuries on students to Child Protective Services.

That, dear old Texas Legislature, is why our society has moved away from any physical discipline of children, even teen-agers. So, what to do with all the unruly, belligerent and incorrigible kids in our public schools? Mandatory parenting classes maybe, online, with refreshers every year? It is about time parents honor their responsibility to be consistent, instead of inconsistent, with their children, lay down the rules and administer fair consequences quickly. Love goes a long way in dealing with kids and teens. Still, some kids are going to want to be independent and push the envelope. They are each unique human beings.

Corporal punishment in the end reinforces the very behavior a disciplinarian wants to eradicate. Take me and all my childhood paddlings at school for talking too much. How did I end up? In the newspaper business for one—you know, the career where you blab to the world about everything? And column writing to boot. Which brings us to this here blog.  

The highlight of the 50-year retrospective that’s been going on about 1973 to me of course is the release of Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. In 1973 this super cool highly polished British rock blues album—with its iconic black cover with nothing but a clear triangle prism converting a stream of white light into a rainbow—sounded futuristic, like a gift or warning from Outer Space, yet each song’s precisely crafted lyrics written by long-haired young human beings spoke to a lot of us coming of age in a world of cacophony and conflict. The year of our Lord 1973 is recalled in shadows, dark and cold, with little light save the one on the Pink Floyd album cover which became a popular teen bedroom poster.

The Vietnam War was officially over in 1973. But no one was happy. There would be no celebrating, not like our nation did in 1945. No ticker-tape parades for our guys finally coming home from a much longer war or police action in Southeast Asia. Instead in 1973 couples started divorcing in much higher numbers.

On TV tennis star Billie Jean King beat big-mouth sexist Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes tournament, watched in the homes of American families across the country.

Gas lines were a common sight due to an oil embargo caused by leaders of the Middle East because that’s where all the oil was. That’s all we knew back then; we needed gas for our cars real bad. So we played the game, and drivers spent an hour or so waiting in long lines to get gasoline which was rationed and not available 24/7 like today.

Watergate became a household word as federal hearings were broadcast live all day long on the three networks (ABC, CBS, NBC). Ugh. What a long hot summer was ’73. My mom kept us kids busy at swimming pools, amusement parks, carnivals and family travels because her soap operas were cut in order to show the Watergate hearings every weekday. Ditto for summer of ’74. And everyone wondered if our president was indeed a crook.

Live and let die

The movies of 1973 reflected and reinforced American anger, numbness and cynicism—especially to kids: The Exorcist, The Way We Were, Serpico, Magnum Force, Badlands, American Graffiti, Soylent Green. Good God, what’s wrong y’all? Well, I was just a kid. But kids are impressionable. I got the picture, so to speak.

On a high note, composer John Williams’ big-time success creating memorable movie music began in 1973 with the dark jazzy noir The Long Goodbye. He’d go on to compose the music to Star Wars, Superman, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, Home Alone, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan and Harry Potter.

But in 1973, amid all the yell-a-thon TV shows like All in the Family and Maude, the most controversial issue to hit Americans was abortion on demand. Roe v Wade became law of the land—and by a conservative all-male Supreme Court who voted 7-2 in favor of a woman’s right to seek an abortion, judging it a right to privacy. If a girl or woman wanted to have an abortion, didn’t want to go through pregnancy (no matter how it happened), she was free to choose in this United States of America. For 50 years doctors (and everybody) could not only help guide females in such crisis … but they could actually say aloud the word abortion.

Not anymore in, what, half the country in 2023? In Texas lawsuits are just beginning to catch media attention, from women whose intended pregnancies turned devastatingly heartbreaking and even potentially deadly (for the mothers) to individuals suing ‘accomplices’ who help a woman get abortion pills. Texas offers anyone $10,000 for bringing to the state’s attention people who provide or assist in an abortion. It seems to me the biggest change in the past 50 years of American history is how vindictive the masses have become. Fifty years ago, people minded their own business.

Give me love

All this reminiscing about 1973 made me wonder how did any of us, kid or adult, manage to maintain sanity and carry on. Mine was easy: music! Rock music. I listened to music all the time after school, at the skating rink, at the swimming pool, and all summer long, top 40 radio which was mostly rock, pop, R&B and country crossovers. The titles alone bring back memories of what may be the happiest time of my childhood: Long Train Runnin’, We’re an American Band, Tie A Yellow Ribbon ’Round the Ole Oak Tree (the number one song of the year), Killing Me Softly With His Song, Diamond Girl, Natural High, Photograph, Angie, Keep on Truckin’, Drift Away, China Grove, Crocodile Rock, Half-Breed, Show and Tell, Saturday Night’s Alright, The Morning After, Shambala, Dancing in the Moonlight, Feelin’ Stronger Every Day, Free Bird.

And into this sparkling playlist fell singles from Dark Side of the Moon, like a meteor shower. The song Money from the album conveyed a bitter hateful tone, perfect for 1973. Maybe it was a love-hate ode. I mean, you gotta have money. Perhaps the point criticized was the love of money.

Dark Side of the Moon’s songs expound upon the human condition experienced by those of us living in the 1970s. The sound of helicopters at the beginning of the album—a spinning disc that actually begins in dead silence and very slowly builds to recognizable sound—represent what many soldiers from Vietnam still heard in their minds. The heartbeat the proof of life, time the ticking clock, then all the clocks stopped by a cluster of alarms loud, pure noise, painful and unrhythmic.

Pink Floyd knew how to get the attention of our generation. What they had to say was going to be important and meaningful: from lyrics to melodies to arcing guitar improvisations. Mesmerizing and profound … to this day.  Each song details modern human life: what’s important, what’s not, how most of us spend our days detesting boredom, and our collective fear of death. Then in the middle of all these thoughts voiced by the rough edges of male rock singers comes the sound of a wailing woman. As if in labor, she sing-hollers as the band’s swaying steel guitar and later cosmic organ counter in soothing harmony. All is right with the world. No words. It’s beautifully haunting … and I always thought sad. In a time when I understood pregnancy wasn’t always good news, I sensed the woman’s anguish. She was bringing forth a child into the world, our awful God-forsaken overpopulated polluted warring murderous lying cheating stinkin’ world. Or is she Mother God, crying for humanity? “Please save yourselves, my Children!” The album is a psychological trip through darkness to enlightenment we all experience while passing through this world. Its conclusion deals with mental illness as man is apt to go crazy now and then. The entire album is a work of art that remained on the charts into the late 1980s.

Rock music was at a social apex in 1973. Music was going to change. The disco years were in our near future. For a kid 50 years ago, music provided a carefree optimism. Songs like Natural High made me believe I would experience feelings of being in love with someone, too, someday. And though I wouldn’t have believed it 50 years ago, we’re still seekers on the road to Shambala.