Humans tend to be discriminatory in terms of gender, age, race and appearance, which includes physical stature. We belong to a very superficial, looksist society, I’m sorry to say. This is another way in which we differ from the animal kingdom. As far as I know, animals don’t have any appearance prejudice towards their fellow creatures or humans, and we don’t judge them like we do each other. But even if they do, they can’t do anything about it. Since animals can’t help the way they look, we accept them just as they are, but we are not so lenient with our own human counterparts. If we don’t like the way we look, we have ways and means to change it.

Everybody seems to be regarded and treated according to their outward appearance. And of course, objectively speaking, beauty always predominates over unattractiveness.  Good-looking people get special breaks and privileges in life just because they are good-looking, as if one’s looks determine their character and abilities.  “Mr. Smith, your wife is very beautiful.” “Yeah, it’s too bad that she is an empty-headed, no-talent, domineering, ball-breaking harpy, though.”  Woman (and men too, in some cases) who never have been told that they are beautiful might go through life with very low self-esteem and a sense of worthlessness.  It seems that perceived beauty is the hallmark of human acceptance.  If one is regarded as beautiful, it excuses all their shortcomings and foibles.

People’s looks and outward appearances influence our judgment, our trust and treatment of them. But what is so unfair about that is, who decides what is pleasing to the eye or not? Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. Nobody should have the right, or power, to establish the standards of human attractiveness, because their opinion will always be biased and prejudicial. Everybody wants to be white, everybody wants to be thin, everybody wants to be tall, everybody wants to be youthful-looking. Well, everybody doesn’t want to be those things, even if they are or could be.

Plus, some assume that everybody prefers only those particular traits in people. The human race is made up of every conceivable physical type, and there is someone somewhere who is attracted to every physical type.  Short, fat, old, deformed and/or ugly people have relationships just like tall, slender, young, physically-fit and/or good-looking people do. They even marry and have children. Please realize that any adjectives I use to describe people and things are completely objective and are not meant to be judgmental.  I don’t know what is universally beautiful or ugly and you don’t either.  I only know what is preferable or pleasing to me.

Supposed beauty is aided by the unnatural body application known as makeup. But why is it okay, even expected, for women to wear cosmetics but not for men?  Gay punk rocker Boy George gave Joan Rivers something to think about when he was on her TV show years ago.  She asked him (I’m sure she was just trying to throw shade), “So George, why do you wear makeup?”  Without missing a beat, he looked right at her and replied, “Why do you wear it?”  I thought, Good for him!  Although George’s rebuttal was meant to be more rhetorical, it’s still a very good question.  Why do women traditionally wear makeup? And of course, like everything else involving the sexes, there is a double standard at work.

Did you ever think about the fact that human facial beauty is judged differently for men and women? A man is considered handsome and attractive on his own merit.  He doesn’t wear makeup, as a rule.  He doesn’t even have to shave if he doesn’t want to.  But from early adolescence, young women start applying cosmetics to their face, and most are never seen in public without it for the rest of their lives. Why is that? I suppose it’s because they want to look the best they can at all times, and cosmetics certainly makes them look better, even if it is artificial. Whenever I hear someone comment, “That sure is a beautiful woman,” I often think, Yeah, but what does she look like without all that gunk on her face?  And if she were really all that beautiful, as you say, she shouldn’t need it.  Most men look better with makeup on, too, but we seem to get by without it (discounting performers and drag queens).  What, don’t we men care about looking our best, too?

Humans are so vain. We are so concerned with our looks because everybody else is concerned with our looks.  It is no accident that a woman’s dressing table is called a vanity.  So masculine beauty is judged in its natural state while feminine beauty is determined by how good a makeup job or hairdo or facelift or rhinoplasty the woman does on herself. Does that mean then that men are naturally more beautiful than women are? I wonder how many of these “beauty” pageant contestants would qualify if they all competed with no makeup whatsoever? In actuality, that’s false advertising. When a woman does choose to go without makeup, she’s deemed to be “plain” or “homely.”  And when a man wears it as a regular occurrence, like the aforementioned Boy George, he is also subject to criticism and effeminate implications.  So then, why aren’t men who don’t wear makeup considered plain?  See the double standard?

In our society there is a weight bias that influences people’s behavior and their self-image.  Thin is beautiful, fat is ugly.  “You can never be too rich or too thin.”  It’s ridiculous platitudes like those that cause some people, young women, especially, to become victims of self-imposed eating disorders, like anorexia nervosa and bulimia, because of their neurotic fear of gaining weight.  These poor, misguided people sacrifice their health and would even rather die than have the world perceive them as overweight.  It has been conjectured that if Karen Carpenter had eaten the sandwich that Cass Elliott choked on, they’d both probably be alive today!

Nasal-voiced actor Fran Drescher did a commercial for Three Musketeers candy bars, in which she makes this rather un-PC comment: “Everybody asks me how I stay so thin.  When you sound like this, you better look good!”  So Fran is equating looking good with being thin, as if saying that if one is not as thin as she is, they couldn’t possibly look good.  There is also an imposed correlation between youth and beauty, and like love and marriage, “you can’t have one without the other.”  Only young people are beautiful, and everyone loses their beauty when they reach a certain age.  Two women approach a portal together, and the younger one says, “Age before beauty,” as if the two were mutually exclusive.  I know many good-looking people over the age of fifty—and they ain’t all white, either!—and I know some very unattractive young adults and children as well.

Another aspect of our personal appearance that subjects us to more discrimination is our height.  There have been studies and tests conducted which have concluded that there is a definite bias with regard to how tall or short a person is. And there is a double standard in this case, too. It is socially preferable for men to be “tall,” that is, at least 5′ 9″, which is the designated standard average height for men. Now that just shows that everything is relative, because we all determine other people’s shortness or tallness by our own height.  I consider 5′ 9″ to be short because I am 5′ 11″ myself (I used to be 6-feet, but I seem to be shrinking with age), and there are many men shorter than that, of course, but there are also many men much taller than that, so I consider mine to be the average, middle height.

Your taller men are considered strong and masterful and are held in high esteem, looked-up-to, so to speak, while “short” men are considered weak and unassuming and are usually overlooked, even ignored, and disrespected.  Little guys tend to be bullied and picked on by the bigger guys, and most women almost exclusively prefer a taller man to a short one. Did you know that short men are discriminated against in employment, in hiring practices and in salaries, too?  They will be the last to be hired, the first to get fired, and they get paid less than their taller co-workers.

Women, on the other hand, being the “weaker and inferior sex,” are supposed to be short, so a woman who is over 5′ 9″ is considered a physical abnormality, subject to pity and derision.  The dilemma that these people set up for themselves is that men don’t want women taller than they are, even if they happen to be short, and women don’t cater to short men, although they themselves may be taller than “normal.” I think that it’s utterly absurd to judge a person or treat them a certain way because of their height, something over which we have no control.  But then, I think that all appearance prejudice is stupid and unfair.

My size and appearance, for instance, are regarded in different ways by people.  Some find me formidable because I am “big and black.”  I’ve told people that I’ve never been attacked or mugged or anything like that on the street, and they will tell me, “Well, you’re so big and black, nobody’s going to mess with you!”  I suppose in one respect I should be grateful that that is how I am regarded, because it indeed keeps people from messing with me.  I mean, I can go anywhere I want to, even into your so-called “rough neighborhoods,” and I never worry about being accosted or mugged, because it has never happened.  But it’s their reason to which I take offense, for it seems that I am feared merely because I am big and black, therefore, some kind of ogre up to no good.  Never mind that I am absolutely non-violent and would not lay a hand on anybody, my size and color serve as a deterrent to prospective aggressors but incites fear in the meek and helpless.

Why is physical stature often equated with brute strength and/or criminal intent?  The gorilla, for example, is one of the gentlest creatures there is, but they were always depicted and portrayed in the movies as fearful, murdering beasts.  Well, actually, movie gorillas are usually actors wearing gorilla suits, so they can do what the director tells them to, things that a real gorilla would not be inclined to do.  And you must already know how black men are regarded in this society, but that’s a whole other issue.

People and animals are not responsible for their corporal size, in most cases.  Our brains don’t tell us that if you are a big person, then you must be a trouble-making brute who throws your weight around, and if you are small in stature, then you have to behave demurely and weakly defenseless. But then again, some people that I encounter look beyond the “big and black” persona and can somehow discern that I am a kind and loving person with no malice aforethought.  Children, especially, readily take to me.  They seem to be able to see past one’s outer façade and into their true nature.

The media are the worst culprits for presenting arbitrary, specialized images to the general public, with regard to fashion, personal grooming and physique.  Television and magazine ads tell us how to look and how to dress.  And if we don’t look and dress the way they tell us that we should, then we must be prepared to suffer the consequences of harsh judgment, ridicule, persecution and discrimination.  I suppose that Joan Rivers, in one of her standup routines, got her comeuppance when she made this sarcastic remark about Boy George. “That’s just what England needs—another queen who doesn’t know how to dress!”

I think that too much is made of clothing and dress—”Clothes make the man,” and all that rot. The phrase is inappropriately sexist, too, since generally speaking, it’s women who are more concerned about what everybody and themselves are wearing than men are. You will hear a woman utter the query, “How do I look?” more often than a man will.  The question also suggests insecurity, as if they are asking for reassurance and approval.  I never ask that.  I can see what I look like by consulting a mirror, and I don’t require anybody’s approval or want their opinion.  I dress for myself, not others.

It’s the women who get most of the attention at weddings, balls and other social functions.  At all of the televised awards shows, everyone’s attention is always on what all the women are wearing, whereas the men get hardly any recognition at all. Fashion and costume designers direct their ideas more to women than men. But fashion trends and emphasis on dress are such a superficial convention.  I have concluded that one of the reasons that we wear clothes, other than for reasons of modesty, is so that we will have something else by which to judge and assess each other. If we all ran around naked, we’d have only each other’s bodies to talk about. With clothes, we have a whole other aspect to work with. The material used, style, how much we paid for our garments, even the frequency with which we wear our clothes, come under close public scrutiny and criticism. “You know, Mabel, I just love that outfit that you wear so often.  I never get tired of seeing it!”

People are constantly being judged by what they wear, but what should it matter? We are all naked underneath our clothes, after all. Just like you can’t judge a book by its cover, what a person wears is no indication of their character or inner being.  But you know that a man wearing a suit and tie is generally afforded more respect and recognition than one wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt.  Anybody can put on a suit, even Adolf Hitler, but how does that make them a better person? I am one who likes to dress for comfort rather than formality.  I usually don’t mind dressing up for special occasions, where the particular job or event requires it, but if I am allowed to wear whatever I want to, I will do just that.

I once had to read a colleague of mine, who is considerably younger than I am, but thought that his own particular style of dress and fashion sense were the paragon for all to follow and would frequently criticize other people’s clothing choices. “Who would wear something like that?! … Cliff, I hate that shirt that you have on.  It’s polyester, isn’t it? … You know, those two shades of green that she has on just don’t match!” His judgmental snobbery finally got to me one day and I asked him, ‘Jimmy, who died and appointed you the fucking Fashion Laureate of the World?!  I don’t care if you don’t like what I or anybody else is wearing.  Why do you think that your opinion is so all-important?  Look, somebody went to a lot of time and trouble and work to design that particular garment, and it is being bought and worn, so somebody must like it, even if you don’t.  If it is not to your taste or liking, then it is not to your liking.  You don’t have to badmouth it or turn your nose up at it.  I wouldn’t wear half of that shit that you wear either, but I certainly don’t have the right to tell you not to.  We all are of different generations and cultures, so why would I, or want to, dress just like you?’  He never berated my clothing again, at least not to my face.  And for the record, by the way, I happen to like polyester.  It’s easy to maintain and it feels comfortable.  So, fuck you, Jimmy!

That goes the same for those self-proclaimed fashion critics, like Mr. Blackwell and Steven Cojocaru, even Tim Gunn (from “Project Runway”), who have taken it upon themselves to express the dos and don’ts of what celebrities choose to wear in public.  But that’s just their own opinions.  The outfits that they hate, others may like and conversely not care for the ones that these guys consider to be all that.  What right do they have to tell people how they should dress or consider what they have on to be wrong or in poor taste?  I don’t think that Tina Fey thought at the time, “I’m going to get the ugliest dress I can find to wear to the Golden Globes, so that I can make Cojo’s Worst-Dressed List.“  She probably thought that she was looking fabulous. I don’t care what anyone wears. It’s entirely their business.  I may not like a particular garment, but I’m certainly not going to tell the person that they should not be wearing it.

Although ironing clothes is not my favorite activity, I didn’t mind it so much when on tour with The Flirtations I had to iron my costume shirts (some were silk) before our shows. But I don’t like to iron at home, due to lack of proper space and convenience, so most of my wardrobe is Wash ‘n’ Wear or “wrinkle-free.”  But sometimes a favorite dress shirt of mine will come back from the laundry a little wrinkled, or from hanging in the closet, and some time ago I decided, why does this shirt have to be neatly-pressed for me to wear it in public?  Don’t judge me harshly.  It’s clean and it’s serving its function.  So what if it’s wrinkled?  I could start my own fashion trend like others do all the time—you know, “The Wrinkled Look.”

Who really determines what is proper attire and guides the fashion trends? I think that we do that ourselves or are greatly influenced by the movies and television.  The common folk like to adopt the look and image of their favorite stars, and the fashion designers are forever all too willing to comply with our wishes.  I’ll bet if Brad Pitt or some other big name made a public appearance with a wrinkled shirt on, you wouldn’t mind at all, and it would probably start a trend.  “Well, he’s Brad Pitt.  He can do anything he wants.”  Well, I’m Cliff Townsend.  Shouldn’t I have the same rights as that Brad guy?

At some time in our history just about anything and everything has passed as acceptable fashion fare.  Just look at what has been deemed in the past as haute couture.  We have seen bustles, hoop skirts, fan collars, zoot suits, jump suits, tie-dyed and see-through garments, platform shoes and high-heel sneakers, very thin neckties and very wide ones, suit jackets with patches on the sleeves and worn with just a T-shirt, hot pants and miniskirts, raggedy, torn blue jeans with actual holes everywhere, overalls worn backwards and baggy trousers worn several sizes too big and below the waist.  I think that all those things look a lot stranger than a shirt that’s only slightly wrinkled.

I suppose that we humans’ need for conformity is what perpetuates these fashion trends, strange as some of them may be.  We tend to behave as lemmings, just going along with what the majority, or even not, is doing.  I, for one, pride myself on my individuality.  I purposely avoid conformity.  I don’t feel a need to “keep up with the Joneses,” as it were.  I would rather try to bring them down to my level instead!  I am one who does not follow the changing fads and trends of the day.  “Oh, that’s out-of-style now.“  Who says?  I don’t let any of those self-appointed assessors tell me what’s in or out at the moment.  I buy new clothes so seldom. I have not purchased a shirt in many years. I suppose that everything in my closet would be considered “out of style.” But I don’t care. Some people will hold on to a favorite garment of theirs, hoping that it will “come back someday.”  Come back from where?  If I’m wearing it, then it’s already back! I don’t need anybody’s pronouncement or permission.

This brings me now to the concept of “cross-dressing” or “drag” (aka transvestism). First of all, what is it exactly? As we are all born bare, clothing is merely a covering for our bodies.  What primeval sexists took it upon themselves to assign specific gender to articles of clothing and decided what was to be “men’s clothing” and “women’s clothing”?  Why does it even need gender distinction, since it all serves the same purpose?  Now I suppose a brassiere would be considered a woman’s garment, but then again, there are men who may require to wear one as well.  No article of clothing is exclusive to only one gender, the exception being a jockstrap, for obvious reasons.  So then, the question remains, what is drag?  A “drag queen” is identified by their outfit, makeup, hairdo and jewelry.  The way I see it, since it’s all unnatural superfluity anyway, anything that we don can be considered drag.  Both men and women wear makeup and jewelry in varying degrees.  Both genders wear hairpieces.  A toupee is a type of wig, so it’s merely a matter of hairstyle, isn’t it?

What exactly is a dress? Women certainly are not the only people who wear them.  The Roman toga was a sort of dress, worn by men.  The kilt is a skirt, worn by men.  Kaftans, robes and ecclesiastical vestments are kinds of dresses, worn by men.  As the name itself implies, when one is dressed, they more than likely are wearing some type of dress.  It’s that old double standard again!  Women can wear pants, shirts, suits, caps, athletic socks and shoes (traditional “men’s attire”) on a regular basis, and no one thinks anything about it.  But if a man puts on lace panties, a girdle, a blouse, skirt and high heels, then he’s going “in drag.”  I don’t see a difference.  Again, it’s all just a matter of vestmental choice and style, isn’t it?  Some women say that they feel more comfortable in pants, so maybe some men feel more comfortable wearing a dress.  What’s the big deal?  Why should people be so bothered by other people’s personal fashion preferences?

Hair growth, too, is a natural bodily function that men and women handle differently.  Hair grows on every part of the human body except the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet.  It’s a hormonal factor that determines how much hair grows on the body and where.  Whereas with men, hair on any part of their bodies is expected and accepted, and they almost always have the option to remove it or to retain it without societal harsh judgment.  If a man wants to keep his moustache, beard, hairy arms, back or even pate, it’s okay, it’s a matter of personal preference.  But “Society” dictates that a woman cannot do anything that she wants with her bodily hair.  Hers should be found only on the top of her head and nowhere else.  Women with hair growth on their faces (other than eyebrows) are looked upon as oddities.  “The Bearded Lady” is a sideshow freak.  Nobody would make a big deal out of “The Hairless Man” or even the other extreme, “The Hirsute Man.”

Who decided for all humanity which aspect of hair growth is unnatural? Why are women expected to shave their legs and armpits when men are not? Because to retain the hair on those places is considered masculine. And a man who shaves his legs and plucks his eyebrows is considered feminine.  Even the length of the hair on people’s heads takes on sexist connotations.  Long hair is feminine while short hair is masculine.  A man with long hair may “look just like a girl,” while a woman sporting a crewcut looks real butch and is probably a sapphist.  A despicable woman who is hated by her peers will tell you, “Yes, I know that I am such a bitch, but I have such fabulous hair, don’t I?”

Even hair color is subject to standardization, whereas only certain colors are socially-acceptable.  Who says that the hair on people’s heads should be restricted to only the natural colors of black, yellow, gray, white or various shades of brown?  Since our clothing comes in all colors and hues, as well as body applications like makeup, tattoos and nail polish, I think that people should be allowed to dye their hair any color they want to without harsh judgment attached to it.  A mother, whose natural hair color is black, decides to dye her hair blonde but criticizes her teenage daughter when she comes home from the beauty parlor with purple hair.  “Lisa, I forbid you to leave your hair that appalling color!” “But Mother, you dyed your hair yellow.  I just happen to prefer purple.”  The girl has a point.  Shouldn’t hair-dyeing decisions be guided by one’s own personal color preferences?  Then, too, it’s only a matter of shades.  So-called “red” hair, for instance, is not really red but some degree of orange or brown.  Really red hair, like the color of a valentine, is deemed just as strange as blue or green.  Even orange itself comes in varying tones, from dull to bright.

And then some consider that even the so-called normal hair colors should be reserved for certain people.  Now white people can wear their hair in any of the natural colors, mentioned above, that they choose. But blacks and other People-of-Color as blond(e)s or redheads are sometimes regarded as odd and strange. Why is that? Commercial hair dyes are in the public domain, to be used by anybody who wants them. Certain eye colors seem to be reserved for certain people, too. Are only white people allowed to have blue and green eyes, for example? (“Can you really dye my eyes to match my gown?”)

There definitely is a gross contradiction of attitude about hair. There are those who don’t want it on parts of their body and obsess about getting rid of it. But then there are others who don’t have it on certain parts of their body (especially on their head) and obsess about getting it back! I have come to wonder of late how this widespread condition of peladophobia (fear of becoming bald) among men came about.  Why are a great number of men so apprehensive about losing their hair?  Hair loss is as common an ailment as dandruff or failing eyesight.  Not everybody in the world gets it, but it’s certainly not anything to be ashamed of.  Men go to great lengths and expense to save their receding hairline. Why? I blame the advertising media for brainwashing the public into thinking that baldness is unattractive and/or associated with aging.

Even so, it’s more okay for men to be bald than women. A woman who loses her hair is to be pitied, or if she deliberately cuts it all off, is deemed to be strange. When will people come to the realization that hair is a useless commodity anyway. It really serves no necessary purpose. They who have become bald or shave their head on a regular basis seem to get along very well without it. So why even have it at all? Have you ever noticed that the common modern screen depiction of extraterrestrials is shown to be these hairless beings, and whether this rendering is based on fact or mere conjecture, it would suggest to me that in their more highly-evolved state—after all, they have figured out how to get to our planet when we have yet to visit theirs—these creatures have realized the uselessness of body hair. Their ears don’t protrude out the side of their head either, which suggests that with their excellent eyesight they don’t need anything on which to support eyeglasses, as we do. It makes no sense to me to obsess, stress oneself over and spend all that money to maintain something—that is, hair—that serves no useful function whatsoever.

[Related articles: Age Is Just a Number; Gender Issues and Sexism]

Let’s talk about sin, shall we? First of all, what is it? People, myself included, have different ideas and interpretations of what sin is. My dictionary defines sin variously as “an offense against religious or moral law; an action felt to be reprehensible; transgression of the Law of God,” and finally “a vitiated state of human nature in which the self is estranged from God.” Then in addition to your basic sin, we have your mortal sins and your venial sins. Mortal sins, like murder, “deprive the soul of sanctifying grace,” whereas venial sins are less serious in nature, therefore pardonable.

I regard sin as I do victimless crimes. If no one is caused any real physical or serious emotional harm, then it’s not a sin. So then, any form of consensual sex is not sinful, in my opinion, and that includes sodomy and homosexuality. Those who contend that homosexuality is a sin must also acknowledge that heterosexual sex is also a sin. According to them, it was Adam and Eve who committed the “Original Sin,“ that is, having sex with each other. So then, if sexual relations in itself is a sin, it shouldn’t matter with whom we do it. Same-sex coitus, therefore, is no more sinful than het intercourse. So there!

I consider the only real “mortal sins” to be crimes against nature, which does not include homosexuality. I’m referring to actions that upset the natural order of things, like murder of any kind: homicide, abortion and killing animals for sport. The jury is still out on the matter of suicide, however, for although it causes physical harm only to the person who commits it, it may cause emotional harm to the person’s surviving loved ones as well. The same can be said for adultery. I don’t consider the act itself to be sinful, but if the cuckolded spouse finds out about it, it may cause emotional harm for them and their children. My most abhorred venial sins would be large-scale gambling and wasting our natural resources, especially food and water.

“Lord God, who takes away the sin of the world…” Really! Where did “He” take this sin to then, since it’s still here and always has been? During each service at the churches where I worked, the congregation recites a “Confession of Sins,” in which they apologize for and ask forgiveness for all the sinful things that they have done during the past week. The priest (or minister) even goes so far as to say that in order to be forgiven of our sins, we need to confess to God directly. But since they say the same thing every time, the prayers must not be doing them any good, because they constantly keep right on sinning, don’t they? So I say, what’s the point? Since you can’t stop yourself from so-called sinning, apparently, then just go on and do it and shut up about it!

I never recited it myself, by the way, because I don’t consider anything I do at all sinful, at least nothing that I need to ask forgiveness for. And then I‘m not a hypocrite either. When I happen to do something that I am sorry for, I don’t want or need God’s forgiveness. I want the forgiveness of the person whom I have wronged. And anyway, if you ask God to forgive you for something, how do you know if you have been forgiven? God’s certainly not going to tell you. What you end up doing ultimately is forgiving yourself, if at all.

“…And forgive us our sins (or debts or trespasses) as we forgive those who sin against us.” That is my favorite passage from “The Lord’s Prayer,” which I agree with wholeheartedly. I expect that most of your law enforcement officials—cops, prosecutors, judges—even jurors, plaintiffs and common accusers themselves are churchgoers or at least accept the Bible’s word (when it suits their purposes, of course). They make us swear on it in court. All the Protestant and Catholic religions that I know about include the Lord’s Prayer in all their church services. People hear or utter that passage every week, some probably every day of their lives, but it seems never to sink in what it actually means. They are so determined to make other people pay for their transgressions, they hold grudges forever and are obsessed with revenge and retaliation, as if they themselves have never done anything wrong or never expect to.

We all need to learn and practice forgiveness. When someone is hurt or wronged by another person, by hanging on to the anger and resentment, it only empowers the other person. They have probably already gone on with their lives, to hell with you! But you are still upset and distraught about what’s been done to you. I have heard people say, “I will never forgive you for what you’ve done!“ But that means that they will spend the rest of their life in mental torment. If you would just let it go and forgive the person, it relieves you of the pain and anguish that has been plaguing you. You don’t have to forget what they did to you, but you can forgive them. It has been my lifelong experience that everyone in my life who has wronged me eventually gets what coming to them. So I don’t worry about getting even. I just sit back and wait for them to receive their own atonement or punishment. And for some reason, they always do. “Karmic Justice” is a real thing. What goes around, comes back around. I truly believe that.

This should be the “Hypocritic Oath”: “Only they who are without any sin whatsoever may cast the first stone.” No one is absolutely guiltless. Therefore, no one has the right to punish another person’s misdeeds, as they are at times most likely guilty of the very same actions themselves. Don’t be so quick to judge. God is my ultimate judge, not you. You should always keep in mind that people are the way they are for a reason. When I encounter an ill-tempered, grouchy, misanthropic person, whom I don’t know, instead of dismissing them or criticizing their demeanor, I always consider how unhappy they must be themself and what they must have gone through in their life to be in the miserable state that they are in. No one is born that way. We all become victims of personal circumstance. That goes for unruly, incorrigible children, people who commit crimes, are homeless or have mental problems, too. I’m not excusing these people’s aberrant behavior; I’m just saying that there is always a reason for people’s actions. When you see someone in trouble or distress, imagine yourself in their position, then try to show them the same compassion and understanding that you would want to receive if you were in a similar situation. It’s the Golden Rule, which I firmly try to uphold.

Of the so-called Seven Deadly Sins—Avarice, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Pride, Sloth and Wrath—I have been guilty of only a few of them, three, to be exact. In my opinion, those three are not necessarily bad or sinful, unless taken to the extreme or used in an abusive manner. I am not a greedy person. I don’t have to have more and more of anything, like money and material possessions. I’m not really envious of anybody. If you have something that I don’t or can do something that I haven’t done, more power to you. I don’t begrudge anyone’s abilities or achievements. I have been known to overeat on more than one occasion, which is the main indication of gluttony, but I do have great self-restraint as well, otherwise I would weigh a lot more than I do. Just like with avarice, moderation is the way I choose to go.

I expect that every normal person, including myself, has feelings of lust from time to time, which is defined as excessive sexual desire. Sure, I get horny, but I don’t always act upon it. It may not be convenient at the time or inopportune. But that’s human nature, not a bad thing in itself. The same can be said of pride. Pride is variously defined as “an over-high opinion of oneself; exaggerated self-esteem; conceit; the showing of this in behavior; haughtiness; arrogance.” But it can also mean “a sense of one’s own dignity or worth; self-respect; satisfaction in one’s achievements.” What’s wrong with that? I certainly recognize my own self-worth, I have self-respect and appreciate and acknowledge my life’s achievements. I think that positive pride is a good thing, whereas false pride or the lack of any humility is not. I’m not too proud to accept help or charity if I need it, and I can admit when I’m wrong and will offer apologies.

I don’t consider myself a truly slothful person. I hate just lying around not doing anything. I do spend a lot of time at home, but I’ve never been a “couch potato” (even if I actually had a couch). Even while watching TV, I’m always working at something—on music, my writing, endless computer projects, stimulating my mind with puzzles, games and reading material, preparing meals, something.

The one thing I definitely don’t do is wrath, which is intense anger, rage, fury. I do find some things in life to be upsetting at times, who doesn’t? But nothing makes me angry enough that I resort to punishment, vengeance, destruction or physical violence to myself or to others. I can’t imagine putting my fist through a wall, for example. For one thing, I would probably injure my hand, and then the wall would have to be repaired. Why would I break or destroy my personal property? I need or want everything that I have. Plus, I would have to clean up everything afterward. It’s not like in the movies when someone trashes a set, because they have people there on hand who are paid to clean up the mess. Besides, whatever it is that made you that mad in the first place, is still going to be there. Your irrational lashing out like that is not going to change anything. Get over yourself!

(# …I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints; the sinners are much more fun… #–Billy Joel)

[Related articles: A Critique of Catholicism; For the Bible Tells Me So; Heaven and Hell; “I Believe…”; Jesus H. Christ; Nativity Negation Redux; Oh, God, You Devil!; The Ten Commandments]

Let us analyze the Ten Commandments (also known as the Decalogue), shall we? These were merely a set of rules suggested by Moses, probably, or whomever, by which to govern his people. Now that the freed Hebrews were starting a new nation in Canaan, they felt that they needed some sort of moral code by which to abide. As idealistic as they may be, each edict is virtually impossible to obey, at least in this day and age, and people’s often futile attempts to abide by them only creates more gross hypocrisy. Why would “God” command such pronouncements? To me, these platitudes sound all too human-inspired.

1. “…Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” If “before” means in front of or in addition to, what’s the matter, doesn’t God like the competition? That is so silly. It doesn’t even make any sense. How can we be held responsible for anything that occurred before the fact? It’s like if you started a new relationship with somebody, and they told you, “You shall not have any other boyfriends before you met me.” What’s already done is done. You can’t change the past. Get over yourself.

2. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.” (Oh, so the Jews do acknowledge heaven!) But then the countless number of statues of Jesus and Mary and every other sculpture and depiction of religious icons, as well as those of regular folks, should never have been. It goes on to say, “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them, for I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God…” Well, your Catholics, especially, don’t follow that one either, what with all the bowing and genuflecting that they do during their worship services, and displaying reverence when they encounter what they consider to be a holy image. And why would the Lord be jealous, and of what? How could God be that insecure? That’s another human trait, not a Godly one.

3. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain…” What does that mean, and why not? If a person calls the Deity by name, a name that we humans have assigned to It in the first place, by the way, then they must be using it for a reason. God has never told us what Its real name is or what It wants to be called, so how is that disrespectful in any way? Another version of this one reads, “You shall not invoke with malice the name of the Lord…“ But just as we ask God to bless people and things, we can also ask It to damn them. What’s the difference? Do you think that God really cares whether or how Its name is used and for whatever reason? I don’t think so. Some people also think that to utter a curse word in a house of worship is a no-no, as if to do so offends God in some way. It’s not God who decided which words are profane or taboo. That’s an entirely human assessment and imposition. It’s God who gave us language and words with which to communicate with one another, and not on the condition that we use only certain words for certain occasions. Drat! Zounds! Gadzooks! (Look them up.)

4. “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy (whatever that means; how does commemorating a certain day safeguard it from evil or sin, and why designate only one day for deep reverence and adoration?); six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God; in it thou shalt not do any work, nor thou children, servants, cattle or any stranger that is within thy gates.” How impractical and hypocritical is that? Most Christian religions designate Sunday as their Sabbath Day (I tell you why in my Nativity Redux blog). But it wasn’t God who picked Sunday as the specific Sabbath. That was arbitrarily decided at a much later time. Sunday is a major workday for many people, myself included, and the officiating clergymen, musicians and staff at all the services and in all the churches and worship houses all over the world are working on that very day. Even the Pope himself works on Sunday. Students have assignments to prepare for school the next day. Horses, sheepdogs and other beasts of burden and work animals don’t know what day it is, or care. How are we going to stop them on certain days from doing what they do? Let’s not forget transportation personnel, commercial and business venues, food and drink outlets and the nonstop entertainment media. What, a whole day of no TV or radio?! The world cannot just shut down one day (or more) every week. If you want to take a day off not to do any work, then that’s your business. Don’t expect everybody in the world to follow such a restriction. Life goes on.

Realize that this Commandment is based on a stupid myth anyway. Since God allegedly created the world in six days and then rested on the seventh day, we should all do the same thing in respectful commemoration, I guess. How dumb is that? And then too, Sunday is not the only “Sabbath Day.” Some religions recognize both Friday and Saturday as their Sabbath. That’s already three days out of every week that would be off-limits. But look at the wording of the Commandment again. It says that six days shalt thou labor, but does not designate which specific six days. People all have different workweeks, depending on their particular job and schedule. For those who work in Broadway shows, for example, normally their day off is Monday. So then each person‘s “Sabbath” could be any day of the week, not only weekend days. That in itself renders this entire Commandment pointless and invalid. Next!

5. “Honor thy father and thy mother…” Well, that’s all right for those parents who merit it. But how about those parents who neglect, abuse, abandon, disown, hate and/or even murder their children? Honor and respect are a two-way street. It doesn’t say anything about parents honoring their children, which I think is more important. No child asks to be born, so I think it’s the parents’ obligation to honor their children for the privilege of being born. The parents are the ones who must set the example for their children. I wouldn’t honor a parent who has treated me like shit all my life just because they’re my parent. Unfortunately, we can’t choose our relatives.

The sixth Commandment simply and succinctly states, “Thou shalt not kill.” It’s not qualified with, “…unless it’s in retaliation for someone else’s death or self-defense” or “…except in cases of unwanted pregnancies, nonhuman pests, self-preservation or in times of war.” Are certain acts of murder acceptable when others are not? How should we interpret the statement? To whom does “Thou” refer? The common person? Only those in lowly, powerless positions? Apparently, most people think that “thou” certainly does not apply to them. Should executioners and hired assassins, for example, be exempt, because killing people is their very job? Police officers in the line of duty and homicide detectives, too, during their investigations, will often make a killing while they are apprehending a suspect (and even when they’re not). Our legal system even employs a convenient defense when it suits their purpose: justifiable homicide. “Oh, yes, I killed him, Your Honor. But he deserved to die.” “Oh, well, then. Case dismissed!”

Some versions of this Commandment have been revised to read, “You shall not commit murder.“ So then, what is murder? Murder is defined as the taking of a human life, regardless of the circumstances, period. Some have said that self-defense, for one, is not murder. But I say, why isn’t it? The intent is still there. But even if it isn’t, the result is the same. “I killed him to keep him from killing me.” Given that you have a choice, you could allow yourself to be killed instead of taking the other person’s life. Of course, you’d be dead, but you wouldn’t be guilty of willful murder yourself. If every single person obeyed the rule, then there wouldn’t be any need to defend yourself. So the concept of self-defense seems hypocritical to me. Since you are not going to heed the thou-shalt-not-kill agenda, why should I? That makes us both guilty then.

This commandment can never be achieved anyway as long as there is any type of warfare between humans, since killing each other is the sole purpose and result of war. Some claim that they “didn’t mean to do it.“ So what if you didn’t mean it? They’re dead by your hand anyhow. Moreover, do the victims of killing, per se, apply only to human beings? But then which human beings? Who decides? Is compassionate euthanasia of person or beast allowed, and then is it all right, too, to abort developing fetuses, to slaughter animals, swat flies, step on ants and roaches, chop down trees, pick flowers, pull out weeds? Don’t weeds have the right to proliferate as any other plant? To me, the terms murder, homicide, suicide, genocide, herbicide, insecticide (and all the other -cides), manslaughter, euthanasia, abortion and even warfare all mean the same thing–death by intentional means. Killing anything is still killing. Who can honestly claim that they have never killed a single, living thing in their entire life?

7. “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Well, now. Most married people have not been able to get around that one. I go into a more detailed discussion of this little indiscretion in my Marry, Marry, Quite Contrary blog.

8. “Thou shalt not steal.” This one is similar to the killing thing. It’s a nice one to follow, in theory, but probably the most difficult one to uphold. Stealing is defined as taking something that does not originally belong to you. Who can honestly say that they have not stolen anything in their entire life? I, myself, am not entirely guiltless. It can be considered stealing when we keep an item we found that someone else lost, misplaced or left behind. School cheating is a form of stealing. You’re stealing the answers from someone else’s paper or from some outside source, and in the case of plagiarism, you’re stealing someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as your own. The people who copy music and visual media items for their own use are stealing the profits from the original creators of said items. Baseball players steal bases. A man might steal a kiss from his beloved. It could mean to seize, gain or win by trickery, deception or fraud, as in, “George W. Bush stole the Presidential election.” One can gain advantage on someone by stealing their thunder. “Nathan Lane stole the show!” Are most of these acts of stealing serious sins? Most would think not.

9. “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” That seems kind of vague. I suppose it means that we shouldn’t tell lies on anybody. But then is it all right to utter falsehoods about oneself? I can make up anything about myself, whether it’s true or not, but anything that I say about anybody else is the absolute truth. What?! Try getting through life without telling a single, deliberate untruth.

10. (I summarize here.) “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, spouse, servants, household pets or anything that is thy neighbor’s.” This takes the 8th Commandment a step further. Not only are we not to take something that does not belong to us, we are not even allowed to desire someone else’s things! How stupid is that? What’s wrong with merely wanting things that we don’t yet have? Okay, Envy is said to be one of the “Deadly Sins,” but this commandment destroys all human ambition and aspiration. It’s telling us to be content with whatever we are dealt in life and never try to better ourselves. My neighbor has a nicely-manicured lawn and beautiful garden, but mine looks like shit. So I should just leave it like that, because my property shouldn’t look as good as my neighbor’s. There is nothing virtuous about that ordinance and has nothing to do with morality.

Notice that physical assault, rape and other undue aggression are not on the “Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit” list, but we mustn’t take the Lord’s name in vain? That’s a much more heinous infraction, apparently. So you can beat the shit out of your wife as often as you want, but don’t you dare ever utter “God damn you, you fucking bitch!” while you’re doing it.

I believe that every one of these Commandments is violated by most people in the world on a regular basis. How can it be avoided? I think that they just should be ignored all together, which all of us tend to do anyway. And since they were created for the Jews by them, we Gentiles don’t have any moral or religious obligation to abide by those laws. One exception might be No. 5, but I show respect to anyone who deserves it, not just to my parents or just because they are my parents. I, myself, have disobeyed only a few Commandments on the list, and some, like Nos. 1, 2 and 7 don’t apply to me. I haven’t created any graven images nor worship those that already exist. Since I am not married, I can’t be guilty of adultery per se, although I have been an accomplice to it. I don’t consider myself unrighteous or sinful by any means, and I’m not an immoral person either.

I have heard people refer to the Ten Commandments as a Christian proclamation. Christianity has nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of the Commandments. Therefore we have no religious obligation to heed them. Those laws were intended for Moses’ immediate flock. I am sure that he did not expect, or cared, that people would be abiding by his edicts for future millennia and beyond. What it comes down to, ultimately, is the fact that all of these Commandments and any other rules of life that humans are subjected to, are all our own doing and not at all advocated by God. We all are given the concession of free will, and God does not give a shit what we do. We all have to take responsibility and make the proper atonement (as well as endure and accept the consequences) for our actions and misdeeds that we commit in life.

[Related articles: A Critique of Catholicism; For the Bible Tells Me So; Heaven and Hell; Jesus H. Christ; Nativity Redux; Oh, God, You Devil!; Sin and Forgiveness]

History as reported by 6th Graders
(These are actual unedited answers to a 6th grade history test.)

Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies, and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.

Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the Ten Commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.

Solomom had three hundred wives and seven hundred popcupines.

The Greeks were a highly-sculptured people, and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.

Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline. This may be true!

In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled biscuits, and threw the java.

Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out, “Tee hee, Brutus.” Eventually the Romans conquered the Greeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place for long.

Joan of Arch was burnt to a steak and was cannonized by Bernard Shaw. Finally Magna Carta provided that no man should be hanged twice for the same offense.

Queen Elizabeth was the “Virgin Queen.” As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted “hurrah.”

It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. Sir Fransis Drake circumsized the world with a 100-foot clipper.

The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. Romeo’s last wish was to be laid by Juliet.

Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained. This also has a logical ring of truth.

One of the causes of the Revolutionary War was the English put tacks in their tea. Also the colonists would send their parcels through the post without stamps. Finally the colonists won the war and no longer had to pay for taxis. Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backwards and declared, “A horse divided against itself cannot stand.” Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.

Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest Precedent. Lincoln’s mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. They believe the assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposingly insane actor. This ruined Booth’s career.

The nineteenth century was a time of a great many thoughts and inventions. People stopped reproducing by hand and started reproducing by machine. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick raper, which did the work of a hundred men. Louis Paster discovered a cure for rabbis. Charles Darwin was a naturalist who wrote the Organ of the Species. Madman Curie discovered radio. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx Brothers.

The first World War, caused by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by an anahist, ushered in a new error in the anals of human history.

Another story was William Tell who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son’s head.

[The following quotes are from an elementary music appreciation class. It should be noted that young scholars have expressed their rapture for the Bronze Lullaby, the Taco Bell Canon, Beethoven’s Erotica Symphony, Tchaikovsky’s Cracknutter Suite, and Gershwin’s Rap City in Blue.]

“A harp is a nude piano.”

“Gregorian chant has no music, just singers singing the same lines.”

“All female parts were sung by castrati. We don’t know exactly what they sounded like because there are no known descendants.”

“At one time singers had to use musicians to accompany them. Since synthesizers came along, singers can now play with themselves.”

“Henry Purcell was a well-known composer that few people have ever heard of.”

“My favorite composer was Opus.”

“Agnus Dei was a woman composer famous for her church music.”

“The principal singer of nineteenth-century opera was called pre-Madonna.”

“Contralto is a low sort of music that only ladies sing.”

“Refrain means don’t do it. A refrain in music is the part you’d better not try to sing.”

“Music sung by two people at the same time is called a duel. If they sing without music, it is called Acapulco.”

“It is easy to teach anyone to play the maracas. Just grip the neck and shake him in rhythm.”

“A virtuoso is a musician with real high morals.”

“Diatonic is a low-calorie Schweppes.”

“Probably the most marvelous fugue was the one between the Hatfields and the McCoys.”

“The main trouble with a French Horn is that it is too tangled up.”

“An interval in music is the distance from one piano to the next.”

“The correct way to find the key to a piece of music is to use a pitchfork.”

“Agitato is a state of mind when one’s finger slips in the middle of playing a piece.”

“Sherbet composed the Unfinished Symphony.”

“Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present.”

“”Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian and half English. He was very large.”

“Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.”

For Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, the ancient Hebrews would take two goats—one to be sacrificed to the Lord, the other to carry the sins of the people away into the desert. So it was this “’scape goat” who, although it did escape sacrifice, bore the burden of the people’s sins. It seems that any closely-knit group has to have their designated scapegoat on whom to dump all their shit.

Most people find it hard to admit to any wrongdoing on their part, so they need to blame somebody else, anybody or anything, except themselves. Check out, for instance, what historical events that gay people have been blamed for: the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the fall of the Roman Empire, the plague in Constantinople (A.D. 543), the fall of Visigothic Spain to the Muslims, the decline of medieval Arabic civilization, the Black Plague, the decline of Renaissance Italy, the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, as well as earthquakes in California, the rise of Nazi Germany, the mid-1970s drought in the western U.S., the 9/11/01 attack on the World Trade Center, and, of course, AIDS. You know all the hurricanes and other national disasters that befall the state of Florida and its environs on a regular basis? Well, evangelist Pat Robertson says it’s because of Gay Day at Walt Disney World! But earthquakes and droughts? Come on! Although, I have been told by my lovers that I have made the earth move on occasion.

We could look at it in another way. Instead of blaming the innocent gays, maybe all these regular natural disasters are meant as a wake-up call to the evildoers and misanthropes in this country and abroad. Maybe they are the ones who prompt all those unfortunate events. It’s too bad that those undeserving individuals have to suffer, but there are always resultant casualties, I’m sorry to say.

Haven’t you noticed that when Hurricanes Katrina, Harvey and Irma wreaked their havoc on Louisiana, Texas and Florida, the country came together to offer financial aid and relief to the storm victims? We had neighbors helping neighbors and strangers helping other strangers without any regard to color, ethnicity, religious affiliation or sexual orientation. Why can’t we do that all of the time? Why does it take a devastating storm or earthquake for people to be kind and civil to each other?

But why no telethon or relief appeal only a few days later when Mexico was hit by a major earthquake and Cuba and Puerto Rico were virtually destroyed by Hurricane Maria? Or they could use part of the money raised from the telethon–over 44 million dollars–to help those other people as well. Why the biased neglect? Aren’t those neighboring Latinos entitled to the same help as our own people here on the home front? We are not discriminating, are we?

People are often unwilling to accept responsibility for their own actions. Like when somebody commits a serious crime, all their family and friends will do all they can to get the perpetrator off and will be upset with anyone who interferes. “Don’t you realize that your testimony could send my daughter to prison for life? How could you do that to her? If she is convicted, it will be all your fault.” “My fault? But the bitch killed five innocent people! We should let her off the hook just because she‘s your daughter?”

A man intercepts an assassination attempt by a group of terrorists and kills one of them in the process. Now the man and his family are targeted for death by the brother of the slain terrorist. “I’ll make you pay for killing my brother!” But, excuse me, what was your brother doing when he got killed? Some people think that they can do anything they want to and get away with it, with no repercussions. I think if anyone commits a misdeed, they must take responsibility for it and must suffer the ensuing consequences—relative, child, parent, friend, loved one or self, I don’t care who they are!

There are those who accuse others of ruining their life. Your life is what you make of it; nobody can ruin it for you. Bad things happen to everybody. If you don’t like the way your life is going, then change it. Some people have a single goal in life, and if things don’t work out as they would like, they think that their life is ruined. Don’t despair. Just get on with it. Do something else. Next! It’s ruined if you just lie around wallowing in self-pity and blaming everybody else for your own failures.

Then on the other side, we have those who tend to harbor feelings of guilt for things that they have nothing to do with. They want to take a person’s actions as their own personal affront. “It’s all my fault! If I had stayed home today, none of this would have happened! … I must be the reason Daddy drinks. It’s all my fault … My parents got divorced because of me … How dare you die on me!” Well, maybe it’s not about you at all. Don’t flatter yourself. People do things for their own selfish reasons which may not even involve you.

While I believe that everything happens for a reason, it does not mean that certain adversities in life cannot be prevented. One of my staunch contentions is that there are no accidents, in the sense of things happening that are beyond our control. We all have choices and free will in life, and while things can happen to us unexpectedly or unintentionally, we are always somehow responsible. The choices we make in life bring about the things that happen to us. Carelessness, unawareness and deliberateness on our part are what cause what we like to refer to as accidents. Accident, therefore, is something people invented as a scapegoat so that we don’t have to take any or partial responsibility for our own actions. People are so quick to call anything an accident, if it will let them off the hook. For example, “I didn’t break your window on purpose, Mr. Wilson. It was an accident.” “But, Dennis, you threw the ball at my house, didn’t you? That was no accident. If you had made the choice to throw it in another direction, you wouldn‘t have broken my window.”

If people did not choose to drive automobiles, there would never be any traffic “accidents.” How does one accidentally have a head-on collision with another vehicle? That requires very specific action on both drivers’ parts. Did each driver expect the other to swerve out of the way in time? “She was involved in a hit-and-run accident.” Oh, you mean that somebody accidentally ran her down in the street and then accidentally fled the scene? “I didn’t mean to shoot him. The gun went off accidentally.” Guns don’t go off by themselves. Somebody has to pull the trigger. If you didn’t mean to shoot him, why were you pointing a loaded gun at him? Just like you can’t accidentally shoot yourself in the head while playing Russian Roulette or accidentally get somebody pregnant.

Rock star Janis Joplin was said to have died from an “accidental” heroin overdose. Maybe she didn’t mean to die at that time, but she wouldn’t have OD’d if she hadn’t being doing an excessive amount of heroin, would she? That goes for all the other “accidental deaths“ that we hear about, due to drug overdosing. “That torrential rain that we had created a mudslide that accidentally caused my house to roll down the hill into the sea.” But you are the one who chose to live in a house built on stilts on the side of a dirt hill. The house didn’t just happen there all by itself. “Oops! My dog just had an accident on your new couch.” That was no accident. He meant to take a shit there! Otherwise he would have done it somewhere else or waited to be taken outside. We all take certain chances and risks in our daily lives and just hope that nothing bad happens as a result of the choices that we make.

There is another convenient scapegoat and watchdog that we humans have to blame all our foibles on and who cannot defend itself, and it’s called “Society.” Society sets all the rules and standards of all human behavior, morals, protocol, etiquette, style and fashion. Everything that we do, we have to answer to Society for our actions. “Society does not approve of that … by Society’s standards … In our Society, that just isn’t done.” Society seems to be analogous with God. We think that it will take care of all our problems and situations for us. But who is this Society person that we are always kowtowing to? I thought that I was part of Society. Then aren’t we all Society? Answering to Society is, in essence, answering to ourselves. If I enjoy having sex with my boyfriends and it’s all right with them, why should I have to consult this Society creature to get its permission?

They do a similar convention with “America” and even “the World.” “The News That Shocked America.” Nothing shocks me. “’Three’s Company’ was America’s favorite sitcom.” It was? I didn’t even like that show. Aren’t I a part of America? A few people may have an opinion about something and it becomes all of America’s concern. “Entertainment Tonight” actually made this announcement one night. “The world (!?) is anxiously waiting to get a glimpse at Jennifer Anniston’s wedding ring.“ Whew, that’s a relief! It’s good to know that I was not the only one who was waiting for that. Can you believe such ridiculous hyperbole?

Then we have the arrogance of knowing everybody’s mind and what they like or don’t like. Progress has often been stifled by Society. We used to get, “Society is not ready to accept People-of-Color or gays in positive TV and movie roles,” for example. Well, how would “It” had ever gotten ready if “It” was never exposed to these and other things?

Many would agree that one of the most hated men in history is Adolf Hitler because of the 8 million or more people he supposedly had killed during the Nazi regime in 1940’s Germany. Now I am not saying that it didn’t happen and I am not defending or excusing Hitler’s personal agenda or his campaign to eliminate the Jews and other “undesirables,” but let’s think about who is really at fault. Hitler himself did not actually murder all of those people. He only expressed his desire to have it done. Just because somebody wants something, it doesn’t mean that they will always get it. (The people in Hell would like some ice water, too!) It was Hitler’s disciples and minions who did the actual killings. So they are really the ones to blame, along with all those who stood idly by and let it all happen. I consider it utter bullcrap when those Nazi soldiers and SS officers say that they had to do what they did under superior order. “We didn’t have a choice.” Of course, they did. We all have the power of free will always to make choices in our lives. Nobody has to do anything, except die some day. Everything else that we do in life is a matter of choice.

What would have happened if nobody had complied with Hitler’s wishes? If he had gotten rid of all his subordinates who defied him, there wouldn’t have been anybody left to work for him. They could have called his bluff. Things would have turned out very differently. He’s only one man. How could he have accomplished that all by himself? Somebody could have stopped him for even trying. It’s one thing only to think evil deeds, and another to carry them out. I have learned that Hitler was just a capricious blow-hard anyway. He would come up with these stupid ideas about harming innocent people, and his fawning sycophants would obligingly go along with it. “Duh, okay, Mein Führer, I’ll do it. You can count on me.“

Likewise, King Herod didn’t murder all those babies. His soldiers did all of the killings for him. “With all due respect, Your Majesty, instead of murdering all those innocent babies, why don’t we get rid of your ass instead?! That would be far less trouble and effort.” Just like I don’t blame the Rev. Jim Jones for getting all those more than 900 people in Guyana to commit suicide with him. The man was obviously a nut. I blame the people themselves for listening to his crazy butt. So then I can’t fault Hitler for having such nefarious notions. People can think what they please. I resent more the ones who put his misanthropic ideas into action and allowed it to continue for as long as it did, and there were many who complied and accepted the situation.

This was no covert operation. The German and other nations’ citizens knew exactly what was going on. I learned that some of the massacres were not done in secret, but in broad daylight with crowds of people witnessing the proceedings. They have it all on film! It became a social event, with people gathering at the lynching sites, and they would stand on the sidelines hooting and cheering as men, women and even children were being dispatched. It was no different how they behaved at other public executions over the centuries. They wouldn’t even bury the dead bodies properly, but leave limbs and heads sticking out of the ground as reminders of what was done. Hitler can’t be blamed for any of that.

Some still even consider Adolf Hitler to have been a great man. I would agree with that in the sense that “great” does not necessarily mean “good” all the time. Alexander the Great’s “greatness” was his military ability for national conquests, which required killing a lot of people in the process. And although Peter the Great did a lot of good for Russia during his reign, he was also deemed a sadist and tyrannical despot. A great person can be one with major influence on the world at large and with much political power. Hitler certainly had that, to get all those followers to do his every bidding, misguided as he was.

I am curious if future history accounts will determine George W. Bush Jr. to be our modern-day Hitler. Look at what all he got his people to do for him during his Reign of Terror as Governor of Texas and then President of the United States. His Let’s-Go-to-War-and-Destroy-Our-Enemies speeches were awfully similar to the ones Hitler made during his leadership. His concerted campaign to “wipe out all the evil in the world where it exists” is the same thing Hitler said about the Jews and other non-Aryans. Just because those Jewish victims didn’t fight back, it doesn’t make this other situation less heinous.

All that war is really is disguised, sanctioned genocide. Bush often lied to the American public in order to justify his actions and decisions. Evil has always existed in the world, so why does Bush think that it was his sole responsibility completely to eradicate it? Why didn’t he clean up his own house first before worrying about other countries and the world at large? Consider that people were not on to Hitler either until it was too late. Only time will tell. Keep in mind that there was another time when somebody listened to a Bush, and the people ended up wandering around in the desert for forty years!

People can be so apathetic about other’s woes, as if nothing will ever happen to themselves. And some seem to be under the false impression that people they know personally are incapable of any wrongdoing. It’s only strangers that commit all the crime in the world, you see. I don’t put anything past anybody, I don‘t care who you are!

Here is one film scenario. A young housewife, who is normally law-abiding, is driving on a country road when she inadvertently runs down a child on her bicycle, putting her into a coma. The driver tried to call it an accident, although she had just been drinking, and she wasn’t watching the road at the time. So since the woman has no phone to call anyone, she leaves the girl by the side of the road and drives away to get help, with the intent of returning to the scene. But while she is gone and before she can tell anyone what has happened, the injured girl is discovered by another motorist who reports the situation as a hit-and-run. Now the woman who hit the girl is afraid to come forward as the one who did it. So she keeps quiet about it.

When the news gets out to the media, her friends and family are outraged and proceed to lambaste and badmouth the “despicable person who did that. I hope that they catch the guy and throw them in jail for the rest of their life!” Of course, they would say that only about some unknown party, because nobody they know could do such a thing, right? But I doubt if their sentiment would be the same if they knew their close friend or relative was the actual culprit. Their moral standards radically change then. And that is where the hypocrisy comes in. A bad action is apparently unacceptable and inexcusable when a complete stranger does it, and not so when a loved one is the guilty party. But if you have such a strong, negative opinion about a misdeed, it shouldn’t make any difference who commits it.

A couple discovers that their teenage son has killed his pregnant girlfriend. Should the parents keep quiet and try to protect the boy or should they tell what they know? Of course they don’t want to get him convicted. After all, it’s their kid. But if it was their own child that was murdered, and the killer’s parents knew it, I’m sure they would want them to come forward. Always put yourself in the other person’s place. A mother claims to be a staunch advocate of capital punishment, until her own son ends up on Death Row. Cold-blooded murder is far less heinous when Daddy is doing it. Every criminal and victim is somebody’s relative or loved one. Just because they are not yours personally, does not change the situation.

Here is a situation which is not criminal but hypocritically judgmental nonetheless. I saw a teleplay about a wartime soldier (portrayed by Jacques Bergerac) whose term is up and is about to be released from active duty. When he phones his family to alert them of his arrival, they all are overjoyed about his homecoming. The soldier then tells them that he has a friend with him, who saved his life, and he would like to bring him along. They were all for the idea until he added that his friend had been wounded in action and is now missing a leg. Oh. Now they all change their tune. Oh, dear! Do they really want to spend time with a disabled person? “Uh, son, we appreciate what your friend did for you and all, and he is most welcome here, but don’t you think that he will be out of place? He won’t be able to ride with us or swim or do anything. We will help him in anyway we can, if he needs further treatment or financial assistance. But don’t bring him with you, dear. It just wouldn’t be convenient. You understand, don’t you?”

When he hangs up the phone, the guy tells his friend that he has changed his mind and will not be going home after all. Then he gets up to leave, and we see for the first time that he is the one with the missing leg! So his family revealed their true colors! They couldn’t be bothered when they thought the poor, unfortunate crip was someone they didn‘t know. I don’t think they would have expressed those sentiments to their son directly, even though now we know what they really think about it. I think he must have already suspected how his parents would react, which is why he first put them to the test.

We might consider changing the way we express certain things, too. Those aspects about ourselves that we had nothing to do with and, in most cases, can’t do anything about—that is, our gender, our ethnicity, our sexual orientation, and the mere circumstances of our birth—we should not be held responsible for. If a female is being subjected to sexual harassment or mistreatment, it’s not her fault. People say, “She was treated that way because she’s a woman.” No, she wasn’t. She was treated that way because of sexism. She can’t help it that she was born a woman. “He was discriminated against because of his color.” No, he wasn’t. He was discriminated against because of racism. What, we should all change our color at will to please certain people? “He was a fine worker, but we had to let him go because he’s a homosexual.” No, that’s not the reason. You let him go because you are homophobes. He was a homosexual when you hired him.

In all of these instances, they make it sound as if certain people are liable by their very being and deserve the mistreatment that they receive. “She’s an illegitimate child, you know.” Why is the stigma of illegitimacy always placed on the innocent child? It’s the parents, not the child, who are “illegitimate,” if you want to use that word. I don’t think that childbirth should be a matter of legality anyway. It’s not against the law to be born or to give birth, and a child is not responsible for its own birth. If you have to say anything, I think that “out-of-wedlock child” is a better term to use. It explains the situation without being morally-judgmental about it. But even that terminology is now outdated and inappropriate. A woman does not have to be married to have a baby. In fact, there are probably as many children worldwide born out-of-wedlock than those who are not. Let’s put the blame where it lies—on the accusatory bigots, not on the innocent subjects.

People need to realize, too, that we are all connected in some way, and anything done to somebody else is going to affect ourselves at some point. No one is exempt from global adversity. Some people think that nothing bad will ever happen to them. Bad things happen only to other people. So as long as it’s not their own problem, they don’t worry or care about anybody else. And when something bad does happen to so-called “good” people, it’s often questioned. “Why me, Lord? What did I do to deserve all this misfortune?” Well, it may not be something that you did, exactly, but rather something that you did not do.
Maybe you denied help to a fellow human in need or allowed a fellow classmate to be harassed and bullied. Maybe you sat quietly by and said nothing when your co-workers made an ethnic slur or said something that was disrespectful to women or gays. Things that affect seemingly only a few people, affect everybody. So then everyone is affected by racism, sexism and homophobia, not just People-of-Color, women and homosexuals. If you put any degree of hate or intolerance out into the world, and that includes the act of willful indifference, it will eventually come back to you. You know, what goes around, comes around. I firmly believe that. And I have seen definite indications of it throughout my life, too.

Of course, we are not alone, but this country, too, is in the midst of a moral deficit. And I’m not talking about matters of sex, either—I mean people’s (that includes children) utter disregard and disrespect for human life. They can commit murder without any conscience or remorse. What is so disturbing to me is this seeming disregard for life in general. We don’t put much importance on human life, certainly not on animal or plant life, and we don’t even seem to care if we ourselves live or die. As a race of beings, we are so intolerant and unforgiving of each other’s common foibles. While we can accept the fact that nobody is perfect, we turn right around and constantly judge each other harshly for our imperfections.

(“Off with their heads!”) We are a great society for persecution, vengeance and retaliation, staunch advocates of capital punishment and have a morbid fascination with public executions. Consider all the lion-feedings, crucifixions, impalements, immolations, duels, pugilistic bouts, firing squads, hangings, lynchings, lapidations (stonings), gassings, electrocutions, lethal injections and decapitations that people have advocated and willingly witnessed over the centuries. It’s another hypocritical situation. I think that a society that practices criminal “tit-for-tat” is no better than the people that they are condemning. We are taught, in theory, that the taking of a human life is the worst thing that a person can do to another, then we, in turn, proceed to punish the perpetrator by taking their life!

There are many Americans that regard the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 to be completely unwarranted, as if we are totally innocent and have never done anything to anybody (although I am not entirely convinced that it even was a terrorist attack, at least not a foreign one, as I have elaborated in another post). “Why do those people hate us so much?” Well, we are not all that innocent, now, are we? Besides the atrocities that we have perpetrated on the peoples of other nations, look how we have treated in the past, and still do, our own fellow gentry. Of course, I don’t condone terrorist activity from anyone, but how dare we judge and condemn anybody for committing mass murder, as if we are completely guiltless of the same thing?!

Ever since there have been people in the world, there has been homicide. We can’t abolish murder by killing everybody who commits it. And since everyone is a potential murderer, why don’t we just kill everybody to prevent them from killing somebody else? An absurdly extreme notion? Well, to me, it’s no more absurd than arbitrary capital punishment. Every person in the world is guilty of some wrongdoing some time in their life, including killing. That is a basic fact of humanity.

I have to blame the media somewhat for this attitude of unconcern for human life, when reports and depiction of murder is so commonplace and matter-of-fact these days. It’s a daily occurrence on the news broadcasts, and although entertaining–I watch many of them myself–the TV crime shows treat murder and mayhem as if they were no big deal. The writers of these shows have to come up with different ways and means to commit murders week after week, year after year, and it has gotten so that people will kill each other for any or no reason. One new show is even called “Motive,” where the victim and killer are revealed at the top of the show, and the detectives spend the rest of the hour determining the why. The reasons become more nonsensical every episode.

A popular motive is they-know-too-much-so-kill-them-so-that-they-can’t-tell-anybody. Not that they will necessarily, but the fact that they could is grounds for extermination, you see. When knowledge of privileged information becomes definite grounds for being murdered, then none of us are safe, I guess. I saw a recent drama where a woman murdered her own daughter because the young woman had a conscience and didn’t like that her family were into some criminal business dealings. The mother’s excuse when she got caught was, “I sacrificed my daughter in order to protect my husband and sons. It was for the family.” So your daughter is not part of your family? The very next week on the same show, “Perception,” a dollmaker, who specialized in realistic baby dolls for women who used his creations to fill the void after the death of their own babies, murdered one of his clients because she didn’t take care of her doll properly to his satisfaction. Each doll was a work of art, you see, and how dare that bitch abuse one of his masterpieces! She had to die. That’ll teach her!

Characters kill spouses, family members and friends for the pettiest of reasons, not that any reason is good enough to merit murder, in my opinion. Fortunately, there are enough rationally-sane persons in the world, like myself, who are not influenced by all that gratuitous violence that we witness on the screen. But there are those who are impressionable, especially the youth, who become callous and apathetic by it all and regard killing as a non-issue. Many are obsessed with those video games where violence is the main objective of gameplay, and too often the line between fantasy and reality become dangerously blurred.

It’s little wonder that we don’t care about each other, because we don’t even care what happens to ourselves. We seem to be hell-bent for self-destruction. For example, we now know what foods are potentially bad for our health and which substances and chemicals are detrimental to our body, yet we continue to put harmful things into it. We know that nicotine and alcohol, for instance, are addictive and deadly, yet the tobacco and liquor industries are forever thriving. Ambitious athletes pump themselves up with harmful steroids, knowing full well their eventual, lethal effect.

We read the warnings on the diet soft drink cans and bottles that say that the artificial sweeteners contained therein have been proven to be carcinogenic, then we go right ahead and buy a case of the stuff anyway. When Patrick Swayze and Alex Trebek (who should have known better), to name only two, died of pancreatic cancer, it was later reported that they both were addicted to Diet Coke. It was their primary beverage for years. The pancreas is designed to process real sugar. When aspertame is introduced into the system, the pancreas get confused. “What is that?” it asks. So its not being able to process this strange substance, it rebels and creates cancer cells to itself instead.

We continue to pollute the air that we have to breathe and the water that we need to drink. We have jeopardized people’s health and well-being by the dumping of toxic and nuclear waste materials into our waterways and environment. For the individuals and companies that do that, what are they thinking? Don’t they have to live here, too? Where are they going when their careless apathy some day renders this earth uninhabitable?

We upset the balance of nature with our senseless, gratuitous killing of wildlife and drive masses of animals from their natural habitats. If you go out and destroy an animal’s home where it lives and eats, then don’t get all indignant and want to kill it when it comes into your yard looking for food. We continue to destroy the rainforests and the ozone layer. I heard a news report that the rainforests’ decimation is responsible for unleashing all these “new” deadly viruses (like the Ebola) on the world, which previously had contained them. So see, that’s another thing that we have brought upon ourselves.

The cutting down of trees, along with the excessive burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas), also cause an increase in potentially-harmful carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, resulting in the “greenhouse effect” and “global warming,” which has been proven to be already affecting the earth in catastrophic ways. When we didn’t know any better, that was our excuse. But now that we do know better, what’s our excuse? I guess we just don’t care enough. I have heard elderly persons exclaim, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself!”

Here’s a riddle for you. “Those who make it, don’t need it. Those who buy it, don’t use it. Those who use it, don’t know it. What is it?” I’ll give you some time to think about it before I tell you the answer.

There is an industrial racket that I really hold in great disdain, and that is the death and funeral business. A recent TV spot reported that death is a billion dollar industry. It’s amazing that something so basic and natural as death can be subject to so much dread, exploitation and greed. I realize that undertakers have to make a living, too, but I wish that they would employ less-extortive means and not take such advantage of people’s grief and vulnerability. Everything connected with morticians and funerals are grossly-overpriced. How can they charge thousands of dollars for some fancy, oblong box which is used for a very short while—a few days at the most—and which is then destined to go into the ground for all eternity. And what’s worse, why do people then pay such prices for such a thing? Oh, the answer to that riddle? Why, it’s a coffin or casket, of course!

Even before the wake and funeral, there is a fee for the preparation of the corpse. It has to be embalmed. Why? What is the purpose of that? Then your “final resting place” is more moolah, depending on whether you get a simple dirt plot, or a mausoleum. If you opt for the ground route, then you’ll need an identifying headstone for your loved ones when they visit the grave. All this money spent for what? To put on a show for a dead person’s surviving relatives and friends. It’s all for appearances’ sake, really. The corpse has to look good, so buy them a new suit or dress, if necessary. You can’t have Mother looking tacky at her own funeral. I mean, what will the neighbors say? Then you have to have an attractive-looking coffin for the attendees to admire. Money’s no object. If we can spend more money on this casket than the family spent on Cousin Euphrosyne’s, then so much the better. I am all for funerals and memorial services to acknowledge someone’s passing and celebrate their life–I would hope that I am honored in such a way when I die–but I certainly don’t have to be there physically.

Corpse disposal is another bone of contention with me (pardon the pun). Think of all the hundreds of thousands of acres of land all over the world that have been used as cemeteries and graveyards. So this land is not being used for anything else, but it could be. The only thing that these planted bodies are doing is taking up a lot of space. But if you are going to bury a dead body, which I think is unnecessary in itself, why not bury just the naked body? Why put it in any kind of container? Why do they try to preserve it, for what reason? It’s just an old dead thing, subject to eventual decay. People seem to be brainwashed in accepting certain conventions of life without acknowledging the practical and logical ramifications of the situation.

I think that we should make cremation the primary mode of corpse disposal. Make undertakers obsolete and do away with the profession altogether. Cremation is more practical anyway. It’s the best form of preservation. You reduce the body to a compact bunch of ashes (sort of like microfilm) and you get to keep them for as long as you want—requires no refrigeration. You don’t need an expensive tombstone either. Just put an identifying label on the urn or other container, if you have more than one. Of course, cremation is controlled by the capitalists, too. If cremation does becomes “the thing,” then somebody has to make some money from people’s deaths. They’ve made it against the law to conduct our own private cremations, which doesn’t seem fair. Anyone can start a fire. If someone dies in their own home, for instance, why can’t the family just dispose of the corpse themselves, instead of hiring some agency, which charges a lot of money, to do it for them? “Uh, Billy Ray, go over yonder to the fireplace and poke up your grandma. It’s gettin’ a might chilly in here.”

I have designated in my will that after my death I offer any of my bodily parts that are of any use to anyone for transplant or replacement purposes or to medical science for the purpose of instruction or experimentation, after which the useless remains shall be burnt up. I also carry an organ donor card in my wallet. Viable human organs have become a much-coveted commodity nowadays. They are so needed that one often has to tap into the black market industry to obtain them. Why not make postmortem organ donation a requirement or law even? Instead of wasting valuable organs and body parts by putting them in the ground to rot, many other lives could be saved and prolonged. They can still dispose of the rest of the corpse after they’ve made use of the usable parts.

This current campaign for conservation and recycling should apply to ourselves as well as other discarded items. I suggested in another post that we should find a way to process human remains into palatable food. With people dying all the time, we would have an ongoing, unlimited supply of food and organs. We could easily end world hunger forever if everyone, including governments, would use practical thinking and an open mind to solve a lot of problems, rather than holding onto outdated and impractical hangups and taboos about death, burial and disposal.

In recognition of Black History Month, I am submitting a series of black-related articles. I hope, as usual, that you find them to be educational, thought-provoking and entertaining.

I consider the modern annual celebration of Black History Month to be a positive educational gesture. From the special TV programming, I learn something new every year. But why February as the designated month? I cynically thought it was picked because it is the shortest month. You know, why draw it out any longer than they have to? But the reason is that it was black scholar/historian Carter G. Woodson who initiated Black History Week in 1926 as the second week in February, to coincide with the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. As part of the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976, it was expanded and became established as Black History Month and is now celebrated all over North America.

I don’t think that Black History need to be a separate subject, however. If so-called black history were just a normal facet of common, everyday education, there would be no need for a special, yearly designation, which makes it a racist gesture and another aspect of segregation by its mere inception. There is no White History Month, for example, because we get that all the time, all the year around! Realize that history is just that—“his story.” But whose story? Who is “he”? There are as many versions of history as there are people. It becomes a racial issue when we are told only one biased side of the story or only one representative of all the different people in the world.

Schoolchildren of Mexican descent, for example, who live in the border states of Texas, New Mexico and the rest, are also denied learning about their own heritage. Mexico has its national heroes just as we do. They hear about Washington and Davy Crockett, but they are not told about Benito Juarez, Miguel Hidalgo, Pancho Villa and others. All history is intertwined, happening concurrently, black and white and every other color and ethnicity. Just include it along with their White History/Herstory.

It was the white historians of the past who wrote and put out the textbooks from which we were subjected to learn, and I suspected even back then that my high school history courses seemed to be greatly lacking in pertinent content. My classmates of color and I were all creative and enterprising in our own way. I never believed that my generation was the first to have an original or innovative idea. There had to have been others before us. For years I wasn’t aware that any black people had done anything, let alone invented anything. But that’s because those white historians of the past didn’t want us to know. In school, they were quick to let us know all the things that white folks have done for this country, though! What I do know now I had to find out for myself.

What is so remarkable about a white man attaining success in his life? He has all the advantages and privileges to do so, as his peers are running the show and encouraging and helping him to succeed. Let us know about the nonwhites and women and other underdogs who overcame the odds and restrictions of their stations in life to achieve recognition for making major contributions to the world at large. They are the real heroes.

In general, white people have always resented the successes and achievements of black people. I am merely stating a fact. Otherwise, why have they not been properly acknowledged? Do you know what the following items all have in common: air-conditioner, automatic cutoff switch, automatic elevator doors, automatic gear shift, automatic traffic signal, bicycle frame, bicycle parcel carrier, boiler furnace, bread-crumbling machine, canopy bed, cap for bottles and jars, child’s carriage, churn, cigarette roller, clothes dryer, comb, corn harvester and silker, cotton gin, curtain rod support, dust pan, eggbeater, electric lamp, eye protector glasses, fire extinguisher, folding bed, folding chair, fountain pen, gas mask, golf tee, guitar, hand stamp, horseshoe, ironing board, kneading machine, lantern, lawnmower, lawn sprinkler, lemon squeezer, letter box, luggage carrier, magnetic computer tape reel, mop, overshoe, peach pitter, peanut butter, pencil sharpener, player piano, portable weighing scale, postmarking machine, potato chips, printing press, reaper, refrigerator, riding saddle, shoe lasting machine, steam table, street sweeper, swinging chair, typewriter, train car coupling device, vacuum pan evaporator, water closet, and window cleaner?

Believe it or not, all these things were invented and patented by Afro-Americans! Now, why didn’t you or I know that before now? Because we weren’t told by our white educators, even if any of them knew themselves. You see, unfortunately, most of these little-known inventors received no money or only a piddling amount for what their inventions were actually worth. And because of the lack of financial support from the white banking institutions, most black inventors were forced to allow whites to demonstrate their products for them, and therefore taking the credit and receiving the remuneration for them as well.

The Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and attended by 27 million people (by some estimates), did not feature a single innovation or contribution by a black person. It was as if we had not ever done anything for this country or the world. Despite the obstacles and limitations afforded them, a black person somewhere has managed to accomplish all the very same things that white people have, in every occupation and scientific endeavor (one even achieved the U.S. Presidency!), some even before a white person did them, as I am about to demonstrate.

During the ’50s and ’60s, when I was in school, we were never taught about Frederick Jones, Joseph Lee, Jan E. Matzeliger, Elijah McCoy, Garrett A. Morgan, Norbert Rillieux or Granville T. Woods, inventors of some of the previously-cited products. But we sure learned about Thomas Edison and Eli Whitney, who owned the slave who actually invented the cotton gin, by the way. Who would know more about the inner-workings and problems of the cotton industry than the people who were doing the actual work? What would Whitney know about it, probably never having picked any cotton in his life? Of course, it was Whitney who had to sell the idea to the manufacturers and therefore received the credit and financial rewards. It resulted in increased production and sales profits, but the lowly, anonymous slave who invented it has gone unacknowledged and ignored. Blacks were the property of their masters and were not allowed to own anything of value themselves anyway.

Elijah McCoy [c. 1844-1929] invented a device which made it possible to lubricate heavy machinery while it was in motion. His invention gave rise to the expression “the real McCoy.” Lewis Howard Latimer, an Afro-American electrical engineer and draftsman, played critical roles in the development of the telephone and the incandescent light bulb, but we never found any mention of his contributions in relation to Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. We were led to believe that they did all that work all by themselves. We weren’t told about black doctor Daniel Hale Williams [1856-1931], who in 1893 became the first surgeon successfully to perform open-heart surgery, but they told us about the later-in-time Dr. Christiaan Barnard.

One of our most brilliant scholars and civil rights activists was W.E.B. Du Bois [1868-1963], who was the first Afro-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895. The next year his doctoral thesis was the first book to be published by the university’s press. Du Bois went on to author 17 more books. His name was never mentioned in any of my high school U.S. history courses.

Ever heard of Onesimus? Me, neither. He was a freed African slave who introduced a method of inoculation as a preventive against smallpox during an epidemic in 1721, 68 years (!) before Dr. Edward Jenner took all the credit for the very same method. We were told that Admiral Robert Peary discovered the North Pole in 1909, but I learned that it was black explorer Matthew A. Henson [1866-1955], a member of Peary’s party (who is a distant relative of mine, by the way), who actually got there first.

You probably know who Sally Ride is, but do you know who Mae Jemison is? She is the first black woman astronaut, who was in training the same time as Sally. But you can guess which one got the mission first. We have just learned from the movie Hidden Figures (2016) that it was three black, female mathematicians who pioneered NASA’s space program in the ’60s. Why are we just now finding out about these women’s existence? In fact, it seems that much of the history involving non-whites we learn from movies and TV documentaries. That’s where I get a lot of my knowledge, as indicated in many of my blog articles, including this one.

Alan Turing has been credited with inventing the first digital computer. But the modern PC technology that is used today by practically everybody was invented and developed by Dr. Mark Dean, a Ph.D. genius from Stanford University, who is a black man. He was a pioneer for the later successes of Bill Gates and Michael Dell and created the internal architecture that allows multiple units such as modems, printers and other peripherals to be attached to home computers. Dr. Dean also led the design team responsible for creating the first 1-gigahertz processor chip. So why isn’t he the wealthiest man in the world, I wonder?

(# Play that funky music, white boy!… #)
All of the truly American music idioms—spirituals, gospel, jazz, the blues (including some aspects of country music), rock ‘n’ roll and hip hop—were invented by blacks with their origins in the cotton fields and chain gangs, and they were all criticized and disparaged until enterprising whites adopted these same musical innovations as their own creation and gave them universal respectability. When we introduced jazz in the 1920s, it was called “Devil’s music” and “nigger music” and was not to be taken seriously. Then a group of white musicians, who called themselves “The Original Dixieland Jazz Band,” recorded “Livery Stable Blues,” and it sold more than a million copies. They were even billed on the record as “The Creators of Jazz.” Another purloiner was the appropriately-named bandleader Paul Whiteman who, as “The King of Jazz,” brought the previously-unsanctioned music genre into the concert hall and helped pioneer the Big Band era.

Black-oriented rhythm ‘n’ blues became the offshoot of jazz, and by the early ‘50s white artists such as Pat Boone and Elvis Presley, among others, started stealing the music of Little Richard and other black artists and recording cover versions of their songs. The white versions became big hits, leaving the original artists without much compensation or even recognition. For instance, did you know that Elvis’ hugely-successful “Hound Dog” was originally written (by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller) for and done by blues singer Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton a few years before Presley’s version? Sister Rosetta Tharp also was a big influence on his musical style. Other big Presley hits, like “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up” were written by black songwriter Otis Blackwell, but many people still regard them to be Elvis’ songs. “Fever” is more associated with Peggy Lee than the composer of the song, Little Willie John, who recorded it before she did.

I always thought that the Diamonds’ biggest hit “Little Darlin’” was theirs alone, until I learned that it was written and recorded by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs before the other group did it. Jerry Lee Lewis got his “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” from hearing it at the dance club run and frequented by blacks where he used to hang out in his hometown of Ferriday, Louisiana. It is generally regarded that Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land Is Your Land,” and although he may have adapted the lyrics, he got the tune from the Carter Family, who in turn got it from Lesley Riddle, a black blues guitarist from the ’30s. There are other country artists (Johnny Cash, for one) who admit being influenced or mentored by older blacks.

But what happened as a result of those white artists appropriating our music, just like with the jazz thing, it eventually caused people to take notice. They found that they liked the songs and were curious enough to check out the original versions, which they discovered that they also liked. So, Boone, Presley and the rest actually did us a favor by giving the previously-overlooked or ignored black music of the time recognition and appreciation. It even improved race relations somewhat within the music and record business.

Besides Elvis, and by their own admission, Little Richard influenced and helped launch the performing careers of The Beatles, James Brown, Otis Redding and The Rolling Stones. According to the film, Cadillac Records (2008), the Stones purportedly took their name from a hit title song made famous by blues singer Muddy Waters, whom the group members idolized. Now, I’m not knocking Elvis—I am a fan, too—but it’s erroneous and unfair to declare him the “King of Rock & Roll” when, until recently, Little Richard was still alive and active. One can’t be a reigning king if he’s dead. Although Chuck Berry, also who we only recently lost, was known as “The Father of Rock & Roll,” apparently a white “king” has more prestige than a black “father,” even if he is dead. Little Richard considered himself both the “King and ‘Queen’ of Rock & Roll.” Berry, incidentally, once accused The Beach Boys of plagiarism, saying that their hit song “Surfin’ USA” is, except for the lyrics, identical to his own “Sweet Little Sixteen.” True, there are some similarities, but they are not the same song at all–no more than George Harrison‘s “My Sweet Lord,“ when it was accused of being a ripoff of The Chiffons‘ “He‘s So Fine.”

Although I don’t think that she ever claimed to have invented it, in 2013 Miley Cyrus is accredited with popularizing the “twerk” dance. But the origins of those dance movements have roots in Africa, where disparate tribes were twerking centuries ago. So Whitey stole that from us, too! The Ghana and Togo version of the dance is called borborbor.

(# …I’ll rock ’em, roll ’em all night long, I’m a sixty-minute man. #)
The attempt to gain more worldwide appeal prompted famous white disk jockey Alan Freed to coin the term “rock ‘n’ roll” to distinguish the more mainstream blues-influenced music from that which was exclusively performed by black artists. But even that claim is subject to some conjecture, because as early as 1951, Billy Ward and the Dominoes came out with a song, “Sixty Minute Man,” which employs the above lyric. Even so, the words rock and/or roll had been used lyrically in many earlier rhythm ‘n’ blues songs and were euphemisms for the sex act, which is one reason why parents objected so strongly to their children’s listening and dancing to the music that developed out of that genre.

(# …Come on, baby, rock me all night long… #)
(# …Roll with me, Henry… #).
Whether they were referring to dancing, partying or having sex, they seemed to have a lot of stamina, too. (# …We’re gonna rock around the clock tonight… #) Then the subsequent slogan, “Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” suggests synonymous interrelation. So then Freed’s accredited coinage was not all that original but was inspired by black songwriters and recording artists. You see, they (Whitey) even tried to take credit for that! The term seems still to be used with the same connotation when Michael Jackson sang, # …I want to rock with you all night… #. I’m sure that he doesn’t mean sleeping with somebody in side-by-side rocking chairs!

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges [1745-1799] was born in Guadaloupe, the son of a wealthy planter and his African slave. When he was still a young child, the family moved to Paris where Joseph became a champion swordsman, virtuoso violinist, conductor and prolific composer. He wrote 6 operas, 9 symphonies, 14 violin concertos, 10 sonatas and 18 string quartets. Unfortunately, most of his music is lost. He has been referred to as “the black Mozart,” whom he actually knew when they shared living quarters for a time. Just as Antonio Salieri was jealous of Mozart, it’s rumored that Mozart was jealous of Saint-Georges. He was beloved by the court of Louis XVI and a friend and confidante of Marie Antoinette. Why he constantly has been left out of the annals of classical composers, and a contemporary of Mozart even, I don’t understand. Fortunately, a feature biopic has been made about him (which I have yet to see), so at least this musical genius is finally getting the acknowledgment that he deserves.

Florence B. Smith Price [1887-1953] was a composer, pianist and organist who was the first Afro-American to have a classical music work performed by a major orchestra, when the Chicago Symphony premiered her first symphony during the World’s Fair of 1933. The official state song of Virginia, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” was commonly accepted as the work of Stephen Foster, but it was actually written by James A. Bland, black composer of 600 songs.

Did you know that writers Aesop of fable fame, Alexandre Dumas Sr., who wrote The Three Musketeers, Dumas Jr., who wrote “Camille” (which is the basis for Verdi’s La Traviata), Russian poet Alexander Pushkin (Boris Godunov and Eugene Onegin), and Frank G. Yerby, who wrote The Foxes of Harrow and Golden Hawk, were Negroes?

There are so many other black innovators and achievers whose black identities are unknown by most or have gone unrecognized. The city of Chicago was founded by businessman/farmer/fur trader Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, who was the son of a French mariner and an African-born slave mother. It was a black man, Dr. Charles Richard Drew, who founded the American Red Cross Blood Bank. Artist and ornithologist John James Audubon was a Haitian with a black mother. There is a persistent rumor that Alexander Hamilton’s mother also was a Negro. But how about our good, ol’ boy FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, who, in addition to being a closeted homosexual and transvestite, we now learn that he was, in fact, a mulatto who knowingly passed for white! And just as he exercised his homophobia whenever feasible, he didn’t do much to help the plight of Afro-Americans either, when he had the power to do so. Along with Thomas Jefferson, Hoover may be one of the most powerful hypocrites who ever lived.

The land on which Madison Square Garden in NYC now rests once belonged to a black woman. Chief Oshkosh, a black man of Indian descent, has a town in Wisconsin named in his honor. Cosmetician Madam C.J. Walker [1875-1919] was the first self-made Negro female millionaire. I suspect that the reason she was able to achieve such a distinction on her own at that time in history was because the white Powers-That-Be were not aware of what she was doing, until it was too late. Do you think that if they had known, they would have allowed it? I don’t think so. “What, that dinge is making more money than I am?! We can’t have that! Close that wench down! Burn her out, if you have to!”

It was a similar situation, although there is the perceived-to-be criminal element, with true-life Frank Lucas (portrayed by Denzel Washington in the 2007 film, American Gangster), who claimed to have made as much as two million dollars in a single day, selling heroin in the late sixties. He was his own boss and operated on the down-low, never calling attention to himself, which is probably why he was the most successful independent drug dealer who ever was, and had been in business for 14 years before the Feds even knew his name! He was a billionaire by the time he was caught and brought to justice. The fact that Lucas did commit murder in the course of his business dealings would make him a real criminal, but that’s not what they busted him for.

You know, it’s sort of ironic and a little hypocritical besides, that although Lucas obviously was a brilliant businessman, the product he was selling is considered an illegal substance, and is what made him a criminal in Society’s eyes. Apparently, it was something that was in great demand or all those people would not have been buying it. If he had been peddling alcohol or cigarettes or doctor-prescribed pain relievers, he wouldn’t have been doing anything wrong, because they are all “legal.” There are many consumed substances, like the aforementioned, that are physically harmful in varying degrees, which have little or nothing to do with their legality, apparently. It’s all arbitrary. But then one can’t make as much money on a legal commodity as they can with an illegal one. (Check out my blog, Drug Legalization, Use and Abuse.)

It took black journalist/activist Asa Philip Randolph twelve whole years (1925-1937) to form the first black labor union for Pullman porters and had to put up with opposition from all sides during the entire time. It was the Pullman company that was mostly against their workers organizing, as they would have to stop taking unfair advantage of them and to start paying them at least minimum wages. But Randolph also received non-support and resistance from the American Federation of Labor and from some of the porters themselves. They didn’t want to make waves and were afraid to go up against their white bosses. This story is chronicled in the film 10,000 Black Men Named George (2002), starring André Braugher as Randolph. The title, by the way, refers to the apathetic anonymity of the Pullman porters, whom instead of their individual real names, were all referred to as “George,” after George Pullman. It was merely a euphemistic alias for “Boy” or “Uncle.”

The royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle caused a lot of hoopla when it was learned that Meghan is half-black. My goodness, will the Royal Family be able to accept and tolerate this racial infiltration? Well, apparently, those dissenters don’t know their family history, because it turns out that Meghan is not the first. Queen Charlotte [1744-1818] was England’s first black queen! She was the direct descendant of the African branch of a Portuguese royal line. She married George III in 1761 and had 15 children, 13 of which survived to adulthood. She is the grandmother of Queen Victoria and the great-great-great grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II. So this was no great surprise to her, as I’m sure she is aware of Charlotte’s existence and lineage. I suppose the reason this is unknown information is because at the time, it was not such a big deal. Then, too, the King could marry anybody he wanted to. He’s the King! Queen Charlotte studied music with Johann Christian Bach and was a friend to his wife. Mozart dedicated one of his early pieces to her. I always contend that there is nothing new under the sun.

Just like Barack Obama is not the first black man (half-black, anyway) to run for President, I would bet that few have heard of George Edwin Taylor [1857-1925]. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Taylor was a journalist and political activist who ran against Teddy Roosevelt in 1904 on the National Negro Liberty Party ticket. Of course, there was major resistance to his campaigning. He got no newspaper endorsement, and most states would not even put his name on the election ballot. The 65,000 votes that he received were not reported. But at least he made the attempt, however futile.

Here is a bit of neglected world history. The year 2012 commemorated the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the ocean liner Titanic. With all that has been written and depicted about the disaster (a number of movies and such), and with published documentation of the passengers and survivors, one interesting oversight is that there was a black family aboard the ship when it made its fateful voyage in April 1912. Surprised? So was I. Joseph Laroche was a Haitian-born, French-educated engineer (he worked on the building of one of the early Metro lines in Paris) who was traveling back to the U.S. with his pregnant wife, Juliette, and their two baby daughters. Mother and children made it into a lifeboat, were rescued and survived. Laroche, unfortunately, perished along with the other 166 second-class passengers. He was 26. Joseph Jr., who was born in France, when his mother returned there later that year, eventually re-married, had three children and only died himself in 1987. Not one of the movies that have been made about the event has included or even mentioned this Laroche family.

Here is another item of little-known black history. In 1955, nine months before Rosa Parks made her defiant gesture on that Alabama bus, a 15-year-old girl in Birmingham named Claudette Colvin (we have the same birthday!) also refused to relinquish her bus seat to a white passenger and, of course, was subsequently arrested and jailed. But the reason given why this incident did not make the news at the time is because this girl was poor, not well-educated and became pregnant, and it was decided that she would not be a proper candidate for the burgeoning civil rights movement, you see. The fact of the matter is, Ms. Parks’ action that day was not exactly unplanned. It was a deliberate coup. The NAACP local affiliate that she worked for put her up to it. Rosa was older, more articulate, had some political clout and would be taken more seriously, whereas this Colvin teenager would have been looked down on as some delinquent who was just trying to make trouble. I always say that there are no accidents and everything happens for a reason.

American historians will know what Crispus Attucks’s claim-to-fame is. He is said to be the first man to die for the American Revolution. Is the fact that he was black only coincidental to his demise? I mean, he was leading the mob against the Redcoats during the Boston Massacre in 1770, but I can imagine what the guy who opened fire on him was thinking. “Look at that. Wouldn’t you know it, that there would be some uppity nigger over there stirring up trouble. Kill him!”

You know those little black-faced lawn jockeys that you sometimes see on white people’s front yards and that black people are supposed to be offended by (although I’ve never been told why)? Well, that’s more ignorance on their part. Considered by some to be the greatest jockey who ever lived (he died in 1896), Afro-American Isaac Murphy won three Kentucky Derbys, which were not exceeded for 57 years and was the very first jockey to be voted into the National Museum of Racing’s Hall of Fame. It has been said that Murphy made more money as a jockey at that time than the President. But Murphy wasn’t the only famous black jockey. There have been many. Nine others had won Kentucky Derbys by 1902.

So instead of being offended, I consider it a tribute and an honor when I see a black jockey on somebody’s lawn. Why should they always be Caucasian ones? That would be discrimination, too, wouldn’t it? Now if you want to object to the actual coloring of the statues’ faces, then that’s another matter. They don’t need to paint them black, exactly; they could use some shade of brown. But we know that the colors of things are not always specific or exact, only symbolic. “White” visual representation is hardly ever the color white either.

Blacks eventually excelled in other national sports when finally given the chance, especially baseball (Hank Aaron), basketball (Michael Jordan), boxing (Joe Louis), track (Jesse Owens, Flo Jo, Wilma Rudolph), tennis (Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, the Williams Sisters), soccer (Péle), hockey (Willie O’Ree), race car driving (Wendell Scott) and even golf (Tiger Woods). There are others as well in each category, of course.

But decades before any of the aforementioned tennis greats made a name for themselves, I recently got wind of Jean-René Lacoste [1904-1996], French tennis champion, actor, innovator and fashion businessman, who, in addition to winning 12 Grand Slam tennis tournaments in 1926-28, introduced the first tubular steel tennis racket and the Lacoste tennis shirt with the reptilian logo. Lacoste earned the nickname “The Crocodile” because of his tenacity on the tennis court. Then, too, the captain of the Davis Cup promised René a crocodile-skin handbag if he won (in 1927). The popular logo on his shirts subsequently became an alligator. What I have not yet been able to verify is the possibility that Lacoste was a black man, or at least half-black. He was very fair-skinned, so maybe he passed for white. I decided to include him in this treatise in the event that he does qualify.

Here’s another one for you. I suppose that everyone knows that Santa Claus is sometimes referred to as St. Nicholas, who was a real person. Before he became bishop of Myra in Turkey back in the 4th century, St. Nicholas was known as a generous benefactor to his people. Well, legend has it that when Nicholas made his neighborly rounds, he was accompanied by his squire (sidekick, if you will), a Spanish moor named Zwarte Piet, or Black Peter, who carried a big bag filled with all sorts of goodies which he passed out to the good little boys and girls that they visited. So our modern practice of the gift-giving aspect of the Santa Claus mystique was originally inspired by a black man! (A 1999 TV movie has been made about Santa and Pete.)

I even doubt if St. Nicholas himself was really fair-skinned, being Turkish and all. But as with all revered figures, or those in a position of power and control, Santa Claus, too, has to be depicted as an old, white man. So these modern-day dissenters who won’t accept Father Christmas to be depicted as or portrayed by a black man (or woman), proclaiming that “Whoever heard of a black Santa Claus?” need to learn some history.

Those were only a few achievements by Afro-Americans and other persons-of-color. We’ve done a whole lot of good shit that the general public doesn’t know about. You see, white folks don’t want to give us credit for anything, unless it’s something bad. Then we get blamed. To let them tell it, everything good in the world only they are responsible for. They don’t ever consider the fact that, although it was not voluntary on our part, it was black people that built this country, not the whites. Think about that. For over 400 years it was the slaves who were doing all the work while the white folks just sat on their tushes all day, not doing a damned thing! Not anything constructive anyway. Oh, they always had big ideas, but when it came to the actual labor, they would get the blacks to do it for them. That is why I think that the aforementioned black “Santa Claus” should not surprise anyone. St. Nicholas probably mused, “I can’t be bothered with all that. Let the shwarzer do the heavy lifting thing.”

(# They don’t give medals to yesterday’s heroes… #)
Not if they’re black, anyway. Having traveled all over the country taking lots of pictures of public art, I have noticed the virtual modicum of black memorials. Of all the famous, accomplished Afro-Americans and other People-of-Color, why are there so very few statues anywhere to honor them? Okay, there is a statue of Arthur Ashe in Richmond, Va., one of Mary McLeod Bethune in Washington, DC, a sculpture of Dorothy Dandridge in Los Angeles, a Mohandas Gandhi in Manhattan, Alex Haley in Knoxville, Tenn., W.C. Handy in Memphis, Joe Louis in Detroit, Willie Mays in San Francisco, James Meredith on the campus of the University of Mississippi in Jackson, Jesse Owens in Cleveland, Asa Philip Randolph in Boston, Jackie Robinson at Coney Island, and a combined statue of Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama (why waste all that extra material on two separate statues, since “they” all look alike anyway?).

Well, actually, I have since learned that there is a G. W. Carver National Monument at some out-of-the-way location in Diamond (?!), Missouri. Of course, that is on everyone’s vacation travel destinations, isn’t it? They just recently unveiled a statue of Dr. Martin Luther King in Washington, DC, at long last. Until then, I suppose that his hometown Atlanta had the only ones. They have named streets and schools after him, too, at least. I thought that the only Frederick Douglass statue is the one in a park in Rochester, NY, but I recently discovered a newly-erected one which stands at the north end of Central Park in Manhattan, appropriately, right where Frederick Douglass Avenue begins.

But where are the Harriet Tubmans, the Phillis Wheatleys, the Ida B. Wellses, the W.E.B. Du Boises? Do I need to go to these people’s home turf to find a memorial of them? I shouldn’t have to. Christopher Columbus was from Genoa, Italy, but there are statues of him all over the damned place! I’ve spotted them in St. Louis, San Francisco, White Plains (NY), Stamford (Conn.), Hazelton (Pa.), Bloomfield, Jersey City and Newark (NJ), Columbus (Ohio) [naturally], Cartagena (Colombia), Funchal (Madeira), as well as several throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn. And he gets a national holiday in this country as well. Why all this honorable recognition for a known slave-trader and navigational idiot besides? He never even set foot in America, but made it only as far as the Caribbean West Indies, which was already heavily-inhabited when he arrived there. Columbus didn’t discover anything. He didn’t even know where he was. He thought he had reached India!

Dayton, Ohio does not have a statue or street for Paul Laurence Dunbar, though, the city’s most famous poet. The person who constructed the first clock in America as well as planned the city of Washington, DC was a brilliant, black man by the name of Benjamin Banneker. So, why not the Banneker Monument, then? Old George W., who was another slave owner, by the way, certainly has enough stuff named after him! Benjie B. does have a memorial fountain in town. That’s all he gets is a fountain?! Well, there is, too, the Benjamin Banneker Historical Park and Museum, but it’s located somewhere outside of Baltimore (they couldn’t even put it in the city, but way outside it?).

There is a monument for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in Baltimore, as well as a wax museum which commemorates great Afro-American achievers. I mean, in all my travels I have seen only a few of the aforementioned memorials, because they are not so prominently displayed. You actually have to search for them.

Escaped slave Harriet Tubman risked her life on many occasions as “conductor” of the Underground Railroad and managed to deliver over 3000 slaves to Northern freedom. Plenty of white folks have been honored for much less. Then why not sainthood for “Moses” Tubman, like they did Elizabeth Seton and Mother Teresa? How about at least a prominent memorial statue somewhere, or a legal tender coin? I guess that saving the lives of black people is not considered important enough humanitarianism. At least there was a commemorative stamp made for her at one time. In fact, there have been only 68 (at this writing) U.S. stamps made that honor black Americans, hardly a comparable number to the many thousands of white honorees.

I just learned, however, that three years ago the U.S. Treasury was considering replacing Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill with Harriet Tubman. I am in possession of $20 bills on a daily basis, and I have yet to see one with her on it. So apparently, talk is cheap. Verbal intent does not get the job done. I also heard that because of his adamant opposition to the idea, it was former President Trump who was holding up the process.

Surprisingly, there is a baseball stadium in Atlantic City, NJ, built in 1949 and named for Negro League great (and Baseball Hall of Famer) John Henry “Pop” Lloyd. Louis Armstrong Park, in the heart of New Orleans, is the city’s largest, and the airport there is named in his honor.

My great-great-uncle Matthew Henson, at least, is getting some overdue recognition finally. In addition to his dedicatory plaque in the State Capitol in Annapolis, a Navy ship has been christened USN Henson and there is the Matthew A. Henson Middle School in Indian Head, Maryland. A statue has been erected in Henson’s birthplace, Charles County, Md., and there is a glacier in Greenland named after him. His character is portrayed in the musical Ragtime, and there is a 1998 biopic Glory & Honor, in which Henson is portrayed by Delroy Lindo. Uncle Matthew has been the answer to “Jeopardy!” clues a few times. On one occasion they asked who was the co-discoverer of the North Pole and even displayed his picture, but none of the players (all white) that day knew who he was. With the clue they gave and if they had shown a picture of Robert Peary, they probably would have gotten it.

I’ve come across statues of dead white guys that hardly anybody has heard of. Who the hell, for example, are John Bullitt, Louis Heintz, Taras Shevchenko and Alexander Webb? Do you know? Well, they all have statues erected for them! In the middle of Times Square, right behind George M. Cohan, stands Father Duffy. What did he do that was so important? There is a statue of a white man in a insignificant park on Staten Island with the caption, “Frank D. Paulo, 1918-1987, A Public Man.” Whoop-dee-doo! I guess some people don’t have to do anything to merit a memorial sculpture. Just be a white man.

Out of curiosity, I decided to Google the aforementioned names. John Bullitt was a Philadelphia lawyer. Big deal! Father Duffy was a decorated military chaplain. So? Taras Shevchenko was a Russian poet, artist and activist. Who cares? Alexander Webb was a Civil War general. So what? I couldn’t even find an entry for Louis Heintz. Why such special recognition for these ordinary guys? When a black person is honored with a statue, we most likely know who it is already, because they are famous. They don’t do it for just anybody, if they are not white. Otherwise, I would have one. Frank D. Paulo was just that–a public man. It probably was his family who erected that statue in his honor. I am a public man. Where is my statue? I will bet that I am known by more people worldwide than Frank Paulo! Oh! But to get one, I guess I have to be dead first, don’t I?

My guess is that if these great Afro-Americans were honored on such a grand scale as memorials and statues and stuff, people would have to take notice of them and maybe even muster some degree of respect and appreciation for their achievements. So even if there is a modest number of black memorials, statues and museums here and there, they certainly aren’t as predominant as most of your white honorees. I shouldn’t have to venture all the way to some out-of-the-way locale in Maryland somewhere just to see a statue of my famous ancestor, for example. There should be one here in NYC somewhere.

I have also come to notice the cultural segregation in the field of visual art. I have visited many art museums during my travels and right here in NYC as well, and I hardly ever encounter any black representation, by artist or production. I’ve seen very few portraits or black settings, maybe two or three at the most, but rows and rows and rooms of white people! I know that there is plenty of black art that exists in the world, as there are certain museums and galleries that display these works. But why must they be relegated to their own separate venues all the time? I should be able to view this black art at the Metropolitan or Guggenheim or the Louvre or any other mainstream museum that I may visit.

There must be a fair amount of black art in Europe, as there is in other parts of the world. But where is it all? I hardly ever see any. I saw only one painting in all of Paris. One! Do I have to go to Africa to find African art or wait to view somebody’s private collection in their home? Who are the renowned black painters and sculptors? There must be some. Every world civilization is deemed by its art, so just like history, our depiction of art should be a full, all-inclusive representation by all its people for fair assessment, not just the Caucasian aspect all the time. I’d like to see Billy Dee Williams’ paintings right up there alongside Tony Curtis‘.

With the opening of the new Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, DC,–I have not been there yet, however–maybe the general public will be made aware of the many heretofore unknown contributions blacks have made and finally to receive the long-overdue recognition and respect that we deserve. It’s about time, anyway!

[Related articles: Black History, Part 2–Slavery and Its Aftermath; Black History, Part 3–Racism via Show Business; Black History, Part 4–Criminal Injustice; Black History, Part 5–Biased Concerns; Color Issues; Real Characters; Some Racial Observations; Stereotyping and Profiling, Racial and Otherwise; Walt Disney, a Racist? Who‘d‘ve Thunk It!?]

As a follow-up to my treatise on marriage, I will now give you my take on child-rearing. I realize that child-rearing methods may vary, but there must be some sort of established, standardized guidelines to follow. Understanding the concept of unconditional love toward your child I think should be at the top of the list. There is no action on their part that should be unforgiven. Love conquers all. Child psychology experts would know about discipline and how to explain the facts of life to a child, for another. People are constantly running to Dr. Phil, asking for help with how to deal with their uncontrollable, willful, disobedient children. “We just don’t know what to do. We’re at the end of our rope!” Why are they having children when they have no idea how to raise them?! They’re putting the cart before the horse.

By the parents’ own admission, these children, some as young as 2-years-old, are controlling the parents. The youngsters have learned very early on how to manipulate them in getting their own way, and if the parents refuse them anything, the kid knows what buttons to push and how to get to them to come around. The parents say that they feel guilty when they attempt to discipline their children and be less permissive with them. And the child knows how to use that guilt to their own advantage. Kids are not stupid. In fact, they tend to be much smarter than their parents. The children know exactly what they’re doing, while the parents usually don’t have a clue.

I remember an episode of “The Simpsons” once where oft-mischievous Bart did something which prompted his mother, Marge, to send him to bed without his supper. Later that night when his father, Homer, goes in to check on his son, Bart appeals to him to take pity on him, defy Marge and sneak him in something to eat, which he does. When Homer leaves the room, Bart chuckles to himself, “Sucker!”

If I had my way, just as with the required marriage quiz that I suggested before, first-time prospective parents would be required by law to take a school course in Parenting and Proper Child-Rearing 101. And only when they have passed the course and received their certificate, would they be allowed to conceive. The course would include personal counseling to determine if the students are emotionally and economically stable enough to raise a child. Do they really want a child, and more importantly, why? Do they intend to stay home with this child and give them their full attention, or will they be out running around doing everything but? Do they fully understand and accept the tremendous responsibility that having and raising a child entails? These findings would influence their grade. This is basically what they put people through who are trying to adopt a child, or even a dog or cat from a shelter or kennel. Why should the criteria be any different for one’s biological children? Let’s go a step further and make unplanned, uncounseled pregnancies a felony. If people cannot be responsible for themselves by having unwanted babies, then let the Government step in to protect us from ourselves, like they do about almost everything else. Make having children a privilege rather than a right.

There are far too many unwanted and impractical pregnancies occurring all over the world. Many of them stem from lack of education about birth control, on the part of the potential parents, and this lack of education is the fault of their parents and by a lesser degree, the public and private school systems. Grade-school curricula should be based on the needs of Society, and just as Reading, Writing and Arithmetic are imperative for a basic, literate education, Sex and Parenting are just as important in the education of Life. I think that a course of Planned Parenthood should be standard, required curriculum in all public and private schools.

It seems contradictory that Society expects everybody to be married parents at some time in their lives, usually sooner rather than later, but sex education and parenting instruction are the very things that are omitted from their studies. The majority of these prospective parents don’t have a clue to what child-rearing is all about. Their parents and school administrators seem to think that if certain things are never discussed, they won’t ever happen. To talk about sex and birth control and disease prevention is giving the youngsters permission to be sexually-active. They use that tired argument that dispensing condoms in school encourages the students to have sex with each other. Well, they are doing that anyway, so why not at least teach them how to protect themselves against unwanted pregnancies and potential diseases?

The so-called “Facts of Life” are just that. Everybody’s doing it, as the thriving birthrate all over the world would indicate, so why are they so reluctant or ashamed to talk about it? Instead of telling children the truth about sex, they resort to fantasy explanations about the Stork and use euphemistic metaphors like “the birds and the bees,” which only confuse the youngster even further and leave them still not knowing what the hell is going on. Perhaps if parents would tell their kids how babies are actually made, they may be so repulsed with the whole process that they will hold off doing anything themselves until they are old enough to understand it all. Just as some youngsters are repulsed by two people kissing, they would probably be more repulsed sticking their dick into somebody’s hole or conversely, having something stuck into them!

Other naïve, uninformed youngsters often will do things out of curiosity, not knowing any better. If you tell them what the real deal is about sex, that might take away the curiosity about it. Many parents don’t tell their children the truth about the facts of life because they expect the kids to pick it up somewhere or learn about it as they go along. We don’t leave other necessary life skills, like reading and writing, up to chance like that, but enforce monitored instruction to teach them what they need to know. We should be just as responsible about sex education and parenting.

These parents don’t seem to realize that sex education is just that, learning about sex in general, what it entails, including safety and prevention. It’s not about promotion or necessarily how to do it. Preaching abstinence could be part of a sex education course as well. Just because condoms are available, it doesn’t mean that everyone is going to make use of them. There may be a Tampax dispenser in the girls’ restroom, too, but they all don’t use it. I have heard of many girls who were not warned ahead of time about menstruation, so when they had their first period, they freaked out, thinking that they must be hemorrhaging or something. Why would any mother keep such important information from their own daughter, as if it were something shameful or inappropriate to discuss?

So what if some people never marry or bear children, it doesn’t hurt them to learn about it. In fact, what they are apt to learn from such a course could influence their decision later on in life about getting married and having kids altogether. All knowledge may be useful at some time in life. I have never had the occasion to dissect another frog since I left high school biology class, although they thought that was so important to know how to do. But I was totally ignorant of gonorrhea and the crabs the first time I got them, for example. I had to go to the health clinic and ask them, ‘What the hell is that?!‘ A sex education course might have covered such issues and informed me about how to prevent getting STDs, or at least be aware of them.

There is a TV movie called Daddy (1987) starring Dermot Mulroney as a hot-to-trot high school senior who knocks up his girlfriend, and she decides to have and then keep the baby. They both admitted to each other, “I didn’t know that you could get pregnant the first time.” See? Naïve ignorance. When the teen finally told his parents that he was about to become a father, they couldn’t imagine how such a thing could happen. Of course, they both passed blame. “Didn’t you ever talk to Bobby about sex?” “No, I assumed that he knew what to do. My father never told me anything. Why didn’t you talk to him? You’re his mother!” “Don’t they teach these things at school?” (No, they don’t.) “But that’s our job!” And they had another son about 14, whom they wouldn’t let in on the discussion and kept telling him to go to his room. I thought, Yeah, that’s right. Keep the other boy in the dark, too, so that in a couple of years, or sooner, he can make the same mistake as his brother did. I mean, now’s their big chance to have “The Talk” with the whole family. People just don’t seem to learn.

Then we have your more enlightened, precocious teen girls who tell their boyfriends that they are on the pill, so they don’t have to use condoms when they have sex. Now he’s going to take only this girl’s word when he already suspects that she’s out to trap him into a permanent relationship? People lie. Never mind that potential STDs never enter their minds. So then the girl gets pregnant and tells her boyfriend, “Uh, I guess I forgot to take my pill.” Yeah, sure, you did. These guys are so naïve and too trusting.

Since TV supposedly has so much influence on our children and on society in general, you would think that producers would be more responsible in discussing sex on their shows. On every family sitcom that features young children, when they ask their parents to explain some sexual matter, it’s always met with embarrassment, shame and evasion. And the studio audiences find that all so amusing. The characters always manage to avoid answering any questions that have to do with sex. It’s like the producers know that parents don’t talk to their kids, and out of some sort of confidential obligation, they think that they should not say anything either. Why don’t they take the other approach, that is, the initiative, and attempt to do the parents’ job of educating these kids by dealing with sexual matters in an honest but non-offensive way? It might give parents some idea of what to tell their inquisitive youngsters. Or if the kids are watching the show, they will get the lesson directly.

There are parents, many of them children, who don’t know anything to teach their young ones because they don’t know anything themselves. Then these children grow up and have kids and they don’t tell their kids anything, and the cycle keeps on repeating itself, which is probably why the youth of each consecutive generation are so disturbed, confused and misguided. Two teenagers (boy and girl) involved in a romantic relationship, each go to their respective parents to seek advice about taking that big step. “How do we know when we’re ready to…? You know.” Do you mean have sex? Well, if they can’t even say the word in the discussion, then I don’t think that they are ready to do it!

Let us discuss the responsibility, and lack thereof, of parenting. It is much too easy to bring children into the world, but not so easy to take care of them once they are here. The incidence of indiscriminate pregnancies is at an all-time high. These women, and girls even, are dropping babies like turds. And while abortion was legal, before it was outlawed again, they didn’t even have to have the kid if they didn’t want it. “So I’m knocked up again. No problem, I’ll just get rid of it.” I will tell you right now that I do not condone induced abortion. But that does not mean that I am not pro-choice. Some people think that if you are for one, then you must be against the other, but that is not always the case. I believe that women have a right to decide for themselves whether to have a baby or not, but I think that aborticide is wrong, just the same.

My solution to women is simply, if you don’t want to have a baby, then don’t get pregnant in the first place. Pregnancy does not just happen automatically, you know. It requires a specific activity and can occur only at particular times. That would be another facet of sex education, for girls to know about their personal menstrual cycle and when they are the most fertile. They don’t realize that, like all mammals, estrus occurs when they are horny and ovulating, and it’s the best time to get pregnant. Although pregnancy prevention is the responsibility of both partners, the ultimate onus is on the woman, since she is the one who gets pregnant and has to do all the work. The man causes the pregnancy, but it’s the woman who has to bear the consequences. That may not be fair, but whoever said that everything in life is fair?

I am the type of person who is willing always to take responsibility for my own actions. When I make a mistake in judgment, I am willing to suffer the consequences. So then, when a woman lets herself get pregnant, it should be her obligation to carry the child to term and be its mother after it’s born. If you don’t want to do the term, then don’t take the sperm! Even in the case of getting pregnant as a result of rape, the woman still has to take some responsibility, for allowing herself to be raped. Please don’t be alarmed by that statement. I have a valid explanation which I am saving for another post. It’s too much to get into right now.

Whatever we think about pro-choice, induced abortion is murder, pure and simple. I am one of those who believe that life begins at conception, not at the time of birth. Some argue that a fetus is not really a person, therefore has no rights and is of no importance. But everything being relative, it’s all a matter of growth and development. When does a tree become a tree, for example? It certainly is before it’s full-grown and has sprouted leaves and borne fruit. By the same token, a baby becomes to be in gradual stages; it doesn’t happen all at once. So at what point in its continuing development should it be deemed a viable creature? A pie baking is already a pie before it’s taken out of the oven. A cancerous tumor growing in somebody’s body is acknowledged for what it is, regardless of its size or state of development. So why is a time limit put on fetal validation? The fetus has movement and a heartbeat. That means that it is alive. Birth itself is just another subsequent phase of human development. Then there are certain things that a newborn baby can’t do yet, but does that make it less accountable? These abortion advocates, who think that the killing of a fetus is inconsequential, should keep in mind that if their mothers had aborted them, they would not even be here. I thanked my mother on a regular basis for allowing me to be born. Others weren’t so lucky, if you know what I mean. I don’t take anything for granted, including and especially my birthright.

Again to point out the hypocrisy of our society, I am reminded of the cases of Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who drowned her two little boys in 1994, Amber Hill from Ohio who drowned her two babies in 2007, and Andrea Yates, the Texas housewife who, in 2001, drowned all five of her youngsters in the bathtub! People were so outraged and appalled by these women’s actions. How could somebody do such a heinous thing to her own children? But considering the fact that women are killing their unborn babies every day via abortion, Ms. Hill, Ms. Smith and Ms. Yates are no worse than any of the others. They just committed their infanticide at a later date in time. One could argue that those women’s modus operandi was possibly less humane, but the result was the same, wasn’t it? “I killed my baby when it was 2 months in the womb.” “Well, I killed mine when it was 2 months out of the womb.” So the lesson to be learned here is, if you choose to murder your children, do it early, before they are born, so that you’ll be protected by the law. For if you wait too long, until after they’re born, you will be subject to criminal reprobation and the shunning of your peers.

And how do we know that abortion is not a traumatic and painful experience for the fetus as well as the mother? Have you ever asked an aborted fetus how it felt to be scraped or sucked or snatched from its mother’s body? What, it doesn’t have nerves and sensors, therefore cannot yet feel pain? Do you know that for sure? They can’t tell you. I would think that a fetus’ nervous system would be one of the first things to develop.

It’s appalling to learn from guests on the talk shows that so many of them are not practicing safe sex, and the biggest culprits seem to be adolescent heterosexuals. And this is your largest and growing group of HIV-AIDS cases, too, by the way. They go on TV and brazenly admit that they don’t use condoms when they have sex—boys and girls both. Those irresponsible adults, who do know what they’re doing but don’t seem to care, I hold in less favor. Consider in itself the inherent selfishness involved in parenting. People become parents for personal reasons. It‘s all about them. “I want a baby.“ No child asks to be born. They are brought into the world against their will, and then are sometimes blamed and punished by their parents for being here.

There are parents who shouldn’t even be having children, because of their own health and mental problems. Those with congenital and hereditary diseases or abnormalities will go ahead and procreate anyway, knowing full well that it probably will affect their child. Some expectant mothers will continue to smoke, drink and do dangerous drugs, which is more important to them, apparently, than the welfare of their unborn child. They refuse to give up their habit while they are pregnant, which causes serious health problems for the innocent child, and they continue to do it even after the kids are born, neglecting them and abusing them in favor of their drug habit.

In the TV movie A Weekend in the Country (1996), when pregnant Rita Rudner is offered a glass of wine by Betty White, she tells her, “No, thank you. If my baby becomes an alcoholic, I want it to be his decision.” Some have been known to abandon their children, even sell them for a fix. These are the women that should be banned from procreating, at least until they get their act together.

The topics of many a talk show in past and recent years have been “Unmarried Teenagers Having Babies,” “Deadbeat Dads” or “Be a Responsible Parent and Take Care of Your Own Kids.” Most of these single mothers don’t even know where or who the fathers are and don’t really care, in most cases. We have your teenage girls, still in school and living at home, who, because they don’t take any precautions, have babies and depend on their mothers to take care of them while they are out partying and having a good time. Again, the fathers are nowhere in sight. These girls don’t even like these guys half the time. I tell you, some of these gals take longer shopping for lipstick than they do in choosing a man to father their children!

Montel Williams did a show one day with some young mothers and their daughters who were not getting along. In fact, the daughters couldn’t stand their mothers, and the moms could not understand why. “I buy this girl clothes and anything she wants,” said one. Upon questioning the mothers, we found out that first of all, they all had their daughters while they were still teenagers themselves. A couple of them were guilty of substance abuse and would sit around the house stoned all the time. Another was a bum and didn’t work. All of them were verbally and physically abusive to their girls, and they admitted to leaving the kids (12-years-old and younger) at home alone for several hours every day. But they couldn’t understand why their girls had no respect for them! They were all repeating the same mistakes and treating their daughters the same way they were treated when they were their age. You would think that they would recognize what’s going on and try to break the vicious cycle. What did I say about lack of education? I just wish the guilty parties would all take an extra moment to think about all that’s involved in raising children before they take that big step.

Our armed forces venue, especially overseas duty, has proven to be a mecca for more irresponsible procreation. Regardless of what one’s spousal situation is at home, sexual activity is expected when people are away for extended periods of time. But there is no excuse for ignoring sexual precautions with the foreign local gentry. I would think that the threat and fear of exotic STDs would be enough to encourage the use of some kind of prophylactic protection. So maybe you will share in my horror and dismay when I learned that by the end of the Vietnam Conflict there were more than 140,000 Amerasian children born!—an obvious result of unprotected sex—who were all abandoned by their servicemen fathers when they returned home to their stateside families. They all couldn’t have been inadvertent due to the women’s ignorance of sexual matters. Most of them were most likely intentional births. Was getting themselves pregnant these women’s way of trying to entrap these soldiers into marrying them and bringing them back to America with them? Well, I guess they know now that it didn’t work!

Aren’t any of these “mama-sans” familiar with Madam Butterfly? Getting pregnant is not the way to force a guy into a commitment. Some will even lie about being pregnant in order to trap a man, as one of the female characters in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) does. In fact, what happens more often than not is that it causes the guy to flee, especially these immature teenagers who are not ready to take on the responsibility of raising and supporting a child. When the boyfriend suggests that the girl have an abortion or at least give the baby up for adoption, she will tell him that no, she intends to have and keep the baby and that he has to marry her and be a father to their baby, which he doesn’t want. No wonder these guys take off. These women don’t give them much choice. Now, I’m not letting anybody off the hook, mind you. Both parties need to curb their hots long enough to think about the incurring circumstances of their irresponsible actions.

There are girls who purposely get pregnant because they want a baby so badly, they say. They want something of their very own that they can love and who will love them. Their problem is that they don’t feel parental love themselves, and they think that having a baby will somehow fill the void. When asked how they expect to take care of their child financially, they simply reply, “I’ll get a job.” Oh, really? They are just children themselves and they have dropped out of school, so they don’t know anything and have no employment skills, but they are under the misguided impression that there are all these good-paying jobs out there, with flexible hours, just waiting for their ignorant, inexperienced butts. If there are such ideal jobs, they’re already taken, and by someone more qualified than these girls are. And who is minding the kid while they’re working? That’s what they should be doing. They have things a little backward, don’t they? Why don’t they get the job first, or at least some education, get some financial security, and then think about bringing another underprivileged child into the world? These girls are so confused and are in need of some serious, professional counseling, as they won’t listen to their parents, who are usually not their best example or influence anyway.

Often shown on TV are the public service announcements about the various organizations that try to raise money for the feeding and care of Third World children. Although I can appreciate these appealers’ efforts and their concern and compassion for these poor, unfortunate children, let us consider the source and the reality of the situation. Why are there so many of these starving youngsters in all those underprivileged nations of the world? The parents of all these kids apparently are unable to take care of them, and knowing that themselves, why do they continue to procreate, and even more importantly, why do we, who are expected to foot the bill, allow them to keep making babies that they cannot possibly support? If it were simply the matter of helping the children who are already here, I’d say, Fine, the damage is done, let’s do what we can. But I have been hearing these appeals for over 60 years now! Eleanor Roosevelt used to be a spokesperson for the cause. Since most of these children are under the age of ten, the main problem apparently has not been solved or even dealt with in all this time.

What are the governments doing about these women having all those babies? It is considered humane and practical to spay and neuter cats and dogs to prevent the proliferation of unwanted offspring. So since these people seem to breed on instinct, just as the animals do, instead of using thoughtful responsibility, I don’t think that it would be less humane to prevent this particular human procreation as well. If we can’t educate these people to practice birth control, then let’s sterilize them, too. I don’t think that I am being cruel or unfeeling not to want to contribute my hard-earned dollars to feed and support a bunch of strange, exotic crumb-snatchers that never should have been born in the first place. I am not responsible for any of them, so I don’t owe them anything either. Just like I don’t want to have to pay for Welfare babies. As with myself, if these people cannot support their own children, then they should not be having them.

I believe that child-rearing should be a full-time occupation. Some modern women want to “have it all.” They want to bear children to fulfill their “womanly destiny,” but at the same time, they also want to have a career. I don’t begrudge them of that, but I think that they need to make a choice. Now, unless a career mother can bring her baby or small child to work with her every day, or the child’s father or grandparent is at home watching them, that child is not being afforded full-time, parental attention. The first five years of a baby’s life are very crucial, and children at that age are very impressionable. Leaving the child with relatives, nannies and sitters most of the time is not the way to form a close, loving relationship with their real parent. I think that the bond created between parents and child in those early years will affect their relationship for the rest of their lives.

There are so many parents who don’t know or understand their children, and that is because they don’t spend nearly enough time with them, and they don’t talk to them. Many couples are so anxious to bear children, then when they get here, they virtually ignore them. They hire nannies and governesses to do what they should be doing themselves, and often the child gets more attached to them than to their own parents. If my mother couldn’t ever be bothered with me, but my nanny was always there to care for me, teach me things and let me confide in her, that’s who I would tend to go to when I had a problem or concern.

I don’t know how prevalent it is nowadays, but from what I have seen in the movies and especially in period pieces, child-rearing was usually somebody else’s job rather than the parents’ themselves. British society, for example, regularly employed servants–butlers, maids, cooks, etc., who ran the household–as well as nannies and governesses to look after the children. Some dismissive parents send their child off to private schools in another town from where they live, some even as far as overseas, resulting in their getting to see them only a couple of times a year, if even then. They justify their decision that they want the kid to get a good, specialized education, as if it is not possible to get one at a local pubic school. My take on it is, these parents apparently don’t want to be bothered with their children, is why they send them away. They are busy traveling all over the place, taking cruises and such, and the kids tagging along would cramp their style in some way. Why do people have children if they don’t want to spend time with them or take an active role in raising them themselves? I would think that would be the whole point. My sister Debbie’s two daughters both attended a private grade school in South Bend, but being local, they could at live at home and receive constant parental care.

My mother knew all of her children, and we all knew her, because she was always there with us. The few hours a day when she couldn’t be at home with us, because she had to work, our live-in grandmother looked after us until we were old enough not to require it. So none of us ever once had an outside babysitter. My mother was home with us every night. She wasn’t one to run around and be gone most of the time. As a parent, I would like to be a witness to those formative years, and be there when my child takes their first step or when they speak their first real, discernible word. I can imagine actor Dom DeLuise’s mother’s delight when she heard him utter his first word, “Lasagna!” These are one-time moments that cannot be duplicated.

Just as television has become a surrogate parent for a lot of American children, so has the growing prevalence of home computers and smart phones. Many children depend on such TV shows as “Sesame Street” and “Reading Rainbow” to teach them verbal skills and to read stories to them in lieu of their oft-absent guardians. There are more and more computer programs produced for children of all ages, and while some of them are useful learning tools, they also preclude parental instruction and attention. A parent personally introducing their child to Dr. Seuss could be a rewarding and memorable experience for both, but now that Green Eggs and Ham is available via Kindle and other easily-accessible formats, the child is left to their own devices without any parental intervention. Modern technology is making it more and more easy for parents to spend less and less quality time with their children. I am pretty sure that a little kid prefers to have bedtime stories read to them by their mommy or daddy rather than by some impersonal computer program.

Have you noticed how the children on television shows are ignored and disrespected in many situations? The daily soap operas are the worst culprits. The characters are always having babies all over the place, as they figure into many of the storylines. But after the babies are born, they are grossly neglected and ignored by their TV parents. The characters are so obsessed and devoted to their children in word, but they spend almost no time with them on screen, except when a scene involves the kid directly. They will come in and deliver a line or two, then off they go. I suppose it’s because of the strict labor restrictions put on juvenile actors, but they could get around that if they wanted to.

They like to keep the children sheltered, too. They won’t let them witness any “grownup talk.” They are always being sent out of the room when the adults have something important to discuss. “Honey, why don’t you go outside and play? … Joey, why don’t you run on up to bed. Mommy will be right there in just a few minutes to tuck you in…” or some similar ploy to get rid of the kid. They tend to keep kids in the dark about anything that concerns their parents or their family. The characters are going through all this dramatic sturm und drang, and their children usually do not have a clue to what is going on in their own house. Well, actually the youngsters are more aware than their parents give them credit for. They’re not stupid. They hear a lot, even if they don’t always understand the whole situation. And these adults all have full-time, around-the-clock nannies to do what they should be doing themselves. In real life, how many middle-class parents can afford to maintain a full-time, live-in au pair for many years, while they just sit around doing nothing?

The Banks family in Mary Poppins (1964) are not all that rich; they are middle-class at best. Mr. Banks works in a bank, and his wife doesn’t do anything, that we could see. But they have a full-time cook and a housekeeper and always retained a nanny for the two kids. I don’t understand since Mrs. Banks does not work outside the house, why can’t she keep house and take care of the children herself? Her husband is just as neglectful. Even when he is at home, he doesn’t spend any time with Jane and Michael. They act out only to get attention from their father, and it is the only time that he pays them any mind.

The producers of “Diagnosis: Murder” felt the need to make Victoria Rowell’s character, Dr. Amanda Bentley Livingston, have a baby on the show one season, I suppose to coincide with her own real-life pregnancy. They even made her get married (so that the child would not be a primetime network bastard) off-screen to an ever-absent military lifer who was always away somewhere on a secret mission. The newlyweds never saw each other, she could never talk to him on the phone, and he wasn’t even present when she delivered her baby or ever came home to see them. We viewers wondered, Who is this Livingston guy that Amanda is supposed to be married to?

So now that this surrogate husband’s services were no longer needed, the couple promptly got a quickie divorce. So then our question was, Where is this alleged baby that she was supposed to have just had? We never saw it, she was never with it, Amanda mentioned it maybe only twice. Dr. Bentley had a full-time (overtime) position at the hospital where she worked as a pathologist and forensics specialist, which kept her away from her child for most of the day every day. Who was minding the baby during all that time? She never said. She never even checked on it. So what did she do when she had any time off? Why, she was over hanging out with her friends and colleagues, Dr. Mark Sloan (Dick Van Dyke) and his cop son Steve, and running all over helping them solve murders, instead of spending the little free time she had with her newborn baby. I found myself telling Amanda every episode to go home and look after your baby! It just seemed pointless for the writers to give Amanda a baby if they didn’t intend to follow through with it. But during the last season of the series, the kid finally showed up. Of course, he was much older then and could recite dialogue, but the writers still didn’t give Amanda nearly enough screen time with her alleged son.

Probably one of the most difficult chores of parenting is keeping a constant eye on your child. Small, active children, especially, literally have to be watched every minute. I know that that may seem like an impractical task, but it is the responsibility of a parent to protect the child from others as well as themself and keep them safe. There are thousands of injuries and deaths of children every year that happen right at home. Your house and yard are a veritable danger zone for your curious, roving tots. Children are like cats in that respect and will get into everything. They also like to taste everything that they get their hands on. Many children are made sick and even poisoned to death by common household items. They electrocute themselves because of faulty wiring and exposed wall outlets and hurt themselves on sharp objects and surfaces around the house. Now there are classes that parents can take that alert them to the many potential hazards in their homes and how to safeguard their children against them, and there are even agents that you can hire who will go through your whole house and safety-proof it for your family.

Many young children drown in the bathtub because their parent left them alone while they answered the door or phone or checked something on the stove. “But I was gone for only a minute!” Well, that’s all the time it takes to slip under the water and drown. Either bring the phone into the bathroom with you or let the answering machine or voice mail take the call. Don’t cook while you’re bathing your baby, and take the kid out of the tub when you have to go answer the door. If the child is not finished yet, you can always put them back later.

Baby Jessica wouldn’t have gotten herself into that well if her mother had been watching her. She was in the house doing who-knows-what and her baby was out in the yard alone playing around that dangerous hole. That’s why I say that people should have training before and when they have kids—to teach them common sense, if nothing else! Parents tend to gamble with their children’s lives, just as they do with their own. “My toddler will be all right while I run upstairs for a minute to get something.” “So what if I leave my little boy alone while I go to the store? I won’t be long. What’s the chance of his hurting himself or burning the house down while I’m gone?”

Some years ago I uncovered the mystery behind Crib Death Syndrome. That’s when newborn infants turn up dead in their cribs overnight due to heretofore unexplained circumstances. This theory makes a lot of sense to me. Parents tend to load their babies’ cribs with all kinds of plush bedding: pillows, stuffed animals and such. Not only are these things unnecessary but can prove detrimental to a sleeping infant. You see, what happens is this. Depending on how young the baby is, they are unable to roll over or move their head during sleep, due to all the paraphernalia surrounding them, so with their head buried in the pillow, they end up asphyxiating themselves by re-breathing their own noxious carbon dioxide.

“I want to go hang out with my homies tonight. I don’t want to stay here and watch this baby.” Well, my dear, you should have thought about that before you had it. Having a baby brings with it certain sacrifices. There are times when some inconsiderate dolts bring their baby or small child to the movie theater with them, and the baby is whining and puling throughout the picture and annoying the other patrons. I’m thinking, Why is this baby here? It’s apparently miserable, but I don’t blame the child. I blame the parents for bringing it. Why didn’t they leave the kid at home? Maybe they couldn’t get a sitter? Then stay at home with it! It’s only a movie, for Christ’s sake! Wait until the thing comes out on video or shown on TV, then watch it at home.

I saw a news report about negligent parents who take their young children with them to the casinos of Las Vegas and Atlantic City and leave them unattended for hours on end while they are off gambling all day and night. They also go off and leave their tots in parked cars for extended periods of time, with the windows closed, and some have died from suffocation or dehydration. What is wrong with these people? These are forms of child abuse, in my opinion. They need to get their priorities straight. When gambling, shopping or some stupid movie takes precedence over the attention and well-being of one’s own child, then it’s a sorry state of affairs. And in the end, it’s the poor child that has to suffer.

On the cable series, “The Secret Life of an American Teenager,” a 15-year-old high school girl (played by Shailene Woodley) gets herself knocked up by a fellow student as the result of a one-night stand. It turns out that she doesn’t even like the boy with whom she had the unprotected sex. She decides to go on and have the baby, while her distraught parents try to convince her to put it up for adoption. Her mother (played by Molly Ringwald) asks her daughter how will she finish high school and take care of her baby? The girl says to her mother, “Well, you will be watching the baby while I am at school, won’t you? Aren‘t you going to help me raise it?” “Uh-hunh! I don’t think so, Missy! Don’t expect me to look after your baby. That’s your job.” Later on she is complaining about being tired all the time and find it so difficult to juggle motherhood, school (she’s only a sophomore) and work obligations. During her summer vacation, she wanted to run off to Europe with her boyfriend (who is not the baby’s father) and leave her son behind, expecting her mother to tend to him while she’s gone. So this stupid, stubborn girl insisted on keeping her baby against everybody’s wishes, but then doesn‘t want to stay home and take care of him.

Many kids get abducted from their parents while they are out shopping or doing something. “I just turned my back for a minute to talk to my girlfriend!” Why do you have to turn your back? You can talk to your friend and still keep an eye on your child. It’s not likely that someone will grab your child if you’re looking right at them, or at least you would be a witness if they would dare do it right in front of you.

It’s good that I am a good and righteous person without serious criminal intent. I was returning home from my neighborhood grocery store one afternoon, when on the sidewalk with me was a young mother pushing a stroller containing a baby, and with her was a 2-year-old toddler following behind. The woman was walking about 20 feet ahead of the child, not looking at him at all. She should have been holding the child’s hand. I or anybody else could easily have snatched the little boy up and could have been out of sight before that mother even turned around. Don’t these people know better than to take their eyes off their children, especially in public and in crowds? It’s that kind of irresponsibility that is the problem. I almost said something to that mother about it, and I certainly will if that ever happens again. They apparently are not aware that your abductors and kidnappers may be watching and just waiting for an opportunity to snatch their kid.

I learned that there are over a million-and-a-half young children missing in this country at any given time. I find that to be utterly preposterous. How were all these abductions accomplished and what is being done to recover all those lost children? I mean, whether they are alive or dead, they must be somewhere! Even with adults, there is some stupid rule that one has to wait 48 hours before declaring someone missing. How practical is that? If someone has been abducted, they can be long gone in two days’ time. Even if they left or ran away on their own, their loved ones want to know right away what the situation is. “Sergeant, my little girl didn’t come home from school yesterday afternoon (Friday). I want to report her missing.“ “I’m sorry, madam, but it’s too soon to be concerned. Now if she doesn’t show up at school on Monday, give us a call.“ I doubt if the law enforcement agencies and others would have such a lackadaisical attitude about helping if it were their own child that was missing.

There was a reality show on TV called “Hunted.” It was sort of an elaborate version of Hide-‘n-Seek, whereas 18 contestants tried to disappear for a month, and the FBI and other agencies tried to locate them. If the fugitives managed to stay hidden for the time period, then they won a whole bunch of money. The hunters used every means possible to try to find these people. So my question is, Why don’t they use these same search methods to recover all those missing children? They are making a stupid game out of it for our entertainment and monetary gain for themselves, when they should be using their vast resources to find the adults and children who are actually lost or abducted and want to be found.

I have a suggestion. When you are out in public with a young child, if you don’t want to hold their hand at all times, put them on a leash! That’s what you do when you are walking your dog. In fact, some people show more consideration for their pets than they do their own children! With a leash, the child cannot get away from you or be abducted by someone without your knowing it. And don’t worry how it might look to other people. I would think that you would be more concerned for your child’s safety than worrying about what other people think. If anyone should ask you why you are doing that, just tell them. “Because I care about my child.”

Here are a couple more helpful tips for parents. As soon as a child is old enough to comprehend it, the parent or guardian should assign them a code or secret password, known only to them alone. So if ever someone approaches your child with a story about wanting to take them to their mommy or daddy, they would be required to give the password or else the child would know better than to go with that person. That goes for people that the child knows as well as strangers. Children have been abducted by trusted friends, neighbors and relatives. Even non-custody parents have been known to kidnap their own children. Every child also should know their home address and phone number, in the event that they escape from their captors or are found and need to tell someone where they live and how to contact the parents. You might write the information on a card or something and have the child keep it on their person, in the event that they are unable to communicate verbally.

There is one school-of-thought that contends that every child needs two parents (preferably, a man and a woman married to each other) to grow up well-adjusted and happy. I don’t believe that, however. I know from personal experience that it is not absolutely necessary, or that a child raised by only one parent is going to turn out to be a miserable, maladjusted wreck or hardened criminal. With that antiquated, idealistic reasoning, it would follow that all two-parent families always turn out the best children, and we know that that’s not the case at all. The Menendez Brothers and Jeffrey Dahmer, for example, grew up with both their parents. The brothers were rich and spoiled, but see how they turned out. The brothers murdered both their parents, and Dahmer became a remorseless serial killer of young boys, and a cannibal.

In this day and age, with the high rate of divorce and unwed motherhood, the American two-parent family unit seems to be the exception rather than the rule. It’s certainly the minority anyway. The father’s presence in the home (or the mother in some cases) is not always the best thing for the child. They may be abusive, drug-dependent, mentally-ill or non-nurturing. The child and other parent might be better off without them. What I am saying is that many single parents have raised happy, productive children while many married couples have raised some really fucked-up kids. It all depends on the individuals involved.

I have watched TV shows that interview troubled kids, where they are asked about their lives and why they are so unhappy. In practically every case, their parents are their problem. One boy is constantly trying to gain acceptance from his father and make him proud of him, but anything the boy does is never good enough for him. His futile attempts to please his father is making the boy a neurotic wreck. Another father told his teenage son to stop being gay or he would put him out of the house and disown him. How does one stop being what they are, and why should they? One girl complained that there is no communication in her family. They all stay in their separate rooms, and nobody talks to each other. Others say that when they do try to talk to their parents, it’s always met with harsh judgment, disapproval, criticism and reprimand. So then, understandably, the kid will stop telling their folks anything. Many youngsters have to deal with verbal, physical and substance abuse in their homes. It has been proven time and again that how people turn out as adults is directly a result of their upbringing and parental influence.

There has been some controversial discussion of late about transracial adoptions, especially when it’s a black child being awarded to a white couple. The argument is that a black child raised in a white environment will deny them their sense of a black identity and heritage. They’ll grow up too “white,” in other words. Now the adoption authorities and adoptive parents don’t seem to have a problem with that. What’s wrong with a child having all the advantages of a white-influenced existence and upbringing? How can they do any better than that?

But they are not as agreeable and accommodating when the situation is the other way around. First of all, it is highly unlikely that a white child would ever be given to a black couple to raise anyway. The adoption agencies don’t encourage it, and even if a black person or couple did specifically request a white child, they would most likely be discouraged and even turned down. Everybody knows that blacks are not the proper role models for their own children, let alone a white child! They’re probably afraid that the child will take up “black” ways and become a hip-hopping, jive-talking, baggy-pants-wearing, dredlock-sporting, crack-dealing gang member.

I am not totally against black children being reared by white parents. Actors Beau Bridges, Sandra Bullock, Angelina Jolie, Madonna and Alec Mapa all have adopted black children, for example. I am grateful that they are willing to do so, considering the difficulty of black child placement. But there is the issue of lost or confused identity to be considered. This is a prime example of the need for special education. If a white family wants to take on a black child for adoption, they should be required to take courses in black culture and black history, so that they will be able to teach and relate to the child on a more personal and cultural level. They most likely would not have this knowledge beforehand, having not been taught it in their rich, suburban, white private schools. They would especially need to take a consciousness-raising course in racism. Then when the kid asks them a specific black-related question or expresses peculiar black sensitivity about something or is the subject of a racist action, these parents would then be able to help and guide the child with understanding, awareness and enlightened advice.

There is one special situation that has become an important reality for black teens, boys especially. This new “The Talk” involves the parents instructing their sons how to deal with law enforcement, in the event they are stopped on the street or pulled over by “The Man” while driving. Black parents know all too well about such a probability, while most white folks are totally oblivious of this particular occurrence because they have never experienced it. How can a white parent tell a black child about something they know nothing about?

It appears that most law-abiding whites have unquestionable trust when the police are involved. Whenever a problem arises, they are so quick to contact the police about it. They assure their white children that “Cops are our trustworthy friends, Sweetie. They are there to help us and protect us from harm.” It would be quite thoughtless and irresponsible of them to say that to a black teen. “But Mom, I just saw your ‘friend,’ Officer White, shoot my classmate, Malik, in the back while he was innocently walking home from school today. That could have been me.”

I think that the same instruction course should be required for white couples adopting Asian and other ethnic children, too, not just black. But what is it about these prospective parents with means who seek out their children for adoption in foreign and exotic regions, when there are plenty of orphans right here in America who need good homes and families? I think that charity should begin at home. It seems that with the growing incidence of mixed cohabitation, the biracial offspring of these unions rather have an advantage. These parents can directly deal with and address their kids’ identity questions and problems.

I believe that I would make a good parent. I consider myself to be a good role model for kids. I would be a good disciplinarian, I am respectful, but I wouldn’t be too permissive. I think that children need and want certain restrictions. They don’t expect you to let them do anything they want, and they constantly test their parents just to see how much they will be allowed to get away with. Too much permissiveness could make the child think that their parents don’t care enough about them to say “no” to them.

A certain popular video game is actually intended for adults, and its premise is crime and violence, where the player is rewarded and congratulated for committing murder and cruelty in its gameplay. When the kid’s mother was asked why she would buy him a toy that teaches him how to hate and kill, she replied, “Well, it was his birthday, and he wanted it so badly. What was I to do?“ So, if he asked you for an assault rifle, and even begged you, would you get him that as well? It’s all right to say “no” to a child when you are stopping them from doing something wrong. If they don’t like it, tough! They’ll get over it eventually. The father who never refuses his child anything will at some point actually say to his son, “Junior, you are a spoiled brat!” “Oh, really, Dad? And however did I get to be this way, I wonder?”

I would not resort to corporal punishment under any circumstances. There is no good excuse for striking a child. I prefer to reason with them. In fact, if one properly does their job as a good parent, the child should never give them a reason to hit them. Education, honesty, good values, freedom of self-expression, consistency, mutual trust, respect and love are the keys to proper discipline. “I tell him to stop that, but he just won’t mind.” The parent apparently has not established proper mutual respect with the child. A disobedient child is purposely being defiant, and they must have learned it from the parent, unless they learned it from certain characters on TV. So don’t blame the child for their misbehavior. The parent must be somehow at fault. They need to figure out how and why the child got that way.

When a child misbehaves, I have heard of parents “punishing” them by calling a time-out or grounding the kid by sending them to their room–you know, that private place in the house where their TV, computer, music player, phone, reading material and playthings are. How is that a punishment? I don’t mind staying in my room, and as a school kid, I never went out at night anyway. How about taking away the computer, TV and phone, things that they just can’t do without? A spanking is only for the moment and at most temporary, whereas denying them of their favorite privileges will probably be more effective. “Darn! If I expect to get my stuff back, I guess I had better straighten up and behave myself.”

I have some ideas of my own about how to relate to children. There are too many parents who refuse to acknowledge that their children are not them but separate entities from them. They try to live vicariously through their kids. They plan their whole lives for them, tell them who to marry, make them go to college even if they don’t want to, and then tell them which school to attend and which courses to take. They tell them what to be with regard to their work and career. Many fathers want their sons to follow in their footsteps, even if the boy doesn’t have any desire to be a doctor, lawyer, used car salesman or bullfighter, for example. I would encourage any child of mine to be anything they wanted to be, provided that it was within the law. I would steer them away from crime and want them to stay out of trouble, but their life’s path is their own. But if they are being raised properly, they wouldn’t be considering a criminal career anyway. My own parents never told any of us what to do with our life. They both respected us enough to make our own decisions. And we all have turned out fine.

Some parents would argue that people who don’t have any children have no right to give advice to those who do. But I think that we who don’t have children can be more objective. I can see things about other people’s brats that their parents tend to excuse or overlook completely. Since that is not my child, I can be honest and open with them, because they don’t live with me and I don’t care if they don’t like what I have to tell them.

People tend to be more protective, evasive and diplomatic with their own children. Many parents fail to acknowledge the fact that children have rights as human beings just like everyone else. Don’t talk down to them or dismiss them just because “they’re only children.” I hate that old saying, “Children should be seen and not heard,” as if nothing that they have to say is of any importance to anyone. One can learn a lot from children. If anything, children help to remind adults of the unbridled honesty and innocence they have, something the adults used to have when they were children themselves.

Adults are always doubting children’s word, as if they are all born liars. They find it easier to dismiss the child’s story rather than checking it out for its validity. I’ll give you two movie examples. In The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), little Billy Gray has befriended the alien visitor and tenant, Klaatu, played by Michael Rennie, and is showing him around town (Washington, DC), and when he returns home, he’s telling his mother, Patricia Neal, what they did and that he is the Spaceman that everyone is looking for. Since he escaped from the authorities, they don’t know where he is now. But it couldn’t be this guy who is actually living in the same house as they, could it? So Pat is berating the boy for making up these ridiculous tales about the giant robot he saw on the Mall and the diamonds that Klaatu gave him. How can she believe such fantasy, although all of it is true (at least for the sake of the story)? I love it when Billy tells his mother, “I wouldn’t call you a liar.” Just because you don’t believe something, it doesn’t mean that it’s not true.

In The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), when the dinosaur has gotten loose and is roaming the streets of San Diego, it wanders into a yard and is witnessed by a little boy inside the adjacent house. The alarmed boy runs to his parents’ room and tells them, “There is a dinosaur in our backyard.” His parents then proceed to admonish the child for waking them up with such utter nonsense. But why would he make up such a thing? Now he could be mistaken, but if my child told me that, I would be curious enough at least to go take a look out the window. I would love to see a real, live dinosaur! If it’s not a dinosaur, he must have seen something out there! Before you call your kids liars, prove them wrong first. But they even do that with other adults. I would be quite insulted and dismayed if my parents didn’t believe me when I told them something, however incredible. If I were joshing them, I would admit it, but if I insist that what I say is true, I expect them to take me seriously.

I think that it’s very important not to lie to children. You don’t need to volunteer certain information, but if a child asks you a direct question, you should give them an honest, direct answer. Children ask questions to learn, and it is quite counterproductive willfully to give them misinformation. Parents should be teachers and impart true knowledge. If a child is already at the place where they can ask an intelligent question, no matter how embarrassing or uncomfortable for you it may be, I think that they deserve to be given a truthful answer. So when they ask, “Where do babies come from?” instead of some evasive or silly, senseless explanation, tell them what the real deal is. Something that everybody is doing, particularly the very ones to whom the question is addressed, why are they so reluctant to tell their own children how they got here? If they are that embarrassed or ashamed about it, why do they keep doing it? Consider that if you don’t answer their questions truthfully, they will seek the answers elsewhere, and it may be the right ones and different from what you told them. If a child catches you in enough untruths and evasive responses, it’s likely that they’ll soon won’t believe anything you say and will stop asking you anything. You’ll lose their trust.

If a child asks why they shouldn’t do something, don’t just say, “Because I said so.” That’s not an answer. You have not satisfied their curiosity. Give them a reason why they shouldn’t do it. “Don’t stick your hand into that open flame, Son, because you will burn yourself.” “Oh, okay, Mama. Thanks for telling me. I didn’t know.” Children sometimes need to figure out things for themselves and make decisions according to what they have been taught. Even as an adult, Because-I-said-so and That’s-just-the-way-it-is doesn’t work for me. Give me a valid reason why.

Then these same unresponsive parents will assure their kids when they get older that they can come to them with any problem. But since they have lied to the kids so many times before, why should they come to them now? Parents will insist that their children be completely honest with them and tell them everything, but at the same time will deceive the kids and keep important things from them. Some parents even dare to utter an obvious untruth in their child’s presence. A mother is attempting to get a kiddie’s entry discount: “How old is your little girl, Ma’am?” “She’s seven.” “No, Mommy! I’m ten.” You’re sending mixed messages. So, it’s all right to lie when it benefits you in some way? Think of it as setting an example. If you never lie to your children, there is a big chance that they won’t lie to you either. Remember all the lies your parents told you while you were growing up. You probably now resent them for it. People that lie all the time think that everybody else lies all the time, too.

And don’t make idle promises to your children, of things over which you have no control. “Everything is going to be all right. I promise.” What, do you have control over the entire world? If you do, then why did you let happen what prompted you to say that? “I promise that I will never leave you.” How can you promise such things? No one can control fate. Shit happens all the time. You can’t prevent it. Recognize that divorce and death are forms of desertion or abandonment to a child. I realize that they’re said only to reassure a child’s fears, but one should realize that most children take promises very seriously. If you make a promise to a child, and you break it, even if it’s by no fault of your own, the child may still resent you for it. Just be honest with the child. Truth needs no justification. “I cannot promise you that nothing bad will ever happen to you in life. Things happen that we have no control over. But I will do everything in my power to protect you from any harm.” That’s better. You have allayed the child’s fears without making any promises that you can’t possibly keep. Or, “People die. I or your daddy may die before you are grown, but that does not mean that we don’t love you. We will always love you.” So when something bad does happen, your child won’t tend to hold you personally responsible for it. A general rule of thumb is simply, just treat your children the same way you want to be treated (aka the Golden Rule).

Children, too, require respect and a sense of dignity and need to feel good about themselves. It’s a parent’s job and natural inclination to protect their children from harm at all costs. But some parents tend to overprotect them from all the unpleasantness of the world, and the child fails to learn how to deal with adversity when it happens. No one can possibly be with their child every minute of their life. They will be on their own at some point. “We’re just trying to keep you from making a big mistake.” Well, life is full of trial and error. No one can stop anybody from making mistakes in life. It’s all a part of growing up. That’s how we learn, from our mistakes—or should, anyway.

Besides, kids are so hardheaded, you can’t tell them anything anyhow. State your opinion, and let them go on, then if or when they mess up, you can have the satisfaction of saying, “I told you so.” Maybe they’ll eventually start heeding your advice. And how do you know that what they want to do is a mistake before the fact? Just because it’s something that doesn’t interest you or something that you wouldn’t do, you shouldn’t prevent your kid from attempting it. I have had pooh-pooh naysayers try to talk me out of certain endeavors that turned out to be good and beneficial for me.

I think worth mentioning is this common piece of not-so-good advice that parents give their kids: “Never talk to strangers.” Well, a stranger is only a fellow human being that you haven’t met yet, so how would you ever meet anybody if you never spoke to anyone that you don’t know? That teaches children discrimination and only helps to perpetuate prejudice and bigotry. You do not know this person, therefore, they must be bad and cannot be trusted? Of course, we do need to be cautious in life, because there are those who are out to get us if we let our guard down. But every “stranger” is not out to do you or your children harm, just as we don’t always know who is a real friend. Persons we don’t know oftentimes offer help to us in times of trouble, they save our lives, they give us things we need, they support and advance our careers. For us performers and writers it’s strangers who buy our records and books, attend our concerts, shows and movies. People who own their own businesses don’t know all of their customers and clients.

Sometimes so-called strangers treat us better than our own family members. That fireman that rescued your children from that burning building was a stranger. So was that homeless woman who helped your lost daughter find her way back home. Do you personally know the 911 operator? It’s sometimes the people closest to us that betray our trust and who we need to be wary of. Children are usually molested and abused by their own family members, and a woman usually knows her rapist. Better advice to give a child would be to be wary of a person’s behavior towards them rather than readily dismissing the person just because they don’t know them. They should regard every person that they encounter in life as an individual, worthy of the same respect, regardless of their relationship, their lot in life, their appearance or their differences.

Parents and others also insist that children forget about their bad experiences, but I don’t consider that good advice either. We shouldn’t exactly dwell on the past and let it color our entire lives. I mean, bad things happen to everybody. But get over it and get on with your life. You shouldn’t forget what has happened to you but learn from the experience. If you remind yourself of your past mistakes, you may keep them from happening again. This blocking out of unpleasant events is the cause of a lot of psychoses, like disassociation, or multiple personalities, amnesia, hysterical loss of senses, like blindness, deafness and self-imposed mutism. It’s another form of denial. The subsequent therapy used in healing these people is to make them remember their shock or trauma and face what they have blocked out of their minds or buried in their subconscious. Many adults discover late in life things that they have suppressed since they were young children, things that have influenced and stifled their relationships and even careers. So, I say, don’t forget your hysterical or shameful past but use it for growth and self-improvement.

Until a child is old enough to think for themself and make their own decisions, they are highly impressionable. You must be always mindful of your actions and watch what you say around them, because they are listening and they usually don’t forget what they hear. It’s how children learn to talk, and they repeat things before learning what they mean. Don’t scold the child for saying something naughty. They probably got it from you. Even though I myself am opposed to any sort of censorship, I realize that parents may have certain verbal restrictions. Let your child know what words are not acceptable around you, and then stop using them yourself.

I know of adults who have confronted a parent about something that happened in their childhood that has affected their whole life, but the parent has no recollection of it. “Sherman, my boy, I just don’t understand why are you so hateful to me? What have I ever done to you to make you treat me so mean?” “Well, Mom, you are always calling me stupid, and when I was 5-years-old, you slapped me and said that you wished I had never been born.” “What?! I don’t remember doing that. Did I really?” “Yep, you did it and said it. I’ve never forgotten it.” Parents don’t always mean some of the things they say to their children, but how is an impressionable youngster supposed to discern what to ignore or what to take to heart?

Then our parents, in turn, are likely to recall things that their parents said and did to them. In cases where children mistreat and actually hate and hit their parents, I again have to put the blame on the parents. The child does not feel the way they do without probable cause. Their folks must have done something to them to elicit such resentment and disrespect, and they need to own up to it. They may think that they are good parents now, but they probably were not so years ago when it would have made a difference in how the child turned out. You have to train, teach them, and especially, show them unconditional love at an early age. Don’t wait until the damage has been done and then wonder what happened, how did they get that way? “I’m doing the best I can.” Well, maybe you are now, but you haven’t always done what you should, have you?

Parents seem to want to forget that they were children themselves once, and they often find their own children doing some of the same things that they did when they were their age. Of course, now they are not so tolerant and understanding. “Mother, Grammy told me that you did that very thing when you were my age.” “Yeah, but that was different.” “Why, because it was you?” No matter how hard they try to resist it, the kids, in turn, grow up and become their parents, doing the same things that they used to do. So “do as I say, not as I do” doesn’t work. You shouldn’t do things in front of your kids and then forbid them to do the same things. Again, you are sending them confusing, mixed signals. “What, dad? I shouldn’t do that because it’s wrong? Then why are you doing it?” The kids will learn to obey by your setting the example. They will say and do what they hear and see you do.

(# You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear…and to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made and people whose skin is a different shade; You’ve got to be carefully taught. #)
Another good reason for screening prospective parents is to prevent those individuals who are advocates of racial supremacy, chauvinism and homophobia from procreating, thus passing on their bigoted ideas to their innocent youngsters. We need to fix the minds of those adults before we let them infect their children with their notions of hatred and prejudice. Where do some white children get the idea that they are, by their very being, better than their schoolmates-of-color? Who told them (these aren’t just the whites this time) that all gay people should be feared, pitied, persecuted and/or condemned, often before they understand even their own sexuality? Why, their parents, of course! They could be talking about their own child! Then if the kid later does turn out to be queer, they have already been taught to hate themself. How does that create a positive self-image for your child?

All the while I was growing up, I never heard any disparaging comments about gays from anybody in my household nor even from my peers, which is probably why I am so well-adjusted and have great self-esteem. How can we make this a better world in which to live if we don’t somehow break the cycle of hatred and ignorance perpetuated with our children?

Before young children know any better and are old enough to think for themselves, they tend to believe everything that their parents tell them. That’s why they buy the folk myths about Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny and the Boogie Man, among others. Grownups are older and presumably wiser, so they must know about all those things, right? Then if a white father tells his son that white people are of a superior race and everybody else who is not white are bad and are to be shunned and avoided at all costs, it must be the truth, because why would he lie? He’s your dad, who only wants what’s best for you. That is why they have to be brainwashed when they are young and impressionable, because once they get out into the world, attending school and interacting with different kinds of people, they will start to question some of the things that they have been told.

As I said earlier, the way children turn out and what they become as adults are directly or indirectly connected to their parents or lack thereof. All neuroses, psychoses, genetic addictions, domestic violence and self-confidence/self-esteem issues are always parent-related—if not our own parents, then other adults who serve as guardians or who have been influenced by their parents.

One woman on Dr. Phil’s show was emotionally damaged by her father all while she was growing up. So now she is married with three children and was taking out all her frustrations and unhappiness on her husband and children, treating them the same way her father treated her as a kid. I was thinking the whole time I’m listening to this, that this woman had a lot of personal issues to sort out about proper parenting. Why did she bother to have all those children, who are being abused, before first getting help to solve her own mental problems? And, of course, she had made her kids emotional wrecks themselves. That is so irresponsible. She should have decided beforehand, “I should not have any children until I get help to fix the plaguing issues in my own life.” Again I say, fucked-up parents are going to create fucked-up kids. They can’t help it.

A lot of pressure is put on school kids by their parents to succeed academically. It’s all about grades with them. Having been both a student and a teacher, I can be objective. Some parents insist that their kids make straight A’s or be deemed failures. “Hey, what’s with this C, Tommy? You’re grounded until you bring your grade up.” But it’s not his grade but the teacher’s. They can impose any grade that they want, at their own discretion, regardless of the actual work done on any assignment. This is what compels some students to cheat. It doesn’t matter if they know the material, all anybody cares about is their getting a good grade. So they will cheat on homework assignments, exams, SATs, anything, in order to get by. They haven’t learned a damned thing, but at least they manage to graduate and get accepted into a college.

I have been made aware of a certain racket occurring in high schools and colleges nowadays, and that’s students getting someone else to take their tests for them. They either pay them or blackmail them or some may even do it as a favor to the other. In practically every case it’s to please their parents, who are the ones who demand the higher grades. The student usually accepts the grades they get, especially if they think it is what they deserve or they cannot do any better. If the kid does not like the grade they are given, it’s not that big a deal. They will just try harder the next time.

When they cheat, however, and even if they didn’t, what sometimes happens is this. One particular student constantly receives D’s and F’s on tests, then suddenly he gets an A on the next one. Now he possibly could have really buckled down and did the required study to ace the test, but it usually sends a red flag to the teacher, who wonders if there might have been some cheating involved. When the teacher confronts the boy about it, and if he is guilty of cheating, naturally he is going to deny it. So the teacher still has no proof one way or the other. When this scenario is depicted on film, it never occurs to anybody to suggest that the teacher give the student in question an oral exam. Just ask the kid one or more of the questions that he got right on the test. If he gets it right, he obviously knows the material, but if he gets it wrong, then he probably didn’t know it in the first place.

In the case of numbered tests with separate answers, a numerical grade indicates how many they got right. I don’t mind that form of grading, whereas the letter-grading method is more arbitrary. What is the difference between an A and a B, for example? I liked one paper better than another, so that student got the higher grade. But did the one to whom I gave the lower grade do less work than the other student? Maybe they worked even harder on the assignment, although it wasn’t as good. To compare students by the letter grades given them puts a value of their worth on them. What if a teacher does not like a certain student? They may not ever give them a decent grade. That happens a lot. One boy gets a C on his book report after much extra study and research, and his classmate gets an A on his report and he didn’t even read the book! Is that fair?

This attitude also spills over onto other aspects of kids’ lives. Parents are so obsessed about winning. In competitive sports, the kids must always win at all costs. If they don’t win, then they’re a “loser” by default. If a child is not as good in an endeavor as one or both of their parents would like them to be and never excels in the activity, they eventually just give up and stop trying. I think that kids (and adults, too) should be rewarded for their efforts rather than their results. In a competition where there can be only one winner, somebody has to lose. And whereas there is always somebody better than yourself, you can’t expect to win every time. Praise them for their participation and willingness to try, rather than belittling them for their blunders and mistakes.

I don’t think that there are any bad kids, really, only bad parents. I often encounter small children in public with their parents who seem not to know anything about proper manners and social graces. They will bump into you or step on you and won’t say, “Excuse me” or “I’m sorry,” and it never occurs to them to say, “Thank you” when somebody gives them something or offers help. When the parents stand right there and neglect to instruct their child on what to say, that’s whom I blame, not the ignorant child. These adults are often rude and discourteous themselves, so naturally they don’t tell their children how to act. Common courtesy is so ingrained in me, I don’t even have to think about it. Uttering “please,” “thank you” and “excuse me” when the situation arises are automatic with me. It is what I was taught at an early age.

Why are there so many teenage suicides? If a child is unhappy, it’s the parents’ responsibility to find out what’s wrong. Why are they unhappy, what are the parents doing about it, and why are they usually not even aware of the unhappiness? They tend to go into that convenient denial mode, just to keep from having to deal with anything that involves their family. They ignore the tell-tale signs and often dismiss or excuse certain aberrant behavior. Many parents have no idea that their child is doing drugs, for example. Why don’t they know that? I think that I would know, or at least be suspicious, if my high-schooler were on steroids or a crack or heroin addict. Shouldn’t they know that their son is building bombs in their basement, being bullied or taking guns to school with him every day? Girls have been known to conceal their pregnancies from their parents, sometimes even to full term. How could a caring mother not even be aware that her daughter is with child? What is she doing for those nine months?

Of course, some parents tend to be overprotective with their children, but that is a matter of degree. Children should have some freedom and privacy, and you should trust them to a point, but it’s not a bad thing always to be all up in your kids’ business. They are not going to tell you everything that they are up to, so you have to be more vigilant and curious. While they are living in your abode, you have the right to snoop in their room, to check what is on their computer and cell phone. They may not like it, but if they are not doing anything wrong, then they don’t have anything to worry about. You can be a friend to your kids after they are grown. Until then, be their parent! They probably won’t admit it now, but in the long run they will appreciate your concern and attention afforded them when they were younger.

Why don’t they know that their teenager cannot read? And more importantly, why can’t the kid read? Again, what have these parents been doing for the past ten years or longer? There is no way that I could raise an illiterate, uninformed child. My being a trivia nut with a penchant for teaching, I would always be sharing my vast knowledge with my kids and asking them questions to find out what they know. ‘What did you learn in school today, son?’ ‘Here, read this to me.’ ‘Which Beethoven Symphony is that on the radio?’ ‘You don’t know what that word means? There’s the dictionary. Look it up.’ All parents should take concerted interest in their children’s education. Don’t just leave it up to the schools exclusively. With help from my mother and grandparents, I could already read somewhat when I started kindergarten, which gave me a good head start. I also learned how to read music on my own.

Why are there so many juvenile runaways? For a child to prefer the danger and uncertainty of the streets to the supposed security of their loving family, something must be terribly wrong at home. Nobody in my immediate family ever had any reason to run away from home. We were all well-loved and cared-for and had happy childhoods. Be careful, too, when you offer ultimate choices to your kids. “As long as you are under my roof, you will abide by my rules. If you won’t do as I say, then get the hell out!” Or, “I forbid you see that boy. If you continue to do so, we will disown you. It’s either him or your family.” So the kid leaves home, and the parents are upset. “What did we do?” They beg the youngster to come back home, saying that they didn’t mean what they said. Then why did you say it? Should they blame the kid for taking them seriously and calling their bluff? Oh, she wouldn’t choose that boy over her own family. Oh, no? If you give someone choices, don’t be surprised or disappointed if they pick the one that you don’t like. Rather than pronouncing ultimatums, parents should discuss a compromise. Little is accomplished with heated threats and accusations. “Tell us what you want from us as your parents and this is what we expect from you as our child.” None of this do-as-I-say-or-get-out jazz. “So is that the only option I have? I’ve tried it your way and it didn’t work, so I guess I’ll leave then.”

It’s even worse that there are many teenagers who are forced by their parents to leave home, against their desire to do so, because they don’t live up to their parents’ expectations. In addition to the gay youths being disowned by their parents, I have heard of Amish communities shunning certain members of the sect, who may not even be gay, because they choose to go against “the ways” by leaving home and going out to experience the world, perhaps even marrying outside the faith. They somehow don’t get the hypocrisy of claiming to be so pious and Christian and at the same time disowning and ostracizing their own children. Tevye (from Fiddler on the Roof) did the same thing with his daughter who defied her father’s wishes and “traditions” by marrying a Gentile!

Many people still have a hard time accepting the fact that homosexuals actually bear children and raise them and have the right and ability to do so. Some are even so ignorant as to think that the two factors together are not even possible. Homosexuals cannot possibly make children, and if a person has a child, they couldn’t possibly be gay. Or they will make unfounded and unfair comments about gays not being fit parents or not providing proper role models, or that children of gays cannot grow up “normal” and will inevitably become gay themselves. Do I need to say that one’s parenting skills is not necessarily dependent on their sexual orientation? There are good parents and bad parents, straight and gay, but I would expect gay parents to teach their kids better tolerance and compassion for other people, if nothing else.

Adopted children, for example, are specifically chosen and not merely the result of careless or unintended conception by some heterosexual unions. There are many who don’t love or even want their biological offspring. With what gay people have to go through to adopt or even be allowed to keep their own, you’d better believe that these children are really and truly wanted. Hets are afraid to allow gays to raise children because it will cause the children to “grow up queer” like their parents. If our straight parents couldn’t prevent us from growing up gay, then how can gay parents prevent their straight kids from growing up straight, if they really are?

The courts’ belief that one’s homosexuality automatically makes them unfit parents is so unfair. There was a case a while ago of a woman who lost her daughter in a custody hearing because she was charged with being a sapphist, therefore not a proper mother. The little girl might grow up gay, you see. So what did the judge do? He unthinkingly awarded custody to the little girl’s grandmother (her mother’s mother), a woman who herself raised a sapphist! Hello?! Where are some people’s minds?

I have seen quite a few TV movies that deal with child custody battles, and I find them to be rather disturbing. I don’t see how adults fighting over young children can be “in the best interest of the child,” no matter what the outcome of the case is. The child is constantly being passed around, back and forth like a football, and they more often than not wind up with a confused sense of belonging. In many cases, they won’t even ask the child which parent or guardian they would like to live with, as if their opinion doesn’t at all matter. The social workers, lawyers, judges and other strangers think they know what’s best for the child more than the child does themself. I find that to be so disrespectful. Children have no rights or say-so about who gets to raise them, when it’s their own lives at stake.

When a kid has a problem, they often feel that they can’t go to their parents with it. “I can’t tell my parents that. They’ll kill me!” “I just can’t talk to my parents. They won’t listen to me.” And in many cases, these feelings are warranted. If any child of mine felt at any time that they could not confide in me or come to me about anything, no matter how terrible they thought it was, I would have to feel responsible. I would ask myself, What have I done to this child for them not to trust me or to be afraid of me? Apparently I have not properly conveyed my utter, unconditional love for this child. We often hear parents say, “I don’t know what’s gotten into that boy!” or, “Where did we go wrong?” Well, that’s a good question. That is something to think about. Where did you go wrong?

So we need to work on the adults if we ever expect the children, our future, to be better people. I do realize that parenting is not easy. Very little in life that’s worthwhile is. That’s why I think people should have professional training and permission to take on such a formidable endeavor. It’s a tremendous undertaking, not at all for the squeamish. So if certain people are not willing to take on such an important responsibility, then they should not be allowed to become parents. It’s as simple at that. They’re not helping our society, and they certainly are not benefiting the poor, suffering, victimized children. I hope that this article has been helpful, and that you parents and potential parents out there put my suggestions and advice into practical application.

We all know that prostitution has been going on forever. It’s even always been sanctioned by most societies—you know, no big deal, a fact of life. In movies about the Old West, for example, you’d always see the town brothel or saloon frequented by the mayor and judge and sheriff, all the important dignitaries in town being serviced by the girls-for-hire on the premises. There was no crime being committed. Everybody was getting what they wanted. It wasn’t until some enterprising black men began to take advantage of the situation, and as pimps, excuse me, personal managers, began to make a lot of money, that they were not paying taxes on, that Whitey decided to step in and deem the whole practice to be against the law. Now it was all right while they were doing it, but they didn’t want any black people capitalizing on such a lucrative endeavor, taking the profits away from themselves.

Then, too, all the time when black slave women were held captive against their will and forced to submit to their masters, overseers and whomever, it, too, was considered no big deal and a non-criminal act. But when it was white women in the same situation, only then did it become a crime and given a name: white slavery. But at least the white girls sometimes did get paid for their services, even if it was not consensual. Whitey never encouraged or even allowed blacks to be creatively enterprising, unless they were benefiting themselves.

All throughout Harlem and other predominately-black communities the Numbers game was a major business activity that almost everyone participated in. Of course, it was deemed illegal, therefore they had to operate on the down-low. But then the Mafia (and whoever else) got wind of it and, of course, wanted a piece of the action themselves, and it eventually came out into the open and legally sanctioned as the Lottery, Powerball, Off-Track Betting and all the other mainstream gambling and “numbers” rackets.

“The World’s Oldest Profession” still catches flak from conservative prudes. I’ve heard housewives on the talk shows lambaste and denounce the prostitutes and kept mistresses that come on as guests on the shows. But these hypocritical hausfraus don’t think about the fact that they are not much different than the hookers that they are badmouthing. The only difference is that the wives are licensed prostitutes. Marriage makes it legal and therefore acceptable. Think about it. What does a housewife do? She takes care of her man by cooking for him, keeping his house clean and provides sexual favors for him in exchange for free room and board, occasional gifts and regular pay for her services. Prostitutes and mistresses get the same benefits, but they don’t have to marry the guy!

There are wives who actually barter sex with their husbands. If he wants it, he has to give her something in return. So what do you call that? Do you know that the word hussy: a shameless wench or prostitute, is derived from housewife? And who do these wives think are keeping these hookers in business? Why, their husbands, of course! Don’t they know that most of these girls’ regular clients are married men? Single men ordinarily don’t have to sneak around and pay for sex. It’s those in committed relationships that tend to have to get it on the sly.

And how about those female therapists who call themselves “sexual surrogates,” whose clients are men who have trouble relating to their wives or women in general or have some other sexual problem? These women—who are not doctors, just licensed “therapists”—are paid lots of money, per session, to help these men with their problems by having sex with them. So, what is that?! Then you have your female gold-diggers who make their living playing men for what they can get out of them. I’ve heard some of them claim that they don’t even have to put out to get rewards from these men. They just give them their time and companionship in exchange for gifts and monetary favors. Well, your high-priced call girls do the same thing. They don’t always have to have sex with their johns either. Many of these guys are into fetishes, fantasy and role-playing, which often don’t even involve actual intercourse. They pay the women for their time and compliance.

It has now been reported that oral sex is the new goodnight kiss. All over the country high-school teenaged girls regularly are giving blow jobs to their male classmates in exchange for favors. “Jason, I will suck your dick if you do my math homework for me.” “Okay!” The girls that are old enough to date and go to parties and clubs where there may be older men in attendance, will actually hustle these men for a little action. “If I’m going to be doing this anyway, I might as well get some money out of it.” But these wives, mistresses, surrogates, gold-diggers and schoolgirls will flatly deny that they are prostitutes, when, in fact, that’s exactly what they are.

But I say, So what? A prostitute is not the worst thing in the world to be. This further confirms my point about the sexual promiscuity of women. There have always been prostitutes in every nation of the world, and a woman who abhors sex would not willingly choose it as their life‘s profession. So they must like having sex or they wouldn’t be doing it, would they? Some will complain, “I have to sell my body. I don’t know how to do anything else.“ Well, the fact is, my dear, you don’t have to do that. If you don’t know how to do anything else, then learn how to do something else! If not, then that must be what you really want to do.

Look at it this way. I have been a singer all my life. It’s what I do. And I sing whether I get paid or not. I don’t always like every gig that I get. I may not like the music or the conductor, for instance. But since it’s my job, I just tolerate it, take the money and run. By the same token, realize that sex is a part of life. It’s what humans do with each other. So if sex is something that you enjoy, are good at it and would be doing it anyway, why not get paid for it if you can? You most likely will not be into every trick that you encounter, but just do your job. That’s what you are being paid for.

People also get so indignant when they are called whores and sluts and tramps and such. I mean, if that’s what you are, then just own up to it. The dictionary regards slut to pertain to a woman, but I don’t think that human behavior should apply to only one gender. There are sexually-promiscuous men, too, which would make them sluts as well. I know that I am a whore and a slut and I’m not at all ashamed to admit it, although I have slowed down considerably, as I get older. My state of mind is still slutful, however, whether I act upon it excessively or not. The ones who do criticize and name-call are probably just jealous because they are not getting it as much as they’d like to, if at all.

A friend of mine once told me about the night he spent in a hotel with a woman. During their session of lovemaking they got a little loud, which prompted the single lady next door to them to come over and knock on their door with the complaint that the noise was disturbing her and would they please keep it down. I commented that if that spiteful bitch had been in her room getting her brains fucked out, she wouldn’t be complaining, would she? She’s not getting any action, so nobody else should have any fun either. I love hearing the sounds of sex from other people. It pleases me to know that others are getting it on. You go, girls and/or boys!

Since it takes two to tango, one cannot be a whore all by oneself. It is a consensual activity. So if prostitution is considered an illegal activity in most places, why are only the paid girls (or boys) harassed and arrested most of the time? That’s not fair. All they are doing is providing a needed service, so the people who solicit this service should be held just as responsible for it. One party cannot function without the other’s support and patronage. That’s why I don’t think bad of the gold-diggers. They couldn’t do what they do if they didn’t have willing participants. I do realize, though, that the solicitors are now more subject to arrest, but it’s usually the result of undercover vice entrapment. I suppose it’s primarily the street hookers who are at the greatest risk for arrest. The vice squad can’t monitor those who do their business behind closed doors. But wherever they choose to do it, it should be allowed.

How can you blame one for doing something when another party is providing them the direct means to do it? Just as there are laws (at least on the books) against reproducing copyrighted material (published music, films, sound recordings, etc.), but then we have photocopy machines, scanners, VCRs and now rewriteable CDs and DVD copiers at our disposal which allow us to do that very thing. What are professional performers if not prostitutes? Singers, dancers (exotic and otherwise), actors, musicians, circus performers, athletes, prizefighters, wrestlers, what-have-you, all are paid to provide public pleasure, that is, to entertain people. We are selling ourselves in some way or another, depending on our particular talent. You pay me money and I’ll sing for you, I’ll dance for you, whatever you want me to do. So we are all prostitutes and get paid in exchange for personal favors or services. Sometimes it’s sexual, but it doesn’t have to be. So then, by the same token, the agents and managers of performing artists are actually euphemized pimps and madams. They offer, promote and exploit their clients and in turn receive a percentage of the money that is paid to them for their particular services. If their people don’t work, then they don’t get paid.

By the way, PIMP stands for, “Put It in My Pocket“–that is, “Show Me the Money.“ This pimp and prostitute business arrangement (and you can call them anything you want, but it’s all the same) is the way of the world and nothing to demean or demoralize. Everybody’s doing it, let’s face it. In male/female relationships, especially, there are very few women, whether they be willing or not, who are not used or exploited for money in some way by men, therefore, some sort of prostitute.

And everyone can be bought, too. An attractive, young female executive, attending a business function for her company, was being hit on by a male associate. The guy asked her, “Hey, sweet thing, would you have sex with me if I paid you $50?” She answered, “Of course not!” “How about for $100?” “No.” “Two hundred?” “My good man, what kind of woman do you take me for?” “Well, I thought that we had already established that. All we’re doing now is haggling about your price.” Who would be prudish or adamant enough not to have sex with somebody for any amount of money? Everybody, including men, has their price. As poor as I often am, I certainly don’t turn down money when it’s offered.