Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘GC Myers’

Welcome to Earth (Again)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 15, 2024| 2 Comments »

Sharing Heart– At West End Gallery

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies- “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

― Kurt Vonnegut

The words above are from the book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater from the late Kurt Vonnegut. They are spoken to the infant twins of a neighbor as part of a baptismal speech from Eliot Rosewater, the book’s protagonist.

It seems like a ridiculous bit of advice to speak over infants at a religious ceremony, but the sentiment is striking in its simplicity and practical application.

In nearly every instance, kindness will make the situation better.

I don’t know why I am writing this today. Maybe it’s the shrill ugliness of our society at the moment, marked by naked tribalism and selfish greed.

Or maybe it’s our attack mentality that has become the norm, one where reason and logic are thrown aside and replaced with insults and slurs.

These negative aspects, the hatred and selfishness we are so often displaying, are not sustainable for us as a society. They are the signs of an undisciplined and unprincipled people.

On the other hand, kindness is a sustainable and enduring principle of guidance. It builds up, not tears down. A hand up, not a push down.

Like I said, I don’t why I am writing this. Maybe the thought was that we– maybe just I– needed a reminder that a little kindness does more for the world that all the ugly words spoken with hatred by one person toward another.

So, this is your reminder. We have a short time on this world. Don’t waste your time here being mean-spirited and vengeful.

Be kind to others. Be kind to yourself.

This made me want to hear a little Otis Redding this morning. Try a Little Tenderness. Doesn’t get much better than that.

Have a good and kind day.

I shared this post back at the beginning of 2020 and it has been one of my more popular posts in the intervening years. Even more so when we seem to be in a period of crisis or hardship. Its popularity has really spiked in the past week so I thought it might be worth rerunning as its message is evergreen. But I want to add a word or two to its message of kindness: Be kind but be strong. Kindness is not weakness– it is strength. Hold tight to those values you know are right. Kindness does not include accepting the intolerance and hatred of others.

Kindness in word and action is the bully’s kryptonite.

Welcome to Earth, babies…

Read Full Post »

The Misanthrope?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 12, 2024| 3 Comments »

GC Myers- Island Getaway sm

Island Getaway— At West End Gallery

If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.

…

If we define a misanthrope as ‘someone who does not suffer fools and likes to see fools suffer,’ we have described a person with something to look forward to.

—Florence King, With Charity Toward None (1992)

Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope.

—Irving Layton, The Whole Bloody Bird

I have to admit that I am not too fond of humans in recent days. I used to kid around, saying that I was a misanthrope, but I never really believed it. I felt that there was some redeeming quality, some goodness, in everyone, and that when push comes to shove that they would ultimately do the right thing.

I should have known better. To do so meant ignoring everything I had read about the history of mankind. It’s a virtual laundry list of atrocity and cruelty.

So, maybe I was only kidding myself. Maybe I was–and am–a misanthrope. Or, like the quote above points out, is it even misanthropy when the horrible behavior of humans fails to even live up to your lowest expectations?

Honestly, while I am not thrilled with people in general at the moment, I still hold out hope for them.

Don’t know why.

This reminds me of a post from several years back, Misanthropy in the Morning. I thought it was worth another look this morning:

I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I’m introduced to one,
I wish I thought “What Jolly Fun!

― Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

On a morning when I am feeling more than a bit misanthropic, I thought I’d express it in the lightest manner I could muster. I guess the verse above from English poet Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh (1861-1922) might do the trick.

I don’t know much about this particular Raleigh and, feeling as I do this morning, don’t really care. Don’t know if he was descended from the more famous Walter Raleigh, the one I best knew from seeing his face on my one aunt’s cigarette packs as a kid. I would imagine so but what does it really matter?

For those of you more interested, this particular Walter Raleigh was a professor of literature at Oxford and that bit of light verse was titled Wishes of an Elderly Man, Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914.

It might be titled Wishes of a Near Elderly Man, Wished in an Art Studio, August 2021. [or November, 2024]

I thought of going with a different piece of verse this morning, like this short bit from Ape and Essence, the lesser-known dystopian novel from Aldous Huxley:

The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace,
The prurient ape’s defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.

Or I guess I could have gone with this simple quote from the great German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840):

You call me a misanthrope because I avoid society. You err; I love society. Yet in order not to hate people, I must avoid their company.

It’s not verse but maybe it gets closer to the bone. Perhaps even closer is this passage from Sinclair Lewis, as laid out it in his It Can’t Happen Here:

… he loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons…

That might best describe my misanthropic urge this morning. And every other morning.

I like and love people individually but, on the whole, very much dislike persons in the collective sense.

I am not talking about you guys. No, you’re okay.

Really.

I hope you will excuse my curmudgeonly behavior this morning. Now get out of here.

And stay off my lawn…

Read Full Post »

Wild is the Wind/ Nina

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 11, 2024| 2 Comments »

GC Myers- Offered to the Wind 2022

Offered to the Wind— At West End Gallery

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents.
Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.

–Jay Griffiths, Savage Grace: A Journey in Wildness

I had a procedure at a doctor’s office this past week. As I sat there waiting for him to come in, there was music playing. It was modern country music. There wasn’t much to focus on, so I listened more intently than I might have done otherwise. The doctor was running behind schedule and I ended up listening to four songs. I am not saying it was bad or anything like that. It was just nothing. The sound was pleasing but bland. Unmemorable. The lyrics said little if anything. The first two I heard could have been the same song in many ways. It all reminded me of some awful AI concoction.

I was still a bit prickly from the events of last week and the music began to grind on my nerves. I could feel my blood pressure rising. After the fourth song, his assistant came in to let me know he was behind schedule and asked if I wanted to listen to something different.

I said that I did. When she asked what, I said immediately Nina Simone. She instructed the Alexa there to play Nina Simone and when the first notes from her piano slowly began asked if that was right. I assured that it was correct and she left me alone to listen.

The song was Wild is the Wind. I couldn’t have asked for a better song in that moment in that sterile doctor’s office at the end of a perfectly awful week. It captured my mood perfectly. I could feel an easing within me as I sat there. A heavy sigh came forth.

The contrast between that song and the stuff I had heard before was stark. This song had a rawness of emotion and a uniqueness and human touch that the other songs seemed to be lacking. As I said, the others felt to me as though they were created by AI.

Contrasted against the dullness of their conformity, Nina’s song felt like a rebellion of the spirit. Though it is not upbeat and has a sense of loss to it, it did feel wild and free in that moment. The other music, on the other hand, felt boxed in and constrained. No wildness, no freedom.

There seemed to be an analogy there to what I sensed has been happening here in this country. The sense of loss is for that wildness of spirit that seems to be leaking away, being rejected and replaced by uniformity of belief, thought, and action.

Maybe there is no analogy to be had. But for a moment I felt inspired at a moment that was uninspiring in every other way.

Maybe that is the purpose of art — if there is any at all.

Something to think about this morning. Here’s Nina Simone and her version of Wild is the Wind.

Read Full Post »

The Day of Great Confusion

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on November 8, 2024| 5 Comments »

1995-V1 The Day of Great Confusion sm

The Day of Great Confusion–1995, At West End Gallery

It was a murky confusion — here and there blotted with a color like the color of the smoke from damp fuel — of flying clouds tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened.

–Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

I was looking at some older work for the West End Gallery, pieces that had been with me for decades and had never been shown for a variety of reasons. Some just were never meant to be shared with the public, work not complete in one way or another. Some were drab and dull.

And some just didn’t completely click with me at the time. They didn’t hit whatever mark I had established for my work at the time they were painted. I don’t know if the criteria on which I was basing my judgement was that much different from what it is now or if it has shifted subtly over time due to time and circumstance. Whatever the reason, my appreciation for some of these unshown early pieces grew over the intervening years. 

Such is the case for the painting at the top of this page. It was painted in 1995 and, for reasons I can’t determine now, never made a journey outside my studio. Maybe it was that its colors were a bit different than my normal range of color in that time. Maybe I felt that the spew lines from where the watercolors broke free from the body of painting were too sloppy and distracting. Maybe it was the title I had jotted at the bottom of the sheet on which it was painted back in 1995, The Day of Great Confusion. Trying to determine why I applied that title always taxes my memory. 

I still don’t know why it didn’t quite hit the mark for me in 1995. 

However, looking at it at various times over the years, this painting greatly grew on me, showing me qualities I hadn’t recognized earlier. Those things I thought might have caused me to withhold now seemed like strengths. And in the past decade the title took on great significance as our country undertook an unnerving political transformation that still causes confusion and bewilderment within me.

Maybe that was the reason? I don’t know for sure, but I think there are other factors at play, as well. I think, even though it slightly differs from other pieces of that time, that it is a fine example of my early work in most every way. It’s one of those pieces that made me always pause in appreciation when coming across it in past years.

You might not see it that way and that’s okay. I just felt that if there was ever a time for a painting with that title to be shared, this was that time. It has put in its time with me and deserves to be seen.

Here’s song that kind of sums up the moment. Well, at least for me. It’s I Don’t Get It from the Cowboy Junkies. It’s from their fine 1988 album, The Trinity Session. It has bluesy vibe and lyrics that bite into the here and now.

 

Read Full Post »

Wishin’ and Hopin’/ Election Day Edition

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 5, 2024| Leave a Comment »

GC Myers- A Prayer For Light

A Prayer For Light— Exiles series

“Of course, there must be lots of Magic in the world,” he said wisely one day, “but people don’t know what it is like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen. I am going to try and experiment.”

–Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, 1911

…until you make them happen.

A lot of us wish and hope for better things and a change from those parts of our lives that disappoint us. But until we act on those wishes and hopes, nothing usually happens.

Things stay the way they are. Or go in ways we never wanted to go.

Of course, wishing and hoping can be viewed as the primary stages of making a plan of action or setting a course and goal for the future. And that’s important.

Action without a goal can be as fruitless as wishing and hoping without action.

But the two– the wish and the action– put together can produce a sort of Magic, much as Colin the bedridden boy discovered in The Secret Garden. It’s a Magic that is within our grasp once we realize this fact.

I am going to give a really basic example. Many years ago, when I was in the early stages of my art life, I wished and hoped for a solo exhibit. I had only been showing my work publicly for a very short time, less than two years, so I didn’t have a reputation or name to pave the way. I didn’t expect anything and it would have been easy to shrug it off and do nothing.

But I decided to try and experiment, to act on my wish.

I had been working on my Exiles series, work that was very personal. It was done during the battle my mom faced with cancer, ultimately losing her life to it in November of 1995. I put together a proposal for show of these paintings and introduced myself to the director of the Gmeiner Art Center in Wellsboro, PA, about an hour from my home. She was impressed by the work and the presentation and gave me a solo show that winter featuring the Exiles paintings.

One thing that struck me about this was when a couple of other artists approached me at a local gallery opening around the time the show at the Gmeiner ran. Both were established artists who had been working much longer than I and had actual bodies of work. They seemed kind of envious that I was having this show and asked how I got this show.

My answer was simple.

“I asked for it.”

I could see on their faces that this was a revelation, that this simple action was something they had never thought to do.

You can’t wait for your hopes and wishes to come to you. Sometimes, you have to take the step towards them, to put things in motion and to make Magic happen.

Unfortunately, a lot of us don’t ever get the connection between wishes and actions. And that’s a shame.

Make something happen today. Make some Magic.

Of course, if you read this blog regularly, you probably know that this is all just a setup for playing a song. I thought that today’s words and image would match up nicely with a hit song, Wishin’ and Hopin’, from Burt Bacharach, who died this past week [February, 2023]. This is the 1964 hit version from Dusty Springfield. Though it seems a little dated and she seems a little needy in this song about getting a guy, the premise that it takes action to achieve wishes and hopes is correct: You won’t get him/ Thinkin’ and a-prayin’, wishin’ and a-hopin’

You got to put wishes and hopes into action…

This post ran early last year. As I walked through the woods to the studio in the dark this morning, the chorus from the song Wishin’ and Hopin’ kept rolling through my mind. It seemed like a great song for the nervous anticipation that has been building for this Election Day. The post seemed to match up well with the day as well. Today is the day to put our wishes and hopes into action. It is a day of great privilege and responsibility, one where your vote is equal to the vote of any billionaire. In some places with tight races, it might be worth more.

Today, put your wishes and hopes into action. Make some magic.

Vote.

Read Full Post »

Pedal to the Metal

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 2, 2024| Leave a Comment »

GC Myers- Releasing the Fire 2024

Releasing the Fire–At West End Gallery

Work is the order of the day, just as it was at one time, with our first starts and our best efforts. Do you remember? Therein lies its delight. It brings back the forgotten; one’s stores of energy, seemingly exhausted, come back to life.

—Boris Pasternak, as quoted in The New York Times (1 January 1978)

I was determined to write something lighter as a counterpoint to my last couple of diatribes here. But desperate times require a little more effort or at least a rousing call to action. I think the song at the bottom serves that purpose very well.

No time to relax now. Full effort required.

Pedal to the metal.

I played this song a couple of years back in the runup to the 2022 elections and what follows is from that blogpost.

I recently became aware of a new album from the Boston-based Celtic punk band, the Dropkick Murphys. The album is called This Machine Still Kills Fascists and is their take on a group of unrecorded songs written by Woody Guthrie.

This is not a new idea. One of my favorite albums is Mermaid Avenue from a collaboration of Wilco and Billy Bragg in which they did very much the same thing, setting music to Guthrie’s unpublished lyrics. In both cases, the Guthrie family approached these artists and invited them to take on the project of bringing these lyrics to life.

In the case of the Dropkick Murphys, this began about 20 years ago when Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter, made them the offer, saying that she thought her father would have felt like a kindred spirit with the band and what they were doing.

They took it on then and the result was their version of Woody’s Shipping Up to Boston. It is, by far, their most well-known song. It was used effectively in a pivotal scene in Martin Scorsese‘s film of Boston gangsters, The Departed. It is also considered the unofficial anthem of Boston. To be honest, though I was a fan of the song, I didn’t know Shipping Up to Boston was a Woody Guthrie song and only recently became aware that they had recorded that small group of his songs that were included in their 2005 album, The Warrior’s Code.

This new album is a more direct collaboration with Guthrie’s music, comprised only of his songs and borrowing its title from the message famously scrawled on Woody’s guitar, This Machine Kills Fascists. They also went out to Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is Woody’s hometown and home to the Woody Guthrie Center, to record the album at Leon Russell’s The Church Studio. Leon Russell was also a Tulsa native.

The result is stirring group of Guthrie’s pro-union/labor, anti-fascist songs infused with the Celtic fighting spirit of the Dropkick Murphys. The song below is titled Ten Times More which has Woody saying that in order to beat back those who would oppress you, you have to meet their effort with not equal effort but ten times more effort.

In short, you can’t take half measures with would-be fascists– you have to overwhelm them with the fire and energy of your resistance. Like the song says:

When the crooks they work, we gotta work
Not once, not twice, but ten times more
Where the robbers they walk, we gotta walk
Not once, not twice, but ten times more

Pedal to the metal, folks…

Read Full Post »

The Song of Wandering Aengus

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 30, 2024| 1 Comment »

GC Myers-- Follow the River sm

Follow the River— At Principle Gallery

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

—William Butler Yeats, The Song of Wandering Aengus

The last Wednesday before a most important election here in the US. Let’s set politics aside for the day and focus on things of beauty, of mystery, of wonder. Those things that make this life more than tolerable. Things that deepen our existence here on this spinning rock we call home.

A fine example, in my mind, is the wonderful poem above from a favorite poet, William Butler Yeats. Perhaps we’re all a bit like Wandering Aengus, silently seeking something forever elusive.

Some of us might know what we seek. Some may not.

It probably doesn’t matter so long as we continue to seek whatever it might be that tugs at our soul. I think we all need that in some form or another. Until time and times are done…

Here’s Donovan with his version of the poem in the form of a song. Lovely.

Read Full Post »

Twilight Zone

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on October 29, 2024| Leave a Comment »

GC Myers- To the Main Road

To the Main Road– At West End Gallery

Benteen: “I remember the Earth. I remember it as a place, a place of color. I remember, Jo-Jo, that in the autumn … the leaves changed, turned different colors: red, orange, gold. I remember streams of water that flowed down hillsides, and the water was sparkling and clear. I remember clouds in the sky: white, billowy things that floated like ships, like sails. You see, in ancient times that’s the way men moved their ships across the water. They unfurled large sections of canvas against the wind, and the wind moved them. And I remember night skies. Night skies. Like endless black velvet, with stars, sometimes a moon, hung as if suspended by wires, lit from inside.”

Jo-Jo: “What’s night, Captain?”

Benteen: “Night? Night is a quiet time, Jo-Jo, when the Earth went to sleep. Kind of like a cover that it pulled over itself. Not like here, where we have the two suns always shining, always burning. It was darkness, Jo-Jo, darkness that felt like … like a cool hand just brushed past tired eyes. And there was snow on the winter nights. Gossamer stuff. It floated down and covered the Earth, made it all white, cool. And in the mornings we could go out and build a snowman, see our breath in the air. And it was good then. It was right.”

Jo-Jo: “Captain, why did you leave there?”

Benteen: “Well, we thought we could find another place like Earth, but with different beauties, Jo-Jo. And we found this place. We thought we could escape war, we thought we could — well, we thought that we could build an even better place. And it took us thirty years to find out that we left our home a billion miles away to be only visitors here, transients, ’cause you can’t put down roots in this ground. But it was too late. So we spent thirty years watching a clock and a calendar.”

— Rod Serling, Twilight Zone episode, On Thursday We Leave for Home

This is a scene from a Twilight Zone episode about a group of people who have left the Earth and settled on a distant planet, V-9 Gamma. It is a harsh and barren place with two suns giving it an unending day on which the group has struggled to survive for thirty years. Some have only vague memories of Earth while children who have been born on the alien planet have no memory at all. James Whitmore plays the leader, Benteen, of the group who also tries to keep up their spirit.

I don’t know why I am sharing this today. Maybe it’s just a wonderful example of the lyricism of Rod Serling‘s writing. That would be enough in itself.

But maybe it has to do with the episode’s theme of opting for a radically different existence and leaving all that you know behind. We often don’t recognize the actual ramifications of such a decision until it is too late. We learn in that moment what has been lost. The absence of those lost things we all too often overlooked and took for granted weighs heavily on us.

What we may lose may never be regained. Those things lost turn out to be the things that enrich and define us as humans. What we think would be a better life ends up feeling like an alien existence with us longing for a way of being we have forever lost.

Hmm…

Read Full Post »

Favorite Thing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on October 25, 2024| 2 Comments »

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

–Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 1855

GC Myers- Niche 2024

Niche— At Principle Gallery, Alexandria

I use the word favorite quite a bit on this blog. I list many songs, movies, poems, quotes, people, etc. as being favorites of mine. There are probably a thousand songs or more that I could list as favorites, songs that always jump out at me. These are songs that raise very distinct feelings on hearing them. It might not be the same feeling for any of them. In fact, it certainly is not. Just something unique in each that excites me in a very specific way.

It’s that way with my work, as well. I am almost always asked at shows which painting is my favorite. It’s a question I can never answer as nearly every piece has something unique in it that speaks to me. Each affects me in its own way.

Some make me happy. Some make me think on darker things. Some make me look back and some forward.

Some make me feel large and powerful while others make me feel small and insignificant. I number many of both of these among my favorites.

Some make me cry. The painting shown here is one such painting. Even now, seeing it only on the screen, makes me emotional. As I wrote in an earlier post about this painting, Niche, they are not sad nor are they happy tears. They are tears of recognition and acknowledgment of the human condition. Tears of catharsis on clearly recognizing a large part of myself in it.

How could I not see this as a favorite?

It might seem improbable that one should have so many favorites but that’s the way it is. How could I place one above another? And why would I want to?

They say life is a banquet. Or maybe they should say life is an endless buffet of favorite things.

Anway, here’s a favorite song from a favorite artist. This is Favorite from Neko Case. How could this not be a favorite of mine?

Read Full Post »

A Fertile Soil

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on October 24, 2024| 2 Comments »

GC Myers- Monde Parfait

Monde Parfait— At West End Gallery

In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not.

–Primo Levi, The Periodic Table (1975)

Love this passage from Primo Levi, the famed chemist/writer and Holocaust survivor, especially with the growing stench of fascism lingering in the air.

I think it succinctly sums up the strength of this country: fertility.

Not fertility in the human reproductive sense of the word. More like when analogizing the country to its soil and its ability to gain strength from diversity, absorbing everything beneficial from the impurities that are blended into it, becoming more fertile and productive.

Without this diversity and the ensuing impurities, the soil becomes sterile and fruitless.

A simple analogy, of course. That doesn’t take away from its point– that the conformity and purity that fascism demands are antithetical to the individual and to humanity.

The fascist society requires absolute obedience and compliance. They desire a homogenous population that is easily dictated to and compliant in their response. Purity and conformity.

There can be only one viewpoint, that of whoever stands at the head of the governing body.  The government is then that person, subject to the whims, beliefs, and aims of that person alone.

That sounds pretty goddamn un-American to most folks. We are not a one-size-fits-all country. There is practically no single unifying factor to this nation except a belief that we can say whatever the hell we want to say whenever we want to say it, that we alone can set our own course and make the important decisions in our life, and that our individuality counts for something.

We don’t like being told we have to be something other than what we are. Or being told what we have to do.

We are a contrarian place in many ways. But that somehow works here. We like the idea of the underdog, the David versus Goliath story of the little guy taking on the bully. Right over might.

Fascism is the opposite of that. It is might over everything, even right. Goliath would smash David to bits in their telling of the story. Fascists hate individuality, anything that veers from the uniform lockstep of their march forward.

Clean and compliant.

But in the end, that’s not who we are as a nation. We are messy and loud, sometimes stupid and wrong. But that’s just because, in theory, we try to give everyone an opportunity to follow their dreams and imagination. That’s the fertile part of it. In that crazy, diverse mix we have often found something that works for us, something that suits most of us in a fair way.

We are at our best when we celebrate the individuals, the oddballs, the non-conformists. When we recognize and respect the many diverse voices and viewpoints, not the commands of one rich old white guy who has exploited every one of the many advantages he has been given in life.

The end of that final sentence– that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not– might be the best argument for rejecting the current form of fascism being seen as a solution by a sizable number of folks.

Some will not have a problem adhering to what is expected of them but many, when seeing how they will be limited and controlled, will flinch at the thought. But it will be too late at that point. Once it has taken hold, it won’t let go except by the physical force of the people uniting against it.

And it will do any and everything to prevent that. That means sterilizing the soil through the elimination of any impurities.

We all know what that means. Some will scoff at the mere suggestion. Some will feel they are safe– they already fit the mold that others will be forced into. I fit that mold– an older white guy who has lived a life of being able to blend in easily on the surface, often going unnoticed. But I certainly wouldn’t feel safe because I know that in my heart of hearts that I will never be part of that group. In any way.

I don’t want to be the same nor do I want that for anyone else. I want people to be the singular beings they should be, to celebrate their differences while still respecting and appreciating the differences of others.

I want the fertile soil that America alone can offer.

That’s a lot this morning, I know. Thank you for sticking with me to this point today. I apologize if you came here to be soothed. I can only offer that this–clarifying where I stand– serves as a check valve, helping to release the pressure of my own anxieties. Holding it in only serves to make it worse.

Here’s an all-time favorite song from the Kinks that I last shared a couple of years back. It’s title really speaks to the subject at hand: I’m Not Like Everybody Else. This is one of my favorite versions, a performance from their 1994 live album, To the Bone.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »