Tag Archives: jesus

diversity, Equity, free speech, John Gardner, memoir

USA 2025: “Cheap Streamers in the Rain”

September 18, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Casper Johansson on Unsplash]

That idea—humankind’s inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—coupled with a system for protecting human rights —was and is the quintessential American Dream. The rest is greed and pompous foolishness—at worst, a cruel and sentimental myth, at best, cheap streamers in the rain.

“Amber (Get) Waves (Your) of (Plastic) Grain (Uncle Sam),” John Gardner

As summer was slipping into fall of 2025, I attended with my partner the Upstate Renaissance Faire held at the fairgrounds in Spartanburg, SC, just a few minutes from where I live. This was my first-time at what many call a “Ren Fair.”

I have a friend group connected with my partner made up of gamers, and a few of them were there along with us and my girlfriend’s sister and her boyfriend.

I was immediately shocked by the size of the crowd. Parking was an adventure, and despite the fairgrounds being quite large, the crowd left me a bit claustrophobic and overwhelmed.

However as we started making our way around—and once my partner kindly asked at the information desk where the beer was—I realized something that I have been mulling over in the context of the heightened social tensions in the US, especially since the inexcusable shooting of Charlie Kirk.

The atmosphere at the Faire was overwhelmingly happy and incredibly peaceful. Despite the abundance of ancient weapons and people dressed as knights—and even when attending a jousting demonstration that included a sword fight—I felt more safe there than in most public spaces.

I thought of October 2017 when several of us attended an open-air concert by The National in Pittsburg just after the horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas. Fireworks were set off behind us during that concert and everyone froze; in the US we have cultivated a culture of guns and as a result, a culture of fear.

As a lifelong educator, I was also involved in a school shooting in the 1980s.

At the Faire, there was a wide array of how people dressed and presented themselves. Yes, plenty of folk in medieval and Renaissance attire (the majority attending were dressed up, in fact), but there were those of us in our daily clothing along with Furries and even a guy in a Spider-Man costume.

Notable as well, many people blurred and broke the boundaries of gender norms. A person in all black and fishnet stockings turned around in the line for beer, and I was briefly caught off guard by his beard.

But as people made eye contact, they would smile and nod, often speaking pleasantly and with the general excitement everyone shared just being there.

This was one of the most diverse places I have ever been. And no one was offended, or angry.

No one was trying to change or judge anyone else.

I didn’t see a single MAGA hat or shirt (again, this was in Upstate SC where the Trump agenda is everywhere, on clothing and cars, and plastered across yards). Oddly, this space was absent partisan politics and a deeply political arena where the barriers of race, socioeconomic status, gender, and sexuality seemed to disappear.

Not to be overly idealistic, but this space is exactly what those of us calling for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all envision.

And I cannot understand how this is a radical or offensive idea.

This experience reinforced for me that the tensions in the US are not between two sides that are equal:

One side calling for all people, even the smallest minorities, to have the same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, guaranteed by our laws and political system.
The other side determined to impose their narrow beliefs on all Americans using the power of misinformation and government mandates.

These are not the same.

LGBTQ+ people who seek “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—they are not seeking to impose their lives on others. They are a minority who have had their access to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” mostly denied, and then occasionally allowed begrudgingly.

And just as there seemed to be some possibility the US would extend full humanity to people who are LGBTQ+, a political wave of resentment, hate, and denial has swept across the nation, often scapegoating this community.

Now, there is a powerful conservative movement in the US who seeks to impose their narrow beliefs on everyone even as they do not practice those beliefs themselves.

These are not the same.

Too many people leading and following in the US have lost touch with reality and facts.

Too many people have abandoned a commitment to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all, pursuing the false sanctuary of imposing their beliefs on everyone.

Ironically, it is not the people cosplaying at a Ren Fair.

Denying “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to anyone is a threat to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for everyone.

This may be the “cheap streamers in the rain” era of the USA that John Gardner rejected in 1976. This may be the final era with no renaissance possible.

Celebrating Violence Is a Type of Violence—But So Are Words

September 12, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash]

Somewhere around tenth grade, I began to recognize in myself a strong belief in nonviolence.

One day in English class remains a seminal moment in my life—one that included people who would shape my life profoundly as an educator.

I was in Lynn Harrill‘s class. Lynn would become my mentor and friend, the man influenced who I am in ways that rivaled my own father’s influence.

Lynn’s English class was unlike any English class I had ever sat in before. We had to write essays (English classes in junior high had been mostly working in grammar textbooks and diagramming sentences), and Lynn grounded his teaching in robust class discussions.

And many of us loved those discussions, and him.

One class period, we found ourselves in a heated class debate about who would willingly fight in a war if drafted. Coincidentally, that day the principal, Mr. Clark Simpkins, was observing Lynn, and Mr. Simpkins was the husband of my 6th-grade math teacher (who I loved) and father of two sons around my age. Most significantly, Mr. Simpkins would be the person who hired me for my first job teaching English.

As the debate unfolded, a clear division developed—all of the male students eagerly expressed a desire to fight in a war, except for me, the lone male student speaking for nonviolence with the young women in the class.

The day of my interview about 7 years later, Mr. Simpkins reminded me of that day, and honestly, there was a bit more than a veiled implication that my beliefs could keep me from being hired—one of many moments when, even after I was hired, these implications were used to keep me in my place.

Being a advocate for nonviolence in the South was perceived as unmanly, unpatriotic; it certainly was one of many of my beliefs that made me unlike the culture of my home and my career.

None the less, one of my recurring units as a teacher, one that my students appreciated and seemed to strongly engage with, included an exploration of nonfiction writing through the writings and activism of Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

The thread running through these men and their lives, of course, was advocacy for civil disobedience and nonviolence.

The goals of this unit were primarily about helping students grow as critical readers and writers, but I also very much wanted my students to consider and reconsider their own beliefs about violence.

I had grown up in the same Southern culture of my students, and I know most of them had not had that opportunity.

This, of course, is a long way to say emphatically that I without qualification believe that celebrating violence is a type of violence.

And I reiterate that in the wake of the inexcusable killing of Charlie Kirk.

Here I want to add that I am also concerned about the aggressive whitewashing of Kirk’s rhetoric and agenda by many conservatives who are using Kirk’s death for political and ideological gain.

That, I believe, is almost equally as offensive as callously celebrating or joking about the gruesome public murdering of a person in what should be a free and safe society.

As just one example of the debates on social media about what Kirk did and did not promote, let’s look at the claim that Kirk advocated for the death penalty for being gay, linked to his quoting Leviticus 20:13 and calling that “God’s perfect law.”

[I will not link the video here because I do not want to platform Kirk, but this is easy to search and confirm. If you doubt anything here, please find the clip yourself.]

This moment by Kirk is, in fact, an example of words as violence because simply mentioning stoning gay people to death because of God’s law is, at best, a veiled threat to the lives of anyone who is gay.

It is a reminder of what has been. It is a warning about what could be again.

History is replete with religious and institutional torturing, imprisoning, and killing people simply for being gay, and often these acts were grounded in religious dogma.

If Kirk was as smart as his advocates claim, he was quite aware of what he was doing by citing Leviticus and saying the law is “perfect.”

This was a threat, a form of rhetorical violence.

But what strikes me as the most concerning aspect of this moment is that Kirk is grinning and smiling throughout. He sees this little reference to stoning gay people to death as a joke, just a cool guy making a “by the way” point to engage in civil debate and discourse.

Despite Kirk being framed as a champion of free speech and an advocate for civil discourse, the content of what Kirk said often contained misinformation and hostile claims about marginalized people; that isn’t civil discourse, and “free speech” doesn’t mean people are not held accountable for what they say.

If Kirk’s agenda cannot be fully articulated after his death, that suggests it wasn’t valid to begin with.

For LGBTQ+ people, quoting Leviticus devalues to their lives and threatens their happiness; it is not a podcast joke, not simply a way to play “gotcha” in an online debate.

This is their lives, and all they request is that they have the same access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that Kirk along with his family and followers also want and deserve.

To be blunt, there are many examples like this that discredit the whitewashing of Kirk being perpetrated by people with political and ideological agendas, people who seem unconcerned about using Kirk’s death for their gains.

There are only a few fair options among those of us who fully condemn and reject the killing of Kirk; we all must start with the truth about who Kirk was and what he advocated for, and then we must reject it or embrace it. The latter is the only way praise and honoring Kirk by his advocates can be taken seriously.

If anyone has to misinform or lie to praise someone, that calls into question whether that person, in fact, deserves praise.

For me the only way to honor Kirk is to condemn the senseless killing and then to accurately describe who Kirk was and what he championed.

To cheer for his death or to misrepresent his life’s work is to dishonor not only Kirk but all of use.

Eugene V. Debs, Kurt Vonnegut

“May Auspiciousness Be Seen Everywhere”

April 6, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Ditto Bowo on Unsplash]

Through my journey with clinical anxiety, I have come to realize that anxiety is not a monolithic thing for all of us even as our own personal anxiety may be of a specific kind.

None the less, I think it is fair to say that anxiety comes from a disconnect between our inner selves and the the world around us, especially when that disconnect seems oppressive, judgmental, and inescapable.

Sometimes anxiety is the result of recognizing who we truly are is unlike how we are expected to be or how we perceive most other people to be. Other times, anxiety is the result of becoming (too) aware of impending doom—both the possibility of something real that is foreboding but (too) often a manufactured doom that isn’t realistic or rational.

For what most or many people simply consider living or the human condition, we anxious are fully charged with an awareness, an expectation of impending doom.

I suspect that all humans long for a sort of life that allows us to be fully who we are, and thus, I have always been drawn to a simple but now fully dismantled American ideal, guaranteeing all humans life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What a beautiful thing, filled with a sort of relief that allows our full humanity—the pursuit of happiness.

My existential self finds this wonderful because I believe the pursuit of happiness is itself happiness, like Sisyphus and his rock, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a [hu]man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

There is a sort of paradox to this pursuit of individual happiness, however, a paradox that is expressed by Eugene V, Debs:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

And then, in this fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, whose life and work were inspired by Debs:

There is another paradox.

Writers and thinkers were the first experiences I had with recognizing other people who thought like me existed, unlocking a sort of awareness that I was mostly unlike the people and place of my birth and young life.

One of those first authors for me was J.D. Salinger and the small novel-in-two-parts Franny and Zooey.

Salinger appeared to be himself on a sort of personal journey to awareness, one that was grounded in something like a Christian mysticism. Eventually the bulk of Salinger’s work was grounded in the Glass family with a Christ-figure, Seymour, who commits suicide but remains the moral core for his siblings.

That is where Franny and Zooey sits, one of Seymour’s brothers, Zooey, and his sister, Franny, continuing their own spiritual quests—”a sort of prose home movie.”

While Salinger’s fiction laid the groundwork for me as a reader and writer, he also taught me a much harder and uglier lesson. Salinger himself, Salinger the real-world man, proved to be not only incapable of fulfilling the idealized spiritual goals he wrote about through Seymour, but also incapable of being a decent human being.

And despite his failures as a person and the now insensitive choices he made for Seymour as the speaker of Jesus-like parables, the end of Franny and Zooey fits into the continuum the reached my embracing Debs and Vonnegut (above) and then, below, David Lynch.

Seymour mentored his siblings while all the children were performers on a radio show; Seymour implored them all the be their best for the “Fat Lady,” his metaphor for the least among us, an uncomfortable but sincere effort at teaching these children Christian charity and love.

As Franny is crumbling mentally, Zooey explains: “But I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady.”

And then Zooey continues: “Don’t you know the goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen to me now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? … Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”

Not a paradox at all, but Salinger’s humanistic and even practical rendition of Christianity makes perfect sense as I found and settled into Vonnegut’s persistent efforts to spread the message of Christian kindness through his own humanism and atheism:

On a smaller scale than Salinger, I had to realize that Vonnegut, too, struggled to be the human he asked all of us to be—although on balance, I think Vonnegut was just flawed in the ways most of us are because we are human.

What causes me greater sadness and, yes, anxiety, is that in our current world, the dominant Christians in the US are collectively as horrible as Salinger was on the individual level.

We are a people bereft of kindness, Christian charity, Christian love.

We are a people aggressively imposing hatred and fear onto others.

I have always been a skeptical person, but now I am slipping—as many do as they grow older—into perpetual cynicism.

I want to believe that it is possible to live the life we want, to be our full and true selves—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—while dedicating ourselves to insuring that everyone has that freedom as well.

Our happiness and the happiness of others are not in tension, in competition.

Our happiness and the happiness of others are dependent on each other.

The weight of my cynicism is harder and harder to carry into my mid-60s.

But there is one person who seems to have found something, found some way to live the ideals that I also embrace and believe with my entire self would make our lives collectively happier, erasing our anxieties.

David Lynch, who wrote in his memoir:

Room to Dream, David Lynch and Kristine McKenna

This seems obvious. It seems simple.

Maybe that’s the problem.

Maybe these ideals are beyond the capabilities of human beings.

Now we are back to Vonnegut who played around with the essential flaw in humans—”the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain.”

It is harder and harder each day, but I keep trying to have hope, hoping Maggie Smith is right: “This place could be beautiful,/right? You could make this place beautiful.”