Change comes slowly, sometimes takes a couple of generations for a society to let go of an old and obsolete tradition. It takes time to get it that what was once a solution has become a problem. The stream of time flows placidly because we like it that way, undisturbed and undisturbing. But sometimes a …
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The Third Wish
I woke this morning from a dream in which I had been granted three wishes. The first was not too hard to come up with: perfect health! No more neuropathy, no more gout, no more weird-sightedness, no more diabetes! A body full of wellness, all the energy to go and do and dance! And perfectly-balanced …
It has never been about “race.”
It doesn’t take a degree in anthropology–which I have–nor a lifelong love of words and the precision of words, which I also have–to make the case that we are all ONE RACE, that there are not multiple races of mankind. The word is used because it has always been used, but it has always been …
CALIFORNIA SUMMER
I lived three summers, age3 to nearly 6, in northern California. This is how I remember it. Summer heat–sweet reliefin darkened hallbeneath the fan,the rumbling wind,the stormthat blew the coolall through the house…I’d catch a chill and die,they claimed.Disbelieving,driven out to play,I’d waitanother chance… Summer feet–freed from socks and kedsnot alwayssufficiently awareof bees among the …
LONG ISLAND SUMMERS
When I was nearly 6, I was sent across the country to live on the outskirts of New York City. That was where I lived the next 12 summers, in Glen Cove, Long Island and then in northeastern New Jersey. I’d go backfor just a moment,perhaps as longas one day and a night,enough, I think,to …
Remembering the 60s
I was beginning to pay attention to the world outside my own life in the 60s, a time of gentle sprouting flowers inviting peace and simple happiness, even as Vietnam body-counts traumatized the country daily. There was the enthusiasm for new freedoms and the abuses of those freedoms; the flowers were tainted with drugs, and …
Familiarity Breeds Compassion
The basic problem with passive racism is that we who live in the gated zone of white privilege simply don’t know enough about black lives, black families, black cultures. We, like most descendents of colonial conquerors, never inherited the genes for sincere curiosity nor for respect for The Other. We accepted so many core beliefs …
Line of Succession
Every one of us alive today is the front end of a line of survival and evolution that began with the first life on the planet. Every one of us represents all our ancestors, all the way back to the beginning. We stand on their shoulders, increasing knowledge and understanding; we limit ourselves by clinging …
How Did We Get Here?
In those days just after WWII, the young adults had come out of war, and their parents, the Great Depression. People remembered how it was to lack and to need and to wait. Kids of the 50s, we had Viet Nam and national division and deep suspicion of our government. But we had licence like …
HERETICS: In the beginning…
This project began several years ago, as the bio section of a character development sheet for a Live Action Role Play game adapted from the Masquerade. The game as designed featured mainly vampires of various character-defining clans, but other supernaturals crept in, the longer we played. The first thing I had to do, once I …
LOOSELY SPEAKING... 