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Right. Let’s talk about Choices.

You might well ask, what kind of choices shall we discuss? Great question!

How about the choice between Good and Evil?

What? You don’t know if you actually believe in Good, with a capital “G”? Or in Evil with a capital “E”? Yeah, it is kind of an existential question, and could potentially involve religious beliefs or faith in something outside our own person. I understand that can be a mixed bag of intellect and emotion, and possibly a slippery slope to confusion.

How about this? Do you believe in the existence of decent people, trying to make a decent living, raising a family, and teaching their children how to get along with others and succeed in this world?

I do. I am one of those people.

How about criminals? Do you believe in criminals . . . those people who do not care about getting along with others, or working to make a living? Those people who steal instead of work. Those people who use violence to bully others rather than using discussion and compromise to mutually satisfactory resolutions.

Do you believe in them? Of course, you do. They are on the nightly news, every single day. They rob and steal, they lie and cheat, they betray and they use violence with hands and weapons to beat and kill other people.

Usually, they prey upon the decent people . . . those folks less-likely to be as violent, uncaring, and murderous as themselves. And, therefore, easier targets to overcome.

Now that we have established that there are Good people and Evil people, let’s begin our discussion about Choices.

The Choice we each face are faced by every person, every day, and usually multiple times a day. Shall we take action on what is Good? Or shall we choose to take action on what is Evil? Shall we support Good and not support Evil, or vice-versa?

Let me lay some groundwork here, which is going to be basically un-palatable. It will not taste good or smell good or feel good. But it is true.

Evil actively fights and participates to harm or destroy Good.

Example: Religious Zealots

Religious zealots, whether they be Christian or Islamic or Jewish or Druid, whatever they claim to be, it is the zealot who is dangerous to the rest of humanity.

The Christians tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of people in the name of God during the Witch Burnings and Inquisitions, with the blessings of the Pope and other religious leaders who desired only to cement their power and wealth. These terrible things went on for centuries.

The Moslems tortured and killed anyone they thought did not properly obey edicts from the Quran, and conducted jihad war against all infidels. These terrible things went on for many centuries. Some of them still do these things today.

Between them, the Christians and the Muslims fought multiple battles, wars, campaigns, and crusades over multiple centuries, and are responsible for the horrible deaths of millions. Perhaps over a billion.

Zealots like Jim Jones and similar others led their followers to terrible deaths based on their own religious beliefs.

And every single case, every single time, was an exercise of power by the leaders to retain what power they held and to gain more power. More control.

Another example: Psychopaths and Sociopaths (of which there are MANY more than most common folk believe).

This example includes the psychopaths and sociopaths who set up Ponzi-schemes or run cyber-ransomware to deceive and defraud the innocent of their life savings, or create and sell deadly drugs to children, or kidnap and traffic in human sex-slave rings . . . those psychopaths and sociopaths are ACTIVELY trying to destroy you and take all of your money and Earthly goods in the process. They want what you have, and they will do anything to take if from you by force, or by sweet lies, or by trickery.

They are ACTIVELY planning, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the many and terrible ways that they might take what you have for themselves.

What are you actively doing?

THEY consider you as their enemy. Their victim. Their prey. They are ACTIVELY hunting you.

The religious zealots take a few nuggets of verses from their “bible,” whatever its name, and use those nuggets, taken out of context, to support what they claim as the “WORD OF GOD.” Then they claim that the WORD OF GOD is SACRED and unchanging through the centuries and multiple translations from and to multiple languages, and to disbelieve is to commit terrible sin worthy of death.

It does not matter the name of the god they claim to pray to, or to support. No matter what the name, they all do the same things to justify their zealotry. Their EVIL against other humans. Their KILLING and TORTURES against other humans.

They are in an ACTIVE battle to either convert every single human to their way of belief and thus gain power, or to destroy those who won’t convert as “ultimate-sin infidels.”

Again, let me repeat, it does not matter what god they claim to worship. These zealots all act exactly the same way regardless of the name of their chosen god.

They say, “If you don’t believe the same way that I do, and if you do not acknowledge me as your leader, then you deserve to die and I will kill you.”

The cartels sell drugs and traffic in human sex-slaves to gain money and power. They DO NOT CARE about the sex-slaves, or the drug victims . . . except as a source of money and power. They ACTIVELY pursue these goals at YOUR EXPENSE.

Oh, yeah, I could go on and on and on for pages and pages. But you get the idea. I know you do.

Evil people, for evil reasons, are ACTIVELY plotting against and attacking Good people.

Here is where we get to the Choices part.

There is a saying, a true-ism, which states: “The only thing it takes for Evil men to win, is for Good men to do nothing.”

How are you standing up to those Evil men, the psychopaths and sociopaths, the religious zealots? How about the haters who foster evil toward others based on nothing but skin color? Or what church they attend? Or what country where they originated? Or what sexuality or pronoun they claim?

Evil, and evil people, are active, always working to perpetrate their evil on the good people.

Good people do not commonly arm themselves with deadly weapons, and gain training and practice in how to efficiently use those deadly weapons. No . . . they are more likely to believe in the goodness inherent in others, and look forward to associating with those other good people.

Evil people commonly arm themselves with deadly weapons. They train with them. They practice with them and become proficient with them. They take training in all manner of fighting arts such as martial arts, boxing, wrestling and such. They do this training deliberately with a mind to being able to overcome any Good person they set themselves against. They PLAN and PREPARE to overcome and destroy good people.

Do you actively PLAN and PREPARE in the ways necessary to protect yourself or your family against Evil, and evil people?

Some people actually think they do not have to choose, that they do not have to make a Choice. They think that they can simply “not choose.” They can turn their heads away when the news channel they watch shows evildoers at work. Mute the sound, or change the channel. Yeah. Out of sight, out of mind. That works.

Say or do nothing when your school district bans certain books which present ideas they regard as subversive, yet allow books with pornographic descriptions of alternative sexual orientations as being “supportive to LBGT-Q-XYZ-whatever.” (I am not trying to insult the LBGT-Q-XYZ-whatever people identifying within that designation. I am simply trying to encompass the evolving and ever-increasing changes within and to that designation.)

Say or do nothing when your state governor or state senators or congress-people pass laws with zero common sense, or promote bigotry in any sense, or get caught red-handed in crimes or outright lies.

Say or do nothing while your federal congress and senate practice partisan politics and internal-party warfare while the government faces fiscal shutdown.

Say or do nothing when obvious criminals gain and hold public office and refuse to step down or resign even when confronted with their crimes.

Say or do nothing, and EVIL WINS.

Yes, unfortunately, you must make a choice.

Either choose to fight Evil ACTIVELY, or Evil wins. As the song says, “even if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

Either you choose to ACTIVELY support Good and fight against Evil, or you passively choose to let Evil win.

You walk along a dike, holding back a tide of water which could destroy your city if the dike fails. As you walk, you notice a leak, and a small jet of water spraying from the dike. You now have to make a choice. Since you noticed the leak, you are forced to participate in a choice process.

You can choose to stick your finger in that hole and stop the leak, or to immediately take steps to notify the proper personnel about that leak and ensure they take action to stop it up.

ANYTHING less than that, and you are making a choice to allow that leak to perpetrate whatever damage or wreckage it will most certainly do. Turn your head and walk on, pretending you didn’t see it. You still made a choice.

That leak, like Evil, is ACTIVE. The water pressure behind the leak is ACTIVE, just like Evil.

It’s binary. On or Off. Yes or No. It’s not a transistor with a third position, or a quantum particle with a superposition. It is A, or it is B. There is no neutral. There is no Switzerland.

What do you choose?

I am afraid.

The federal government of the United States is broken. It is seemingly broken beyond repair.

The citizenship of the United States is fragmented into special interest groups who all demand their voices and their agendas be heard and taken seriously. They demand to be respected by all the other groups even while they act in incredibly divisive manners.

The government has been caught red-handed manipulating the messages which our primary health groups, like the CDC and WHO, are providing to warn citizens of the dangers of pandemic illnesses like various strains of flu which can kill.

It seems that everything we face, as citizens of the United States, has devolved to me-politics.

The January 6th riot where citizens charged into the White House and caused so much damage, and attempted to locate specific government individuals with the intentions of acts of violence against them, is a definitive sign of the dire straits in which we exist.

Donald Trump, purported billionaire and former president of our country, is under several major state and federal indictments for alleged crimes against the people of the United States. Yet he is still running for another term as president while crying out that the indictments are nothing more than “witch hunts” and denies any criminal actions. Recently, a judge stated publicly that Trump, and his sons, are clearly guilty of defrauding the American public and business partners concerning the valuations of his holdings. He is on recorded audio talking about possessing classified secret government documents, yet at the same time continues to deny having any knowledge of or culpability in the numerous secret documents found at his privately-owned residence in Florida.

And still, he continues to run for the highest public office in the land, and continues to gain voter and financial support.

Joe Biden currently holds office as president, despite the public knowledge that his entire political career has been followed by scandal after scandal. His son, Hunter, despite publicly-known drug addiction problems, managed to gain a position on the governing board of a giant power company in Europe, which he held for years. Now, he is back in the U.S., and facing criminal charges for owning a handgun in violation of law based on his publicly-known drug addiction.

Hillary Clinton was shown, clearly, to have a privately-owned computer and server in her private residence containing federal government email software and many, many secrecy-controlled emails contained on that computer and server. She was implicated in numerous scandals and potentially law-violating activities, yet each of those were quashed, somehow, and made to magically disappear. And somehow, the media never, kind of, got around to digging deeply enough into any of those scandals to expose the truth.

This list could go on, and on, and on, ad nauseum. To include a law-maker who was exposed as a rampant liar who based his entire campaign on deliberately-manufactured and outright lies to the American public. Despite being exposed clearly as a liar and a fraud, this lawmaker refuses to step down and continues to hold the position. Why do his peers allow this? Do they not realize that inaction on their part paints them with the same brush of malfeasance?

Do they not wish to point fingers and take action to force this evil-doer to face punishment just in case someone might discern their own criminal acts and wish them to face justice, too?

And what about this criminal liar’s constituents . . . the ones who voted him into that position? Are they doing anything to force this fraud to step down?

It seems as though these Senators and Congress-people have taken to the idea that they are our leaders . . . that they lead us.

The problem with this is that the concept of them leading us is completely backwards of how the Constitution was intended to be applied.

They should be serving us.

We should be leading them.

Our lawmakers are supposed to be representing us to the federal government. They are supposed to poll their constituents to find out what we want, and how we react to any given issue, so that they can then represent that attitude to the federal government.

How is it possible that the American citizenry has become so jaded, so lazy, that we allow these jerks to act this way, and then continue to remain in office and to be re-elected in future terms? Did we all swallow the lie that they are our leaders?

Now, we face yet another government shutdown as funding cycles draw to a fiscal close. The military folks will not get paid. Hundreds of thousands of government employees will not get paid. Vital services will shut down.

Yet, the lawmakers will continue to get paid. So, why should they care about the rest of us? Why should they care about federal services, and the extensive ripple effect this shutdown will have on our economy?

See, they voted themselves all kinds of protections and immunities, our lawmakers did. They don’t have to obey the same laws the rest of us do. Because they are special. They are the law-makers.

When national health-care laws went info effect several years ago, it became public knowledge that the lawmakers soon discovered that the way the health-care law was written required them, the lawmakers, to obey the same exact health-care laws as the general public was required.

“Well! This will not do,” they exclaimed. It took the law-makers less than two weeks to formulate themselves an immunity to the new health-care laws, agree to that immunity with a vote, and pass that immunity into law. Less than two weeks!

Yet they have months and months to deal with financing legislation and budgetary concerns but seem completely unable to overcome partisan warfare. Even within their own parties! Unless, it appears, that whatever the issue is will directly benefit them as individuals. At that point, they act with an alacrity which is astounding, and breath-taking.

Why is it that, for the last several decades, our choices of candidates in the elections have been so abysmal? We are no longer choosing the best candidate, except in the loosest interpretation of the phrase.

We are being forced to vote for the least-objectionable. The least-despicable. The least-terrible. And participation in voting is necessary, lest the special-interest groups get their candidate elected. We know the candidates, the politicians, are lying to us. We know they have no intentions of carrying through with their promises, and even if they did the entrenched old boy network would crush them and carry on with whatever their own agenda might be.

People, that is how Hitler came to power! He presented himself as the least objectionable candidate, and made campaign promises he never intended to keep. He said out loud what the people appeared to want to hear, never caring about the content or meaning of the words. He knew that all he had to do was get elected, and then he could begin subverting all of the laws and strictures from within.

Sound like anyone campaigning in America today?

All that type of “leader” needs to do in order to begin subverting the laws of the nation is to gather unto himself a cadre of psychopaths and sociopaths who have no limits or conscience to control their viciousness and brutality, then place those people into positions of authority where they can exercise their psychotic plans and desires. Those people will then do, literally, anything to keep their beloved leader in power so that they can continue to perpetrate their slavering lusts on society. They will tell and spread and support any lie, or perform any act or deed regardless of criminality because they know they will get away with whatever they do so long as they support their beloved leader.

Have not our own law-makers over the last several decades shown us clearly, by their actions, that they expect no consequences for whatever they might do? Imagine that. What if there were no consequences for you? What might you do . . . if you knew that you would almost certainly get away with it?

Hilary Clinton faced ZERO consequences for her deliberate crimes nor for her outrageously poor acts as Secretary of State. Biden, neither of them, have yet been forced to face actual punitive consequences for any of their foibles and scandals. Trump, at least so far, has not been forced to face any actual consequences of his actions and words.

To my knowledge and memory, the only well-known politician who had to face any consequences was Richard Nixon. He was essentially forced into resigning his office in the face of public pressure. Yet, he did not go to jail for his criminal acts. He paid no fines for his criminal acts . . . and in fact made millions of dollars directly from his time in office. He gained book deals and speaking fees, and much more. Yeah, he was exposed as a criminal, a liar, and a potty-mouth, but in the end his only punishment was public ridicule and having to resign.

What about all these other assholes who have been shown to be criminals, evil-doers, by media coverage, public statements from themselves, and even admissions of guilt? Have any of them had to do anything but step down from their public office in the worst of cases? Have any of them been convicted of crimes, been forced to spend significant time incarcerated, or been forced to pay substantial fines to return some of the money they stole back to the people they stole it from?

HEY! All you sheep out there! When are you going to grow a spine and begin taking actions against this horrendous over-throwing of YOUR Constitution? We used to be a country with pride, rather than a massive group of bickering biddies, with each demanding all the others show them some respect.

We have far more important issues to deal with than what fricking pronoun to use. And, please remember, the first word the acronym “PC” represents is “political.” Do YOU want to stand for perfect political correctness while your country burns to the ground?

Take a stand. Call a liar a liar, and then find a way to show them the door. Demand of your lawmakers that they represent your wishes. If they don’t, take them to task, get them ousted, show them the door.

You are paying their salary with your tax money! Why the hell should they be telling you what to believe and do as if they were your leader? Are you really that lazy?

Do you understand the concept that YOU are PAYING THEM to have them think that, because you elected them, they HAVE THE RIGHT to LEAD YOU? Essentially, that means that . . . YOUR RIGHTS . . . begin and end . . . with whatever they believe.

Now, that is a scary fucking thought. My rights begin and end with whatever the elected lawmakers determine based on whatever they believe.

It should be EASY for them to take a poll on any issue via the Internet to discover what we, their constituents, want them to do to represent our desires. Websites can be created in a matter of hours. Encryption and controls can ensure a fair reporting using unique voter identities.

Straw polls can be conducted. Phone polls. Call-in campaigns. There are many ideas of ways to get our wishes known to our representatives. We can turn this around, and have them represent us instead of them trying to lead us.

It takes action on your part. Read! Educate yourselves on the candidates. Educate yourselves on the issues. Take action by voting. Show up at rallies. Show up at protests. Take action.

Or . . . let them win.

I am afraid.

Well! It has been some time since my last posting to the blog, aside from the publication note for my Fantasy trilogy.

Apologies . . .

To catch up, I, like everyone else, have been dealing with the Covid19 pandemic and all the resultant changes to our society. Some have been good. Most have been not so good. Not so good would include the degrading of our national economy, the strong international tensions worldwide, and the enormous amount of distrust growing in the American people.

Groups of people are being even more separated and enclosed within their beliefs than ever, by a very noticeable margin. Each group has its own needs and desires, its own goals and agendas, and too often the people of the group are fighting so hard to maintain and proselytize those needs, goals, and agendas, that they become inured to the needs of any other group. What I am seeing is group isolationism and separatism. This produces not only anxiety, but then aggressions.

I try very hard, very hard indeed, to try to remain apolitical. I do not claim any political group affiliation because they all disgust me with their partisan fighting with other groups. Yeah, I know . . . I am going to take a LOT of heavy-duty disagreement for some of the things I write here.

But, then, anyone who says anything or takes any kind of stance publicly these days immediately becomes the target of dissenters and trolls who wish to tear apart that person’s position and statements. Sometimes, it is not honest dialog or disagreement, but rather the simple act of tearing down someone else for the only benefit of an anger release by tearing them down.

This is my point. There is so much angst and anxiety, distrust and fear, out there in the populace of America, that it is easy to get lost in the resultant mud-slinging. The Internet is filled with haters and trolls who only wish to tear apart others for no other reason than the venting of their own angst and fear. Political parties and their affiliates are doing exactly the same thing . . . isolationism, separatism, lashing out at anything which does not directly support them, and using the American people as their cannon-fodder.

I have spent three years or more, counting the time from the beginning of the pandemic, watching the U. S. government deliberately obfuscate and outright lie about the pandemic and its horrible effects. We all have witnessed the distancing between party lines, and the vehemence of each party arguing against the “other guys”, who are presented as complete morons and liars and criminals. Really? Do our government representatives actually think the common person in this country is so stupid as to believe whatever they say?

My position is that our government is irretrievably broken. Congressmen and Senators blatantly break state and federal laws, and EXPECT to get away with it. They resist prosecuting each other because they do not want to set a precedent in case they get caught at something and might face prosecution themselves. They bend laws to the breaking point, they willingly try to find ways to violate our Constitution and get away with it.

There are no good choices for voting for a representative at any level, any more. There are only what seems to be bad choices, and worse choices . . . or possibly equally poor choices. How can we, as a people, possibly trust our government when we are faced with voting for the “least offensive or less objectionable” choice.

And . . . worst of all . . . we, the people, let them get away with it. I am not pointing fingers here, because I am among the worst of the lot when it comes to letting them get away with it. I try to not vote because my choices are “bad” or “worse”. Or choosing someone of whom I know nothing at all.

I do not do nearly enough research about the prospective candidates. I do not make statements in public where someone might argue with me or take slight and want to escalate to a fistfight or pull a gun and start shooting. I don’t want conflict with my neighbors so I either don’t discuss politics or religion with them, or I make generalized statements which are meant to defuse rather then confront.

I am a horrible person when it comes to this political stuff. I whine about how broken and terrible it is, but I am doing almost nothing to make it better. I just wave my hands in disgust at the news on television, and then try to stay in my own house and backyard as much as humanly possible.

It is a good thing our forefathers, guys like Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and all those others, were not afraid of controversy. They may have been afraid, but they forged ahead anyway. Jefferson pointblank talked about the blood of patriots and tyrants being spilled, and how revolution is necessary in the political world as much as violent storms are necessary in the physical world. Despite whatever fear or misgivings they may have felt, they stood up. They ACTED.

Jefferson also addressed the question of who you are, or what you stand for, or how to figure that out if you are really not sure. Many young people are not sure of who they really are, or for what things or ideas they wish to stand. I was like that most of my life. With so many ideas coming at me from so many different and “trusted” sources, which idea was right? Which source could truly be trusted? Especially when so many of the ideas and sources disagreed with each other. How can you figure that out?

Jefferson said, and I paraphrase, if you want to know who you are, don’t just sit around questioning this and thinking about it. Instead, stand up, move, and TAKE ACTION. How you make your decisions, and what actions you take will definitely define you. And if you don’t like the definition, you don’t like what you see . . . turn and take a new direction, take a new action. Repeat, until you like what you see, and respect what you are.

It is exceedingly rare to get it right the first time, so don’t despair. Just keep trying until if feels right. Oh . . . and don’t let anyone else tell you if you are right or if you are wrong. Decide that for yourself based on your choices and actions.

I am taking action just by writing this essay in a space where anyone can read it. And they can respond if they like. Tell me I am right, or tell me I am wrong . . . but give solid reasons for why you think the way you do. Don’t just do a drive-by and call me names before disappearing behind the anonymity of the Internet. That is not fair to either me or you.

I am going to keep trying, too. To find other ways and means to let people around me know where I stand, and why. Maybe I will succeed. Maybe I won’t. But I do promise to try.

Will you try, also?

More good news! As of May 31st, 2023, my fantasy trilogy titled FOUNDATIONS OF BRISTON was published to Amazon. Detailed information of these novels is included on this website in the Novels section in the Fantasy grouping. Descriptions of the series and of each individual novel are there.

Here are the names of each novel and the hyperlink to its page on Amazon:

BRANDYWINE: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C6VNM3CG/

CHOICES: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C6V8HJKT/

CONSEQUENCES: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C6VQDH4M

As of late July, 2021, the second book of the science fiction duo introducing the universe and base set of characters is finished, finalized, and now published.

The first book, titled COMMANDER: Into the Future, Book 1, was published in 2019. Now, it it joined by the second book which finishes the base story. The second book is titled GENERAL: Into the Future, Book 2.

Both are available on Amazon Kindle as eBook and Paperback, and available on Google Books as eBook.

Published on Amazon:

COMMANDER https://www.amazon.com/dp/1074015886

GENERAL https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099SDLB66

Publish date 9/15/2019

eBook ASIN: B07XM916C5

paperback ASIN: 1074015886

paperback ISBN: 9781074015886

GENERAL

Publish date 7/19/2021

eBook ASIN: B099SDLB66

paperback ASIN: 8537505624

paperback ISBN: 979-8537505624

Published on Google

COMMANDER GGKEY:CU9LCZ3LZ52

https://www.google.com/books/edition/COMMANDER/WOCvDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

GENERAL: GGKEY:ZHC06GGDAL8

https://books.google.com/books?id=HFE5EAAAQBAJ

I will provide announcements of each of the other novels as they are published.

Thanks! And enjoy the stories!

As a final note, it would be helpful to me and to any other sci-fi fans searching for books to read, if any of you who do read my books would take a couple of minutes to write a review of what you read. I always appreciate honest feedback.

Well . . . it has been awhile since my last posting. A lot has happened. That is worth repeating. A LOT has happened!

There have been many mass shootings in the United States. What are people thinking? Where does all this rage come from?

One extremely controversial president has gone after two separate attempts to have him impeached were enacted and failed.

Another extremely controversial president has taken office amidst unceasing accusations from the former concerning claimed election voting fraud. This new president brings with him a national first as a female of color named as his vice-president, not to mention a history in the senate involving scandals of claimed sexual abuse and international political intrigue involving his son, who was a board member for an energy company in the Soviet bloc.

Then, we also faced the corona-virus which appears to have began in China in a hotly contested location where viral research has been conducted and amidst what appears to be an attempted cover-up by the Chinese government concerning the source and the potency of the virus. In the year since being declared a world-wide pandemic, populations of countries have been ordered by their governments to remain at home, businesses have shut down, national economies have been left in tatters, and people have found themselves not only isolated from friends and family but also isolated by the politics of special-interest groups.

Some groups claim “the numbers” of infections, of hospitalizations, of deaths, of victims of the pandemic are basically no worse than any former pandemic such as the “bird flu” or the “swine flu”, etc. Yet, with Covid-19 all national governments and especially the media have apparently gone completely bonkers by over-reacting to an insane and illegal degree. Other groups claim that this perception is deliberately short-sighted and that not nearly enough was done, not nearly enough stringent measures to stop the spread and effect of the virus was done.

Who is right? When anyone with a blog or message board membership can misquote numbers or spread fake news or half-truths, or knowingly spread lies for whatever reasons they may have, who can possibly know or claim to know the truth?

Can we trust the government sources to tell us the truth? Or, are they telling us what they wish us to hear and know, and therefore are attempting to tailor our reactions to their benefit? Can we trust the scientists and doctors and claimed benign and beneficial institutions like the CDC to tell us the truth? Or will what they say be reported incorrectly, and statements taken out of context by the media? Or potentially be influenced by threats against their financing or leadership by others who control such things?

Heroes are made to appear as devils, and devils as heroes. Who can possibly know the truth? Certainly not me. I am as confused by all of these things as anyone and probably more so than most. So, I am not going to tell you what is right, or what is wrong. I am not going to add to the daily vomitus of facts and figures and mind-twisting delusions.

I am just sad to see such things occurring.

What I WILL do, is reach out to my neighbor. I will ask them how they are and I will think about them and what they might need to make their lives just a little better. Then I will do my best to fulfill any need they might have. I will smile at them. I will be pleasant to them. I will do my best to listen to them and to actually hear what they say so I will know how to best help them through these times.

Think of it like the March of Dimes campaigns began so many years ago. If everyone will give just a little . . . a bit of the best of themselves to their neighbor, then how can this not be a good thing? If everyone will just smile at their neighbor, a tsunami of smiles will wash across this nation and the planet. How could that not be a good thing?

I was listening to a different radio station than I normally do a few days ago, due to large-area rain storms which was creating havoc for the station to which I normally listen. I heard a song which I had never heard before. Maybe it was a recently-released song, or maybe it was several years old. I don’t know. I do not know the name of the song, or the artist(s) who performed it.

Regardless, what struck at me was the lyrics, the words of the song. Essentially, the song set out a situation where a man is speaking figuratively to his ex-lover. Apparently, the ex-lover left/rejected the man sometime previously. The man has now gone out and located another lover and is speaking to his former lover from the perspective of being with the new lover.

The man says (essentially, and not a direct quote) “Look what you have made me do.”

Obviously, the man is still very emotionally invested in the previous lover, and is saying, “I still love you, but you left me and now look what I have to do because of you.” In essence, the man is blaming the former lover for the man’s action of going out and finding, then taking, another lover with whom the man is not emotionally invested. It may be just a one-night stand, or possibly a short-term relationship built on nothing but sex and mutual need/desire. It may be the beginning of a true and deep relationship. Who can know at this stage?

My point is this; the man is blaming the ex-lover for the man’s action of taking a new lover with whom the man is not “in love.”

Maybe is it just my age. Maybe it is just my experience and/or cynicism levels. But I am struck by the horrible and inaccurate scenario painted by the lyrics! In essence, this song is teaching others who listen to it that it is okay and perfectly reasonable to blame others for your own actions. Hell, maybe it is true. We see it happen all the time in the news as crimes of passion are played out and the perpetrators almost universally say, “Look what (they-the victims) made me do!”

A good, politically acceptable turn of phrase here would be “Rubbish!” What I say is “Bullshit!”

It is time for people, all people, from the lowest social standing to the highest, to take responsibility for their own thoughts and actions. Every human is responsible for his or her own thoughts, and what they actually do about those thoughts. We each are responsible for the decisions we make and the actions we carry out each day. No one “makes” us feel in any specific way, or “makes” us do specific actions as adults. We choose.

One of the primary contributors to this,”they made me do this” mentality, where blaming others for our own actions is somehow an acceptable excuse, is the way that our political leadership have glommed onto this attitude and use it constantly in the media. In all actuality, this attitude comes from bullying! It is used by terrorists and torturers. The corollary is, “If you just stop what you are doing and do what I need/want, I won’t have to do (this).”

If you give me your lunch money now, I won’t have to beat you up any more. If you tell me the secret plans now I won’t have to tear out any more fingernails. If you will only vote to support my plan, my bill, I won’t have to extort you by shutting down programs you endorse. It is YOUR FAULT that I have to (beat you up, torture you, extort you by harming others you feel responsible for). YOU can make it stop by simply giving me what I want.

Bullshit! Take some self-pride, man. If you are a bully, then be proud of being a bully, and say to your victim, “I am still going to beat you up even if you give me your lunch money, just because I like to beat on you. But, I may beat you a little less if you give it up now. Either way, I don’t care, and either way you get hurt as much as I want to hurt you, just because I can.”

If you’re a criminal, then be proud and say to the world, “I blew up that church because I wanted to! It made me feel better about myself. I don’t care about hurting innocent people at all because my pain is so great I cannot feel anything but my own pain.”

If you’re a criminal politician, be proud of it! Own it, man! Say to the media, “I committed to that campaign promise! I committed to it so deeply that I do not care if it is a stupid thing based on emotional manipulation. I committed to it and I am so stupid that I am going to follow it through regardless of the consequences. I will not listen to anyone who tells me I am wrong, and I will fire or publicly denigrate anyone who disagrees with me. I will impose sanctions to get my way even at the expense of the American taxpayer, simply because my ego is so huge and so fragile that I dare not expose it to the truth lest it implode.”

Anyone who says, “Look what you/they made me do,” is first, a liar; second, a possible or potential criminal; and third, so self-delusional as to be a danger to those around them.

I don’t care what prevailing, generational attitudes might be. This issue speaks to the core of individual humanity within each of us. Either we take responsibility for our selves and our own choices, decisions and actions, or, we choose to blame someone else for those things and to lie back and luxuriate in our delusion of “it’s not my fault.”

I am not trying to place any blame on those artists or publishers or radio stations involved with the song lyrics, though, and I want to make that clear. Hell, for all I know they wrote and performed the song as a satirical shout-out against that very attitude.

The trouble with doing something like that, whether it be song lyrics or plays or movies which delineate social inequity or wrong, most people who view/hear that stuff only view/hear that stuff. They do not necessarily hear the writers or the artists in a news interview explaining “why” they produced that stuff.

The public rarely understands satire, as it must be explained to them by someone else. The public only hears/sees what it wants to hear and see. The public is not a socially responsible animal who thinks about what it ingests and how it reacts. I mean, even in Shakespeare’s day, do you really think a miner or a chimney-sweep with a less than stellar education really gave two figs about the satire of W. Shakespeare? No. If they could afford to, they went to the plays to get a short respite of entertainment from their otherwise dreary lives. Nothing more.

The public generally acts like a mob, taking in only what is relevant to each member of the mob and then reacting to it. If the mob seems to surge in the direction of angry response to something, then the bulk of the mob members will follow and support that surge of response regardless of how they might individually feel.

I think it is socially irresponsible to put such garbage out there for public consumption. If it was satire, the artist might point at me and say, “You’re wrong, dude! Look at how you reacted! You reacted positively and actually said something publicly to help eradicate this erroneous and egregious attitude!”

Yeah, well, for every one like me out there, the public has a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, who will hear those lyrics and say to themselves, “Yeah! Fuckin’ A! Look what those bastards MADE ME do!” Who knows whether their next thoughts will have them reaching for a sandwich or some kind of weapon?

Wow! So many lessons here. Let’s break it down.

Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. Few people even want to admit their own mistakes, much less examine them to discover things about themselves and learn lessons from the experience. To learn from a mistake means I must accept the mistake as a mistake, as a failure of some kind. Then, I must avoid the trap of thinking of myself as a ‘failure’. I am not a failure, but what I did was a failure.

Philosophers throughout the ages have been saying the same thing, that we only learn from our failures, our mistakes. They also say that all of life is learning, and that when you stop learning, you begin dying. I think that is at least half true. You see, learning is one thing. Changing is another. Change is hard. It is even harder than admitting mistakes and learning from them. Learning and changing are two very different things, yet we have somehow arrived at a place where we think that learning inherently means changing for the better. Semantics at work. If we learn something but do not change our lives, did we really learn?

I learn things every day. But, do I embrace what I learn to the point that I let it change me, change my life?

The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity.  I readily admit I am not able to learn this lesson from Faulkner. First, what is a “good artist”? Am I a good artist? Frankly, I don’t consider myself an artist at all. I am not a wordsmith whose prose flows like poetry. I suppose I consider myself a storyteller rather than an artist.

Do I have supreme vanity, such that no one else is good enough to give me advice? Not hardly. In fact, this statement seems completely at odds with the idea that, as a good artist with supreme vanity, that I could even make mistakes. So, what would I have to learn? Dichotomy.

I prefer to believe here that Faulkner is trying to reference the great difficulty of having enough belief in myself that I am willing to place my written thoughts out there in public view for scrutiny and judgment by anyone. That, my friends, takes guts. It takes unassailable courage and the willingness to suffer. If you cannot suffer the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” then you do not wan to enter this particular race.

No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him. That, right there, is why I started writing stories. Truth is, it is in my blood. My grandfather wrote stories from his life as a pioneer in the young Pacific Northwest. My father wrote stories, too. Some were true tales of their lives. Some were fiction made up based on incidents in their lives, or others pure fiction based on imagination. I didn’t know this until very late in life when both my grandfather and father had died and I inherited some of their things. No one else in my family wanted the old boxes filled with hand-written papers. When I opened them, I discovered a treasure trove of stories.

I always did love to read, though, and read prolifically from many genres. Some were good stories, well told. Some were good stories told poorly. Some were downright awful stories told terribly. One day, after finishing a poor story told poorly, I thought to myself, “Jeez Louise, I could tell a better story than that!”

My next thought was “Really? Did I really just think that?”

The truth is, it just pissed me off that some hack managed to get some dumbass agent to publish such a piece of excrement. I was angry about that, and it was my anger that motivated me to even consider the notion that I might write something myself.

Now, my grandfather, and my father, having no education beyond high school, both wrote exactly as they would speak the story. They just told the story, with no “pretty” words of description or deep-diving motivations. They wrote in oral tradition.

So, I dusted off one of my father’s stories, a western, and began to imagine how I could honor him by turning his story into a novel. Please understand, as an oral story, it was quite good. But as a written story, it was not so good. I sat in front of my computer and opened a word processing file and began. Several months later, I finished my first draft.

It was fun. It was terribly difficult. It was anguishing and exulting at the same time. No one had ever told me it would also be addictive. I cannot stop.

I once told the story of how I began writing to some fellow novice writers in an online group, of how anger was my beginning motivation. Hoo-wee! You would have thought I threatened to bomb somebody! They were outraged that I would even admit that “anger”, that horrible and negative reactive emotion, could possibly be motivation for something as pure and enlightened as “writing”.  How ignoble of me. Yes, one of them literally used that phrase.

I ignored them and kept writing. You see, it doesn’t matter where we get the original motivation to begin. What matters is that we begin. And we keep with it. For me, it was like Faulkner’s phrase in that I thought I could do it better than “the other writer”.

Well, I guess that is enough risky thought-writing for one day. Party on, dudes!

Earnest Hemmingway said this, and was quoted. Not that anyone was, or should be, surprised by it as Hemmingway was notorious for his drinking.

So, why do you suppose he actually said it as if he meant it, when he knew it could be quoted? Did he actually mean it? Was he really advocating writers should drink themselves into inebriation before they begin writing? If so, why?

I think the obvious answer is because inebriation causes the lowering of our mental and emotional protection measures. It loosens our inhibitions and releases more of the actual truth about what we really think and feel about nearly any given subject.

Unfortunately, it also perches us precariously on the precipice of drunken mood swings to allow our uncontrolled motor-mouth to rush off into unintended and definitely ill-advised rants. On the plus side, Hemmingway does also advocate editing when sober. This would allow us to remove or revise those unfortunate rants.

The point here, I think, is to dig down, below the surface thoughts and observations we have. The truth about how we feel is there, but often disguised under flooring of all the “PC” niceties society tells us we must have in order to get along, and to avoid offending others.

Let’s face it. In today’s world there are so many self-interest groups, so many points of view spread so liberally throughout electronic media and instant, world-wide communications, that whatever you might say or write is going to offend someone. Offending others is unavoidable. It is going to happen, and with regularity.

What Hemmingway is telling us is to dig down to the truth about how you feel about the subject at hand. This is your personal truth, and you need to know it, to acknowledge it, if you are going to know who you are and what you stand for. And if you want to share how you feel with others through your writing, accept that you are going to offend someone.

There is no need to be cruel or vulgar in offending others. Those things are choices. Being “politically correct” does not necessarily mean you have to omit or lie about how you feel and what you think.   It just means you should try to be nice about it. If you can’t be nice, then be truthful without apology and without intentionally being mean.

In a nutshell, I interpret “write drunk” to mean digging down to the truth of my personal thoughts and feelings.   I interpret “edit sober” to mean attempting to remove any deliberate cruelty or meanness and focusing on the truth in as socially-acceptable manner as possible without being dishonest.

Jonathan Franzen: It’s doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

What the hell is this supposed to mean?   No, really.   Think about it for a moment.   This quote could be taken any of a hundred thousand ways.   Or, perhaps as many ways as the number of readers who ponder it.

It is an incredibly controversial statement, sure to engender disparate thoughts and much debate.   This debate could take the form of anything from friendly discussion over coffee or adult beverages in any kind of setting from a living room or den to a beach or coffee shop.   It could also be in the form of heated debates, or real teeth-gnashing arguments.

It’s very nature brings conflict and discontent – controversy.   And, isn’t that what good writers are intended to explore?   No matter what aspect you agree with, which side you choose, which plane of perspective you align with, there is deep controversy lurking in the shadows with decidedly anticipatory grins of visceral delight.

Gear up, writers!   Don your battle-rattle and check your mags.

As writers, conflict is something we NEED.   It is the engine which drives our stories and our passions forward.   Without controversy, we are becalmed in an ocean of words in which each one is just like the other, dead and meaningless with no movement.

As mere humans, much less writers, we need conflict in our lives.   We require it.   It there is no source of external conflict, human beings will, without fail, create conflict from within our own imaginations.   We must have something to overcome or life has no meaning.

So, where does the Internet fit into this mess?

Well, it is full of all manner of information.   This information can be correct and accurate, or, it can be false and misleading.   It can be a wellspring of ideas, a deep and broad pool of research material, or it can be a compelling distraction to what might be a single, poignant train of thought.

You can shop on the Internet, or be entertained eternally with videos on any subject of your choosing, or distracted by innumerable blogs filled with every idea imaginable and more recipes than you could ever cook.

Personally, I disagree with the quote even though I recognize the potential of truth within.   The Internet can be a huge, massive, all-consuming distraction to the serious business of writing.   It boils down, I think, to a question of self-discipline and passion.   One must develop the self-discipline to avoid the distractions offered, and focus on the project at hand.   If a writer has passion for the project, then the passion and self-discipline will compel them to focus on the project rather than falling down the rabbit-hole.

On the other hand, I devoutly appreciate both the quote and the warning it contains.   The Internet should be a tool, nothing more.   And any tool is only as good as the person using it.