Month: February 2024

Our closest relatives are quite telling. I mean, they are not telling us as in writing us a book or anything. They are not speaking English to us. Maybe a little sign language now and then. Rudimentary stuff. Yes, No…Gimme’ banana. Stuff like that.

99.6% of our genome is shared with Chimpanzees, and now scientists have found, also with Bonobos, (pygmy chimps) although we share a different 1.6% of our genetics with Chimps than we do with Bonobos.

Monkeys and Greater Apes, like the Chimpanzees, are generally not pleasant creatures. Chimps especially will become very vicious creatures as adults. Just think back a few years when the poor lady in New York City got her face ripped off by one of her friends “pet” chimpanzees. Vicious.

My Father in law was a Veterinarian. Dr. L.J. Neurauter. He was an administrator, and after he retired from the Air Force, he ran the BIG primate center out in Davis, California. But he didn’t like monkeys. He certainly didn’t like the Chimpanzees. One time we visited them in Davis, and took a tour of the primate center. “Don’t get too near the Chimpanzee compound,” said Dr. Neurauter. “They’ll throw feces at you, and they are really accurate.” I took him at his word. He went on to tell us how none of the handlers would ever…ever…get in the chimpanzee compound with them out, unless they had a death wish. Vicious with each other, and vicious with human beings. Almost like a hatred of human beings.

Our closest relative, as far as genetics go. I know a lot of people are gonna’ say: “We didn’t evolve from monkeys!”

So true.

We had a common ancestor with the chimpanzees and bonobos about 4 million years ago, and the ancestor who eventually evolved into human beings split off from that common ancestor. I imagine they were pretty vicious animals. Out of the three most closely related Primates, the Bonobos, who are the smallest, are the least vicious. Humans and Chimpanzees….not so much.

Survival of the fittest…and the meanest.

As Anthropology major in college, I took a lot of classes in Physical Anthropology. Dr. Butler. A hard man to please if you didn’t study like you outta’. He once told me that early man was probably a vicious animal, but also a social animal. Conditions of living dictated that families stay together for protection from larger predators. Sabre tooth tigers, Cave bears. You know…all that Jean W. Auel stuff. Eventually families started hanging around together for even more protection. They became tribes. Tribes grouped together and became ethnic groups. Discovered agriculture. Started building small villages, towns, cities. Still maintained the viciousness. The aggression and the primal instincts of those first ancestors.

Survival of the meanest?

For how long?

The creator alone knows, and he ain’t telling.

If the United States of America is the “melting pot” of the world, then New York City is at the center of the pan. It’s the hot, hot cauldron which has produced many a hero, but conversly has produced many a fiend.

The five boroughs of the great city which was founded in 1626 as New Amsterdam have given us Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. It has given us Carl Sagan, Lou Gehrig and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Also Anton Scalia, and Harry Houdini. A diverse group of good folks.

There also have come the “Son of Sam” and the Oklahoma City bomber, born in New York City. Many others…good and evil, darkness and light..

The complex interwoven city, with it’s open mindedness also harbors the most secret of secret societies and relationships between people who might at first glance seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum from each other.

Businessmen and mobsters in relationships. Prostitutes and politicians. Rabbis and priests. Strange bedfellows, strange indeed.

Now comes Donald Trump…and the story begins……

There will be more….

“Dreary” my Mom would say as she looked out the window, “such a dreary day.”

Mom used to look out the windows a lot during the Winter, and she hated the dreary, rainy days like we are having lately. She didn’t much like winter at all after Christmas was over and done with. I have to admit, I’m much the same.

On sunny, warm days Mom might go around with her dust rag, polishing the coffee table and end tables and hum some country tune she heard as a child. She could sing on tune and in key if she wanted to, but would never let anyone hear her if she could help it. She would clown around most of the time, and act silly with it when she sang.

She once told me she wanted to be a country music singer when she was a little kid, but her Daddy had made fun of her once when she was singing, so she never sang for anyone after that. It was a shame, because in the unguarded moments when the sun was shining outside, I could hear a spark. I loved it when the sun was shining as a child, and Mom was happy. It didn’t happen too often, because Mom’s personality became dark very early on due to mental illness, and stayed that way off and on until she died.

As far as the singing goes, she had done the same thing to me when I was little also, but probably hadn’t realized it. I had heard Elvis singing on T.V., and stood in the doorway of our home on Simmons street and belted out my version of “Hound dog” Mom burst out laughing at me. I think it was because she didn’t know before that moment that I actually could sing. I was embarrassed. I wouldn’t sing out loud for anyone after that, until the year I was in the eighth grade.

I was in “Glee club” at school and we were singing as a group with band director John Corruth as our director. It was at Christmas and we were doing a version of “White Christmas” I was really into the song, and with the seeming anonimity of others around me singing, I was belting out my best Bing Crosby version. “Hey Bowers” said Mr. Carruth. “I want you to sing the first verse of that song at our program as a solo”. “You sound pretty good.”

My face went bright red, and I almost ran out of the rehearsal area, which was at the front of our Elementary school cafeteria. But…I ended up doing it, and although I was extremely nervous, my voice didn’t break. I went on to do a lot more singing during High School. If it hadn’t been for that one situation with Mr. Carruth though, I may not have.

My parents didn’t come to that program. I can’t remember them ever coming to any of the “minor” activities we did at school. It’s not that they weren’t interested, but it was more that the programs took place during the hours in which they worked. I wish they could have been there sometimes.

As my Mom got older, she was beset by a bevy of health problems which finally took her away in December of 2010.

But sometimes during the dreary days of winter, like the one today, as I dust the bookshelf or the T.V., I can hear her gently humming a country tune…..

The Voice

There is that voice which is there all time in my head. He has been there ever since I can remember. He was the one who told me back in the fall of 1953 when I was almost 4 years old to ride my tricycle down the front steps on my house. A busted forehead and several stitches later the voice told me we would never, ever do that again.

He sings constantly to me, in any style. I can have a country song by Johnny Cash followed by Imagine Dragons singing “Demons” At times he scares me with my person demons, but at other times he soothes me with sweet poetry. He will be with me until my last breath.

I have read a lot about this… “Inner voice” our internal narrator, our personal monologue which I think….at least from conversations which I have had with others… I think we all have going on constantly in our head. I know all about my guy. I know what to expect from him most of the time. He comes up with some weird things, some good things, and some thoughts which are verbalized which I would never consciously say to another human being. He says some very rude and vulgar things. He also comes up with some tender and moving soliloquies. I hear him just as if he were another person speaking to me. It is never like an invisible or hidden voice, but always speaking directly to me just as another person would. I don’t know how other people hear their inner selves, I really do not know if everyone even has an internal voice.

I’ve heard some people say that our internal voice comes from the way our parents and those around us speak to us as babies and early toddlers. I’m not so sure I accept that theory. I just cannot hear my parents or any other relatives I knew as a baby or child in my monologue. I also can’t accept that people like John Wayne Gacy , or Jeffrey Dahmer had normal inner voices which came from their early associations. I would have really, truly have hated to be inside their head, listening to what was being said. I think their voice must have been riddled with hallucinations, or nightmares.

On the opposite end of the spectrum I would have loved to have heard some of what Leonardo da Vinci, or Albert Einstein had to say to themselves…maybe. I can imagine their inner voices having a sort of discourse, bouncing ideas off of their own walls in order to make discoveries of new things. I would probably been very confused. One cannot imagine what might be going on in the mind of the genius.

Jiminy Cricket would have called our inner voice our “consequence” In Zen, they would think of it as “Nen nen ju shin ki” which means something like “Thought following thought.”

I personally think of it as my heart. The center of my being.

I have read all the mundane explanations, about how the “soul” is nothing but a bunch of character individualization’s based on time, location and socioeconomic factors combined with each person unique experiences, which comprise our personality. I just don’t agree. There is enough of the mystic within me to continue to believe in things which cannot be seen or heard.

Whenever my inner voice speaks to me of any deep emotions it always comes from the heart. I have never had a headache from something bad happening, but always have the feeling come welling up from the center of my chest. My tears start in my heart.

When my voice tells me to be happy, I have never had my head spin. My joy starts in my heart, and radiates out into the rest of my body.

My inner voice comes from my heart and tells me the things no one else would or could tell me. I’d sure hate to lose him because he’s my oldest and closest companion.

I sometimes see the question “If you had the chance to live your life over again, would you do it?”

Of course none of us ever will….

And when I see this question, people usually qualify the answer: “Well, if I knew what I know now…” or “If I could make just a couple of changes…”

I tell you straight to the point, that I would. I’d do it again just exactly the same without changes anything one iota. I’d take the pain and heartache of burying a child, just to see her again through the nursery window.

I’d go through the agony of my parents death, just to hear their voices again. I’d let Mom hit me on the head with my bow again. I’d endure watching Porter Wagoner.
I’d wait til I was 16 again to see the Ocean for the first time. I’d rinse poop out of cloth diapers to have the chance for my baby girl to take a nap on my tummy.

I’d buy hot wheels for my boys to crush with rocks and bury under the Elm tree I planted on 9th street. I’d pick cherrys straight off the tree in the blazing Idaho summer sun for my Mother in law to can.

I’d chase lighting bugs all evening until I had a jar full, and take my turn at cranking the old ice cream machine.
I’d smell Grandpa’s pipe tobacco, and the wood smoke from the pot bellied stove. I’d listen to him cuss when I’d turn over his “spit can” I’d relish the taste of Grandma’s fried apples and homemade lard biscuits.

I’d take the two heart attacks a stent, and four bypasses and a year of recovery to see baby Eli and Rue come in the door the first time again.

I’d play countless games of hearts at the student center at West Georgia college to fall in love with my wife. I’d run off the road in a rain storm on our wedding night and double back to Dalton to a tiny little hotel room.

I would load tractor trailer loads of matresses by myself in 100+ degree weather, so I could have Saturday off to go to the baseball card show.

I would do all the stupid things again, just to do a few of the smart things. I’d take the ass chewings, and countless hours of driving out and back to work in Calhoun and Dalton just to have the hugs and the kisses from the ones I have loved, and do still love.

We will never have that chance…perhaps…depending on your philosophy, or depending on how the Universe works. Who knows really how it does work? All I can say is that the joy has vastly outshined the sadness.

Yes, I’d do it again. Unqualified and unquestioned if I could.

Walking the Mall and The Memories

One of the places which I still like to go and take a walk when it’s rainy and bad outside, is the Mt. Berry Square Mall. As a matter of fact, my wife and I went there today and walked to get our cardio workout. Unfortunately, as my Dad once sang about the old gray mare, “she ain’t what she used to be, many long years ago.”

Mt. Berry Square Mall opened back in 1991. It was brand spanking new back in mine and my wife’s “heydays” of our working careers. It was beautiful. Skylights illuminated the food court and it was full of new stores with new smells, and stocked full of stuff we needed in our lives. Our sons were still living at home with us then. If I remember correctly, they opened it early in 1991….almost a “late” 1990 opening. The first Christmas we shopped there would have been in December of 1991.

As with all other years, 1991 had it’s memorable historical moments. The first Gulf War took place that year. Space shuttles were being launched with regularity. The shuttle Columbia carried another piece of Spacelab into space that year. In December of that year, Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union collapsed. Memorable historical events.

Of course there were the everyday events also occurring in our lives. Paula and I got on the same shift at Crown Crafts where we were working that year, and we rode out and back together to work every day for the next eight years or so. We had a lot of discussions and listened to a lot of music in those years. We went to lunch together practically every day. We were very lucky to have good jobs at a good company.

Then, on a lot of weekends we went to Mt. Berry Square and shopped. Afterwards, we might go to the movies in Rome. A couple of years later, can’t exactly recall when, they opened up a movie theater there at the mall. We made a lot of trips to Rome during the ensuing years. A lot of trips to that mall. Most of them were great trips.

Paula’s Mom and Dad made one of their last “spring visits” to Georgia the year the mall opened and we took them there. Cancer took them both in a few years after that. My dear mother in law died first in 1992. She really enjoyed her first and only trip roaming around that mall. She would always say “Wow” or “Oh my” if she thought something was special. She was a wonderful, caring woman who passed too soon.

There were the Christmas shopping trips, when we would always buy a Christmas ornament from the little old folks from Loganville, who set up in the middle of the mall. They always had some interesting and nicely priced things, and it was a pleasure to look at them and select “just the right thing” Evie played with a set of Russian nesting dolls this year that we bought from those good folks way back then. Good quality to have lasted so long.

We always looked forward to the day that Santa came to the mall, and started letting the kids come sit on his lap and have pictures made. I think we have photos of almost all of our grandchildren sitting in that mall Santa’s lap. A couple of them are hanging on our refrigerator now, held up with assorted animal magnets. I know my children could recall a lot more memories associated with the mall than me. Ted was learning how to drive during those years, and I am sure that old red EXP of his went out and back to Mt. Berry quite a few times.

The stores were jam packed with great merchandise back in those days. You could always find what you were looking for to celebrate a birthday, or any other special day. For years, businesses were on waiting lists to open up a storefront in Mt. Berry Square. It was bustling and full of people on weekends. Not anymore.

As we walked around and around today, there were more empty spaces than spaces with stores. Sears, which had a presence in Rome for over 100 years closed up last year and sits empty. The mall has up ads begging businesses to come move in. It’s a little sad. No, more than that, it’s a lot sad. It’s amazing how quickly things change in the world of business, as well as in our lives. Just as Walmart opened up their stores in many small towns across America and closed up most of the “Mom and Pop” shops in those towns, the Amazon’s and other “online” shopping ventures have begun to cause many malls across America to close up. I suppose that’s progress, but not for a sentimental old guy like me.

I hope that Mt. Berry Square manages to stay open for a while. I go out of my way to go there sometimes just to walk and to remember. There are still sights and smells which invoke the nostalgia of days gone by. Good days, wonderful times, great memories. There are closer places to where I live in which I could walk in the rain, but none of them have those memories contained in their walls. They don’t contain my memories, which are kindled and which burn warmly inside my chest every time I go around one of those familiar corners

I hear a child’s laughter, and for just an instant I’m back to 1991, walking through there with Matt, looking for the newest and greatest transformer for Christmas.

And so, it’s worth the few extra miles drive. Well worth it.

COAL- My life story in a few paragraphs…..and in relationship to coal….

I have lived, up until this past year,…and for the short number of years I was away at college, I had lived in a little Cotton mill town all of my life. It was a great place to grow up, with regards to my own personal situation. A wonderful place really. But, things change. Things go unnoticed by most people if they don’t pay close attention to what goes on.

I know when Paula and I first moved back to Trion in 1974, we moved into a little house on Ninth street. The first 10 years or so after we moved back were “thin” years. We got by….we did get by, but on a lot less than most people would ever think or know. Our dinners were populated with a lot of fish sticks, creamed chipped beef, tuna casserole, spaghetti, and salmon patties. Now, don’t get me wrong. I still like most of those things. I still fix them from time to time. Brings back old, good memories.

One of the things about living in a cotton mill town is smoke. As I previously mentioned, we moved back to Trion to 9th street, which had always been know as “Smokey row” or smokey road. The reason it was given that title was because it was the street that led right to the mill, which was only a block away. Actually, the “back end” of the mill, where the boilers and power generators were located was only a few hundred yards from our house. When they were burning coal, hard and strong back in 1974, we couldn’t leave the windows open for a breath of fresh air at night. If we did, we would wake up the next morning with a coating of fine black dust and tiny black coal crystals covering the areas inside the house near the windows.

Of course this was nothing really new to me, having grown up near that mill. We had never lived out of sight of those gigantic tall smoke stacks at any point during my childhood. Simmons street and eighth street had been our homes and you could see the smoke stacks from both places. You could hear the “work whistle” as it blew at 20 minutes before the hour, and the hour itself at 8 a.m., 4 p.m., and 12 a.m., for all the shifts. Many times those smoke stacks would be belching out smoke. Sometimes white. Sometimes gray and sometimes black…especially when the stacks were being “blown out” As a child, I don’t remember it being as “nasty” as it was in the 70’s. Perhaps there was a reason for that. As I recall, we could go by the big coal stack as kids, and the coal was actually beautiful. Large, shiny, almost obsidian looking pieces lay all around the coal pile. I collected some of them as a kid, and took them home. You could rub your hands on this stuff and you would get very little, if any, black on them. It also burned very clean. It was what they called Anthracite coal.

You see, back in the fifties, a lot of things were still being made in America. Riegel Textile had a lot of high end goods. Baby blankets, and cloth being made into all kinds of wonderful products. Government contracts making cloth for the DOD. Riegel had one of the best dye houses in the country, with men dying cloth who could make it look like almost anything. None of these people had been betrayed…yet. And times were pretty good in that small town, at that time, for those people. Not so much for some people in other places, but for those people…at that time, the fifties, the early sixties…perhaps even into the late sixties, things were good.

Jobs hadn’t been farmed out to China and India, or Vietnam and Mexico yet by the owners of the businesses, the soon to be millionaire and billionaire traitors who traded American jobs for money in their pockets. Some of the people who are still around today, and who still have that money. Some of the people….

By the seventies, I believe they were using Bituminous coal. The dye house was gone, and Riegel Textile had turned into Mt. Vernon mills. The big thing that was keeping the mill going, and the jobs there was denim. Blue denim. My Daddy and some more hard working men at that mill had gotten the mill switched over from running the cloth of the fifties, and the owners had switched the business model around to suit the fashions of the times. Everybody needed blue jeans, and things made from denim, and they were making the best denim in the world at that mill, at that time. When I went to work for them, and they were burning that Bituminous coal, and all I had to do was walk down the street to the mill, they were running seven days a week, 24 hours a day, 364 days a year. We got Christmas day off. They were making BIG money on denim, and they were taking advantage of it while they could. I can’t blame them. But I didn’t fit in that environment, like my Daddy and his Daddy had for so many years. I left working there in 1978 after four years of that seven days a week stuff. I never went back…except for a ultra short stent in the 90’s. But that’s another story for another day. Denim rocked on for quite a few years after I had gone. I continued to live in Trion, and work out of town. But I paid attention to the smoke stacks, and the coal. If you’ve been following me for very long on Facebook, you have seen some of my photos of those stacks. I may just attach one to this post if I can find one.

Now, the last time I looked at the railroad cars that were coming into the mill at Trion, the last time, before I moved out of town…before I stopped walking that little town and left for other places, that last time I looked they were using Lignite. The lowest grade of coal, the cheapest and the kind which burns the dirtiest. Denim was not king anymore and business was again changing. Some jobs had gone other places, outside the United States. But, some of them stayed, and they have stayed, and they still stay. And I admire them for that. One of the very few who could keep some jobs here, in the face of all the change, and all of the pressure of the years, and all of the temptations to put profit totally over location. They didn’t give raises, they hired the folks coming from down South, but they have kept the doors open. And they are still open, but things are not the same…and they will never be the same. From Anthracite to Bituminous to Lignite. The story of our country in coal. It’s just a story though, and I’m a poor story teller. I have not solutions. I offer no advice. It is what it is, and it will never be the same. And that’s the shame of it….that’s the shame..

Common people badly need a place, a niche in today’s America. We little people, which includes not only those who work for hourly wages, but also the retired, the disabled, and the veteran’s who fall in any of the aforementioned categories…we need a spot in America. Unfortunately it’s been being taken away for the last thirty years or so, and I see little movement on the part of our constipated government to ressurect it.

I’m not sure the “powers that be” realize that you cannot have a “body” without a middle. They may want to have an America with just a head and an ass, but without the guts and especially the heart, you have a country which will soon be DOA in a world full of sharks which have been circling us since World War II. They smell our blood in the water and they want a piece.

We haven’t had leadership in this country since the fifties or very early sixties who have had the welfare of our middle class, and so by default the welfare of our actual country at heart. They all have either been under the control of the billionaires, or trying to become billionaires themselves. I’m tired of hearing all the patriotic hogwash about some of them, and about the fake progressiveness of others. You know what I’m talking about. They all have sucked when it has come down to the brass tacks of making America work for Americans.

There are SO many balls in play in the court of mistakes made, or purposeful acts committed in order to hurt common Americans, that the Williams sisters couldn’t keep them in play. It’s time we realize, we little people, that they.. the rich and super rich, and the Wall street minions intend to enslave us. If you think I’m wrong or I’m kidding, just sit quietly somewhere for a while if you are over fifty, and think where you are now as opposed to where you used to be. Then think about how the media feeds you milktoast in the form of the Kardashians, Deflategate, the Oscars, House of Cards, HDTV, the Cooking channel, the Today show, Fox news, the Weather channel, ESPN, etc, etc, ad infinitum. Think of how they seek to divide you by keeping issues such as gay marriage, guns, religion, abortion, and wars always in the forefront while never mentioning how 1% of the population owns 99% of the wealth. As long as they have that power they don’t give a crap about anything else…period. Listen to Robert Reich, that inequality gap really is the issue.

I for one hate being manipulated and even sometimes falling for the manipulation.

America is lagging behind the rest of the world in so many important areas that it is shameful. Other countries take care and revere their elderly. We put them away, and allow the system to bleed them dry to the point of poverty before they die. We produce High School and College graduates who have NO practical knowledge about what it takes to really function.

So, I guess I’m just fed up with being fed up tonight. I’m touching on unpopular areas which people would rather not think about. Unfriend me if you can’t stand to hear it because I’m probably just getting started. Somebody, somewhere has to piss people off in order to get them to pay attention and perhaps…just maybe begin to participate in taking our country, the little people’s country, the hourly worker’s country, the disenfranchised veteran’s country, the honest teacher’s country, the former manufacturing worker’s country, the small three bedroom house owner’s country, the hunter and fisherman’s country, the small farmer’s country. Maybe if we work together and forget about some of this manure they are trying to use to divide us…maybe we middle class Americans can make a come back.

I swear I hope so…and my apologies in advance for rambling, preaching and blowing off steam.

Today’s Random Thoughts…..

Without a doubt, much of what we think we know is false. Even being as “smart” as we humans think we are we don’t even know everything about our own bodies. When we move out from there, into the world around us, and eventually into the Universe that surrounds us, our knowledge becomes exponentially less and less.
There are SO many theories on how the Universe started, where it’s headed and how it’s going to end. Some of them are theological in nature, and some are scientific. None of them are right, probably not even near right.
I shudder when I think about how little I know. I have to take most things I do every day on faith. I have faith when I plug in the coffee machine that it is going to make me a cup of coffee. If it didn’t, I don’t have the knowledge to tear it apart and remake it so that it would. If I put my key in the car, and turn the switch and it doesn’t start, most of the time I wouldn’t know what to do. When I had my heart attack, I couldn’t fix my arteries. Of course there are people who DO know how to fix these things, and it’s a good thing too. Otherwise, most of use would be in a heap of trouble.
But, even those people who are “technologically” smart, don’t have all the answers. Every few years or so, a new theory comes out about how the Universe began. Of course, all religions would acknowledge that it was ‘created’ if you will, by God. A thinking consciousness started the ball rolling and made use what we are today. Makes sense to us as humans, because WE are conscious thinking creatures. That’s what separates us from the rest of the creatures….at least so we “think” ( I am not so sure sometimes, when my little dog plays me for a sucker that she is not “thinking” about what she is doing) I guess there is all different levels of thinking, and I am SURE that we are not in ANY way close to the “thinking” if that is what it is, of a consciousness so powerful it could create the Universe.
Now secularists have a harder time trying to explain how something like the Universe started on it’s on. I read somewhere a few weeks back that they think all the matter that it took to get the Universe started, could be compressed down into a ball the size of a basketball, but that it would weigh some astronomically heavy weight. Some basketball! When this thing decided to explode and start the Universe, it continually spread from a central point and made us what we are today. The scientists can look at light coming in from outside our Galaxy that took billions of years to get here. That’s cool. When we look up in the sky at night, and see the stars, we are not really seeing what is happening at the moment we are looking, but what happened years and sometimes hundreds or thousands of years ago and is just now reaching us. For all we know, some of those stars could be, and probably are, gone. Mind boggling ain’t it?
Well, I just don’t believe that either group has ALL the right answers. I personally believe the Universe was created, and didn’t just happen, but I don’t even PRETEND to understand the type of intellect it would take to do it.
　
　I know that we have had books and bibles, and documents from the beginning of the time that man learned how to write, with all the theories about how things happened. All of those came from the minds of man, and have been shaped by the mind of man down through the centuries. None of them are accurate. I don’t think that we even know how to define accurate.

Now, don’t go all funny on me, and think I am being sacrilegious. I’m not. I don’t go around telling people what to believe, OR that what they believe isn’t right. I don’t have the right to do that, and neither does anyone else. There are, however, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, etc. who would disagree with me. All of those religions consider that they have been given the innate approval, by the being that created the Universe to tell everyone that there way of thinking is the only one that is correct. I happen to disagree with them. There may be some correctness in all of them. Being a Christian, I personally believe in that philosophy and some may think it is a conflict of teaching that I would state I don’t believe in telling OTHER people what to believe, but I don’t. Everyone has to decide for themselves, and I think on that particular point that the being that created us, God if you will, has been totally succinct. You choose for yourself whether to be good or bad, light or dark. This choice is yours no matter what your religion or philosophy.

I think we will all find out one day, of course. I think that God would be totally unfair to just leaving us hanging about the answer to things. Of course, I could be wrong about that too. We may go to Heaven, or we may lay unconscious of the passing of time until we come back around in the endless cycle of the Universes coming and going. We MAY know nothing, and that’s that. I highly doubt this to be the case, but….

Everytime I hear the national anthem, I still get chill bumbs and tears still fill my eyes. When I see the flag of my country flying high from a flagpole, I am so proud to be an American. I hate to see it abused, I have reported municipalities and schools in the past for not taking down the flag and taking care of it. I also, cried like a baby when Johnny Cash sang “Ragged Old Flag” before the not so “Super Bowl” a few days back.

Most of my ancestors have been in this country since the earliest of early times. I have half a dozen who fought in the Revolutionary War, and a dozen who fought in the Civil War. I have Native American ancestors by the dozens also. My roots go very deeply in this beloved soil we call America…and I call my home.

My Daddy fought in World War II and Korea…and went into the fog soup of radiation on a Navy ship right after they tested the Atomic bomb at Enewetak atoll in 1946. I’m certain part of his health problems later in life were due to this, but he never got a dime. He never asked.

I grew up with many of you who are my Facebook friends. We were close in Trion. Most of our experiences were practically the same. We had the same teachers, the same “mill town” environment, where most of our Daddy’s and Momma’s worked their rears off in the cotton mill to raise us kids. To give use things they never were able to have during their depression years of growing up.

I graduated with many of you, I have worked with some of you over the years. I went to college with some of you. Some of you I have never met, except through Facebook.

I have been a religious man over the years. I was baptized when I was 8 years old, in a Southern Baptist Church. I spent 52 years as a member, including 12 years as a deacon. I became disillusioned about 6 years ago and now keep my own peace…but I respect the beliefs of everyone, as long as their beliefs are peaceful.

I have hunted, with bow and with gun. I have fished the rivers and the lakes…the streams and the creeks of this wonderful country.

I don’t care how many guns you own, as long as you are careful with what you got…and you know you are responsible for how they are used.

I don’t personally believe in abortion. I would counsel any family member or friend who comes to me against it. However, I do not believe it is my responsibility to tell other people what they should or should not do. (see three paragraphs back)

I’m an opinionated man. Anybody who knows me well, knows that. My opinions are not shared by a lot of people. I know that. For many years, it has been much easier to keep my own counsel concerning things I believe and don’t believe, and how I believe. With the coming of “social media” it has become harder and harder to actual have opinions, and have them ON “social media” without it causing hatred, hard feelings, name calling, and other myriad of bad things. Things which cause emotional and physical reactions, which a man with my problems doesn’t need. It’s hard for me to not make comments and share my opinions. It’s almost impossible for me really. I think it goes back to the old “blank page” syndrome for me….in which if I open Facebook and start reading stuff I just have a compulsion to open my mouth and say something….or write something on my timeline….my own “blank page”

Some of it may be the chance to finally have somebody “like” what you write….but unfortunately also have many “hate” what you write…as it pertains to politics, and perhaps also as it pertains to religion. I’ve tried keeping it mostly to photograhy which I love..but which I’m not that great at, and also some “homey” writing…which I also like to do, but which is mediocre for the most part.

I have said all of this, and have come this far with this post just to say that in my condition as a human being it’s in my best interest to stay disconnected for a while, think things over, and see what happens from there. There are a lot of things I am not happy with that are going on, and one of them is me. My attitude, my feelings, my need to gain more empathy and understanding for others.

There are many who are so unreachable in the security of their opinions and beliefs, as to never be able to be persuaded by either reason or love…by compromise or negotiation, by anger or pathos, that we humans, we Americans, have so much more in common than we have different. We cannot see past our bias and our ignorance to realize that once…we liked each other, perhaps once we even loved each other, but we let it slip away and we let it go just because we HAD to be the one who was right.

I don’t have to be right all the time. Neither do any of you people. If we just realize that, then perhaps we could see a little more peace in this lifetime.