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  • Hardly Famous

    Magician 19@nodkeem

    Philosophical Model 19@nodkeem

    The Art Colony and related sites are just a modern day book with photos

    please share our address here with others as a book

    and its a book by donation mostly yet we sell subscriptions to forums

    other wise its free to view and listen to the music

     

     

     

     

    signatrure0999123456789.jpg

  • REPRESSION is COMMUNISM! BODY AUTONOMY for ALL

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Communist_repression

     

  • 226318120_23847857240430382_8268526558249737630_n (1).jpg

     

    In service to a great nation, I gave nearly my all. My soul for God and Country! Your Psychological Warrior for the war effort. MK-Donald/donna

  • While there are eternal truths such as gravity exists but why? (theory/model/faith) yet life is a series of half-truths that create an understanding or an illusion of preference  for each of us when added up making what some call that faith theory or modeling.

  • My personal opinion is that I am HALF right, and you are HALF wrong.
    DKMeek the Magician 19@nodkeem

  •  perhaps we are all conservatives yet we take the things that are offbeat and outcast at times and propose a better life that is more inclusive of the individuals in a society that is the liberal way

Metanarrative - Walking the Walk


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  • Writers

I AM NOT A COLOR

CHAPTER 3

Full Disclosure... 

I Am Not a Color I am Caucasian, not white. White is a color; I am not a color.

I am Welsh/Nowegian, not American.

I was born on Ojibwe land off the great lake Michi Gami, not in Wisconsin.

I have an organically grown penis and testicles, and identify myself as a cisgender human being, not male. The contemporary construct of what it means to be a white, hetero male from Wisconsin does not adequately represent the person typing these words.

I am educated, I have enough money to get by, and I consider myself a spiritual person, but I am not elite, rich, or “chosen” to be or do anything more than serve my conscience and choose to use my means in the way of my choosing, just like anybody else.

My conscience was developed during my formative years through a dizzying array of oral stories, literature, music, and art. This collection of propaganda habitually and intentionally lied to me. I was complicit in those lies, enthusiastically, for the first 33 years of my life. I still am to a certain extent—truth be told.

Like everybody else, I sit idly by and watch videos on the Internet of people who have developed under a different collection of propaganda, while they hurt themselves, humiliate themselves, or do likewise to Others. After all, pain is funny, right? Reels and reels of my propaganda involve The Lone Ranger, The Three Stooges, and Warner Brothers Cartoons. Despite the fact that these were works of fiction, my mother and the scars on my scalp tell the story of a boy who thought he was immune to gravity. I learned through the sight of my own blood and countless trips to the emergency room that Mr. Disney, Larry, Moe, Curly, and even Daffy were, in fact, compulsive liars.

Sure, I learned my colors in school like everybody else—a red apple, a blue ball, a yellow banana, and that “it’s good to touch the green-green grass of home.” It was from literature, music, and oral stories, however, that I learned an entirely different palette. For example, red was the color of several things. Native Americans were called “injuns,” Indians, and Redskins. Redskins were portrayed as drunkards, fools, and untrustworthy around Caucasian women, yet this is still the name of the NFL team from America’s capitol. Red was also the color of Communist Russia, the people of Russia were called “Reds,” and Communism—I was told—was pretty much synonymous with Socialism. “Better Dead Than Red,” and “The Red Menace” were familiar quips during my Vietnam upbringing.

Now, I used red as an example, but red was not just a word or a color at a time when my exposure to the humanities had the potential to have its greatest impact. So, you see, red was different than white, and I was encouraged to compare, to belittle all things “red” in preference to white. I wasn’t old enough to verify what I was being told to be true. In fact, to recklessly question my place as a white boy from Wisconsin and the preference I was apparently born to have, was little less than treason. More so, it made me less of an American and less of a real man, and shame on me for not taking the side of my people. “I mean, what are ya, some kinda pinko?” Hell, Charlie Daniels told me this much when I was only nine years old.

“Well he's a friend of them long haired, hippy-type, pinko fags!

I betchya he’s even got a commie flag,

Tacked up on the wall inside of his garage.”

Ironically, just over ten years later, The Charlie Daniels band would release, Still in Saigon, a song about a Vietnam veteran who comes back from the war with “shell shock,” -as it was still called at the time. I would guess they did not see the irony as the lyrics still start out with the same mindless adherence to a misplaced loyalty to an arbitrary morality of power.

“I could have gone to Canada or I could have stayed in school,

but I was brought up differently—

I couldn't break the rules.”

I was a child; I needed someone to explain to me that difference was subjective, unilateral, and part of our power as human beings, not part of our weakness. To get a better idea of what I’m talking about, simply replace the word “Red,” with Black, White Yellow, Female, Male, Irish, Polish, Jewish, Mentally Challenged, Hillbilly, Mexican, Blonde, Poor, Rich, Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Transgender, or Queer. We even played a game called “Smear the Queer,” on the Ridgecrest Elementary playground. I, too, adhered to all the rules surrounding this random construct, and remained changeless for the better part of three decades. I’ve tried to convince my peers and my colleagues what a bully I was during those early years with little luck; let me assure you, I am Augustine, the heathen made saint, the frat boy who joins the peace corps, the pimp at Planned Parenthood, and if its still unclear…

Little Boy Lost

There was a kid at my school who simultaneously sucked his thumb and picked his nose every day during class all the way up through the fifth grade. There was a girl with braces and bottle-bottom glasses who lived up the street and had a funny last name. There was an entire family of Native American boys who lived next door, and their house always smelled of fried eggs. There was an African American boy a few blocks up whose mother bred and slaughtered chickens in their suburban backyard. There was also a little freckle-faced kid with red hair in the neighborhood who relentlessly teased the thumb sucker, threw broken glass and dog crap onto the doorstep of the girl up the street, laughed at the poverty of the boys next door, and secretly ridiculed the family a few blocks up for not buying a frozen bird from the grocery store like everybody else.     

Like everybody else; why couldn’t these people just be like everybody else? By the time I was a teenager, I figured out that people who chose to be different were setting themselves up for public scrutiny. I made it a point to be that public voice and to scrutinize at will. If my uncles—and even the movies—used words like faggot, whore, retard, spic, kike, and nigger, then why shouldn’t I? I grew up watching cowboys and Indians, the dark-skinned savages in Tarzan of the Apes, and the “oriental” houseboys on Mr. Magoo and Bonanza. If there was a different indoctrination to cultural awareness, it was not made available to me during my development. My father was against any bigoted language in the house; he wouldn’t even allow us to say, “cop.” It always had to be “police officer.” (Conversely, he would occasionally take us to “Sambo’s,” a restaurant on Highway 99 whose mascot was Little Black Sambo, a small, dark-skinned boy in a turban.) His influence, however, disappeared into a bottle before I reached the sixth grade.     

Unfortunately, my critiques were limited to Other or subaltern targets. Even though I was a victim of my own ignorance, the finger rarely, if ever, pointed back at its owner. I made no connection between my need to defame others and my own issues of self worth. I liken my disconnectedness and lack of cultural appropriateness and respect, not just to literature, music and oral stories of the time, but to the blind consumerism that was prevalent as well. I felt no need to reconcile, for example, the obvious relationship between The Archie’s playable 45-rpm single of “Sugar-Sugar” imbedded on the outside of the cereal box, and the unforgivable act of buying such a nutritionally empty product to start our day. I never questioned the fact that Super Sugar Crisp was “part of a balanced breakfast.” After all, it said so on TV and there was a picture on the box—albeit a very small picture—of a bowl of cereal accompanied by a glass of orange juice, toast, and fruit. No one explained to me that a bowl of dirt, with a glass of orange juice, toast, and fruit, could also be considered a “balanced breakfast.” As a result, I was unaware that there was anything wrong with my diet. There was never a need to question what I ws putting in my body or what I was putting in my head.

During developmental years for both mind and body, I was coached little in the area of war and politics. These were things in which my father, grandfather and uncles participated, and not up for debate. I believed in killing Commies, Reds, Japs, Germans, Nazis and visitors from outer space, regardless of the fact that I couldn’t tell one from the other. This unfettered rampage protected our way of life in the U.S., and the American way was the right way. Quips like, “White makes right, and “That’s very white of you,” fell off my tongue as easy as “Indian giver,” and “Jewed me down.” I really didn’t understand the implications of the Kennedy and King assassinations, the Bay of Pigs or Viet Nam, because there was no priority placed on my individual awareness, let alone my cultural awareness. Again, I made no connection between these national catastrophes and my personal beliefs. I didn’t think there was anything the matter with America at all, in fact, until the Nixon administration. Again, I would have been considered a sideshow freak had I stood up and declared myself independent of the mores and lack of cultural compass in my environment. Perhaps, as Greene (1998) suggests, it is developmentally impossible to see multiculturalism as an inclusive phenomenon. [W]hen I talk about multiculturalism, I first talk about myself, and I imagine that it is not unlike that in many other cultures. In other words, when I was fourteen, I didn’t give a damn for my culture. I wanted to go out and be myself (Greene, p. 181).

I did not invent my own malignant ideology, nor was I an anomaly created in a vacuum. Much of what I experienced was the dominant paradigm of race and xenophobia prevalent in America at the time. Omi and Winant (1994) addressed the origin of such ethnic divides in their book, Racial Formation in the United States.

  • The dominant paradigm of race for the last half-century has been that of ethnicity. Ethnicity theory emerged in the 1920s as a challenge to then predominant biologistic and Social Darwinistic conceptions of race. Securing predominance by World War II, it shaped academic thinking about race, guided public policy issues, and influenced popular “racial ideology” well into the mid-1960s (p. 12).

I knew all the popular jokes that directly or indirectly degraded people of different race, gender, or sexual orientation, and I would remain a racist to a greater or lesser degree for the remainder of my young adult life. I discussed the potential universality of this ideology among men and women of my age group in some of my earliest research. I discovered that one of the commonalities among teens growing up in the ’70s, regardless of background, was a constant struggle to define ourselves—or to resist defining ourselves. There was a pervasive cynicism and alienation, that, when combined with the psychosocial crisis of my parent’s divorce, created a fertile environment for abuses and trauma in my life. Consequentially, a lack of an authentic voice, coupled with a compulsion to demean the voice of marginalized groups, evolved. This practice was not limited to my family or my little patch of land just north of Seattle.

  • Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy, which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences among us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that’s not possible, copy it if we think it’s dominant, or destroy it if we think it’s subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion (Lorde, 1984, p. 115).

When I reflect on that little red-haired boy, I am ashamed. I now feel it was catastrophic for me to miss the earlier influence of all the human difference readily available in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, especially those of literature and stories which may have pointed me toward a more balanced, positive psychosocial development. I separated myself from people, ignored, misnamed, misused, and was ironically confused, then, by my inability to maintain meaningful relationships. Methodically, year after year, I would raise the periscope to see sinking ships on my horizon, only to look down and see my own hand, firing torpedo, after torpedo, after torpedo.

Little Boy Found

I was not compelled to examine the trajectory of such a loss, or make directed shifts in my thinking until I stepped onto a college campus. At the age of 33, I had an epiphany in which I realized the limitations of my intellectual agility; essentially, I woke up. Not unlike Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the realization that no one would be dragging me out of the cave toward the light was only slightly less frightening than the thought that I was incapable of leading my own daughters toward the light. It became a waking nightmare, that I would inflict the same, comparative, destructive acceptance of this arbitrary morality on to them. Remember… As I got older, it became my exclusive identity. By the time I reached my early twenties, I found myself quite adept at playing the comparison game, though the ramifications of it kept haunting me. Eventually, for lack of any other identity, I decided it was worth the pain, even for colleagues, family, friends, and society to put on a good front and continue the game in “earnest”  (Spitzer, 2005, pps. 76, 77).

It is no mystery that these identities are choices, forged by examples and non-examples present in our upbringing, literature, and our informal educational environments. It took months of personal therapy, equal parts of soul searching and sacrifice, along with the understanding of things exactly like Plato’s Allegory Cave, for me to snap out of it. This was my true conversion. I was eating crow and the forbidden fruit right along with the blood and the body. In 1998, my self-serving, comparative identity began a slow but marked shift to a servant-leader, a contributive identity. Again, stories, literature, music, and art led the way. I rebooted my own development and degaussed the prerecorded voices that explained the world to me when no one else would.

So, here, this time in the first person, is how one might describe a completed transformation:

  • I listed the various contributions I could make to family, friends, work, or community, and make these the ends of my achievement, my competitiveness, my respectability, and the like. I began to notice my anxiety level dropped and my relationships improved. Above all, I will noticed a marked improvement in my capacity to achieve goals, for these goals were now viewed as opportunities instead of problems (Spitzer, p. 81)

It has been very important to the future of my authenticity, for me to reflect on my past; I feel it has helped me to transform into a productive, contributive adult. Additionally, the gift of a Jesuit education allowed me to witness contributive service to something greater than myself. This reflection—if I am to remain true to this new, authentic self—must be paid forward, so that I may be a part of a movement that provides young readers with an opportunity to form a collection of stories and literature that celebrates difference, that shuns comparison, and forces—yes forces—them toward cultural fluency and contributive identities.

Leaders Leave

The new stories written and told by the Intracolony Learning Community will include, but will not be limited to, ancestry exploration and familial connection, or a lack thereof, to a marginalized group or people in history. For example, preference will be given to children’s and young adult literature that explores and exults the contributive identities of blended families as a natural occurrence, and not as the central theme of the story. Preference will be given to children’s and young adult literature that explores and exults the contributive identities of trans-gender characters as a natural occurrence, and not as the central theme of the story.

Preference will be given to children’s and young adult literature that explores and exults the contributive identities of equity in the workplace as a natural occurrence, and not as the central theme of the story.

Every story, in fact, that honors equity, pluralism, and the positive impact of contributive identities above comparative identities, will eventually unveil the cultures already present in the reader’s life. If the reader is enrolled in a traditional school, what is the historical and geographical evolution of the school’s site and surrounding area? Who were the indigenous people of that area, and what was the process for consequent claiming and acquisition of the land? Whose hands mixed the mortar, ran the plumbing, and installed the electrical system? They need to know who actually erected the structure to fully understand how their school came to be, to recognize from whom they acquired such privilege, and to properly give thanks.

Imagine the difference in each individual contribution, empowered by a myriad of social, political or economical avenues, and what could be accomplished if different pathways and transformations were now given the green light. Giroux (1998) voiced a concern for young learners and how the intrinsic relationship between education and the success of our economic structure cannot be understated.

  • We need more work on how these pedagogical machines are rewriting the texts of power and identity and how such texts resonate with a broader public discourses about race, gender, class and national identity. We need more work on the politics of democracy. The question of democracy strikes me as so central to what’s going on in this country and what’s going on globally. I also think the youth of this country are really under attack … Giving up on youth is tantamount to giving up on democracy (Giroux, p. 140).  

As a nation becoming more and more aware of how sandy a foundation can be when it’s  built on “what the market can bear,” new voices of children and young adults must form a more measurable congruence between having a welcoming beacon of liberty in our harbor, and the equitable division of equity and respect between people of difference in our communities.

Institutionally, we continue to marginalize, label, and assess students based on difference, a century-old trend that has been, and remains to be, in direct conflict with the better interest of our society, our schools, and our children. Peña (2005) suggests that rampant complicity in such “categorizing behavior is neither organic nor ecological. It does not herald the specific, mutual and holistic benefit of race, nor does it stress individuality, unity and the independence of society, social systems, spirituality and place.”

and…

  • This tendency to associate race with conforming and nonconforming behaviors, with normalcy and deviance, lays the basis for past, current and future studies of unanticipated and anticipated consequences, I believe, and for similar investigations of social and individual function and dysfunction. Narrowing the achievement gap as so many school districts are wont to do, for example, while appropriately drawing attention to the nature of testing, different test outcomes and possibly achievement and social in-equities, oftentimes is considered in just such a way as to be socially Darwinist (Peña, p. 21).

Thus the regression is complete. What do we gain from creating an entire country of competitive children who remain ignorant of entire civilizations, ethnicities, creeds and orientations? We gain what every profit-driven society needs, an expendable and sustainable commodity. The youth of North America—largely due to the early exposure and continued subjection to stories of privilege vs. subaltern—they are conditioned to become one, or any combination of, three things: Consumers, pitted against one another in endless comparisons; Casualties, willing to die for those consumptive proclivities; and finally, Prisoners, hard at work in contemporary plantations—and just like the plantations of old, the modern, imbedded prison complex creates jobs.

However comforting it might to place blame on something out of our control, we are complicit as our children are “dumbed down” by our current system; we watch and cheer them on as they mindlessly consume a variety of commodities until they quite literally become our commodities. They are our consumers, our riminals, and—with growing frequency—an integral part of our profit-driven military industrial complex.

The importance of creating contributive citizens through compassionate approaches to children’s and young adult literature cannot be understated. While greater pluralism in literature and formal education is not a new or untested concept. Similar approaches have been successful by the European Council of International Schools (ECIS). St. Timothy’s, for example, is a working, thriving ECIS school in Stevenson, Maryland. The ECIS, has proven that cultural fluency and service is not the enemy of a free society. Liechty (2005) in The Ernest Becker Reader, discussed how Becker saw the perfect marriage of education and democracy as an ongoing discourse to maintain a natural evolution of ideas.

  • Becker characterized the educational system in the ideal/real democracy as a Great Conversation carried on by a community of scientist-scholar-investigators. This was also his basic description of an ideal/real democratic state, in which the expansion of maximum individuality within maximum community would itself serve as the socio-cultural immortality project—the only kind of immortality project that by its nature will not displace the freedom with servitude in the process of achieving its actualization (Liechty, p. 21).

Wow. Let that sink in...

A great, immortal conversation, which expresses a maximizing, ever-expanding individuality within the community toward praxis, and/or the actualization of ideas manifested in that conversation. Reading children’s and adult literature that celebrates difference and the natural migration of this library into institutionalized racism would be a far greater gift to America’s next generation of learners than, say, No Child Left Behind (NCLB). As the only major educational policy reform since Head Start was initiated, thirty-seven years ago, NCLB was signed by President Bush in 2002. Moore (2005), in her essay Testing Whiteness: No Child or No School Left Behind, called this piece of legislation an act that “imbeds racial formation practices centered around whiteness into a national movement of standardized testing” (p. 174). Administratively, Moore cites English and Steffy to show how NCLB reduces the gathering steam of the multi-cultural education movement and critical classroom pedagogies. “[T]he latent effect of high-stakes testing is to ‘flatten the curriculum,’ reduce diversity, reward minimum performance with commendations, and reduce initiatives to engage in reform” (p. 180). To legislate “whiteness,” or any single dominant ideology for that matter into our educational system, is to act in direct conflict with our best scholastic, economic and cultural interests.

The disproportionate amount of high-stakes tests in states with higher ranks of African American and Latino-American students has created skyrocketing dropout rates, and represents “…the manifest outcome of the process, rather than an unintended consequence” (p. 182). If we are, indeed, in a machine building competition, i.e., Giroux’s pedagogical machines vs. the self-perpetuating, profit-by-prisons machines unveiled by Brewer and Heitzeg, then there is no culture more qualified to create the winning design than America. Ours, however, will neither be de Tocqueville’s inhuman, steam-powered monstrosity of “POPS! WHIRS! and BANGS!,” raking haphazardly across a field of budding, disenfranchised youths and putting them behind bars, nor will it be satisfied with simply chugging along, rewriting texts, re-imaging heroes, and identities to create an army of self-involved, competitors.  

The better machine, an equally systematic, purposeful approach, filled with the literature and stories that expose empty comparisons for what they are, and insists that what they wear, eat, watch, or buy does not define them. Instead, this new machine will be an amorphous, evolving, entity, dedicated to readerships geared toward compassion and humble confidence, as to develop a clear understanding of how power and identity resonate within discourses about race, gender, class, and identity. The youth of North America will be fully prepared to aggressively dismantle every entrenched, exclusionary stereotype they face, regardless of its mode of delivery or intended audience.

My Cathartic Writer’s Voice Development (CWVD)    

As early as age ten, I developed a growing feeling that I did not belong anywhere. As a product of an abusive, highly dysfunctional family, I sought acceptance and a sense of confidence in my own writing and selected reading. This was not enough, however, to save me from the other trappings of being an unsupervised young adult. Children from homes in which emotional or physical abuse between adult partners, parental substance abuse, and/or child abuse or neglect exists, are disproportionately represented among runaway [homeless] youth (Washington Institute for Public Policy, 1997, p. 4).

As a former homeless youth, I recognize that one of the commonalities among those of us growing up in the ’70s, regardless of background, was a constant struggle to define ourselves—or to resist defining ourselves. Like the youth of today, however, we always employed the language of others. Adolescents of the 1970s, have a unique view on individuality and their role in society. The ’70s, though often lampooned in modern media, was a very difficult time to be an adolescent. Not quite a baby boomer and not yet a member of Generation X, we were the forgotten children left over from ’60s idealism and headed toward the repressive ’80s. I grew up with promiscuity, drug use, and cynicism. Developing any skills that required the least amount of self-discipline, not to mention an identifying language, was difficult at best. “Americans reeling from defeat in Vietnam, Watergate and the Iran hostage crisis essentially lost their faith in the institutions of society, leading to the pervasive cynicism that endures today” (Brotman, 2000, p. 1). Pontell (2005) has dubbed children of the 70s “Generation Jones,” has authored a book on the subject, and maintains a website that explains the lingering repercussions of an era in which the number of women entering the workforce and marijuana use was at an all-time high. “Generation Jones started out optimistic only to see idealistic dreams smashed by the financial hardships of the ’70s. The character of the generation became a mixture of idealistic yearning and cynical alienation” (p. 1). This “pervasive cynicism” and “alienation” combined with the aforementioned psychosocial crisis, created a fertile environment for abuses, trauma and consequentially, a lack of voice, written or otherwise.

I spent a few homeless days wandering the beaches of Southern California in the late ’70s, and spent a couple shaky moments in the back of police cruisers. I am fairly certain that there are elements of my misadventures that I have blocked out of my memory. Conversely, I have glamorized elements of this self-inflicted disaffection as a way of turning a horrifying experience into a great story. How was it that I was able to transform my lack of belonging—along with the other aforementioned traps of the marginalized, such as thievery, promiscuity, and drug and alcohol abuse—into voice development? My continued contention is that the modicum of encouragement directed at my writing, and the smallest notion that there was value in my experiences, told me that one day I would have a great need to process it all using my own particular voice.

My early writing was songwriting. I often felt supported by my ability to put lyrics to melody and consequently by people who liked my songs. I was apparently processing some of my trauma on a level that I kept hidden away. One of my first songs, “Call On Me,” although somewhat pedestrian, represents a deep, perhaps subconscious feeling that I was still being controlled by the trauma of my past. It’s a song that reveals both the longing and the promise of a responsible, human connection. Early relationship, vocational and social decisions were often made based on this duality, the recognition that, though I was not whole, I held a deep need to take care of those who were also ill nurtured, to be there at a moment’s notice to care of them. To be relied upon meant reliance and reliance meant a stability that only existed in song.

The first time I knew that my writing could sustain me through difficult times, was after the move from urban Seattle to agrarian Montana. Two English instructors at a miniscule high school of just 400 students had a significant impact on my voice development. I was fairly certain that Mr. Belder was the only person in the entire state of Montana that actually owned a men’s bicycle with a basket attached to the handlebars. On my first day at Powell County High in 1975, I was wearing a ring on every finger, AngelFlight bell-bottom slacks, polyester, wide-collar shirts, platform shoes, and sporting a David Bowie haircut. To say that I stuck out when I walked into classes full of bull-riders and farmers is an understatement. But Mr. Belder saw me among my peers as someone of great potential in need of a little confidence and encouragement. Within a few weeks of entering his class, I knew I had found someone special as well. One day, he played “Fixing a Hole” from The Beatles’ White Album and asked the class to do a freewrite on what we thought the authors of the lyrics were trying to say. I was in heaven and used this opportunity to let my voice shine a little bit. Mr. Belder eventually asked me to act as a teacher’s aid for his class and eventually allowed me to student-teach on a couple of occasions. This mild-mannered mentor asked for my opinion, valued my learned experiences and believed in my ability to communicate these experiences and abilities using my own language.          

It is quite miraculous that I was able to find not one, but two highly innovative instructors in a prison-town high school. Ms. Harris was Mr. Belder’s female equivalent, and in every way his opposite. She encouraged me to actively and unabashedly pour out my truest, deepest, darkest secrets and fears in my weekly journal assignments. I came to understand that she expected more from me and we learned that we had a great deal in common. She, too, was from a big city and felt out of place. She helped me create a sense of belonging and a sense of authority in my own words that I had not experienced in any environment—real or imagined. At age fourteen I wrote my first short story and depicted myself as a “sex-drugs and rock-n-roll” suburbanite trapped in a world of western wear and cow pies.

Despite these racier illusions, the thing I remember most about the story is the image of “crunching” across a snowfield away from a secret rendezvous and toward town. I specifically recall describing the sound of my footsteps as crunching across the blank, canvas of snow—an action appropriate to my situation—I was breaking through the brittle shell of who I was toward an unexplored center, in an effort to find better footing. Looking back on it now, this first attempt sounded more like a love-sick confessional; but I have the distinct recollection of re-reading it, refining it and being quite proud upon its completion. Ms. Harris probably would have been mortified by the story, but the gift she gave me was far more than just a bit of license as a novice, lovesick writer. She gave me the ability to find value in my experience above the experience itself, and that beauty and understanding can be found writing about our defining life experiences.

The literature I chose to read during my voice development prior to rejoining academia was eclectic, ranging from science fiction and horror to dramas and autobiographies. I imagined how cool it would be to pee on the floor in the middle of one of my parent’s cocktail parties or puke on a member of the clergy like Regan did in The Exorcist. The truth, however, was that at times I did feel possessed, and that my behavior was secretly controlled by someone or something else. I found it sad and simultaneously liberating to learn that Conrad needed shock therapy and extensive counseling to release the misplaced guilt of his brother’s death in Ordinary People. What would it take to release my guilt? I was Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land and believed that I had mysterious powers over earth people. I longed for the courage, discipline and direction depicted in Chuck Yeager’s autobiography, Yeager. All of these examples—as well as the feelings that accompanied them—affected who I am, my writer’s voice, and the subjects on which I chose to write.

To summarize, my personal development and my CWVDare inextricably linked to the literature and the caretakers that encouraged my voice to develop. If it can transform the person you read today, imagine what it can do for an entire school, school district, city, state, or country. 

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  • Idiocracy would not relate Repression to Communism due to their years of training by the misdirecting repressors.
    .Raydon.

  • In my opinion, I am HALF right, and you are HALF wrong. Let's part ways. Each of us is taking our HALF LIFE in peace.
    Peach On Herb says Be Anointed with Kenah Bosum and seeking you will find HEAVEN is at hand.
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