Don't get me started ...

It never seems to stop. Some days just make me sad. Rainy days make me think of sitting on a bunker with an M-16 on my lap, staring at the jungle during a steady downpour that has gone on for more than a week.

They make me think of the young Navy Corpsmen in a wrinkled, soiled uniform, but with a chest full of ribbons, sitting alone on a bench at the Da Nang airbase, waiting to go home but staring into space with vacant eyes, unable to talk, and I remember wondering how long it might be before the demons left him

They make me think of how we, I and the guys on the plane with me, thought we had survived it all when we first saw nothing but the South China Sea below us. How we did clap and cheer.

They make me think of maybe a fourth of my comrades on that plane who would be denied, because of the color of their skin, the basic dignities of life when they disembarked onto American soil, and how not a few of my brothers and sisters would be hated and harmed, even until today, because of the body nature provided them.

They make me think of the woman in the San Bernardino airport who shielded her young child from me when she saw the service ribbons on my uniform.

They make me think of the personnel manager at the telephone company office in my home town, where I had filled out an employment application just to pass the time, telling me that the telephone company didn’t need veterans. It needed smart young grads.

They make me think of the “liberal” woman at a party years later who, when a friend told her that I was Vietnam Veteran, looked me over and said, “You don’t seem crazy like the rest of them.”

They make me think of how many movies, even still, include the ubiquitous character of a dope-fiend sociopath stalking the innocent because of his military service in that long-ago war.

They make me think of how those of us who thought we had survived, now a half-century later, awake each morning knowing that we may be carrying a final liability foisted upon us back then by people who thought we could kill more of their enemies if jungle hiding places became defoliated. As our former colleagues die or become disabled, one by one, we think more and more about the idiocy of war.

They make me think of the draft-dodging sons-of-bitches who would send young men and women to war, then say that it’s not worth taxing the immeasurably rich to provide care for the poor and the poor in spirit, many of my comrades among them.

They make me think of the sorry bastards who mock those comrades in public.

Finally, they just make me think, and wonder, that’s all. It places a sadness in my heart for all those who served and then become forgotten. I’ll get over it, if the ancient seeds planted by evil men don’t get me first.

Why we are who we are

It’s interesting. There are approximately four billion DNA base pairs, or letters, that make up the human genome, an organism's complete set of DNA. Think about that for a moment.

While you are thinking, consider that a typical internal combustion engine car has about 10,000 moving parts.

Oh, you science majors may say that is a false comparison. That doesn’t make it less interesting. Science haters may say that it is false news. They learned so on Facebook. That doesn’t make things less scary.

Anyway, think about how many moving parts must operate in both unison and harmony for an automobile to be a Honda Accord instead of a Jeep Cherokee. Of course, an automobile is not the direct product of evolutionary forces acting unaided upon, as it now seems accepted, the genetic structure of an existing body. That’s why we can put it in working order with 10,000 moving parts.

That’s also why it took three billion DNA pairs and four billion years to produce a modern member of Homo sapiens. Now that’s a lot of connections working at once, the product of what Charles Darwin called “descent with modification.” Some connections serve uses that are no longer needed. Some confuse us. I read somewhere once that there is a genetic mechanism in our makeup that served to keep us alert when we shared the Savannah with creatures that ate humans for breakfast, lunch, and supper. No, it didn’t serve to warn us of danger. It warned us of a perceived lack of danger, for a feeling of safety may be the most dangerous condition of all in a violent world.

In other words, “You think things are fine? Think again.”

Could that archaic mechanism be what makes it counter-productive to tell a person suffering from chronic depression to, “Cheer up. Everything is going to be all right?”

Why do I bring this all up? It evolves (no pun intended) from a sermon I heard yesterday, full of the love and grace that eludes most TV evangelists. It included a story of a young man who was almost suicidal because his 3 billion DNA pairs had produced a sexual orientation that differed from his parents, siblings, and the majority of his peers. Why the difference? I don’t know. Multiply 3 billion DNA pairs times four billion years and look therein for the answer.

Do I understand it correctly from my friends who are fundamentalist evangelicals that we are somehow spiritually ordained to hate a person who has a slight difference in his genomic makeup from mine?

Am I supposed to assume that this slight difference is not the result of DNA but the result of a conscious decision by a fourteen-year old that puberty, psychic anxiety, fear of the future, a lack of popularity among peers, and a world seemingly gone insane does not produce enough psychic terror in one’s life? That, in order to round things out, he or she might just choose to adopt a lifestyle that would make them an object of un-reasoned hatred in members of society, including the adults who are supposed to be in charge?

I once knew an individual who thought so. “It’s a choice,” this person avowed, “a result of our ‘old sin nature’ generated by the Devil himself.”

Our what? Only someone as nefarious and full of venom as Franklin Graham could believe that.

As a side note, this individual assured me that a college professor had taught his class, at a central Arkansas university (not my Alma Mater thankfully), that a homosexual could be identified by a certain bump at a location in a certain place on their forehead.

I can’t find one on mine, although I do think Orlando Bloom is awfully sexy.

Anyway, this post-factual age could get me down if I didn’t occasionally run across thoughtful, caring, loving sermons like the one I saw yesterday. Contact me for a source.

There is hope. Study and believe.

Book Review: October 31, 2017

At my age, I don’t have the time to study all the great books I cherish. But I may spend more time on Giovanni’s Room. One of only two novels by James Baldwin, it can break the heart of anyone who cherishes the right of people to live in freedom.

By “freedom,” I don’t believe in freedom from incarceration or freedom from tyranny, but in the complete freedom to live as one’s physiological genetics would have them do, as long as that freedom didn’t harm another.

Of course, people are harmed in Baldwin’s book. The narrator, David, is a severely damaged man who damages others. He is a gay man in an era in which the shame heaped upon him and those like him stifled and contorted every emotional impulse. His tormentors weren’t necessarily open and visible, like that poor, demented, homophobic county clerk in Kentucky of today’s headlines. No, at the time covered by the book, prejudice and punishment flowed over the likes of David as some dense, impenetrable fog, silent, pervasive, and unyielding. That fog of torment created a self-disgust that caused its victims even to despise their own fellow wanderers, even their own lovers, even humanity in essence, and worse, even themselves.

One struggles to imagine what it must be like to have the world stifle one’s emotional feelings to the point of harm against humanity or against one’s own person.

Readers have treated the book as a study of shame, and it is. Moreover, it is a book that rips away scabs and displays the raw damage done to society by hate and homophobia. The festering sores flow from the narrator to others, mostly the innocent who, themselves, struggle to find the freedom to love in a society given to hatred.

Would that it could be required reading.

A life burned out too quickly