We say hello to Florida

 Let's get the preliminaries out of the way. It's hot and humid here. It's more crowded than I remember. The college football season starts today so the barbecues flare and the liquor stores are swarmed. The Governor did another stupid thing yesterday. The sunsets over the river are gorgeous and I hear the same thing about the sunrises. I've seen two Trump signs and two for Harris/Walz. So far, a 2-2 tie.

We almost got creamed by a pickup truck. We waited at a light in front of Sushi Fugu. That is a bit ironic as Fugu the pufferfish can kill you if not prepared by an expert chef (read the darkly humorous story "Sorry, Fugu" by T.C. Boyle). I thought about that and watched the couple on the Harley in front of us. I heard something and looked over just in time to see a pickup roar off the bridge, jump the curb, and come right at me. It was a nice truck and it was coming my way at a high rate of speed. Luckily, the truck wheels hit the median next to us and the driver steered by and raced away. 

I remember Chris screaming and the pickup passing a few inches away from my Nissan. I thought, "I can reach out and touch it." Time slowed and the truck took forever to blow by and continue down River Drive. "We were almost killed," Chris yelled. "You were almost killed." I acknowledged this but kept remembering my hand reached for the automatic window lever and I was ready to touch this truck as it flew by, inches away. It was a magical moment and I never felt terror. 

There is something wrong with me.

Police officer: "Son, you were almost killed by an F-250 driving crazy down the bridge. You escaped death by inches."

Me: "I just wanted to reach out and touch it."

They might have sent me to the county hospital's 1400 ward where I worked as an orderly when I attended the local community college in the 1970s. That's where certified insane people go. I could have been DOA at the Ormond Memorial ER. I was both blessed and lucky I could go on my way, cross the bridge to the other side of the river, and drive home.

Chris: "We were almost killed."

Me: "I just wanted to reach out and touch it."

Chris: "You're crazy, dear. I mean that in the nicest way."

Welcome to Florida.

In Flannery O'Connor's Garden of Life, chickens walk backward

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the intersection of writers and gardening. I mentioned that Flannery O'Connor's Andalusia in Milledgeville, Georgia, had gardens and peacocks. Yesterday, as I looked up writers with Savannah ties, I came across the fact that O'Connor was born and mostly raised in Savannah. Her childhood home is now site of a museum and gardens. Now I have two O'Connor-related gardens to visit next time I'm in Georgia. One of the more interesting facts on the museum's web site, was a snippet about a 6-year-old O'Connor and her trained chicken. She trained a chicken to walk backward. This apparently caught the attention of Pathe News Service and they came to Savannah to see for themselves. They filmed O'Connor and her talented chicken and it ended up in a 1931 newsreel that theater patrons would see before the cartoon and double feature. The writer sarcastically noted later that this was quite an event for her and everything that followed was an "anticlimax." The writer died of lupus at 39. Her anticlimax included some fine writing. She's influenced thousands of us with her spare style featuring "grotesques" (her term) of the South. Plenty of humor too. Not sure if any story or novel featured a backward-walking chicken. Who would believe that? The Misfit?

As the hymn says, gonna lay down my sword and shield

A viral plague kills thousands and forces millions to hunker down at home and practice social distancing when out in public.

Black Americans killed on the streets by rampaging police.

Millions of Americans lose jobs due to record unemployment.

The President of the United States hides in the White House guarded by armed troops and a fortified fence.

Riots in the streets.

Armed secret police of unknown origin face down peaceful protesters in the nation's capital.

This could be a blurb for a best-seller or an action-packed new movie.

Instead, they are news headlines.

That was the week that was. The U.S. is in deep do-do. Trump can't be blamed for it all. But he can be blamed for making it much, much worse. He is totally unfit for the highest position in the land. Where other leaders unite, Trump divides.

What makes it worse is that Trump is a lifelong racist and a narcissist. He can't look weak even when he is. He has all the traits of a schoolyard bully.

What does a person like this due when threatened? We've seen it. Brute force. He is the commander-in-chief and thus he commands unlimited power, or so he believes. He wanted to unleash troops on protesters. It's been done in the past but you have to go back the Vietnam War protests to see it in action. It happened but not to the extent we feared. Heads were beaten, rubber bullets fired, tear gas employed, arrests made. But the protesters didn't give up and critics of both political parties and a phalanx of retired U.S. generals condemned Trump's tactics. Protests have calmed down. The rioters have not been identified but you know they were radicals intent on watching the country burn. White supremacists. Anarchists. Black radicals.

The protesters cause is just. Peace prevailed. Many police sided with the protesters. A Tennessee National Guard unit laid down their shields after protesters sang the anthem of nonviolent protest.

I'm gonna lay down my sword and shield
Down by the riverside.

And study war no more...

I have a part to play in this. Not sure yet what it is. But it's clear we need to change the way government employees treat minorities. Not just police. Everyone up and down the chain of command including police and the President. I was a government employee for 25 years. Now retired, I wonder what I could have done better. As many have said, racism is a systemic problem. I am not a racist. But as a white guy, I worked for a system that perpetuated certain racist policies. It was built that way. I may have thought about that briefly during my public service. But how did I transform it to serve everyone's needs?

I was slightly woke but really blind and now I see.

What did I do in the arts that made a difference? And what can I do now?

Stay tuned...

In the spring of 2020, we live in an absurdist novel

People are struggling. They are sick and dying; their businesses are shuttered or they are unemployed, either for the duration or for good. Many are caught in a virus hot zone such as New York City or New Orleans. Health workers battle it out with an invisible enemy every day. Sometimes, the enemy wins.

Sometimes you eat the bear and, sometimes, well, he eats you.

As in The Big Lebowski, the world is, at turns, hilarious and deadly serious. Creative types take to Zoom and Instagram to sing, dance, and read poetry. Poetry, especially, is a balm for hard times. I've been reading a lot of it. It's also a counterweight to the heavy and feckless hand of Trump. Whenever he weighs in, I feel like Atlas with the weight of the celestial heavens on my shoulders. Trump should be like Roosevelt or Churchill, sharing the weight with regular folks and, sometimes, removing it altogether. But he lacks all empathy and compassion and leadership skills.

For now, we're stuck with him. His minions, too, like Turtle-face McConnell and the right-wing wing of the Supreme Court and the knuckleheads with guns who barge into state capitol buildings. All this repulses me. And, as a writer, it fascinates me. I am a big fan of absurdist lit with big themes: Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Good Soldier Schweik, anything by Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove, Candy, etc.), Fran Liebowitz, National Lampoon writers, Lewis Nordan and other writers whom I can't remember right now. As I said, though, I'm reading poetry which is more about feelings and images that ripping off the mask of contemporary society. It's about that, too, but primarily the power of words. So much great poetry is short.

"The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

"The Pool Players: Seven at the Golden Shovel" by Gwendolyn Brooks. 

Sylvia Plath wrote "Poppies in October" on her last birthday following several suicide attempts. Her next attempt would be fatal.

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly – 

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky  

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.  

Oh my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frosts, in a dawn of cornflowers.

Not many of us could write so movingly of deep depression. And we can forgive her for palely and flamily, her turning strong adjectives into pale adverbs. But they work with carbon monoxides and eyes dulled to a halt under bowlers. She wrote this while living in London in the 1950s when men wore bowler hats. It invokes a grey day in London, crowds of faceless men wearing bowler hats.

You could say that these are depressing poems, and you would be right. But life is not a sitcom or a stand-up comedy routine. I take that back -- it is those and a thousand other things. Plath's last stanza echoes what happens to most of us if we live long enough and experience enough horror. Late-blooming poppies that "cry open" amidst the frost while dawn brings beautiful cornflowers.

I leave you with a Dad joke. These are the dumb jokes Dads tell which elicit groans and may be remembered fondly by their kids. The joke, as always, is on us.

Helvetica and Times Roman walk into a bar.
"Get out," shouts the bartender. "We don't serve your type here."

"That's some catch, that Catch 22"

"That's some catch, that Catch-22. 

"It's the best there is."

Those lines stuck in my head in 1969 and never left. I heard them again in the Hulu iteration of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22." It was good to hear those words said aloud on a big smart TV. It acknowledges the elegance of the term, its evil logic. Yossarian would be crazy to fly the increasing number of combat missions. To get out of them, all he has to do is ask. By asking, he shows that he is sane and thus must fly more missions.

Fifty years ago, we could easily see the parallel for our times. Yossarian would have to be crazy to go to Vietnam and fight strangers. All he has to do to get out of it is ask. By asking, he shows that he is sane enough to go. It was a bind many of us found ourselves in.

Yossarian summed it up his self-centered beliefs during a talk with Clevinger who would soon disappear into a cloud. "The enemy is anyone who's gonna get you killed, no matter which side he's on."

We knew the people trying to get us killed in 1969. Johnson/Nixon/Westmoreland/Selective Service System. Also, our family and neighbors and teachers and all the people who were solidly behind the war. Fast-forward to this generation's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and its architects -- George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld -- and you can see through recent history what Heller was getting at.

In the Hulu version, by executive producers George Clooney and Grant Heslov, Yossarian is a wide-eyed antihero and a self-centered jerk. His acts of self-preservation hurts others. He whines and complains. He retreats to the hospital. As the scenes add up, it becomes increasingly clear that he is correct in his assumption that everyone is trying to get him killed. Still, he goes on his bombing missions, eager to drop his bombs so the planes can escape the flak field and he has one less mission to fly. The horrors multiply until Yossarian reveals Snowden's secret in the back of the B-25 (one of the book's proposed titles was "Snowden's Secret").

The most telling scene thus far comes at the end of the second segment, when Yossarian reaches out of the bombardier's window in mid-air and tries to erase a spot of blood. During the previous mission, the plane next to his is hit by flak. The plane's bombardier, his body streaked with blood, slides across the glass on his way to his doom. He leaves behind a bloody trail and we see the look of horror on Yossarian's face. On the next mission, some of the blood remains and Yossarian attempts to scrub it off, as if he could banish all of the blood that he has seen and will see. The music accompaniment: is Benny Goodman's "Goodbye," which can't be meant irony-free.

I finished watching the series late one night. That seemed somehow appropriate. There were plenty of laughs, many absurdities. The final scenes are eerie as Yossarian confronts the secret they all share and the blood of the innocents causes him to ditch his bloody uniform for the duration. Catch-22 loyalists may not like the last scene. It's not as hopeful as the one Yossarian chooses in the book. He revels in Orr's survival and his escape from the war. He contends to duplicate it or die in the attempt.

The Hulu series does not give Yossarian an out. The look on his face after yet another bombing run says it all.

Clooney and Heslov made other changes to the narrative. They work, for the most part. I missed Chief White Halfoat and Dunbar. Major ____ deCoverly gets very little to do. In the beginning, I thought it seemed a bit dated, maybe because we have been through so many absurdities (and absurdist fiction) since World War II spawned the book. And now, Trump, a true Scheisskopf, claims our attention.

Maybe it's not so dated after all.

It just doesn't end. There are so many enemies, those who want to kill us for nebulous reasons. Norman Mailer, another World War II combat veteran, said that Heller takes "his reader on a more consistent voyage through Hell than any American writer before him." That may be the biggest secret of all. Life is a trip through hell. Our assignment, should we choose to accept, is to make it heaven without losing our souls. At 18, "Catch-22" gave me an inkling of the challenges ahead of me. At 68, I see the road I traveled, how many choices I had to make along the way. I suppose that's the gift and curse of aging. Sometimes we get a little gift, such as the resurrection of a beloved book, to ease the journey.

The most thoughtful article on Hulu's "Catch 22" was by Jeffrey Fleishman in the L.A. Times, "Why Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22' is a relevant antiwar satire in the age of Trump." You have to get by the firewall, but read it at https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-et-st-catch-22-novel-hulu-20190515-story.html

In finding fault with Heller's depictions of female characters, he refers to Susan Straight, the writer who teaches a fiction class on love and war at UC Riverside. She lambastes Heller's treatment of women, especially the nurses. Most serve as just sex objects, an oversight that the producers try to remedy in this adaptation.

The following paragraph wraps up the article. To me, it sums up the real byproducts of war -- the damage done to the men who fight them, and the damage they do to the people who love them.

Straight’s memoir “In the Country of Women,” which will be published later this year, reflects in part on women in her family who endured their own private battles. “I’m writing about the women who fled all the men who had been in war,” she says. “My ancestors survived the men who survived the cannons and they were terrible men.”

Of course, you don't have to go to war to be a terrible man. Draft-dodger Trump is proof of that. But in "Catch-22," we see the bullet and the damage done.

"Lincoln in the Bardo" explores the gap between tragedy and comedy

George Saunders' novel "Lincoln in the Bardo" is eerie and hilarious. The novel is written by an experienced short story writer and is structured as a series of scenes set in the cemetery where Abraham Lincoln visits the resting place of his 11-year-old son, Willie. Saunders has constructed an excellent novel from snatches of dialogue from dead people and swatches from books about he Civil War era in Washington, D.C. You can be excused for getting lost amidst the first few pages and wondering where the book was going. I did. But I persevered, as you sometimes have to do with a challenging literary work.

At the core of the story is a man mourning the untimely death of his son. How do you cope with such a loss? You could write a book about Lincoln's monumental depression. We have seen public figures deal with the death of their offspring. Joe Biden publicly mourned the death of his son Beau and Beau was a seasoned adult and war veteran. But mourning a young son or daughter is a special kind of hell, one that doesn't require a belief in the actual Hell of the Bible or religious iconography or even Dante. It's a hell on earth.

First, what is a bardo? From Merriam-Webster Online:

The intermediate or astral state of the soul after death and before rebirth.

As is true with all online research, you can use this dictionary definition as a launching pad into a universe of references. Bardo is a Tibetan term that's found in the Bardo Todol in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Bardo Todol is translated as "Liberation in the Intermediate State Through Hearing."

Here's a quote from a Lion's Roar piece from April 2017:

More generally, the word bardo refers to the gap or space we experience between any two states. The lesser-known bardos described in the traditional texts include the bardo of dreaming, the bardo of meditating, and even the bardo of this life—which is, after all, the intermediate state between birth and death. 

A bardo can even be seen as the pause between one thought and another. I experience bardos on a daily basis but didn't realize it.  Once you know that, the shades that inhabit the cemetery where Willie Lincoln is buried take on a new dimension. They are not ghosts, really, or those dead people with unfinished business who haunt old hotels and abandoned mental asylums. You know, the ones who get the attention of the guys on TV's "Ghost Adventures." These souls in the bardo make up a compelling cast of characters who comment on Willie's funeral and Lincoln's nighttime foray to his son's final resting place. The two main narrators are printer Hans Vollman and Roger Blevins III, an eternally young man with some secrets.

In the reader's guide that follows the novel (Random House trade paperback), Saunders describes the core question in the novel this way: "How do we continue to love in a world in which the objects of our love are so conditional?"

Heartbreak is at the heart off "Lincoln in the Bardo." Lincoln is so heartbroken by Willie's death that he can barely go on, that he forgets he has another young son at home in a sickbed. Some of the most amazing lines in the book happen when each of the spirits admits he/she is dead and transforms into the next life. As they depart, onlookers get a glimpse into their lives before death and the lives they could have led had they lived to a normal life span. I was reminded of the graveyard scenes in "Our Town," when the dead comment on the fragility -- and ignorance -- of the living. Life is a mystery and a tragedy. Heartbreak is our destiny. The ones we love leave us and we are challenged to keep going in this sphere. Lincoln lost a son, lived with an off-kilter wife, and had a war to run. We often hear of "Lincoln the Emancipator" and "Lincoln the Rail-Splitter." The mythic Lincoln. In recent years, we have heard more about the Lincoln with crippling depression. I can hear R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe wailing "Everybody Hurts" as Lincoln makes his way home from the cemetery.

One note about Saunders as short story writer: I hadn't read a Saunders story in awhile. Not sure why. I picked up a 2016 Random House paperback reissue of "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" at my local bookstore. I read the title story and beheld intimations of what would appear in "Bardo." We meet the "ghostly McKinnon family" who occupied the CivilWarLand site back during the Civil War. They met a bad end at the hands of Mr. McKinnon, who was never the same after the Battle of Antietam. The daughter, Maribeth, is "a homely sincere girl who glides around moaning and pining and reading bad poetry chapbooks. Whenever we keep the Park open late for high-school parties, she's in her glory." Maribeth is more real than the narrator's two bratty sons. Saunders makes the real absurd and the absurd real. As Joshua Ferris notes in the intro, it's the latter skill "is a much harder trick to pull off" but it moves Saunders from the pigeonhole of satirist and "into the open air of the first-rate artist."

In "Lincoln in the Bardo," Saunders skill as a writer helps us see that the human tragedy is also the human comedy. Maybe that's a bardo, too, the gap between tragedy and comedy.

Drama nerds and debaters seize the day after Florida school shooting

It seems that arts education can be a wonderful asset in standing up to bullies.

That was on display last week at the CNN town hall meeting on gun violence. Young people from Margory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., schooled Sen. Marco Rubio and an NRA flack on just about everything. No surprise that the students had honed their skills by participating in the school's drama club and speech and debate programs.

Memorizing lines and defending your views in front of a crowd can give you the confidence to take on a U.S. senator and the NRA. I encourage these students to continue the fight. Their #NeverAgain movement is sponsoring March for Our Lives march on Washington on March 24. Allied marches will be help around the world. Some are being planned for Wyoming. I will keep you posted on these pages. Several high-rolling liberals have donated to the cause. The rest of us can donate by going to https://www.gofundme.com/8psm8-march-for-our-lives . As of noon Sunday, the campaign has raised $2.5 million of the $2.8 million goal.

Further reading on the topic:

Emily Witt wrote this Feb. 19 New Yorker piece on how three drama club nerds sparked the #NeverAgain movement: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-the-survivors-of-parkland-began-the-never-again-movement

New Yorker article on Feb. 23 about high school protester Cameron Kasky and his "Spring Awakening" at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-spring-awakening-of-the-stoneman-douglas-theatre-kids

The high school's drama club wrote and performed an original song for the CNN-sponsored town hall session Feb. 21. Get more here: http://womenyoushouldknow.net/marjory-stoneman-douglas-powerful-shine-song/

Here are some of the song's lyrics:

But you're not gonna knock us down
We'll get back up again

Never fear -- the world will never run out of material for fiction writers

I read Adam Johnson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about North Korea last spring. "The Orphan Master's Son" is a humorous and harrowing look inside a country that most of us know through occasional TV clips that show the ridiculous-looking Kim Jong Un viewing a military parade or inspecting a missile site. The West lampoons him often, yet he still holds an iron grip over his citizens. Dennis Rodman visits occasionally, as The Great Dictator is a roundball fan. North Korea is is a great example of what an authoritarian regime can do once its power is institutionalized.

The latest stunt by North Korea is horrific. The country returned a comatose Otto Warmbier to the U.S. a week ago. Warmbier spent 18 months in a North Korea prison for stealing a propaganda poster from a wall. He supposedly wanted a souvenir. What he got was torture. U.S. officials tried to get him released but North Korea just relented when Warmbier was on his deathbed. An Ohio coroner has decided to investigate the case.

I saw a photo of his parents online. The looks on their stricken faces said it all. This wasn't supposed to happen... That could be and my wife standing there. We've experienced those 3 a.m. phone calls. None involved capture and torture and eventual death. But we know the look. The life of our child wasn't supposed to be like this... Will someone please explain this to us...

We are left with what could be the plot of a novel. A young American student gets more than he bargained for during a trip to N.K. He dies under mysterious circumstances. Trump bloviates. Kim Jong Un goes into hiding, fearing a decapitation attack by the U.S. and South Korea assassins. Could be fiction but it's not. It throws Johnson's novel into relief. Absurd and awful things happen to its North Korean protagonist, who has an orphan name but is not really an orphan.

What is fiction and what is fact?  We now have a billionaire reality TV star for president. He tweets nonsensical statements. Republican congressional reps draft major legislation in secret -- and lie about it. They are afraid to hold public meetings in their districts because people keep yelling at them. Our attorney general wants to recriminalize marijuana and return to those golden days of yesteryear when men were men, women were in the kitchen and everyone was afraid of  colored people. The Trumpists work hard to erase any record of our black president's eight years in office.

The world is so confusing. It can be a brutal place for a 22-year-old college student who takes one wrong step.

This makes it a fantastic place to be a writer.

How else can we make sense of it?

Republicans are aghast that anger rages in America

Republicans are aghast that someone would be so angry as to take a shot at Congressional reps practicing for a baseball game in Alexandria, Virginia.

I am aghast that they would be aghast at this turn of events.

Republicans and their Fox News mouthpiece have been stoking American anger for decades.  This led to the simmering stew of hatred that begat Trump.

A Republican rep says that America is "fraying around the edges" earlier this week on CBS This Morning. And who is responsible for that turn of events? A Bernie Sanders fan who was a little frayed around the edges, frayed enough to go shoot up a baseball field? He was angry. Many are angry. And they have guns.

What do these Republicans expect? They stoked grassroots anger for eight years during the Obama administration. And the recipients of this barrage of hate were not all Republicans. A fair number of Democrats and Independents watch Fox, listen to Rush Limbaugh, and voted for Trump.

So who's to blame? All of us. For inciting hatred and letting it slide -- or stoking it with snark. For not countering hatred with love and tolerance. For not doing something to make the world a better place.

I am as guilty as you are. I have been poking fun at conservatives online since 2005. For eight years, I assumed that we were a civilized nation with a minority of ignorant, regressive haters. I was smug. I made fun of those Obama haters who carried misspelled signs to Tea Party rallies. I even invented a character called Tea Party Slim, whom I imbued with the many TP utterings I heard at rallies and on the Internet.

All of that only stoked more hatred and resentment. Our leader, Barack Obama, provided an example for us to look up to. Meanwhile, he did little or nothing to stem the tide of resentment. Obama didn't fight hard enough for the America we wanted. Neither did I.

It's game on now. The enemy is obvious. Our government is trying to kill us and our planet. For the second time in my 66 years, I know who to fight. During Vietnam, my government wanted to kill all of its young men in pursuit of a rotten Cold War policy in Vietnam. Our government would rather kill its sons than admit it was wrong. That's why the trauma of Vietnam will never end. Let's hope Ken Burns informs us of the real reasons behind Vietnam this fall on PBS. I am not optimistic.

Now our government wants to maximize riches and marginalize the rest of us. We are on our way to be serfs, a return to the Dark Ages of Europe. Ironically, Europe is experiencing a golden age.

Response is to #Resist with the tools we have. We have wit and grit. #Resist on your own and with like-minded people. Marginalize those who urge violence. Many of those people are not our friends and may be insurgents in our midst. Now that an apparent anti-Trump person shot up a baseball field and some Republican reps, look for law enforcement to plant operatives in #Resist groups. It may have happened already. This sounds paranoid. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't following you. Read some of the first-hand account of the antiwar and Civil Rights movements. They often were the targets of COINTELPRO units of the FBI. They were provocateurs who knew that to turn a protest violent invited a violent response from the police. No better way to discredit dirty hippies than to show them getting beat up by the police. The 1968 Police Riot in Chicago was caused by those dirty hippies (and Yippies) that were getting bloodied by Mayor Daley's Finest. At least that's how Middle America saw it and turned to Tricky Dick and Kissinger for a solution for Vietnam.

You saw how that worked out.

Angry Americans have now turned to a spoiled rich boy who gets his way because the Republicans in Congress have fallen into lockstep behind him. Shame on them. Shame on us for letting it happen.

#Resist

Aurora connections bring tragedy closer to home

My 19-year-old daughter was at the midnight showing in Cheyenne of "The Dark Knight Rises" on Thursday night. When I awoke Friday morning, I had no idea about the shootings in Aurora. I skipped the news and watched the Weather Channel to see how hot it was going to get in Cheyenne. Very hot, as it turns out in this normally temperate place. It wasn't until I got to work and fired up the computer that I understood the scope of the tragedy. Sick at heart -- that would be a good way to describe it. I was sad for my home state of Colorado, site of so much tragedy with this summer's fires. I was sad for Aurora, too, the now-huge Denver suburb that was the site of my parents' first house, one that was a block away from the old Fitzsimons Army Medical Center where, as fate would have it, was the place where my paternal grandparents met after World War I. He was a soldier recuperating from gas attacks and she was a nurse. Fitzsimons closed in 1999 and that now houses the sprawling hospital campus where many of the shooting wounded were taken. When we moved from Florida to Denver 30-plus years ago, my wife and I lived in an apartment in Aurora. It all hits close to home. But you don't have to have any connection to Colorado at all to be affected by this. Any of us could have been in that movie theater. One of the wounded was on a cross-country jaunt and decided, on a whim, to go to a movie Thursday night. A young female sports reporter had to talk her boyfriend into going to the film in Aurora that night. She didn't make it. While I can only imagine the loss that her family feels, I have enough empathy to do so. It is a tragedy and our prayers are with you all.

"Good Night, Ryan:" Yet another Iraq veteran dies by his own hand

The film that accompanies Nicholas D. Kristof's New York Times story makes me incredibly sad -- and pisses me off. Why isn't more being done to take care of these young people that we send to war?

THERE’S a window into a tragedy within the American military: For every soldier killed on the battlefield this year, about 25 veterans are dying by their own hands.  

An American soldier dies every day and a half, on average, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Veterans kill themselves at a rate of one every 80 minutes. More than 6,500 veteran suicides are logged every year — more than the total number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq combined since those wars began.

For everything (even 9/11) there is a season

As always, the arts were front and center during this morning’s televised tenth anniversary of trying to make sense of 9/11.

Performances by choirs and singer/songwriters and classical musicians punctuated the reading of the names at the Twin Towers memorial. Each of the politicians who spoke referenced a poem or a Biblical verse, which is another type of poetry. You might even say that the reading of the names is a very long epic poem. The readers themselves ended their recitations by remembering their loved one who died on 9/11. A short personal haiku amidst the epic poem.

Former NYC Mayor Rudy Guiliani read the verse from Ecclesiastes that was put to song (“Turn, Turn, Turn”) by anti-war and environmental activist Pete Seeger in 1959 and made famous among non-Bible readers in 1965 by rock-era legends The Byrds.

Ecclesiates 3 1-8

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

This only seems to emphasize the fact that, while poems and music and Biblical verses bring some comfort and understanding to tragedy, they don't seem to make grief any easier to bear. Sometimes they bring up issues that still desperately need to be faced.

After Giuliani’s speech, Paul Simon sang "The Sound of Silence" accompanied only by his guitar. Simon began composing the song after the Kennedy assassination. It became one of the standards of Simon & Garfunkel performances and nearly every young person alive in the sixties knew the words. This morning, Simon’s words and guitar chords echoed eerily off of the big buildings still under construction. His words argue that “silence like a cancer grows” and many prophetic warnings are gobbled up by the sounds of silence. Sounds a little bit like what we’ve seen the past 10 years in the U.S. The silence, however, is really the sounds of millions of screaming voices blaring out of the Tower of Babel worlds of the Internet and Cable TV.

The famous hymn “Amazing Grace” was performed by flautist Emi Ferguson. “Amazing Grace” was co-written by repentant slave ship sailor John Newton and renowned British poet William Cowper. It’s now performed often on bagpipes, notably at the funerals of fire fighters and soldiers. I heard many pipe band renditions of this standard over the weekend at the Scottish Irish Highland Festival in Estes Park.

It’s no namby-pamby verse. The author is crying out in anguish, thanking God’s “amazing grace” for saving “a wretch like me.” This takes humility. This takes courage. Something that we saw plenty of in those who gave their lives for others on 9/11/01.

Wyoming's UPLIFT displays the better side of human nature

It was a week marked by savagery and bravery.

A disturbed young man shoots 18 people in front of a Tucson grocery store. Six of them die, the rest wounded, one -- Rep. Giffords -- critically.

Amidst the slaughter, people rushed to save the wounded and subdue the attacker. You're heard the stories, if not from Cable news than from Pres. Obama's eloquent speech at Wednesday's memorial.

What causes some people to run away from chaos and others to run toward it? I've been asking myself that question all week. Daniel Hernandez ran toward the gunfire and tended to his boss's wounds. He didn't leave her side until the ambulance got her to the hospital. When he spoke Wednesday, we saw a self-confident and self-effacing 20-year-old college student. He's devoted himself to a life of public service. We saw that commitment to both the "public" and "service" parts of the equation this week.

When challenged, we will sacrifice our own lives to help our fellow humans. This is the good side of our nature, the empathetic and charitable side. Researchers announced recently that there is a part of us -- the "altruism gene" -- that promotes charitable instincts. We also know that there are parts of us that respond to the venal and violent.

In the end, which wins out? Physiology is only part of it. Family upbringing makes a difference, as do other role models. Intelligence and education do to too, although we know that many sins have been committed by "the best and brightest." Religion can play a part. Again, many slaughters have been committed by the righteous.

I was thinking of this yesterday during the quarterly board meeting of UPLIFT in Cheyenne. We are a volunteer board of 14 members. We just welcomed a new one, LaWahna Stickney, from Thayne. We now are a truly statewide board, with members from Cheyenne, Laramie, Casper and Thayne. Most of us became involved in children's mental health and behavioral issues because our own children were struggling. Teachers complained that our kids were unruly and defiant. Other parents complained when our children got aggressive on the playground. We were at wit's end at home because we could not understand why our little darlings were such monsters. Weren't we kind and generous and educated human beings?

We were stymied when we attempted to find help in the community. We were either told outright -- or it was implied -- that we were bad parents with bad kids. We knew that wasn't true. By the time our son, Kevin, was five, we'd seen practically every specialist along Colorado's Front Range. We finally found a psychiatrist in Fort Collins, Dr. James Kagan, who diagnosed Kevin with ADHD and helped put us on the right road. That involved medication in the form of Ritalin. Therapy, too. But we still had this weird sense that we were all alone in this, that it was our struggle to bear and understand.

Finding UPLIFT when we moved to Cheyenne gave us some handy tools, especially when it came to dealing with schools. We also found similar struggles among its staff and board. We discovered helpful ways to deal with schools. It was cathartic to share our stories and hear those of others.

Here's UPLIFT's mission statement:

Encouraging success and stability for children and youth with or at risk of emotional, behavioral, learning, developmental, or physical disorders at home, school, and in the community.

UPLIFT just marked its 20th anniversary of service to Wyoming. At yesterday's board meeting, we heard details of our recent financial setbacks. UPLIFT is an organization that gets 97 percent of its funding from governmental (mostly federal) sources. Sometimes you get turned down for grants, and sometimes funding streams dry up. Strings are attached to most government funding. So, while your organization has a significant budget, you may not have enough money to pay for the basics, such as salaries, electricity and a office space. It's a truism in the world of non-profits -- keeping the lights on is the biggest challenge.

UPLIFT had to cut the administration budget. That includes salaries and benefits, including health insurance. Two employees left because that health insurance was crucial to them -- many employees have kids with special needs. One employee moved out of state. The ones that remained not only stayed and worked with their clients around this very rural state, but they even stopped claiming travel reimbursements. Some employees even made cash contributions. That's something, isn't it? Salaries and benefits get cut, yet you still find the means to put some cash in the kitty.

They know that this is a short-term problem. They also know that the cuts bring pain to their boss, Peggy Nikkel. They are certain of the good work they do and don't want it to stop or interrupted. Most of their time is spent working with families. They accompany parents to school meetings, helping them make sense of the requirements with the Americans with Disabilities Act and Individualized Education Programs. At these meetings, the principal and school psychologist and half the teachers are arrayed against you. We have had several of UPLIFT's family support specialists (Judy Bredthauer, for one) at these meetings and it made a huge difference. They are cool and calm and knowledgeable. They can get tough when presented with intransigence. But the main thing is that schools now know that UPLIFT can be trusted. Oftentimes, they welcome the participation of UPLIFT staffers.

As I've recounted often on these pages, Wyoming is a huge, rural state with many challenges when it comes to children's mental health.

UPLIFT, an affiliate of the Federation of Families for Children's Mental Health, fills a huge gap. Its staffers don't provide clinical services, but they are the great connectors between families and those services. They can translate government regulations. For cash-strapped families, they find funding. They make sense of the great big world of mental health.

They are on a mission. Maybe, as were the Blues Brothers, they are on a mission from God. Whatever their motivations, they come from the better side of human nature.

By the way, if you want to stimulate your own better natures, you can donate to UPLIFT by going here.

Looking for help, call toll free 888-875-4383.

Big weather pounds high plains -- big hailstone travels to Boulder

Sean R. Heavey/For The Billings Gazette

From the Billings Gazette: Sean Heavey of Glasgow tracked a storm that hit Valley County and Phillips County on Wednesday evening. A pickup truck pulling a trailer drives in the storm on Highway 2 between Hinsdale and Glasgow at about 8 p.m. Wednesday. Victor Proton, lead forecaster for the National Weather Service office in Glasgow, said reports indicated the tornado touched down for a brief time near Hinsdale at about 7:30 p.m.
 

Twenty-five tornadoes have been reported in Montana so far this year. That compares to seven last year. An EF3 tornado that hit Reserve on Monday killed two people and injured several others. Another big storm in Vivian, S.D., spawned hail the size of cantaloupe. One of those hailstones was 11 inches in diameter and may be the largest ever recovered. It was transported to the National Weather Service office in Cheyenne last week. On Friday, it was shipped off to NOAA in Boulder.

 

There's some bad news: When the NWS measured the hailstone, it had shrunk to only eight inches in diameter. This may endanger its chance for a weather record. 

 

At first, I thought the impressive chunk of ice was coming to town for Cheyenne Frontier Days. I would like to see a huge hailstone. Others would too. The CFD committee should have found a place in the parade for it. "Record-setting hailstone from Vivian, S.D. See it before it melts!" The stone, of course, would have to be transported in a refrigerated plexiglass case. Probably impractical. Hail is transitory, as are the storms that birth them.

High plains storms are bitchin' to watch from a distance but hell when they strike your community. On Sunday, Cheyenne marks the 25th anniversary of its deadly 1985 flood. Twelve people were killed, including the mayor's daughter.


Here's how the NWS describes it on its site "Historic flood events in the Missouri River Basin:"

By late afternoon on August 1, 1985, a stationary thunderstorm developed over Cheyenne, Wyoming, producing record amounts of rainfall. In approximately a 3-hour time span, six plus inches of rainfall occurred. The storm produced at least one tornado, heavy rains, and hail. In some parts of town, hail piled up to depths of 4-6 feet. The severe flooding resulted in 12 deaths, 70 people were injured, and total damages exceeded $61 million.

Strangely enough, another historic flash flood happened on the same day nine years earlier just 60 miles south of Cheyenne. It was the Big Thompson Canyon Flood that killed 135 people.

It takes a talented photographer to capture one of these summer storms (see above). For another impressive shot, go to www.billingsgazette.com

Depressed? Get over it, cowboy!

Wyoming teens still engage in risky behavior.

That’s not really news for teens living anywhere or at any time. I must admit that I engaged in some risky behaviors as a lad. Lived to tell the tale and to lament the fact that we don’t seem to be making any progress on this front.

In its Kids Count report, the Annie E. Casey Foundation says this:

Wyoming’s death rate among people 15 to 19 years old, based on accidents, suicides, homicides and other causes, was 86 per 100,000. Only seven other states had a higher rate.

In 2000, Wyoming’s teen death rate was 81 per 100,000.

For our teens, things are getting worse, not better.

And this happening during boom times, a time of budget surpluses and increases in state spending on education and, to a certain extent, health care. This includes boosts in funding for mental health care, too.

So, if throwing money at a problem fixes it, we should all have happy and productive and living teens.

Some of us do not. In 2008, six percent of the state’s teens were not attending school and had not graduated from high school. That’s better than 2000 when that figure was 10 percent. Teen pregnancy is up. Fifty-one births were recorded in 2007 for every 1,000 females 15-19 years old. That was 42 per 1,000 in 2000.

Lots of bad news sprinkled with some good news.

These are more than boring stats for those of us with teen children. Our 17-year-old daughter Annie has engaged in some risky behavior. I’m sure that Chris and I know only some of it. The war on drugs has failed us and our country. Teens seem to get booze any time they want. Annie seems to know more high school drop-outs than kids still in school. There’s a batch of homeless teens in Cheyenne who roam from one friend’s house to another and occasionally sleep under bridges. One only has to wander through the mall to see our town’s array of teen mothers.

One could write a book on this subject, but someone else will have to do that. I just want to explore one factor that underlies all of these problems.

Wyoming.

A conservative state with a frontier mentality. If you live here, you get to enjoy some incredible scenery and outdoor activities. Peace and quiet and low crime rates. In exchange, you will be underpaid and have access to second-rate health care and third-rate amenities in the arts and culture. Mental health care is almost nonexistent. This is a state without a single child psychiatrist and only one drug and alcohol treatment center for teens. The reigning attitude is that you can tough it out, no matter what the “it” is? Drunk? Quit drinking. Depressed? Get over it, boy, and get to work. Suicidal? If you want to shoot yourself, please do it outside.

This is all tied in with the rugged individualism that made Wyoming great. That’s the myth, anyway. Our State Legislature actually spent time during the past session on an official code based on some pretend cowboy past. I blogged about during the session (http://hummingbirdminds.blogspot.com/2010/02/wyomings-new-code-of-west.html) and last spring http://hummingbirdminds.blogspot.com/2010/04/uw-panel-discusses-wyomings-new-code-of.html.

The Legislature is representative of Wyoming in that it is overwhelmingly Republican and more conservative that most of the Wyomingites I know. It has many more members from the ranching and agricultural fields than is represented in the population as a whole. The part-time Wyoming House and Senate should be made up of mainly of those from the extractive industries, tourism and government – local, state and federal. A columnist once postulated that if Wyoming had a logo that better represented its population, it would replace the bucking horse with a bureaucrat carrying a briefcase. Just imagine that image on state letterhead.

We hate gubment. We are the gubment. Wyomingites get more back in funding from Uncle Sam then they pay in taxes.

We hate gubment.

Back to our teenagers. We have some fine teens in this town. Smart, energetic, talented. In a few years, they’ll be of to college and exciting careers in places other than Wyoming. Some will had for the military, and still others for the oil patch.

Many others will be left behind. Pregnant at 16, or working fast-food jobs while something better opens up. Others will die while driving drunk.

And we’ll sit back, watch the unfolding chaos, and ponder the wonders of the Cowboy Code.

No clear-cut answers left behind after suicides in WY & WI & CA

My wife Chris and I attended a funeral yesterday for Charles, one of my son's best friends from high school. I will use just his first name, out of respect to his family which I barely know. Charles hanged himself at home. He was 24.

Charles and my son Kevin were both hyperkids -- impulsive kids diagnosed at a young age with ADHD. Often in trouble at school -- when they went. They spent many days skateboarding and riding bikes and playing video games. They also drank and used drugs.

We ferried Kevin to a treatment center in Florida when he was 17. He was there for a year and came home clean and sober and has remained so. He lives in Tucson.

Charles took the rocky road. He was in jail for a time but worked his way out with the help of a transition program. Met a girl. Married. They had a baby girl a few months ago.

Things seemed to be looking up for Charles.

The day before Thanksgiving, Charles hanged himself at home. Yesterday was the very sad funeral. Always is when a young person leaves us in this way.

Last March, James Weigl, an Army veteran of Iraq, hanged himself in his garage in Cedarburg, Wisc. He was 25, not much older than Charles. He's one of 129 soldiers and marines who committed suicide during the first half of 2009.

Meg Kissinger wrote an incredible story for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel about Sgt. Weigl's life and death. His parents are outraged at the Army that their son didn't get the mental health care he needed. Some say that Weigl shouldn't have been in the service, that he had two medical conditions that should have made him ineligible. One of those was a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

I'll leave it up to you to read this sad story. Getting to the bottom of events like this is what real newspaper reporters do well. We'll miss them when they're gone. Read the article at http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/70721137.html

Is this weren't enough, NPR this morning featured a pair of stories about teen suicides in California. During the past six months, four Palo Alto teens have killed themslves by jumping in front of trains.

From Palo Alto Online:

Between 20 percent and 23 percent of deaths ruled suicides in Santa Clara County in the past two years were individuals under 30 years old, according to the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner's Office. In both 2007 and 2008, the county had 31 suicides of people under 30. The coroner did not provide city-by-city breakdowns.

Philippe Rey, a psychotherapist and executive director of Adolescent Counseling Service, said Palo Alto's teen suicide rate is in line with national statistics.

That's discouraging. Fifteen suicides a year by young people in a mid-sized city is "in line with national statistics."

Those 129 soldiers and marines who committed suicide in the first six months of 2009 must be "in line with national statistics."

And here are some stats about teen suicides in Wyoming (a bit dated, but still relevant):

Mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spanning the five-year period from 2001-2005 show that suicide rates for Wyoming teens ages 15-19 are more than twice as high as national rates for this same population (WY rate of 17.48 per 100,000 deaths versus U.S. rate of 7.70 per 100,000 deaths). An alarming one in six Wyoming high-school students reported making suicidal plans within the previous year according to the 2007 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, representing a 13 percent increase over 2005 data.

It appears that Wyoming's teen suicide numbers ARE NOT "in line with national statistics."

They're much worse.

Welcome to "Vietnam with sand"

For an on-the-ground look into the U.S. "surge" in Iraq, read Nir Rosen's "The Myth of the Surge" in the newest issue of Rolling Stone. Rosen speaks Arabic, so he gets to hear exactly what Iraqis are saying to each other. This is a great advantage as almost no American soldier speaks the language. Their homegrown translators often have their own axes to grind. This makes a baffling situation even more confusing. "Vietnam with sand," is how an Air Force veteran of Iraq Wars I & II described it to me last week, adding that a fifth airman at Warren AFB had had just been killed in Iraq.

Read it and weep at http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18722376/the_myth_of_the_surge

Thanks to my old college chum Bob Page of Independence, Mo., for tipping me off to the story.

In a crisis, words are crucial

Last week, poetry and prose were sources of healing at Virginia Tech. Nikki Giovanni, Lucinda Roy, Edward Falco – these writers in the school’s creative writing program brought a healthy dose of reality (and comfort) to endless numbing hours of TV babble and cliche. The shooter was an English major who took writing classes. That brought the media stampede to the gates of the Ivory Tower. Instead of finding a gaggle of monk-like scribes hunched over their writing tables (or PCs), we saw a feisty group of real people who care deeply about their students, their school, their world.

Nikki Giovanni read poetry at the campus convocation following the shootings. Her We are Virginia Tech was a rousing anthem of a poem, one that drew equal doses of tears and cheers. I saw her interviewed on TV several times. A gracious, beautiful, tough human being. She had been disturbed by Mr. Cho’s attitude and his writing. She had complained to the administration, finally demanding that either Mr. Cho goes or she goes.

I also saw Paula Zahn of CNN interview Lucinda Roy. Cho’s writing had disturbed her so much that she reported him to the administration. Zahn asked Roy if the university did enough to address Cho’s problems. Roy said she wasn’t interested in causing more pain at Va. Tech by assigning blame. Zahn told Roy that she didn’t answer her question. Roy told her, very graciously, to go ask someone who wasn’t grieving so much. In other words: Go jump in the lake, you cold-hearted ditz!

Ed Falco wrote an e-mail to his students in which he comforted and advised them. Falco is a pioneer in hypertext writing and e-books. I saw him speak at the University of Wyoming in fall 2005. First and foremost a writer, he’s enjoyed experimenting online with the interplay of text, music, photos, and video. While he said that "in the future...we’ll be doing our reading on screens," he also acknowledged abandoning the world of hypertext to return to print.

"I was spending a lot of time alone in dark rooms with a computer," he said during his UW visit. "That seems unhealthy."

Obviously Prof. Falco’s sense of empathy didn’t disappear into cyberspace. Cho was his student in a script-writing class. After the shootings, he wrote this to his students:

"Cho's behavior was disturbing to all of us -- and the English Department tried, with the best of intentions, to both get him help and to make the appropriate authorities aware of his disturbing behavior. We did all that we thought it was reasonable to do.

"There was violence in Cho's writing -- but there is a huge difference between writing about violence and behaving violently. We could not have known what he would do. We treated him like a fellow student, which is what he was. I believe the English Department behaved responsibly in response to him. And please hear me when I say this: it was our responsibility, not yours. All you could have done was come to me, or some other administration or faculty member, with your concerns -- and you would have been told that we were aware of Seung Cho, we were concerned about him, and we were doing what we believed was appropriate.

"Look, all our hearts are broken. There's no need to add to the pain with guilt."

Sure, some of this could be seen as self-serving. Maybe the professors and the English Department and the VT administration did not do enough. Zahn did ask Roy a great question: "How did Cho get to be a senior?" The faculty reported him in 2005. Two years passed and he was about to graduate this May. It doesn’t take a writer to look at that and say: "What’s the story inside the story?"

Still, I look at the writing faculty at Va. Tech and see people that I could trust in a crisis. The university president, in his convocation speech, said that words were inadequate at times like these. I disagree. Words are crucial, as demonstrated last week by Giovanni, Roy, and Falco.

No one deserves a tragedy

This week in Sojourners, Jim Wallis talked about the Virginia Tech shootings in his "Hearts & Minds" column. The headline, "No one deserves a tragedy," is a line from Va Tech professor and poet Nikki Giovanni and her speech at the memorial convocation on Tuesday. She said:

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning. ... We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.