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I had her in my life for 60 years. She often drove me crazy, more when I was a teen-ager then unexpectedly in our shared golden years. Our tiffs—OK arguments, OK fights—when I was growing up were along the generation gap but never the major issues of the 1970s: smoking, boys, teen run-away, criminal, drugs, alcohol, addiction, sex, and teen pregnancy. Not at all. Our fights were … more about mutual respect. She treated me like a kid; I treated her like an old harpy. She always said we don’t get along because we’re too much alike.

Of course, I’m talking about my mother. Earlier this month she died, expected yet not so soon. She was 85 and in declining health after breaking her hip a year and a half ago. Her transition from this world to the next was, I hope, glorious and peaceful because the last few months of my mother’s life were a strange odyssey of which we never foresaw.

A few months ago, she stopped eating then stopped drinking. And this was a person who loved to eat, especially sweets. For more than a year, she had said food didn’t taste good to her anymore. She was losing weight. As she took to lying flat on her back on a living room sofa, she spoke of feeling uncomfortable yet not in pain. Her feet, however, were horribly swollen. Then a fall, her third one, did not break a bone this time but got her carted away in an ambulance and later diagnosed with renal failure. She was incapacitated and hospitalized for weeks. With all this, she caught Covid. When I visited her in the Covid wing, she appeared to be on her death bed: weak, sleeping, somber, confused, thinking she was at home on her couch, unaware of the flurry of specialists and staff watching over her. I figured she’d pass away as another statistic of the pandemic, which in the end hit our world’s elderly most of all.

But like many times with my mother—who survived a hysterectomy and a heart attack and in old age recuperated from a broken arm, started using a walking cane until a couple years later broke a hip and though permanently disabled could slowly get about with a walker—she seemed on the mend. Or so we thought. We weren’t sure what was going on … until she was finally diagnosed with a rare auto immune disease that targets the kidneys. The treatment, besides some rounds of dialysis, would be a shot every six months. She’d be all right if she had the wherewithal.

She didn’t. Not this time. My mother—a tall, big-boned woman with large hands and feet she’d jokingly point out to strangers like she was a human oddity—to me resembled a firmly rooted tree. She would always be taller and in my daughter mind with no choice but to look up at her never came across as ready to accept death, to cross alone into the Great Unknown. It took a few blows by nature’s axe to her body—one that as a kid was skinny and malnourished yet active in sports and as an adult after a couple decades of sedentary life working and parenting by age 50 returned to daily exercise and healthy dieting.

In her final days, she was in a nursing home requiring 24/7 care. She could not sit up on her own or get out of bed and into a wheelchair. She must have been so humiliated because she could not take care of basic bodily functions, and she was well aware of this her fate. She would not socialize with nurses, staff or residents. She was not the mother I knew. Even in her wheelchair at a previous rehab facility, she socialized when exercising in the gym. I guess at the very end of her life, she had given up. But her husband and two grown children felt this persona was not her style. We expected her to fight, like she had so many times before. We were asking too much. We perceived her behavior as childish: expecting people to feed her and turn her body in the bed. She would scream “NO!!!” when nursing staff tried to lift her out of bed and into a wheelchair or vice versa. She was sure they’d drop her. She didn’t want to fall again.

And that’s the mother I knew: She always needed to be in control.

Light the corners of my mind

Looking through hundreds of family snapshots to prepare Mom’s memorial, I could see the love she always had for us. In the early years of getting to know each other, words got in the way. That along with a look of disapproval, disappointment or unconcern left deep emotional scars that never heal whether parent or child. Nevertheless, Mom always loved us. At old age, she would stop herself and rephrase what she was saying so to not overly criticize. She knew life is short. We can’t go back in time during the whirlwind of 18 years spent child rearing. Must’ve been as hard on her the parent as it was on me the child.

Still, my childhood was spent with lots of laughter, some angry periods, few blow ups, and mostly the calm boredom that comes with routine and knowing parental boundaries. My mother was the disciplinarian, strict but not overly so. I never had a curfew. Never needed one. Mom could be a very loving person especially with people and even pets truly ill or needing her care. Among her siblings she would be driven to occasional tears of sorrow or much more often giddy elation depending on their recollection of shared chaotic Depression childhoods in rural Oklahoma.

Having lived most of my life as an adult, I understand my mother’s motivations, why she cared for her children, put her foot down in certain cases, and purposefully cut the apron strings. She was determined her children would be independent kids and therefore more prepared for adulthood. Decades later she explained she was aloof and expected us to take care of ourselves in preparing meals, hygiene and other essentials because she knew life can be cruel and a parent can be suddenly taken away from her children. As a kid, you’re thinking she doesn’t care or is too busy doing other things.

There were beautiful moments of time spent with my mother. When I was in 5^th grade, for my 11^th birthday Mom bought me a genuine silver ring with my birthstone in the shape of a heart. I wore it on my wedding finger for years. Later I realized she may have done that because a few months prior I started my first period. Maybe she wanted to mark my passage from child to young lady.

My mother was an elementary teacher. For a while when I was in junior high, after each of her monthly paydays, Mom would take me to a teen dress shop with the latest styles, all denim in the mid ’70s.  Mom made sure I had a new outfit every month. My friends were jealous, so I realized I needed to help more with household chores. By that age, I kept my bedroom organized and tidy, vacuuming my rug and dusting my shelves on my own volition, everything in its place. But helping her clean the rest of the house every weekend, I wasn’t keen on—a source of many fights between mother and daughter. Anything I cleaned was never good enough anyway.

For some reason, my bedroom was where the old furniture ended up. My bedroom had a towering dark wood bookcase; at one time a jukebox; two-seat divan; bean bag chair; wicker chair and basket; my parents’ former bedroom dresser drawers; and major-league stereo system that played records, FM/AM radio & 8-track tapes—that last item my parents bought just for me one Christmas. It was like I lived in a small apartment. That might explain my independent streak.

Growing up with TV, Mom and I watched the Ed Sullivan show with all the pop music of the late 1960s and early ’70s, the Lawrence Welk Show with orchestrated Big Band numbers, the Tom Jones Show, Sonny & Cher, The Partridge Family, the Carol Burnett Show. All that music plus a stack of LPs played while housecleaning or barbecuing, each record from American pop and country music, instilled in me a lifelong love of music specifically America pop music. The love of music culminated at Mom’s family reunion when her siblings and my cousins jammed dusk to dawn one weekend every summer. Music was our family bond. Too, the musician relatives were very good at emulating the hits. That took practice, discipline, and a remarkable ear to perform songs precisely as the recordings by big-name stars.

That perfectionist streak was another aspect of my mother, the teacher. She corrected my grammar whenever I chatted with her or friends or when she read something I wrote. She was firm and meaning to be kind, sometimes laughing at my many unintentional malapropisms.

Without realizing it, Mom taught me to overcome fears, mostly her fears. She was afraid to drive in Dallas though we lived in a suburb. So I was determined to get familiar driving in the big city. I loved driving. Mom, however, was my worst passenger—and she taught me to drive, letting me practice on the vast high school parking lot when no one else was around Sunday afternoons. From then on, Mom remained deathly afraid of my driving, constantly hissing at every stop which she naturally assumed I hadn’t seen and a crash was inevitable. We got into so many arguments about her unfounded fear over my driving … all those spats while I was driving.

Mom was afraid to swim, so she made sure my brother and I were enrolled in the Red Cross swim lessons. She’d take us to the public swimming pool in the summer and sit in the sun reading a book while my brother and I learned to hold our breath under water, float, swim and dive into deep water. I tried to get her to be more comfortable in the swimming pool, holding her hand as she’d walk from the shallow end to where the water covered her waist. She would go no further, not to the deep end when you had no choice but to stay afloat with feet dangling unable to touch the bottom of the pool. I’d demonstrate how to relax in the water, reclining back and floating on the water like it was a mattress. She could not, would not do it.

Facing the final curtain

After retiring from teaching, Mom spent her time exercising and became a mall walker. She befriended others her age who kept active indoors regardless of the season for free. The mall awarded walkers after logging so many miles.

Mom had a good run of health up to about age 65 when she had a heart attack. She had been told years earlier she needed a pacemaker. Mom, who was left-handed, felt she might mess it up somehow. She’d heard stories of others whose pacemakers had to be refitted or caused some temporary problem. I told her if a doctor told me to get a pacemaker, I’d damn sure get one. [Mom cussed on occasion.] But this was probably the first time I realized Mom would defy her doctors. She had her own ideas about things, and there was no changing her mind. She was getting old.

Sometimes when I’d visit her, I was stunned to see the color of her face was grey, like the aliens in outer space. No one else saw the hue, just me. I don’t think she or her doctors realized it, and I wasn’t about to point it out and frighten her. I knew she routinely saw several types of doctors, one who pointed out her oxygen level was low. I told her to see about getting oxygen, those portable light-weight containers that allow people to go about their lives outside the home. She wouldn’t pursue it. This was Mom officially in old age.

I called her just about every weekend, checking in, usually complaining about something happening at work or expensive repairs for house, auto or health, but first wanting to hear how she and Dad were doing. In our phone calls, we’d often delve into politics especially during my first career as government newspaper reporter. In those days, the 1990s, and for the earlier part of my life, Mom was a democrat. I mean a staunch Democrat. I would not be one if not for her. And she was one because of her father, an FDR supporter all four terms. Mom taught me the difference between republicans and democrats: republicans care about business and the rich while democrats care about workers and the poor. Sounds dead on. Then race got in the middle of politics followed by women’s rights and gay rights. Way back when, none of that mattered to Mom. She remained a Democrat throughout my upbringing in the 1970s. It was like growing up with TV’s Maude. Mom’s sense of humor was just as dry and on point. She understood life, especially the lives of women and men, girls and boys. She grew up with nine brothers and a mother who gave birth every two years.   

As Mom progressed into her 70s, she was starting to wind down. Yet even in her 80s, I’d call or visit, and there she and my dad would be exercising on their stationary bike and treadmill in their living room. Though she and my father would go to town to dine, shop thrift stores or get groceries, she started spending most of her time at home watching TV. Mom kept the curtains closed. My parents sat in the dark. It was like a cave when I visited them. I was shocked. They kept the heat on, too, sometimes past 80 degrees. They were always cold.

Fox News became Mom’s preference, especially after Oprah’s show left the air. My mother started to change. We didn’t agree on politics anymore. A few years ago, she told me she was no longer a democrat. She wouldn’t say she was a republican, but she wasn’t a democrat anymore. She also thought the whole world was in a great big mess, that these times were worse than any known to mankind, and we needed a savior like Jesus Christ to come down this very minute and smite all the evil doers. She was elated when Trump won. She had supported Obama his first term but not his second term. That’s when she changed politics permanently. As for me, I lost a good friend that understood and supported my political views, the views she taught me in childhood.

If Mom drove me crazy as a teen-ager, it was to the tenth degree as she grew into old age. She became everything I’d heard happens to people when they get old: more cynical, much more conservative, distrusting of strangers even neighbors and family, sitting in the dark during the day with the TV blaring, suspicious of the internet and bank account debit cards, monitoring every penny charged by utilities, closed minded, prejudiced, and super religious. Fox conservative commentary, country music shows and gospel music and preaching by the Swaggarts were the preferred TV viewing of my folks every single day. And then I discovered while staying with them … they sleep through most of their shows!

To be mother and daughter, Mom and I lived two very different lives. I had experiences which she could not possibly understand and vice versa. She regretted having stopped teaching in her 40s and wished if she could have done it over to keep at it and know more about the computer age. So my goal is to never retire (again). Mom had an utterly unimaginable childhood, only recently talking about how her large country family moved frequently from shack to shack, once living in a barn. I had the impression her family lived in one small house. I remember it as a little kid bathing in a large washtub and using the outhouse. That was in the 1960s when President Johnson soon dragged rural America into the 20^th century with electricity and sewer lines.

When Mom turned 80, I threw a birthday party during the family reunion. We played Who Knows Aunt Clara Mae? I’d ask questions about her life, and family members competed for the right answer which only she could confirm. Her birthday cake was topped with a photo of her from her teaching days, one taken in 1976 when she would have been 39. I presented her with a charm bracelet with silver items based on her life and things important to her like a sneaker, basketball, diploma, teacher apple, Oklahoma shape, a cross and a Bible. On her birthday as she used her cane to get ready for the drive, Mom said, “I never in my life thought I’d live to be 80 years old, and yet here I am.” She was tired, I could tell. She was looking grey and not getting enough oxygen in her blood.

Mom lived a very good and long life. She may have wanted to live longer—or knowing her, simply didn’t want to die, not yet, not now, well not ever. I asked her brightly when she was so sick with Covid, “Do you see any of the family who’ve gone on?” She looked horrified and answered, “No! And I don’t wanna see them!” I understood, as she did, that seeing our deceased loved ones is a sign we’re near death. She would have been scared to death if she saw her parents or siblings who’d passed on.

In the nursing home, Mom would not face visitors, looking away at a wall, depressed and angry. Perhaps angry with God. “Why would You do this to me, let me be placed here, leave me weak and unable to defend myself, scared and alone, unable to be with my family or to die in my home as I wanted, as I deserved?” Her kidney doctor slipped while talking to me about Mother’s prognosis or next steps toward recovery and going home because she wasn’t improving. He said this is what happens when the body is shutting down …

I see it clearly now. Mom’s age and frailty, not eating and drinking, refusing physical therapy, her depression, not wanting visitors to see her or to talk to anyone even on the phone. She had to deal with her death and dying, her ultimate fear shared by … EVERYBODY.

When I read the news by text that Mom was gone, I cried yet typed onto Facebook that Mom would want us to sing Glory Hallelujah! She made it, transcended across the Great Divide! I am so proud my mother was able to face that hurdle and finally join her family on the Other Side. Her final lesson to me? Reviewing her life in pictures—photos I personally know and have analyzed since childhood when they were stored in my bedroom closet in albums and boxes—I realized all along we were seeing Mother’s spirit—not her body, once attractive and inevitably aged, that shell we must use to roam this world and live this life, that body that no matter how we take care of will deteriorate … and surely die. We saw Mom’s essence: beautiful, grand, lively, ethereal, eternal—that part of us shared with God, that part of us that never dies. Mom returned to spirit and now resides in a wondrous place where there is nothing but pure Love.   

I hate guns. I don’t care what the U.S. Constitution says. At this point with mass shootings every day in our country, I don’t see a reason for citizens getting to have and to hold guns like they’re married to them. Self protection is maybe less than a one percent chance; most police work their whole careers without ever firing a shot. There’s no need for us to hunt for food anymore. And the sport of hunting is legally marked by certain seasons and is not legal every day everywhere. No, the only reason for guns, in this country, is to kill people and lots of them quickly. We’re the only nation on earth whereby our total freedom includes guns and bullets to kill people.

I know that only a third of Americans own all the guns. But now most right-wing public protests feature guns visibly worn by the protestors. It’s a menacing show of force. It’s to tell unarmed counter protestors to shut up or they’ll shoot. It is intended to be a threat and should be illegal. Threatening a person’s life is illegal. So why does the law allow people with guns to shop with us at Walmart or walk around armed in any public place? It can’t be to play hero in the event someone starts shooting. The hero scenario never happens. We only know about hundreds of innocent people being shot to death or disability while minding their own business at parades, holiday shopping centers, churches, and mostly school.

And now that we know only four percent of mass shooters are mentally disturbed—meaning all the other shooters are just regular guys—why do Americans need so many guns? In the U.S., there are enough for every child, teen and adult to have three apiece. Yes, we have three times more guns than people.

The common military-style rifles used in daily shooting massacres were once banned in this country. But our elected officials in Washington, D.C., let that ban expire around 2003, when we were scared senseless by Islamic terrorism and whole hog supportive of two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Live by the gun, die by the gun

I don’t believe in guns. It was a decision made in the 1970s, being influenced by pacifist TV shows like Lou Grant and All in the Family. I was convinced that a gun in the home leads to accidental shootings especially among kids. And that fact remains true and indeed increased dramatically during the stay-home orders associated with the pandemic.

When John Lennon was shot to death in December 1980, Americans wondered why someone so famous would choose to live in New York City. Everybody thought New York to be the most dangerous place in the U.S. Ha, what a laugh today with American shooting massacres occurring in hundreds of cities and small towns across the land.

My thinking about America’s repulsive ‘gun love’ is more about the human brain, the last of the major organs scientists are beginning to study and hopefully understand someday. See, the brain thinks everything it sees is real. That may not make sense, but just think about it. We agree that our minds are influenced by what we see, right? So if we see dozens of murders on TV or in movies and video games, does our brain think it’s all real, that it all really happened? My theory is we made ourselves a culture of hyper anxiety—our first reaction to a situation we don’t like is ‘Shoot!’ Think I’m wrong?

In the year 2022, what do we all have in common now that we collectively know of hundreds of shooting massacres while seeing even more through the mass media of TV, internet, movies and video games? What do the victims, the assailants and all of us casual observers have in common? We’re all American for the most part, share the same culture that loves guns and believes they have solved all our perceived problems, and our eyes watch a lot of entertainment involving guns and shooting bullets.

We’ve always romanticized the Wild West and admired 20^th century mobsters like Bonnie & Clyde and characters like Scar Face. From childhood to old age, we’ve ‘seen’ time and again how the one with the gun calls the shots, so to speak. The one with the gun is in charge, and the ones without loaded dangerous firearm are helpless. And ACTION.

Going back to the 20^th century with full speed to today, it’s our mass culture of visual entertainment that filled our brains with the power of the gun especially when in the hands of a good person or a bad guy. For generations now, we’re replaying what we’ve been conditioned to accept. We are trapped in a loop. Someone gets angry about something, easily gets a gun made universally accessible, then shoots everybody to death until stopped dead himself.

Don’t believe me?

How to get out of this American nightmare? That I don’t know. I’ve made my decision to not believe in guns and have nothing to do with them. With each passing day and year, however, I know I may come into contact with a shooter—some young guy conditioned by our shared culture that guns are part of life and death—and never seeing any other way.

As for me and the mid-terms of 2022, I’m hoping for a ‘Pink Wave’—WOMEN voting in droves; more women than men voting, heh heh; and voting in candidates who support the reproductive rights we used to have instead of state by state or like here in Texas community by community, encouraging nosy neighbors, relatives and strangers by paying them $10,000 for hauling in a female resident who had an abortion.

I, like Beto O’Rourke, have had enough of Gov. Abbott’s and the controlling State Republicans’ illogical and mean-spirited abortion laws, nonchalance over nonstop mass shootings across Texas, and presiding over the unfixed and deadly-in-winter Lone Star power grid.

There used to be a saying among working-class Americans long ago who were as ‘mad as Eddie Chiles’ and weren’t gonna take lousy no-count selfish elected leaders anymore especially in Washington, D.C.: THROW THE BUMS OUT.

We don’t hear expressions by fed-up voters anymore because now elections are a blood sport; you can taste the animosity. The fangs are out. Republican candidates show themselves in campaign ads brandishing machine guns, implying, no saying outright they’ll shoot anyone who gets in their way. We just accept this murderous pledge? People are gonna vote for them? Yes, gunslingers get loads of votes. Our nation is so angry.

Americans are mad and rightfully so when it comes to inflation we haven’t seen since the disco era. Who’s to blame for the economy? Always the party in power. So President Biden, who knows this, is gonna have to take it on the chin, like President Bush in 1992 when Bill Clinton won (by sticking to an in-house campaign slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.”)

Yes, the economy appears to be a major problem to many voters if not to everyone. It’s not my number one issue though it has been in the past. My concern as a voter is eroding 50-year rights and dismantling our form of government, these issues over economy—the latter which in reality has little to do with who’s the U.S. President, don’t you know?

Economists tell us there are many issues that impact the economy. The big picture is we are part of a global economy, and the pandemic upended business around the world. Come on, billions of people could not work for one reason or another: They were ill or dying, taking care of the ill and dying, living among the ill and dying, and quarantined—weren’t allowed to work for months. The brakes were put on every type of business … in the world. Whiplash was bound to occur. It’s painful and takes some time to heal, we’re finding out.

And wake up Americans! We just fought two wars on the other side of the world for two decades! We gotta pay for that. We gotta pay for two wars for a long, long time. Taxes were going to go up no matter which political party’s in charge.

Having spent most of my life paying attention to American politics since, say, the 1970s, and still never forgetting a day of the ’80s’ Reagan-Bush years, I find that every time a Democrat gets elected President, economic messes are cleaned up—not quickly in a year or two, but quite a bit during two terms. It’s remarkable how slow and steady wins the race. But hold on. Then a Republican gets elected President, and the formerly economic ‘conservatives’ in the U.S. House & Senate spend ALL our money like they’re drunk on … power. I can’t say I’ve ever witnessed ‘tax-and-spend’ liberals of whom Republican leaders criticize.

But I have witnessed the Republicans signing ‘American family’ pledges which master plan featured a list of filthy adjectives to ALWAYS use whenever talking about Democrats, those elected to office, at first at the national level and now all the way down to county clerks, mayors and school board members—and finally just any Democrat in the nation, half the population.

And with the free speech internet, Americans have turned ugly more than they are angry.

American anger is misplaced. Blame the national economy and inflation on all the merchandise still sitting in ships off the coast of California, the world’s manufacturers forced to stop producing for a year or so, Americans not wanting to work millions of jobs (some requiring expertise like nurses and physicians, police and teachers) and related anti-immigration policies, and yes residual effects of the pandemic leaving mostly mothers at home to care for their youngest children. And don’t ever forget about two decades of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—costing at times a billion dollars a month.

The enormous, enviable and wildly rich and prosperous U.S. economy has always appeared a mess (like finding out 60 cents of every tax dollar goes to the military), save a few glorious moments in relatively recent American history. We can vote all Republican because we’re angry Democrats haven’t fixed everything in two years. Or we can be realistic and honest and suck it up: Our nation owes a lot of debt. We can cry over spilled milk, say bitter grapes, throw a pity party, hold our breath till turning blue. But voting in an election requires the calm reasonable mind of a mature adult not an angry temper tantrum of a spoiled brat.

So I’m turning 60 in a couple of days, another big birthday, and I’m feeling kinda blah. This will be a sick birthday since I caught a cold, and it will be a working birthday plus additional hours on that particular day. Yet I know it will be my special day, that date on the calendar that marks me as a Scorpio, that hour of birth at dusk my most powerful moment of the day, an exact week before Halloween, for whatever cosmic and metaphysical reason the day of my birth on planet Earth in 1962.

Turning 50 was a milestone ten years ago. I know a lot of people who never made it that far, now this far in life. Turning that particular age had such a monumental impact on me that I decided to go back to college for a master’s degree. Didn’t know it at the time, but I’d end up traveling the world, going to India of all places (yet the country I always wanted to visit). So you never know where life will take you. A bit later I started writing this blog and then founded my own educational nonprofit business about the importance of journalism in our country’s democracy. Throughout the past decade, I became that person I always wanted to be: someone who marches at rallies—that greying frumpy woman with rimless glasses or shades protesting in March for Our Lives (calling for sane gun laws to end mass school shootings) and Reproductive Liberation March and Bans Off Our Bodies (to keep abortion a private legal choice for girls and women). Chanting “This is what democracy looks like!” and “Hell no, we won’t go back!!” with my elderly hippie colleagues and a mass of middle-aged and young adults. Proud to have participated and mostly glad to have the physical ability. A few elderly in these protests walked with canes or sat on the sidelines in wheelchairs. I respect them so much for Being there.

All last year at age 59, I felt every bit 60. My muscle strength is notably declining, sight dimmer, more vitamins & ’scripts necessary, bones stiff, chronic aches (a middle finger is twisted; doc asked if it was from over use—rim shot, very funny), my mind a bit forgetful or occasionally a tad confused especially when driving errands. Hey, I’ve got a lot on my mind these days. Sixty is going to be tough. I see. I either succumb or get tougher.

One of my parents is dealing with a compilation of diseases requiring long hospital stays and 24-hour care. That reality weighs on a child turning 60, too. I see. This is nearing the end of life, very likely. I realize each day the importance of every moment, how touching the lives we encounter with kindness can be and will be transformative for them, even though at home I resort to my curmudgeon self, the Scorpion sting. Sor-ry.

Curtain call

While I was enthralled in grad school and enthusiastically traveling the world, I made a plan to work on a doctorate at 60. And here I am. IDK. That aspiration has to wait a bit. Reality is paying for other obligations. Not sure why I was so gung ho on a doctorate anyway other than personal fulfillment and ego. For 50 years I was never interested in earning a doctorate. Maybe being in the real world these past few years, away from all those college professors, has set me straight.

I had a dream recently, what is called a Big Dream, very meaningful to the dreamer. I am sitting alone in a white corridor, and I know I’m dead. I don’t know how I died, figured suddenly like a car crash. But I’m confused and sorry to be dead. Then a man casually is walking down the corridor toward me. I know he’s Jesus; he’s got long hair, a beard, but wearing today’s casual men’s clothes. As he gets closer to me, he morphs a bit and wears small round glasses; I know he wants to appear like John Lennon to make me feel more comfortable and perhaps to make me realize that I, too, am dead. He’s got a hand in his pocket and a pleasant smile. He says, “I’m here to take you Home. Ready to go?” But I stay seated, confused, unwilling to move, to move on into eternity. He’s surprised by my reaction and asks, “Aren’t you excited?” And I respond, “I just wanted to accomplish a few other things in life.” And JC says to me: “You’ve done A LOT with your life.” Hmm. Wonder if he meant ‘Come on, enough already.’

So what are those things I want to accomplish? I guess that is what I should be focused on more instead of just work and busyness and succumbing to debilitating body ache. Actually, I have done as much as I could in some areas of interest. The internet has allowed a lot of people to pursue their dreams and talents in writing, performing, all the arts, business, teaching, preaching. It is an incredible age we live in. Now getting those online ‘hits’ is another factor. Eh, I leave it up to the cosmos as far as fame and success here in cyberspace.

Turning 60 is important. Time to stop putting off anything wished we’ve done or said. My family says “I love you” every time before parting. And we never ever did that for 50 years. I remember the first time. It was blurted out by my dad as I was leaving. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. The family unit is a mystically close relationship that I both observe as an outsider and participate in as my role. In Hinduism, the religion is layered with complexities because the culture believes life is very complex. Their millions of gods and goddesses represent every facet of life, and they believe each person has many facets, plays many roles. We are parents, children, relatives, friends, enemies, spouses, bosses, employees, pastors, congregants, etc. We each live many roles—and we do not act the same way, as the same person, in each role.

Shakespeare said the world is our stage and we the players. We are acting out our lives. If we’re lucky and healthy in body, mind and spirit, we become who we want to be, do what we want to do, accomplish all we want, and in so living become what once were our dreams. Through time and age, we learn this and our comings and goings on Earth will make life better for those who follow us. Happy birthday everyone! Make each one special with a new revelation … and another aspiration. Rock on!

At long last, Alex Jones, star of his own ultra right-wing radio show called Infowars, is found ultimately responsible for lies, slander and defamation against parents whose little children were shot to death at school. After the mass shooting in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Infowars, starring Jones, erroneously claimed and maintained all these years that it was a leftist plot to change gun laws. Jones figured the Black U.S. President Barack Obama was hated enough for the Infowars’ audience to believe Sandy Hook didn’t happen. It was so horrible, it couldn’t have happened, he knew millions of Americans would believe. Some disturbed young man, depicted in MSM with the same peculiar grainy black-and-white photo, and dubious past never thoroughly analyzed even in a TV series or movie? It’s simply made up. No way could a skinny guy use a military-style assault rifle and successfully shoot open a locked steel door, kill every brave adult (principal, counselor, teacher) who got in his way then calmly proceed to his old classroom where as a youngster he was allegedly bullied—and shoot, repeatedly, 20 little kids unknown to him. No, that just didn’t happen, Jones angrily pressed … over and over and over again—his listeners in total agreement. No way a 20-year-old guy takes loaded firearms into a school and shoots a bunch of students until stopped or shooting himself.

Practically every one of the deceased school children were shot five to six times, their bodies red meat. They were no longer recognized as human beings.

And so because they did not resemble real children, perhaps that is the reason millions of Americans chose to believe a lie. No way did this school shooting happen. Besides, Connecticut is so very far away from Texas, the base of Jones and his Austin business.

When I heard of the elementary school shooting, whispered by a fellow teacher in the halls of the elementary school where we taught, and that the dead were little children, tears welled in my eyes. I knew it happened. No doubt. School shootings not only occur on a regular basis, our nation continues to do nothing to stop them.

The message to troubled adolescents is this is normal instead of abnormal. America has made school shootings a part of life at school for at least one generation.

Strong delusion

But school shootings are not the only repeated nightmare Americans live through. Believers of the gospel according to Alex Jones chose to pursue the parents of all those dead little ones in a school called Sandy Hook. (What kinda made up name is that? And Newtown? The whole thing sounds fake. Fake news! Government conspiracy! There’s no other explanation).

So from the get-go, Infowarriors went after the grieving parents with a vengeance. They shouted them down in public, mocked them as ‘crisis actors,’ questioned their tears. The warriors said the parents never had a child attending Sandy Hook Elementary School. They’re all Democrats, Jones’ warriors presumed, and therefore are in on the big government plan to confiscate every Americans’ guns or just the military-style assault rifles that kill and maim lots of people in seconds. The Infowarriors took to social media, harassing the Sandy Hook families, as the sad parents with dead children from this school shooting came to be known. Not a stone was left unturned in the private lives of those parents. The parents were yelled at while mourning their children at the funerals, scorned at their children’s gravesites, stalked everywhere they went. Their homes were repeatedly vandalized, their addresses and phone numbers and workplaces made public for even more crazy Americans (the manic types with a lot of time on their hands and minds) to stalk and harass and intimidate them—for years, all these years. Parents moved from home to home, from town to town, state to state, trying to get on with their lives and, yes, take the high road in avoiding the crazed and ignorant Infowarriors but to no avail.

They had no choice but to sue, and they sued the Big Fish. Let the police deal with the little people who harassed them and vandalized their homes and property. Then the plaintiffs waited for the slow wheels of justice. They were in the right. They deserved to live in peace after their children’s murders.

Their story, every bit of it, is true.

So Alex Jones owes the Sandy Hook families he tormented on air with spiteful words and sarcastic self-assured cynicism—all of it an ‘act,’ he told the Texas judge presiding over a child custody battle with an ex wife. He’s just an entertainer, he said on the stand—and Infowars, just his current gig. He can’t help what his fans believe is truth and bluster and therefore can’t be responsible for their actions toward real people he constantly and loudly defamed on air. He maintained his right of free speech even if lies with terrible consequences.

But the Sandy Hook parents, who like any parent of a murdered child, could care less about the millions of dollars they may or may never get from Alex Jones. Today and in the foreseeable future, they contact parents whose children are shot to death in American schools—because the same Infowarriors use social media to bully, harass, intimidate and in the end terrorize any parent whose child is killed in a mass school shooting. The same bunch went after the parents of Uvalde immediately after that elementary school shooting this year. (Uvalde, what a made up name. A Texas town? Yeah, right. Never heard of it. Can’t be real. Never happened. Government just wants our guns! Never!)

First off, I never asked for or expected the federal government to pay off in full or part my college loans. Secondly, I’m not going to ask for it either. If, however, the government comes offering to reduce my student loan debt from a master’s degree, I may take it.

I’m kinda confused about the extreme agitation of Americans who oppose college student loan reduction. It seems their real anger is at any American who went to college for any reason, any degree, any additional knowledge or even skills. Behold, another generation gap. My parents did not provide for my college education. They did what they could to help with books and personal items but did not have the money to pay for a college education. College was something I not only wanted to do with all my heart but had to complete to be a public school teacher.

While in college, the student financial aid office told me about Pell Grants for which I qualified along with the work-study program. I applied and received Pell Grants and work-study on-campus jobs that pretty much covered my college expenses. Afterwards, I had to pay $50 a month for two federal student loans I (and not my parents) took out the first two years of college back in the early 1980s. The Jimmy Carter loan came with a two percent interest rate while the Ronald Reagan loan had a nine percent rate. Making that $50 a month payment was hard most of the time when starting out as a full-time worker, mostly with low-paying jobs that did not require a college degree. I wasn’t instantly hired as a teacher, see. But the loans were paid off and long ago.

By the way, I was so grateful to my country for providing me the golden opportunity to go to college that I did a lot of volunteer work after graduating, mostly at a homeless shelter. I was trying to give back to our society to make the world a better place. I was idealistic way before college. It had a little to do with held-over attitudes from the 1970s.

Through the ups and downs of life, I managed to have had a career in journalism and then, 16 years after college, finally got that first teaching gig which turned into a second career, albeit with two layoffs during the Great Recession. It was then I decided to go back to college. Grad school, it’s called in the world of academia. It had been 30 years since I’d been in college. I searched online options and old school campus scenarios and after much contemplation decided to pursue a master of liberal studies, AKA liberal arts. At age 50, I wanted to take courses in a variety of subjects. But on a teacher’s salary—yet in a career where it is expected you will always return to college and earn higher and more degrees—I had to look into financial aid.

I signed on the dotted line and agreed to attend night school twice a week along with summer sessions, accomplishing the goal in two and a half years. I was so proud. I know I did the right thing, wished I had done it a lot earlier.

After six months or so, I had to start paying the debt with a monthly bill five times what it cost for a bachelor’s degree back in the ’80s. I own a house now and am growing older. In short, life happens and impacts the budget from time to time. Even so, I kept my payments even when unemployed. Then the pandemic came, and for some reason college debt collection and payments were put on hold. Still is.

I’m very happy to pay off what I owe. After the new roof and other necessities, I figure it’ll take maybe four more years. That’s if nothing major happens.

When did college become a dirty word?

I’m not sure why my parents—featuring a mother who was a teacher and spoke of her college daze as the most fun time of her life—did not create a fund for me starting at birth in the early 1960s. But I didn’t have time to cry about it in 1980-81. I talked to the high school counselor who provided all sorts of college applications for student loans and grants. I filled them out by myself, only asking my parents for their income information. They earned too much for me to qualify for grants, so a federal student loan was my option. I also worked a lot of jobs while in college, something that I’m proud of but not really. Those jobs (sandwich maker, singing waitress, university news service reporter, music librarian assistant, writing tutor and freelance newspaper writer) took a lot of time from my studies—the purpose of being in college in the first place. Two of the part-time jobs were work-study. But by my final year in college, the federal government cut that program to bare bones. Somehow, penniless, I no longer qualified for work-study. The writing lab director kept me on anyway, explaining with a wink it’s all just paper.

I guess I was prepared for a bleak future in getting financial aid for college. My senior year in high school, the government teacher talked about our country’s divide in whom should attend college, making it clear one should already have the money before attempting to enroll. I never heard such a thing. It was the first time I feared I may not get to go to college. Some people believe college is only for the rich? For those who can afford it upfront? For those who upon graduating high school must work for years to save for college then attend? I disagreed with the premise and told her so, choking back tears, not realizing that a lot of Americans do not support the idea that anyone who wants to go to college should be ‘afforded’ the opportunity.

While in college a couple of friends had to quit. They had been attending on Social Security (one’s parents were dead) and the GI Bill. The Reagan administration cut the GI Bill and the Social Security provision which provided college tuition for kids whose parent or parents were deceased. The government’s line was budget cuts were necessary to balance the budget. College was only for those who can afford it and not for anyone else even if already in college. The friends made plans to live with relatives and work a job and save all that money to return and finish their education. I hope that is what happened. But I also know how for young adults, life can interfere with a goal like obtaining a college education if you don’t finish it while young. Young people get married, most have children quickly, start working whatever job they can get, and life goes on into covering a growing family’s necessities. For many women, college may be attempted but is never completed, left as a dream and perhaps their life’s biggest regret. I grew up seeing it often.

It was a C-SPAN series on all the American presidents, starting with George Washington, that made me realize why I was so adamant about the American right to attend college. The program on President Johnson revealed he was the one who believed a college education should be provided to any American who wanted it. I wanted it, more than anything. I’d pay for it one way or another. And I believed (and still do) that in this country, anyone who wants a college education should be able to get it. Johnson, architect of the Great Society, supported a college education because he knew the number one reason for poverty was the death of a parent, usually the father. A college education was a tremendous leg-up for a family facing generational poverty.

So I’d like to thank President Johnson who somehow, probably while speaking in his televised national addresses overheard as I played in the living room, put the idea in my little head that I and all Americans had the right to a college education. Still believe in that right. You just gotta work for it and yes pay for it, too. I thought that was what the federal student loans were for.

Nowadays our nation has changed from cheering on and even encouraging young Americans to go to college, to pursue that BIG dream if it’s their life’s goal and a necessity for specific career paths. No, now we hear mostly from bitter folks (ironically even by those with a college education) who believe college to be a complete waste of money and time, that people are much better off getting a trade (that’s like college, too) or just any job after high school and somehow working their way up to the top. College has become way, way too expensive, and many graduates will never pay off their debt.

This is the fast-paced high-tech age. America cannot be the greatest nation on earth if only a small percentage of the population is college educated. Most jobs do not require a college degree, and everyone doesn’t need a college education. But I believe a lot of people would benefit from it. There is nothing wrong with gaining more education and knowledge, to become smarter.

The highly criticized and equally lauded multi-billion-dollar cost to reduce student loans (ONLY to people earning less than $75,000 a year) will take many years and is, believe it or not, small potatoes within our very wealthy nation’s federal budget, in the ballpark of $22 trillion. Compared to two perpetual wars and all the other ga-zillion-dollar misadventures in which our nation has engaged in recent decades under ‘fiscal conservative’ administrations—the real reason for turning modern Americans into grumpy gusses—the student loan reduction act isn’t going to break the bank.

By far the strangest change in America’s political right is the turn-around from anti-communist anti-Soviet to blind adulation of Mother Russia and its forever leader Vladimir Putin. At 70 he’s leader until 2036. Putin, the man without a face, KGB anti-American anti-Western spy, hasn’t changed since the fall of the Soviet Union and, we smugly thought back then, the collapse of communism. And because America’s conservative republicans sing the Russian leader’s praises, particularly citing his grand gestures toward Christianity, democrats are the ones holding up law and order and making known the line in the sand. Democrats, who used to be called communists, pinkos and reds back in the 20^th century, are the ones warning of Putin and pointing out how corrupt, even murderous, his government is. I never thought I’d live to hear an American president gush over a Soviet leader, but Donald Trump repeatedly kissed the emperor’s ring and went so far as to accuse the FBI and CIA on the world stage as completely wrong about Russia and Putin.

They, who in our country are represented by the color red, claim Putin to be Christian, and all is right with the world.

Have they even read the words of Christ in the Bible?

There is not one thing about Putin that is remotely Christ like.

Calling him Christian because he calls himself that is insulting to Christians everywhere.

The root of all evil

After the Soviet Union fell, business people in the new Russia wanted to emulate American and Western capitalism as quickly as possible. But in our nation’s beginnings, America was very strict Christian, intentionally so from the Pilgrims and the Puritans and all the other Christian groups who left Europe to start over in the New World—to practice their religion without persecution. Christians who are sincere in putting their faith first do not cheat in business dealings. They don’t shortchange customers, sell flimsy garments or unsafe products. Not intentionally. Christian businesspeople go out of their way to make things right because not only is it good for business but it’s the Christian thing to do.

Russian business people in the 1990s toured this country to study our practice in commerce. They could not believe sales clerks would count back change so that the customer would see he or she was getting exactly the correct amount, what was owed him or her. Sales staff were courteous, helpful, kind and friendly with no sinister air as most Soviets expected and experienced in their homeland during decades of communist rule.  Fair business dealings, ‘do right by the customers’ and ‘the customer is always right’ mantras were unheard of and not practiced in Soviet Russia. The people were screwed in every possible manner when it came to business. Their cars did not run. There were always bread lines and lines for essentials. People spent hours in lines and then when finally entering a store, shelves were empty. Their water was impure. Their air polluted. Their nuclear plant accident produced ghastly birth defects and deadly cancers for generations to come.

Americans used to try to figure out how the Soviet Union, our arch nemesis, was a nation that could put a man on the moon yet incapable of building a reliable washing machine. Something was missing. Ingenuity? Perhaps. But the Soviet goal was and remains to produce smoke and mirrors and put all their money into one major project like building a rocket that could blast the stratosphere and land on the moon.

We beat them to the punch in 1969. And we could mass produce automobiles and machines that catapulted American life into the envy of the world.

Now Russia is admired along with their life-time leader? By republicans?

What happened? How did our two political parties go full 180?

I’ve never forgotten what we were taught about communism during the Cold War at school and church:

Communists do not believe in God.

Communists believe the people exist only for the benefit of the state and not the state for the benefit of the people.

The ultimate goal of communism is world domination; everyone will be communist even if by force. Objectors will be killed.

Communism—a government system whereby everyone takes care of one another, food is plentiful, no one is homeless, social ills like addiction and criminals are handled with heavy hand, everyone from garbage collector to brain surgeon earns the same wage, and everyone thinks exactly the same way—was proven to be ineffective at least in the Soviet Union because humans are flawed, jealous, stingy and basically not all that altruistic.

Hmm. The central belief, for those of us who witnessed via TV news the spread of communism in eastern Europe, Latin America and Asia, is the forced disbelief in God and religion. Bibles and all religious books, statues, pictures, prayer beads, etc. were destroyed. I won’t mention how the Communist revolution dealt with Buddhists monks and nuns in order to wield the government’s power. Unspeakable. Unconscionable. Evil.

See, hear, think

In the former Soviet Union (and really in present-day Russia), the people had a saying that explained their basic survival: You see one thing, hear a second, and think a third.

Entire classes of school kids were punished by standing straight as a rod with eyes staring forward for hours on end.

This is communism as I understand it from listening to people who lived in that kind of regime. Citizens have no rights. People are arrested on trumped up charges and thrown in putrid jails to languish without a trial or legal representation. Prison is hard labor. The criminally insane are thrown into jails, too. People spy on each other to report wrongdoing to the government, hoping for a reward or bump up among the party (better housing, more money, better job). The rulers at the top are always fat and live a life of luxury. You can see why a brutally suppressed and brain-washed people would come to think cynically about any government, that none is better than the other even America. And what do Putin and his followers say about our country? They think we’re trash … because Americans are not a pure race. We’re mixed ethnicities and cultures. They think this is awful and has brought down every great society in history. Ah, this would explain the republicans’ newfound enlightenment about their old foes the Russians. See, our country is indeed wrestling with our formerly touted melting pot. Some people aren’t supposed to be thrown into our once savory stew of humanity.  

Putin’s communism in the middle of this century has a big problem: the internet. China simply censors it. But that’s not how satellites and invisible waves work. Everything’s out there one way or another. The Russians know how others live all over the world. After the fall of the Soviet Union, many Russians were grateful to return to churches and worship God without fear of the government surveying them and chiding them as emotionally weak and inferior. Somewhere along the line, Putin decided to confirm himself a Christian.

But let us not forget that Jesus did not call himself a Christian; people called his followers Christians because they emulated his manner. Christians constantly forgive. They strive against excessive living. They give freely to help their fellow man. They pray and stay in constant contact with the Lord. They are not known to be brutal. They do not practice cruelty though history does not reveal former self-proclaimed Christians as righteous souls and innocent. Christ taught live and let live, judge not, and love your neighbor like you love yourself.

The Christian life is not just an adjective people call themselves to get along with certain populations in the world. It is a way of life that others can see and can believe. It is love, kindness, affection, honesty, freedom, integrity, faith, humility, gratitude—none of these are Putin’s attributes and are hard to see in a lot of politicians. So, stop claiming to be Christian if you’re not. At least with communists, we knew what we were dealing with.