The Spam that comes in cans

 

The good old days

 

Kat Meets Cowboys - Interview with Charles Ray

 

The link below is to an interview I did for DS Productions, formerly known as Dusty Saddle Publishing. Worth checking out if you're curious about how I got into writing:

Kat Meets Cowboys #9: An Interview With Charles Ray – Dusty Saddle Publishing (dspublishingnetwork.com)

The secret side of me

 

When I was a youngster, I was a straight-A student, the joy of every teacher in my school and the pride of my mother and grandmother. For a while I even sang in the church choir, I had a full-time after-school job and helped my fellow students with their homework.

     Sounds like a real saint, right?

     For a long time, even I had begun to believe that I was a model child, the one boy in the neighborhood that parents pointed to when their children misbehaved.

     But, alas, there was another side of me that had lain long buried. It was exhumed at of all places, a funeral.

     In the part of the country where I grew up, there is a tradition of holding a feast after the funeral when neighbors and friends bring food for the grieving family. Several years ago, when I attended the funeral of one of my younger brothers who died from a long battle with cancer, at the after-service dinner, I sat with an old classmate and two older cousins of mine who knew me from childhood.

     The conversation got around to what kind of children we had been and one of my cousins mentioned what an angel I had been. My classmate laughed and pointed out that during high school I had been the ringleader for a number of acts of mischief and that when they came to light the participants, who were always following me in my pranks, were punished, but I never seemed to be caught and no one ever told on me. Needless to say, I vaguely remembered it, though perhaps not in the detail he did. I had to admit, though, that he was right. I was always doing things that today would probably be called vandalism, like the time a friend and I rewired the school bells to ring late for the start of class and early for the end by one minute per class. It had all the teachers checking their watches all day long and took a technician almost a full day to correct. I did it because I was curious about how the system worked and wanted to test it. My friend confessed, did not mention me, and took the detention.

     Another time, I took some of my mother’s good cotton sheets and constructed a glider based on a photo I had seen in an encyclopedia of one that Michelangelo built. I tested it off the roof of our house. Actually glided nearly twenty feet before crashing into a neighbor’s hedge. Needless to say that sheet was ruined. My mother, so happy that I wasn’t seriously hurt, looked sad, but did not punish me for it.

     I fancied myself a kind of junior scientist when I was a kid and was always experimenting with things—my mother’s sheets were not the only things I ruined. I built a phonograph out of cardboard, watch springs and sewing needles and tested it on her 78 rpm records. It worked but ruined four of her favorite records. Again, she forgave me. The exception to her forgiveness was the day she found the snake I was keeping in a shoebox  under my bed. My mother hated snakes with a passion. I did get a bit of a thrashing for that, mostly because when she tipped over the shoebox and the snake crawled out, she almost had a heart attack.

     I got up to so many pranks before I graduated from high school a few months before my seventeenth birthday, one of our neighbors told my mother she seriously doubted that I would make it to eighteen. I think everyone in town thought one of my pranks would kill me.

     When I surprised them by celebrating my eighteenth birthday in the army, I was told that they had just revised their estimate upwards. When they found out that I had volunteered for paratrooper training when I was twenty, they bet I wouldn’t make twenty-one. Fooled them yet again and volunteered for Special Forces when I was twenty-three. That might have been the year they stopped predicting my demise, but whenever I went back to my East Texas hometown, people still talked about how amazed they were that I could do the things I did, including serving twice in a war zone as a soldier and once as a diplomat, and come out of it relatively unscathed. The old folks said it was because I was ‘blessed.’ My contemporaries just shook their heads. I put it down to dumb luck.

     I have finally come to terms with my secret side. On the one hand, it was kind of nice having people thinking that I was a ‘goody two-shoes,’ but I have to confess, I get a kick out of them thinking that I was a really clever con man who could talk his way out of anything.

Ethiopia: What Does Peace Look Like?

How stories evolve

January 6, a date to remember, a country divided

 

People are now trying to rewrite the history of what happened
on January 6, 2021, just as they try to create a narrative to support
the Big Lie about the 2020 election.

December 7, 1941 - Japanese carrier-based fighters and torpedo bombers attack Pearl Harbor, Hickham Airbase, and other military and civilian targets on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. The United States came together as a nation to respond to this ‘date that will live in infamy,’ building a massive war machine, mobilizing industry and ultimately prevailed. Some of the outgrowths of that event were the acceptance of women in jobs that had been traditionally closed to them, the ultimate integration of the armed forces and the end of racially segregated units, and a more vibrant economy.

     September 11, 2001 - a group of terrorists, mostly radicalized middle class Saudi Arabians, hijacked civilian airliners and flew them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in the nation’s capital, and had plans to fly one into the Capitol but were thwarted when passengers rose up and took it back forcing them to crash it in a field in Pennsylvania. The country came together briefly in mourning of this dastardly attack. The outcomes were, however, not quite so positive. It resulted in the Patriot Act, legislation that curtailed a lot of our cherished freedoms, distorted our foreign policy by putting counter terrorism at the forefront and minimizing our use of soft power diplomacy which had been relatively effective in general, tarnished our image as the ‘city on the hill’ through actions such as rendition, treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Naval Base, and led to an upsurge in anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. that was often little more than mindless racism.

     January 6, 2021 – A mob of supporters of the outgoing president who had been promoting the ‘big lie’ that the election was ‘stolen’ from him and the will of millions of American voters should be ignored stormed the U.S. Capitol building, attacking police officers with bear spray, fire extinguishers, and staffs holding the American flag, extensively damaging the building and forcing lawmakers who had gathered to certify the results of the November election to flee for their lives. This attack on one of the most important symbols of American democracy played out live on national TV and was viewed by millions of people around the world in real time. Politicians from both parties decried the violence immediately and called for the president to ask his supporters to stop the violence and go home—something he failed to do for several hours—and when he finally did it was such a tepid request it almost amounted to a ‘thank you for what you’re doing, you can go home now, we love you,’ message. It didn’t take long, though, for many of those politicians of the president’s party to begin to backtrack on their condemnation of the rioters—hell, let’s call them what they were, insurrectionists—who had been chanting that they wanted to hang the vice president, and had erected a gallows on the Capitol grounds. They have since tried to rewrite the events of that day; blaming the violence on leftist infiltrators, saying the rioters were actually just loyal Americans exercising their Constitutional rights, and in some cases even saying that the violence was justified. The big lie of a ‘stolen’ election continues to be flogged by the former president, many of his congressional enablers, and the far right media, despite volumes of evidence and adjudicated court cases to the contrary. State legislatures controlled by the ousted president’s party have written and in some cases passed hundreds of laws designed to make it harder for people to vote and many still cling to the fallacious belief that somehow the election was rigged to cause their man to lose. This despite the fact that many of their party won in the same districts where he lost.

     As sad as it is to say, an event that should have been as unifying as December 7 or 9/11 has had just the opposite effect.

     We as a country are now more divided than we’ve been since the days leading up to the Civil War when the country was almost torn apart by a cabal of men determined to preserve a system that allowed them to hold others in perpetual bondage.

     Even after a mob had forced them to flee for their lives, a majority of Republican members of the House of Representatives voted not to certify the votes in those states where Donald Trump lost, and in many by a significant margin, even when down-ballot Republicans won their races. Except for a hand full of Republicans who lived up to their oath of office to ‘support and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic,’ Republican lawmakers refused to hold Trump accountable for his actions inciting the events of January 6, just as they had refused to hold him accountable for his actions to coerce the nation of Ukraine to take actions to damage his political opponent in the election.

     Despite many in the right wing media pleading via email and text for Trump to do something to stop the violence, these same personalities continue to support his lie about the election and try to downplay the events of that day. They continue to try to rewrite history.

     Approximately 65 million self-identified Trump supporters in a recent poll continue to believe that he actually won the election and that it was ‘stolen’ from him, and 23 million believe that violence is justified to achieve their aims.

     When asked if January 6 was an attack on the government rather than just a peaceful demonstration that was ‘manipulated’ by the FBI to hurt their candidate, only 29 percent of Republicans polled said it was an attack, as opposed to 95 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Independents.

     While most people will probably pay little attention to this, those of us who are aware of history as something other than a pain in the neck course in school that you have to pass in order to graduate but can promptly forget, this is troubling.

     These attitudes seemed to be hardwired and they reveal a country that is seriously divided. The last time such divisions existed, we almost lost our ‘united’ states. We the People cannot afford to sit idly by and allow such a thing to happen again.

     There’s not much one can do about the ‘hard’ right whose beliefs seem to be set in concrete. But those who can’t be bothered to go out and vote, or who would rather find out what happened on ‘Survivor’ than track the legislation being considered by their state legislature, need to sit up and take notice.

     Democracy is never guaranteed. It is gained at a great price, and a price must be paid to maintain it, or it can be lost.

     January 6, 2021 is a date that should be remembered, and like December 7, 1941, it should be a call for all of us as a nation to rise up and fight to protect what the Founding Fathers gave us, the goal to create a ‘more perfect union.’

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