“The enemy is complacency”: Why Donald Trump Emerged, Our Role In His Ascension, and How to Defeat Him

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
— Edmund Burke

On Thursday, the monosyllabic Mercurochrome mutant otherwise known as Donald J. Trump gave his apoplectic acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Red faced, sweaty, and veiny, much like his delegates and supporters, he painted a dystopian America – one of violent immigrants, refugees, and minorities; anarchy, (which only he can stop); and a corrupt Democratic presidential candidate who will most likely kill me before the immigrants, refugees, and minorities. Trump’s success has cashed in on the electorate’s anger. Like them I am angry. But my anger is not toward demonized scapegoats and what Trump claims they have unleashed and will further unleash on America. My anger and fear land on the privileged profiteers and institutions that his supporters are really angry with too. And like them, for the time I feel I am no longer in charge of my own destiny despite my best efforts to take control of my life. Like them, I feel paralyzed more than I would like to admit.

In 2008 the housing bubble broke two months after my husband and I had closed on our shoe-box-sized, money-pit of condo (a great investment our selling agent told us at the time); a year later, we were paying more on our mortgage than the condo’s worth. We still are.

Two years after the crash, my husband’s company MF Global, headed by former New Jersey Governor and junior Senator Jon Corzine, went bankrupt. Three months after my husband was able to secure a new job (of course for less pay) at the company he left MF Global for, that company laid him off. At the time, our daughter was only 18 months old. When my husband was rehired by the same company fifteen months later (he was temporarily working at a company for even less pay that took a substantial portion of his paycheck for health insurance), it was for even less money than the position he had originally been laid off from.

On top of our housing woes and my husband’s employment and unemployment, I faced roadblocks with my health (I live with multiple sclerosis, Grave’s Disease, depression, and in 2011 I had a grand mal seizure at the Randolph and Wabash El in downtown Chicago). Since 1999, I have made my living as an adjunct faculty member at several institutions of higher education and receive no health benefits or paid sick leave. The day my husband was laid off in March 2012, I finally went to the hospital to have a hairline fracture in my finger x-rayed. His insurance had kicked in, and I took care of a break that I had sustained four months earlier. This past February, I contracted bacterial pneumonia; due to the pneumonia I lost pay at a tutoring job in addition to a class. Despite all my health issues, since MF Global’s bankruptcy, I have worked intense and long hours teaching and tutoring on little sleep and food, which I am sure is what lead to the February pneumonia. I have tried to write in the little hours available and with the little energy and stamina I have and have published a little, but not as much as I want and need to.

I think I can guess your response to me: Why don’t you get a full-time job outside of academia since it’s such a dead end? Adjunct has never meant full-time. Work a normal job with normal hours and get some friggin health benefits.

Well, I have looked for a full-time job outside of academia. Repeatedly. Countless resumes have been sent out to companies and publications; I have networked and passed my resume on to people personally who have said they would “put in a good word for me” to their editors and employers. All for naught though. I have paid money to resume services to help me revise my twelve-page academic curriculum vitae so it is applicable to “the real world.”  My investment has not paid off. In 2000 I started trying to leave academia for the real-world – two years after I took my first college teaching job. At the time I was researching a topic for my first attempt at a novel and read Shattered Vows, a book written by an ex-priest. The author David Rice said that people who are former clergy or have taught in academia are not attractive in workplace; we are often viewed as too independent (n.a.). Those professionals I paid money to help me leave academia had told me I have transferrable skills and am qualified. I don’t know who to believe anymore. I do know though that I am depressed, exhausted, demoralized, and pissed.

Before graduation, adjunct teaching was suggested to my classmates and me. By building teaching experience and publishing, we could then apply for and obtain full-time teaching jobs. It wasn’t until my first semester of college teaching that I learned the truth from a fellow adjunct who had been teaching in this hand-to-mouth life for over twenty years:

“Don’t call them students anymore,” he said. “They are consumers of education now.”

I quickly learned that higher education had been corporatized. In the years since, it has only gotten worse. Universities now hire and employ more adjuncts than full-time, tenure-track faculty members. Academic-break unemployment is no longer paid. And adjuncts still have stagnant and unlivable wages (more than a few adjuncts in the United States are on some form of governmental assistance, including food stamps) and no health benefits.

My anger though lead me to support Bernie Sanders instead of Trump. Why though? True, I am a writer, educator, and liberal, but it had to me more than that. I think I may have found the reasons why.

The reasons behind Trump is not only because of anger but also because of fear, pathos, presentation of a false savior, and the electorate’s lack of education and critical thinking – the same five elements that allowed Adolph Hitler and his Nazis to rise to power in Germany, the U.S. Government to intern Japanese Americans during World War II, and McCarthyism in the 1950s. History shows the end result of allowing political leaders to rise unchecked. Plus allowing the reptilian part of our brain direct our actions instead of reason and intellect never, to say the least, leads to good results.

Recently, I have been reading Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free to better understand how “the shadow” (Karl Jung’s term for our darker nature that he claimed led to Hitler’s rise) overtakes a civilized society. Mayer interviewed several members of the Nazi party years after World War II, and I was struck and terrified by how their stories and Mayer’s analysis applies to what is happening now with Trump. Some of his interviewees were unemployed, one was a teacher, some were employed but disaffected with the Kaiser and then the Weimar Republic, and some were just plain anti-Semitic to start with. Hitler offered a solution out of the economic misery Germany lived under after the Treaty of Versailles’s imposed reparations. While it was not compulsory to join the Nazi party, if a person didn’t or spoke out against the Nazis there would be retribution in terms of lower income, lack of employment, and social acceptance. All of the Nazis interviewed by Mayer say their lives during this time were good.

Social, economic, and political reasons aside: Trump is also the result of how American education – starting with pre-K all the way up to higher education – while touted as being the best in the world and the gateway to success in life has been dismantled by our own federal, state, and local governments though slashed budgets, especially portions designated for music and art, the demonization of teachers, and a corporate model that looks at the bottom line instead of students and faculty.

For society and its citizens to prosper and survive, education, especially public education, must occur. If a country’s citizens are not educated, especially regarding civics and history, democracies and nations perish.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler said the “less educated masses” were the target for his propaganda (635). He continues: “[I]ts effect for the most part must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect. All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to” (636). After he won the Nevada caucus, Trump thanked the “poorly educated” who voted for him even going as far as to say he “love[s] the poorly educated” (Saul).

In They Thought They Were Free, Mayer points out that German teachers were always given great respect and paid more than their American contemporaries. However, those teachers and intellectuals were ridiculed and scorned under National Socialism.   For some of those teachers, like the one Mayer interviewed, it meant curbing their independent thinking and values to stay employed under the Third Reich, which meant teachers had to spew Nazi propaganda to students of all ages along with the three Rs.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would never be elected in today’s toxic and negative Republican party, said in the 1950s what happened in Germany could happen here. However, American independence, optimism, self-determination, fortitude, comfort, and privilege (if you came from the right race, religion, gender, social class, or ability that is) wouldn’t allow awareness or vigilance. We failed to realize that if our nation was not intellectually curious or capable of questioning and critical thinking that the U.S. could head down the same path.

It is easy to blame Trump’s supporters and the milquetoast Republicans who encourage and excuse the Fascist Cheetoh for the mess before us. Of course the aforementioned (especially Trump’s toady Chris Christie) have created and fed a schoolground bully, but that bully’s power increases when witnesses say and do nothing.

My hands are clean you may say. I did not vote for him and certainly don’t support him. Don’t blame me. Not so fast. You are responsible and will get Trump elected:

• If you do not vote in mid-term elections.
• If you do not vote in this election simply because you are angry that your candidate was not selected.
• If you do not support education and teachers: public and private; elementary, middle, high school, and higher-ed.
• If you do not read.
• If you do not question and critically think.
• If you blame those different from you for your own troubles and not those privileged few in power who have created your troubles.
• If you serve your own interests instead of your fellow man’s.
• If you do not initiate a conversation with someone of a different race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability, or religion.
• If you come from a privileged and comfortable position and do not break out of your own bubble.
• If you do not speak out.
• If you do not believe you are vulnerable.

Last summer Trump was looked upon as a joke and nothing more than a carnival barker by the media—the same media that has endlessly covered him for ratings and that we have encouraged by our love of tabloid and reality television. The Huffington Post even positioned its coverage of him in its entertainment section. But now Trump’s power and hold over a segment of the American electorate is all too clear and all too terrifying. On a recent Real Time with Bill Maher episode, Michael Moore prophesized Trump would be elected president. The crowd’s reaction to Moore’s statement somewhat resembled the reaction Texas Senator Ted Cruz received at his RNC speech when he refused to endorse Trump.

“Boo if you want. I am glad you’re saying it,” Maher remarked to Moore and the audience. “Everybody should say that. . . .the enemy is complacency. Say it every day.”

We can no longer look at Trump and his “movement” (Has a more ironic use of the word ever been used?) as a joke. If anything, those minority demographics Trump has attacked – Mexicans, the disabled (to which I belong), women (to which I also belong), African Americans, and Muslims – need to organize and register to vote if they already haven’t and show up at the November polls. Along with Millennials, those dismissed and ignored demographics were what re-elected Obama in 2012. Those same voters can stop Trump from being elected by exercising their right to vote instead of sitting at home demoralized and defeated. If those of us who are offended by Trump but dislike Hillary just a little less do not vote, the American experiment will have truly failed. As much as one hates Hillary, I can say with confidence that our Civil Rights and First Amendment Rights will not be revoked under her administration. WikiLeaks release of DNC emails proving what Bernie supporters have long suspected should not deter us from the bigger picture: saving the United States and its democratic values. If we elect Hillary, at least we have a chance of voting her out in 2020. I am not so sure about exercising our voting rights after President Trump is sworn in January 20, 2017.

James Baldwin, one of my favorite writers, said, “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” The United States needs to account for its actions that have lead to a portion of its citizens to put their lives and interests in the hands of an egotistical and narcissistic man who has never demonstrated substance; made anything, does not read; and has harmed people through his greed, entitlement, and unchecked privilege. Democrats, progressives, and independents need to account as well if we choose to stay home on November 8. Our political leaders are our mirrors. If we don’t like what we’re seeing, we need to start with us and accept our own failings, complacency, and cowardice. The next step is to correct them in ourselves and at the voting booth.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son: Notes of a Native Son , Nobody        Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street, The Devil Finds Work,
Other Essays. Library of America, 1998, p. 10.

Hitler, Adolph. “The Purpose of Propaganda.” The Informed Argument, edited by Robert K.      Miller, 5^th ed., Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998, pp. 633-640.

Mayer, Milton. They Thought They Were Free. 2nd ed., Kindle ed., University of Chicago P.,       2013.

Rice, David. Shattered Vows. William Morrow, 1990.

Saul, Heather. “Donald Trump Declares ‘I Love the Poorly Educated’ as He Storms to
Victory      in the Nevada Caucus.” The Independent, Independent Print Limited, 24
February 2016,      http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/donald-trump-declares-i-
love-the-poorly-educated-as-      he-storms-to-victory-in-nevada-caucus-
a6893106.html

Murph at Forty

Today would have been Michael J. Murphy’s, “Murph” to family and friends, fortieth birthday.  Eight years after his untimely passing, it still

Murph

doesn’t feel real and definitely doesn’t feel fair.  Yet in honor of Murph and the way he lived his life and pursued his artistic passion, I refuse to let sadness overwhelm me.  I still listen constantly to the music he and his Leave bandmates, Joe Herrman (bass), Terry Keating (drums), and Jimmy Latsis (co-songwriter and lead guitar) left us on three albums:  Don’t Go (check out the video of their song from it, “Any Other Way”), I’d Rather Not Say, and On a Happy Note . . .  But they are not all I have of Murph.  In addition to his music, pictures, and signature on my wedding canvas now framed in my bedroom, I am left not only with happy and tender memories but something more important—a lesson on how to live life and impact people for the better.  It was true then, is true today, and will be true on my deathbed—Murph was the most loving, tolerant, moral, down-to-earth, driven, life-embracing, decent, and unselfish person next to my husband I have ever known.

As I write this, my eyes move to two pictures of Murph situated on a shelf above my desk.  Though the photos are too far,  I can still see his aqua-blue eyes and the birthmark on his nose’s tip.  One was taken on my wedding day.  Murph’s blond hair is cut to his chin in in a bob.  He wears a white dress shirt, golden tie, and blue suspenders.  Two of my other friends bookend him:  Murph’s songwriting partner and fellow guitarist Jimmy and Rolando Franco, a talented visual artist and another of Murph’s numerous friends.

The other picture is from a Christmas party my husband and I hosted at our apartment on Chicago’s southwest side months later.  The photo features my friend Rich Bird, a journalist, writer, artist, and cartoonist; Rolando; and Murph, now sporting a short haircut. In these photos, the guys all smile toward me. Murph’s smile is serene.  Murph will always be that way for me.  The image of him in those photographs along with those where he performed and created his music captured his spirit on film.

My husband Bill Hincks met Murph at R.J. O’Brien in The Loop.  I met Murph shortly after my husband and he became co-workers.  I’ll never forget our first meeting.  It was at a southwest-side bar.  Murph and his former band Far Out of Me were playing.  That Friday night I was awestruck by his musical talent.  In addition to singing and playing guitar onstage, Murph played saxophone and Theremin.  I later learned he played cello and piano.  Before he died, he was learning the violin (an unforgiving instrument he claimed).  At the break he came up to my husband who introduced Murph to me.  Though only our first meeting, Murph hugged me with a tight and life-affirming embrace that so many of his other friends experienced and commented on after he died.  Genuine love and friendship were in Murph’s hug along with warmth, empathy, and altruism.

Though I know Murph had his bad days like everyone, he had a smile on his face more than a frown.  He was true and stood up for truth.  Never did I feel insincerity from him nor see it in him or his art.  When my husband and I invited Murph to our wedding, my husband personally delivered the invitation to him at work. After reading the invite, Mike grabbed my soon-to-be husband’s hand and then clasped it between his own hands.  Looking him straight in the eye, Murph said, “I would be honored to be at your wedding.”  I remember seeing Murph sitting in one of Holy Name’s pews as my father walked me down the aisle.  Again, his smile of love and joy greeted me.  At the reception, though I was busy making the rounds, I noticed Murph enjoying himself, smoking a cigar at the bar, and telling me when I made it to his table that I looked beautiful and that my husband was so lucky to have me as his wife.

During the time of my wedding, Murph and Jimmy began playing music together.  Those sessions were the origins of the band that came to be known as Leave.  Leave and their cover band Joe V. gained a following and touched countless people with their music and, most importantly, their humanity, humility, gentleness, and genuineness.  Such talent Murph and Leave had.  Leave’s songs were played on WXRT’s Local Anesthetic on Sunday nights and received rave reviews from publications such as the Illinois Entertainer and reviewers such as the Chicago Sun-Times’s Jim DeRogitis.

Leave went on to play throughout the nation as well as overseas.  Their proudest moment came when they played The Cavern Club in Liverpool, England.  The Beatles and John Lennon influenced Murph’s music and lyrics.  With the exception of The Cavern Club, Bill and I attended as many Leave shows as we could.  Only Murph’s parents, Mary Ann and Jim Murphy, attended more.

Early in Leave’s career, Murph, Jimmy, Terry, and Joe played The Beat Kitchen on a Sunday night.  My husband and I drove up from our southwest apartment  to 2100 West Belmont.  Besides the sound people and Murph’s parents, my husband and I were the only two people in attendance.  Murph and his bandmates meant so much to us, and we wanted to see Leave succeed.  After the show, Murph said we earned a backstage pass when they were famous.  I believe Leave would have been.  The music kept maturing.    Murph’s goal for On a Happy Note . . . was for the band to be signed by a major label.  The day before his death, Murph, Jimmy, Terry, and Joe had finished recording and mixing the album.  On a Happy Note . . .  is genius and eerily gorgeous.  Without hesitation, I dispassionately know On a Happy Note . . .  is Leave’s best album.  How I believe they would have gotten signed from that album.  Powerpop Station rated On a Happy Note . . . one of 2008’s top albums.   Murph’s music is resonant and beautiful with haunting and prophetic lyrics.

In addition to Leave and Joe V., Murph also played with the Larkin and Moran Brothers and taught at The Music School in Oak Lawn.  Music fueled Murph’s existence.  He never would have given it up and never would have been stingy in sharing it and teaching it to others no matter how old he became. He valued music’s importance in life.

Not only did Murph leave a legacy of beautiful music, he also left a legacy of genuine love and friendship.  Two summers before Murph died, he and the rest of Leave played my birthday party held in the backyard of my former landlady’s home.  One of my friends had taken me out that day in order for Bill and Leave to prepare.  After my husband got me into the yard by telling me that our dog Teddy had dug up our landlady’s garden, the shock of seeing my friends and family and a stage for Leave overwhelmed me.  Never have I felt a tangible sensation of love in one area.  A few minutes after my surprise, Murph walked over to hug me with one of his famous Murph hugs and kiss me on the cheek.  Murph’s girlfriend was sitting on a bench when he hugged and kissed me, and I told Murph that I loved him.  Smiling, I then turned to his girlfriend and said, “Don’t worry.  It’s a friend/brother love.  You’re safe.”  The next day my husband told me that when he approached Murph about Leave playing my surprise party, Murph responded, “Just tell me where and when.”

At every show before that party and every show afterward, Murph would hug me, kiss me on the cheek, and ask, “How are you doing, beautiful?”  With Murph, I knew he wanted nothing from me except friendship.  He was my second younger brother.

It didn’t matter if Mike knew a person for decades or if that person was someone on the street.  He put others before himself.  He was true and stood up for truth.  Never did I feel insincerity from him nor hear it in his art.  A year before he passed, he told me he loved the John Lennon quote I had posted on my social media page:  “Time wounds all heels.”  He understood though unethical and cruel people may achieve success and power in life that in the end karma is their true legacy.

Murph’s death hit our group of friends and me especially hard — not only because we deeply loved him but because we were all artists.  Artists share a special communion that can only be understood if one is an artist him or herself.  That communion deepens and thickens when artists do not put their egos, accolades, and success before friendship and love.  After my multiple sclerosis diagnosis, Murph remained in my circle of true friends that has unfortunately grown smaller each year.  He never defined me by my illness or was repelled by it.

Though he is physically gone from my life, I cannot bring myself to believe Murph is no longer here or that I will never see him again.  My faith and belief in metaphysical connection and an afterlife will not allow me to think otherwise.  Every day I talk to him, ask him to pray for me, and ask my godmother who passed four months before Murph to let him know that I am working to make him, her, Bill, my daughter, and God proud.  I want to live my life well and create something positive, game changing, and resonant before I pass.  Sometimes I sense Murph with me as I walk my dog or write at my desk.

Even if I could not talk to or feel Murph, I would know Murph still lives.  In response to Murph’s death, his mother and father established a scholarship fund in his name called Murph’s Gift of Music that provides money and instruments to young musicians who cannot afford instruments or lessons.  Money from On a Happy Note . . . years ago went directly into the scholarship fund.  Today, fundraisers are held every few years where bands perform on the southwest side to raise money for the fund.  Online and instrument donations are also accepted.  Even in death, Murph’s love for his fellow man and passing on his passion for music remains.

From his art and most importantly his actions, Murph is my inspiration in life now and will be to my last breath.  Like me, Bill is confident we will see him again, and his confidence further strengthens mine.   And though I often fail, I strive to live a life that would do honor to Murph and make him smile.  Several weeks after he passed, Jimmy told me that Murph read Eckhard Tolle’s The Power of Now that explained how and why to live in the moment.  I bought a copy a day later and read in three days.  I go back to it often as I do to my memories of Murph – especially those hugs.

A few years after Murph passed, I lost three other peers and a mentor.  Murph’s loss changed my perspective drastically.  At my age, a person should not lose peers; I empathize with people younger than me who have lost just as many if not more.  Life cannot be replaced.  My priorities shifted and perspective widened in the days and weeks following Murph’s passing.  Now negativity, vengeance, focus on financisl and material success, selfishness, whining about age and aging, and obstacles are seen as nothing more than shallow, immature, and maladjusted priorities.  Murph was never given the privilege to live to forty.  He will never be given the privilege to live to fifty.  Sixty.  Seventy.  Eighty.  Ninety.  A hundred.

This cliché is a cliché for a reason:  On one’s deathbed, there is never a regret to have worked more; a person regrets not spending enough time with friends and family.  Though he was incredibly busy with his music, Murph knew what mattered in life.  He loved his girlfriend and his friends immensely, but the love for his mother demonstrated a bond like I had never seen or felt before.  He protected her, and I know he is watching over her now.  She attended all of his shows, even when ill, and flew to England with Leave.  I strive to have that bond with my daughter, who I think will become a performer if not a musician like Murph.  When only a few months old, she hummed in her crib.  Her sixth birthday is a few weeks away, and she still sings all the time and tinkers around with my flute and Bill’s keyboards.  We took her to piano lessons a few months ago, but the instructor said he wanted to start her on drums.  While she remained too shy for a music lesson now, the instructor said she was a natural, and he was impressed that she accurately followed all of his drumming patterns – even the difficult ones.  There is no doubt that she will join the Children’s Chorus at Saint Matthias Elementary when she reaches second grade.  I can’t help but think Murph is her musical guardian angel.

Thank you, Murph.  It was such a gift and blessing to have known you, and I look forward to meeting you again in a place free from pain, illness, cruelty, ego, and selfishness.  And I do hope when meet again in Paradise that it will be exactly like my birthday party.  I’d love to hear Leave play again for eternity.

 

 

 

 

My Love for Baldwin

I discovered James Baldwin as a college freshman when my English 102 class was assigned to read and analyze his classic short story “Sonny’s Blues.”  I marveled at not only the story and his craft but the power and control in his elegant and artistic prose.  Years ago I read Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and plan to study it once again.  I just reread Giovanni’s Room and am now reading Another Country.  When I took Tom Jenks’s Art of the Story seminar years later, he required my seminar group to purchase American Short Story Masterpieces that he edited along with Raymond Carver. The short story that opens the collection is “Sonny’s Blues.”

I have been rereading and studying “Sonny’s Blues” since receiving Tom’s book A Poetics of Fiction two weeks ago.  Throughout A Poetics of Fiction, Jenks references, dissects, and analyzes “Sonny Blues” to teach and prove the art and craft of fiction.  Baldwin’s prose have not only made me revere him as a writer and polemicist but shame me in terms of my own writing.  Not only does he have a rhetorical command of his stories and arguments, but the gracefulness of his prose is something I aspire to.  Yet there are more than writing lessons I take from Baldwin.

I feel  he understands me.  Like him I am an “other.”  In my case, I am a woman and disabled  We come from different races, genders, sexualities, and backgrounds, but Baldwin along with Erica Jong, Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison, William Styron, Sylvia Plath, Kathryn Harrison, Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, Andre Dubus, Phillip Roth, and Jennifer Egan rank among my favorite writers. Not only am I attracted to him and his art because of the beauty and power in his language but because he understands the human condition.

I found this Mavis on Four interview where Baldwin noted to the interviewer that the loneliness she saw in his work is a universal theme and not only applicable to African Americans.  The loneliness I have felt in my own life intensified when I learned I had multiple sclerosis.  It intensified further when I faced discrimination, dismissal, and intolerance from my peers whether it was through strangers on the street or in my profession.  When Baldwin noted the anger that arose in him when he was not seated at a restaurant simply because of his race, I connected with that anger.  I have been denied opportunities and dismissed simply because of my MS, most recently in my role as a mother, and it has been a struggle and challenge not to let that anger overwhelm and paralyze me.  Baldwin stated that aforementioned incident was  a turning point for him; shortly after, he moved to France where he wrote his early essays and his first novel the semi-autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain.

Baldwin was able to funnel that anger and loneliness into his art and activism.  He never held back  and faced great criticism for his honesty by the white community as well as his own.  But he kept writing, kept creating art.  Baldwin stands along with Anne Sexton as one of the people I hope to meet in heaven.

This year marks Baldwin’s 90th birthday.  If you have not read any of James Baldwin’s works, I encourage you to do so.  And if you have read some of his work, I encourage you to read more.  I encourage you to discover your own love for Baldwin.

 

“I Just Can’t”

Last night, I was emerging from what my freshman writing students have termed the “DePaul Plague” — a cold that is worse than a cold but not exactly the flu — when I learned of the horror in Paris on my  social media news feed of BBC News.  Immediately, I private messaged my friend, a writer of French descent who lives in Paris, to see if she and her family were safe.

“Yes.  So shocked,” she answered.

I told her I was relieved and turned on my television’s streaming connection to Sky News.  Her quick answer relieved me, but I knew what was going on for her at that moment internally and externally was more complex than three words.  In January  she lived through the Charlie Hebdo massacre and its violation of life and the French values of liberté, égalité, fraternité.  I remember U.S. news and some French citizens saying the Charlie Hebdo attack was France’s 9/11.

But 9/11  arrived last night.

I watched the news last night until my emerald-colored cold elixir took effect around 11 p.m. my time in Chicago.  Today I awoke to read the articles in The New York Times and watch more of Sky News and clips from CNN International where stories ranged from French president François Hollande stating the attacks were an act of war to survivor tales to the revelation that ISIS was behind it (a fact that Richard Engel, Chief Foreign Correspondent of NBC News called a game changer) to the CBS-sponsored Democratic presidential debate shifting its focus to the Paris attacks to the indie music the tongue-in-cheek titled Eagles of Death Metal actually played.  But one piece of writing was more resonant.

“Writers are supposed to find the words,” my friend wrote on her Twitter feed, “but I just can’t.”

Can anyone?  Since my country was attacked on 9/11, writers have tried to define, analyze, and argue the reasons behind the violence on our own soil, our allies’ soil, and the soil of the Middle East.  The polarization between the left and the right in my own country became a sinkhole in terms of civil discourse after al-Qaeda flew planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.  Words, words, words.  They have always been there before, during, and after an attack, after an atrocity.  But can any of us truly find them?  Should we even try?  I can’t.  I can only be a witness and hang on to these words from Martin Luther King, Jr.–the only ones that help fill the crevice devastation and loss always carve :

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already           devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate                 cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence           multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of           destruction.

Like my friend, I have no words.  I shouldn’t even be writing this.  Honestly, this is terrible and not worthy to be published, but I need to contemplate.  And be a witness.  That’s all I can be now.  All I ever can be throughout this nightmare.

 

Greetings! I’d Like You to Hang Out with Me.

Greetings and thank you for stopping by my blog Hecate’s Hangout.

I named my blog after the Greek goddess Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, magic, spells, the moon, the night, and crossroads; guardian of the house; and a female deity of independence.  There are several reasons why I chose her name.  As a feminist and believer in the healing power of nature and nature itself, Hecate is my goddess.  As a writer who is often under the spells and magic of creation and art as well as a writer who hopes to create spells and magic for my readers through my creative work, Hecate is my goddess.   As a human walking down the winding path of life that offers multiple crossroads, Hecate is my goddess.  And as a mother who works inside and outside the home, Hecate is my goddess.

I created this blog to not only share my commentary and analysis on writing, freedom of expression, art, healing, feminism, motherhood/parenthood, and life’s bumpy road, but to also provide writing tips and exercises that can help anyone in his/her writing and life.

Enjoy!

Hecate hanging out.