Tag Archives: history

234. Revisiting Columbus

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A year ago today, I was anticipating a January 2016 release for my novel Cyan. Since Columbus had a brief appearance there, I published an excerpt on Columbus Day as a teaser. The novel’s release has been delayed, and very few people were reading that early in the blog’s history, so here is a reprise

*             *             *

Poor Columbus; he has taken a beating over the years. We don’t see him for what he was, with all his strengths and weaknesses, but through the lens of our own times. Here is a picture of how we might view him a century from now, when we have had to change our calendar to meet the demands of the rest of the world.

Anno Domini
A Latin phrase meaning the Year of our Lord.

Before sunrise on October 12, 1492, Anno Domini, a lookout for Columbus’ expedition sighted land. Columbus had found two new continents (although he did not know it), following his own powerful vision of how the Earth was constructed (a vision that was wrong), and began a five hundred year reign as king of explorers.

Half a millennium later, Columbus was dethroned. Even school children were now being taught that Columbus was not the only one who knew the world was round. Sailors and scholars had known that for hundreds of years before him.  Columbus’ great vision was that the Earth was small, and in that he was wrong. By the late twentieth century, it was certain that the Vikings got to America first, likely that St. Brendan beat Columbus there, and there were a dozen other putative explorers who had their champions.

Besides, American popular thought was in one of its Noble Savage stages, and it was politically correct to echo the Native Americans who complained that Columbus was a destroyer of races and cultures.

But even at the height of Columbus bashing, it was apparent that his voyage had differed in one significant detail from the other explorers who had preceded him. After Columbus, America was never lost again. After Columbus, and those other explorers who sailed close on his heels, the Earth became entirely known and entirely interconnected for the first time.

*****

In the year A. D. 2037 (as Christians measure time), at the Conclave of Mecca, the Islamic world announced that they would no longer recognize, speak with, acknowledge, or deal with any person, nation, or document which forced them to use a calendar based on Christianity.

At the International Bureau of Weights and Measures Convention in Buenos Aires two months later, a new calendar was established, based on a sidereal year. It would have neither weeks nor months since Islam and the rest of the world could not compromise on the issue of lunar months. It could not start at Jesus’ putative birth, nor at Mohammed’s, and it quickly became apparent that the new Standard Year should date from the midnight preceding the day the Earth became one planet for the first time.

This whole Standard Year business came about by accident. When I wrote Jandrax thirty plus years ago, I had no idea that I would write other stories in the same universe. After all, I stranded all those poor people so far out that no one would ever find them.

However, I began wondering what circumstances, beyond what I had already written, might cause Dumezil to invent his pan-Earth religion, and I wondered what Jan Andrax’s ancestors were like. That led me to make Stephan Andrax, Jan’s multi-great grandfather, spaceside commander of the Cyan expedition.

In Jandrax, I had pulled the date Standard Year 873 out of thin air. Now I had to backtrack and make it work for Cyan, which I did my making Standard Year Zero start with Columbus’ discovery of America.

222. Too Many Mouths

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This continues from yesterday’s post The Wall.

When I was a kid in Oklahoma, we had tornadoes just like now, but with less destruction. About the time I was born, a local town was hit, and people were still talking about it when I left for college. It was that unusual.

When I was in my early teens, we watched a tornado drop down and march across the prairie. It was five miles west of us and in plain sight. Every ten minutes or so there was an explosion of wood and tin as another barn got hit, and it collapsed one house just before it lifted up again. It walked six miles across the landscape, destroyed three or four barns, and one house. No one was killed. One woman was slightly injured and scared half to death when her house fell in on her.

If that same storm were to hit today we would see hundreds of homes destroyed, numerous injuries, and probably deaths. The difference — more targets.

**     **     **

I would give you a reference on this next bit of information if I knew it. It came from a classroom lecture during college in the late sixties, and if I ever knew its source, I don’t know it any more. Call it an honest memory, with figures subject to further verification.

When Europeans conquered Africa, according to earliest census information the birth rate and the death rate were both about 4% per year. Medical missionaries saw the massive losses to disease and set about rectifying things. Slowly, the death rate dropped to about 2% per year.

The birth rate never changed.

You can do the math. Kindness, sacrifice, and the eradication of disease took a stable population level and started it on its way toward overpopulation and famine.

**     **     **

Yesterday’s poem Hungry paints a bleak picture of the future. It could be co-oped by conservatives as a call for borders. I reject that interpretation. Walls won’t help. No country is strong enough to survive without a fundamental change throughout the globe.

This world is straining at its limits with five times the population that should exist. The reason is clear – too many births for the number of deaths.

It would be facetious – and heartless – to say we need more deaths. We need fewer births, and the change needs to be world wide. We fight against terrorism, pray for peace, and try to tamp down bigotry, but all of that will get us nowhere if we don’t solve the problem of overpopulation.

Science continues to produce wonders. We may be able to feed the world, even with a population expanded beyond today’s. We may; but where will we house them? And what will be the psychological effects of inhuman crowding?

**     **     **

Let’s get back to the small picture: I used to keep an aquarium in my classroom. Every fall my students would bring me some crawdads. In spring, we let them go. One year the crawdads died unexpectedly in mid-year. I left the aquarium in place and we watched what happened.

Once the crawdads were gone, we just had algae (only visible by a greening of the water) and a few water snails. They multiplied. And they shrank. Every week there were more snails and each snail was smaller. Eventually there were thousands of tiny snails inhabiting the tank, filling the water with veils of snail mucus, covering the bottom, and the sides, and clinging to the surface tension, and filling the mid-waters.

I am afraid that my students and I saw our future. Not a cataclysm. Not a nuclear war sending us all back to barbarism as the science fiction cliche would have it. Just more and more people living smaller and smaller lives, relentlessly moving into a future horrible beyond conception.

Hungry.

221. The Wall

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This post carries a poem at the bottom. Pardon me while I set the stage for it.

I wrote this poem years ago, when Trump wasn’t even a blip on anyone’s radar. It isn’t about him, but he eventually came to symbolize what the poem spoke against. When he started talking about a wall, I published the post repeated below, back in September of 2015. AWL was a new blog then, and no one was reading, so once again . . .

Have you ever asked yourself, “How could Germany have been fooled into following Adolph Hitler?” The answer is on your television this morning, and it is Donald Trump.

I’m not saying that Trump is a Nazi. I don’t see him as evil, merely foolish. But the techniques that have brought him to prominence are the same techniques that Hitler used.

First, appeal to a country’s deepest fears.
Second, claim to be the only one to have the answer.
Third, claim that your opponents are all cowardly and incompetent or, to use Trump’s favorite word – stupid.

The tactics are false. But the fears are real, so Trump promises his followers a wall to keep the world out. There is no wall strong enough to do it.

*****

This morning, September 15, 2015, Hungary closed its borders with a wall of razor wire. By the time this post reaches you, it will have been breached. Count on it.

The Hungarian Uprising of 1956 forms my first political memory. I was eight, and I remember sitting in front of the TV with my parents watching the streams of refugees escaping Soviet reprisals. Eventually 200,000 Hungarians fled. That memory makes it hard for me to watch Hungary put up a wall against Syrian refugees fleeing genocide.

Backed by Russia, East Germany built a wall across Berlin in 1961. It slowed the flow of refugees escaping from tyranny, but it did not stop them. And it didn’t stop the fall of East Germany.

There is a fence across our southern border that holds back no one hungry enough to jump it. Trump wants a wall to hold out “illegals” and a massive sweep through our country to deport the “illegals” who are already here. He wants declare that the 14th amendment doesn’t really mean what it says, in order to authorize the deportation of American citizens, born here just like you and I were.

Hitler would be proud. East Germany would understand. Russia is laughing.

*****

Poetry should stand without explanation, but, like anything else, it can be misused. So, be notified! This is not a right wing call to man the barricades to keep the enemy out, but a cautionary tale about what it will cost us if we don’t find real solutions.

Hungry

We who horde the common wealth
Upon this crowded planet,
Must look to see what lies beyond
Our barricaded borders.

The world stares back,
Unblinking eyes — prepared
To eat us all alive, and still be hungry.

                              It’s happened all before.

Once, seven in a cave drove out the eighth
With stones and fire-sharpened sticks,
Because the antlered carcass on the ground
Was not enough to feed them all.

And then in ancient days when kings and priests
Invented both religion and the law,
To fill their coffers so that they could eat
While those who raised the food went hungry.

Or yet again, when men of white
Despised the black, and black despised the gray.
And those whose colors ran together were disowned.
Color was enough to make them hate
But hunger taught them how and why
A thousand years ago.

Yet still we breed and laugh,
And play at deafness, though an angry sound
Declares the world is poised to seize its bread.

They will march like locusts through the earth,
And eat us all alive, and still be hungry.

This world is troubled. We are surrounded by people hungry for bread and freedom. Pointing a finger at them and saying, “It’s your fault!’ won’t solve our problems.

And a wall won’t do it. Never has; never will.

I’ll have more to say on this tomorrow.

219. Required to be Equal

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Do you remember the game telephone? Here’s how the game is played in the halls of education.

“All kids deserve an education.”
“All kids deserve a chance at a decent education.”
“All kids deserve an equal chance at an education.”
“All kids deserve an equal education.”
“All kids deserve the same education.”
“If all your kids are not coming out of your school equal to one another, your school has failed.”

I hope we all agree on the first three statements. The fourth looks good, like a hand grenade wrapped up in pretty paper. Whether it is reasonable or crazy depends entirely on how you define “equal”. If you mean equal quality, bravo. If you mean that every kid needs to learn calculus and quantum physics, or needs to understand Chaucerian verse in its original language, or needs to know how to play basketball . . . sorry. You’re off on a well-traveled wrong road.

When Thomas Jefferson said “all men are created equal”, he didn’t mean that strangers could come in and drink his wine, or borrow books from his library. He certainly didn’t mean that children lacking math ability should be tortured with equations, or that children who already run, hike, play and explore should be forced to trade that for the tedium of organized, competitive sports.

The fifth telephone response is simply wrong on the face of it, and the sixth is the discredited concept called No Child Left Behind.   (see 48. No Child Left Behind)

*          *          *

If educators had the courage to tell the truth, these are the words which would be carved over the entrance to every school in America:

Children are NOT created equal.

Some children have many gifts, some have few, and none have the same gifts. They are all wonderful, and all different. One size does not fit all.

If a poor black child wants to be a doctor, and has the talent for the job, it would be a crime for his situation to hold him or her back. That is the impetus behind No Child Left Behind, but in education, good ideas get the life crushed out of them during implementation.

Every child deserves to go as far as his/her talent and ambition will allow. But no mother’s love, or teacher’s pity, or governmental decree will make a doctor out of a child who lacks talent or lacks ambition.

Every child who has the talent and ambition, should go to college.

That’s just good sense and nearly everyone would agree. But that statements has a flip side:

Children who lack talent or lack ambition should stay the hell out of college.

Now put that on a bumper sticker and see who salutes.

Somewhere along the line, Americans seem to have changed the reasonable notion that, “Everyone should have the chance to try his or her hand at winning,” to “Everyone should win.” That’s bad philosophy, bad morals, and bad arithmetic.

There are two casualties of this way of thinking – those who don’t make it into college because of overcrowding, and those who go to college because they were told they should, and then find out they don’t fit.

Our high schools should produce graduates who are ready for life. Instead, they focus on college prep. That’s proper for perhaps twenty-five percent of students. The rest are being cheated out of their educational birthright – a high school experience that educates them for the life they will actually live.

218. It Couldn’t Last

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I normally avoid long quotations, but  I have to share this one from the novel Cinnamon Skin, written by John D. MacDonald in 1982. The technicalities of this seem a little dated, but his understanding of human reality is still spot on.

Walking back through the mall to the exit nearest our part of the parking lot, we passed one shop which sold computers, printers, software, and games. It was packed with teenagers, the kind who wear wire rims and know what the new world is about. The clerks were indulgent, letting them program the computers. Two hundred yards away, near the six movie houses, a different kind of teenager shoved quarters into the space-war games, tensing over the triggers, releasing the eerie sounds of extraterrestrial combat. Any kid back in the computer store could have told the combatants that because there is no atmosphere in space, there is absolutely no sound at all. Perfect distribution: the future managers and the future managed ones. twenty in the computer store, two hundred in the arcade.

When MacDonald wrote this, I was facing the reality that I wasn’t going to make a living with my writing, and considering options for a day job. Two years later, Apple introduced the Mac. Two years after that, I was teaching middle school and had accumulated enough money to buy my first computer, a Mac SE. It was a joy to use. SuperPaint by Silicon Beach had both dot matrix and vector graphics in one program. I’ve used more sophisticated graphics programs since, but I’ve never used a better one. Microsoft Word for Mac was lean and fast, nothing like the slow, bloated, obese monster it would soon become. HyperCard showed what hypertext could do, long before the internet made it the center of everything. We became masters of our lives, makers instead of consumers, with a powerful tool that answered our commands seamlessly.

If you are reading this, you are probably under forty. If I could take you back to that golden age, you would hate it. It would seem like nothing to you. It would be like trying to imagine what it felt like to ride the first tractor, instead of walking behind a horse, avoiding the semi-solid horse exhaust. Or trying to imagine how empowering it was to shoot the first bow and arrow, instead of throwing rocks at your food.

It couldn’t last. I saw the handwriting on the wall a few years later when Apple came out with its first oversized laptop. For the first time, there was room for more than a minimal keyboard, and laptops could finally handle the third element. The keyboard handled words, the mouse handled graphics, but there was no proper input for numbers. Scientists and businessmen alike needed the ten-key function that was (in those days) on every keyboard of every full size computer. I was sure it would be added, but when I saw the rollout, the keyboard was still minimal. Instead there were a pair of oversized speakers so games would sound better.

It was all over. From that time on, Apple catered to consumers instead of creators. When Steve Jobs came back from Pixar to save Apple, and created an I-Mac that looked suspiciously like the Pixar logo, I knew it was really all over.

The change from creator culture to consumer culture happened in three stages: first the pre-Windows IBM computer was so hard to use that all your effort went into mastering it, not using it. Then the Mac and the mouse made the machine transparent, and you could make things you never dreamed possible. Then came a day when all you had to do was push a button and the finished product appeared, with none of your input and none of your personality.

Life happens. Progress happens. But I liked stage two the best.

215. Cash Crop

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I was a young man during the sixties. The summer of love came about in San Francisco while I was off on a summer archaeology dig in Michigan. I read about it in the magazines. A geology major friend of mine was on the west coast that summer, working for an oil company. He brought back some interesting vegetation and some interesting pills.

It was a strange time in Michigan, legally. Possessing marijuana was a felony but possessing LSD was a misdemeanor. The law hadn’t caught up to the pharmacopeia.

I won’t say some of my friends were pushers; that paints an inaccurate picture of grown men hanging around the middle school parking lot with baggies of pot. However, they bought wholesale and sold retail to their own acquaintances to finance their personal indulgences.

I didn’t participate. Not that I was holy, but I had my own issues. I was going to college on a scholarship. It was my only shot at leaving some ugliness behind and getting on with the life I wanted. I didn’t plan to let anything jeopardize that.

I let my hair grow long. I wore a beard – but that was in imitation of a favorite archaeology professor. I doubted everything – but I had learned that when I was a kid in Oklahoma. I dressed like a farmer – but that was because I had been a farmer. I hated the war.

I didn’t wear love beads or bandanas and I didn’t smoke pot. I was about half a hippie.

When it came time to write Raven’s Run, years later, I needed to know more about pot and its culture than I had picked up living on the edge of things. I took a drive north to Garberville which was the center of it all and soaked in the local color. 

I did my library research as well, and found a superb reference in Cash Crop: An American Dream by Ray Raphael. It consists of a mixture of interviews with law enforcement, growers, enforcers, and near-slave laborers, along with personal stories of Raphael’s days in and around the trade. If you have ever read a book by a professorial type who seems too far removed from his subject to be believed — this isn’t that book.

I was particularly taken by one interview with a old time cop who was thinking back to the early days. He said (this is a near quote from memory, I don’t have the book at hand), “We used to spend all day running around the woods rousting out moonshiners when alcohol was illegal. Then we would relax after work with a joint. Now we spend all day running around finding pot farms and burning the weed, and after work, we kick back with booze.”

Incidentally, here is lesson in the virtue of never throwing away a good book.  Amazon is offering Cash Crop used from $44.14 and the only new copies available start at $200. At that rate, my jammed back room full of cheap paperbacks would sell for a million bucks, if I could find a buyer with the same weird and eclectic taste that I have.

213. Borders

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I don’t need to remind you what Europe is like today. Everyone knows her troubles. Refugees, and terrorists disguised as refugees, are flooding in, and once they arrive, they can move more or less freely from country to country. BREXIT came largely as a result of this crisis, with the threat of terrorism and economic dislocation driving the vote.

It was very different in 1989, the year in which the novel Raven’s Run (see Serial) takes place. There were no open borders, even between friendly countries. When my wife and I traveled from Switzerland to Italy during that era, the train crossed the Italian border at 2 AM. It stopped and a cadre of officials came aboard, moving from car to car, waking everyone up and checking passports. Of course, as Americans, it was a formality. Our passports carried us through without strain, but if there had been an irregularity . . .

There was an irregularity later, coming back from Hungary. A young and carefree European, French as I recall, had gotten into Hungary – God knows how –  with a passport, but without a visa. He confessed his lack to everyone in the coach, and laughed about it. Some very surly individuals took him off at the border. I never saw him again, but I had to wonder how funny it seemed a few hours later.

I had my own irregularity, harmless but thought provoking, earlier that same summer. My wife and I were camping at Innsbruck, Austria. When you camped or stayed in a hotel in those days, the owner confiscated your passport when you checked in and returned it when you left. It was the law throughout most of Europe.

We took a day trip from Innbruck to Reuthe, also in Austria. We did not know that the train passed through Germany on the way. As we crossed the German border, some very severe guards, with automatic pistols at their hips, came demanding passports. My wife had hers; I didn’t.

I took German in high school, which is very close to not taking it at all. I tried to ask why, but my one word “Warum?” (Why?) got me nowhere. The border guard repeated his demand for my passport. My weak German “Ins camping.” (It’s at the campground.) must have made sense to him. He had to know that holding passports at campgrounds and hotels was the law. It didn’t melt his icy stare.

Now I have met many people traveling through Germany, both before and after this incident. They were universally friendly and helpful, and they all spoke English, especially after trying to deal with my attempts at German. Not these guys. They just looked pissed. It was probably an act, but they had me convinced at the time.

Those of us with passport irregularities were taken to another car, without explanation, with just gestures and an intense glare, where we were sealed in. We passed through a piece of Germany and back into Austria, and were released.

It wasn’t life threatening, nor the stuff of spy novels, but it was very much a part of the system the Eurozone was designed to overcome. Open borders did away with a lot of annoyance, and allowed a freedom of movement that helped bring prosperity to Europe.

Today, new circumstances are bringing Europeans to reconsider that openness.

210. Close to the Ground

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During 1987 and 1988, we spent 130 days in Europe, traveling by train, backpacking, and living in a dome tent. The tent cost twenty-nine dollars at K-mart. It kept the rain out until it rained; then it kept some of the rain out. All the summer of 1987 the fiberglass tent poles kept eroding at the ends, and the tent got progressively lower to the ground. Finally we started patching it with branches harvested from bushes at the campgrounds. When we got home, we took the ragged remnants back and they gave us a replacement. That one got us through 1988.

It was a vacation, and a cultural and historic tour, but I also had the rough outline of a novel in my head, and I was looking for places to let it happen. I visited the American consulate in Marseilles because I intended to have my protagonist make connections there. At the American embassy in Paris I mentioned that I was planning to write a novel about an American in Europe on the run from gangsters. The information clerk sighed wearily and said, “We wish you wouldn’t.”

We left looking like Americans. We came back looking like very fit Americans. Walking every day and eating very little will do that to you.

During those two summers we went all the way to the northernmost point in the Orkneys and as far north as the Arctic Circle in Norway. Looking out from the train from Myrdal to Flam, I saw a grassy cliff and knew that it would become the scene of the climax of the novel. We went northeast to Finland, southeast to Budapest and Greece, south as far as Pompeii, west as far as Portugal, and ten thousand places in between. We did not go to Berlin, because that was still East Germany and Eurail didn’t go there. Germany was a fairly tense place, those summers.

We took the train everywhere. Without Eurail passes, none of this would have been possible. We also walked, probably more than a thousand miles, around towns, on Alpine trails, and daily to and from the campgrounds which were always far out on the edge of the cities we visited. Those campground trips took us through back alley parts of cities normal tourists never see – seldom scenic, but always interesting. We only ate in restaurants where the exchange rate made them cheap; in Switzerland, we at a lot of bread and apples.

Being poor, or something like poor, can be an advantage to a writer. It’s hard to imagine Steinbeck writing Cannery Row or The Grapes of Wrath while living in a penthouse. Poverty, or something like, can seem exotic to those who have a little money.

Of course, most people want to read about the rich. After all, the James Bond novels wouldn’t work if he wore ragged clothes and drove a ten year old car.

I find life close to the ground interesting, and all those experiences allowed me to build a story in which my protagonist, Ian Gunn, has reason to live like I did, at least for a part of the book, and draw on those experiences for the rest of it. It is called Raven’s Run and it begins in Serial tomorrow.

At one point, he and his girlfriend meet a street musician, and Ian thinks:

On the ladder of affluence, we were near the bottom. Eric was one critical step lower. We knew that we could not eat in a restaurant; Eric did not know where his next meal was coming from.

Ian Gunn is about thirty, as we were, and on the verge of moving into better circumstances, but not quite there yet. He finds himself traveling on the cheap, like a teenager, but his age makes him a misfit in that crowd. I could tell you more, but check out Serial tomorrow and read it for yourself. 

208. The Cost of Research

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I grew up on science fiction, but that wasn’t all I read. I read about the westward movement, pioneer days, cowboys, and Indians (as opposed to cowboys and Indians). When I discovered adult books, I read a lot of Costain. He was about all we had in the closet sized abandoned library in our elementary school.

I found a set of cheaply bound classics in a stationary store in a nearby town. They were two-ups, with Moby Dick and Two Years Before the Mast in one volume. I loved them both, along with Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, and a half dozen others. I eventually learned that my Moby Dick was an abridged version. When I tried to tackle the original as an adult, I figured out why they abridged it. Damn, that book is long; maybe I’ll finish it next year, when I’m not so busy.

Everything I read, outside of The Scarlet Letter, was an adventure of some sort. Navel gazing literature never crossed my path until I was an adult. I still like my fiction to be doing something, even while the protagonist reflects on life and its meaning. After all, we mix up action and reflection in real life.

That was the way I approached my writing from the beginning. Plenty of action; plenty of things to consider along the way and, hopefully to consider again after closing the book for the last time.

By the time I was ready to write, I could have written in any of a number of genres. I chose science fiction and fantasy for two reasons. First, they are my favorites. I had been reading both for decades and I knew their possibilities and the readers’ expectations. They weren’t all I wanted to write, but they were a place to start.

The other reason was money. Re$earch co$ts dollar$ – and time, which is a form of money. I could create whole worlds out of my imagination, but if I wanted to write about the area west of Philadelphia in 1789, or West Virginia in 1865, or the Mississippi River in 1845 – to name the settings of three novels on my to-write list – it would have taken years of library research and trips to those places. I couldn’t afford that, so half of the things I was ready to write were out of reach.

I was a pleasure to write what I could afford to write, but still frustrating not to be able to crawl out of that box.

Eventually I started teaching, made a few bucks, and had the chance to travel. That opened things up. I‘ll tell you a bit about that over the next two posts, then acquaint you with one of the novels that came out of those travels. more tomorrow

207. I Have a Dream

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I’ve told my personal story regarding justice for black citizens several times, and I fleshed it out over a month and a half in February and March of this year. Here is a brief reprise for those who weren’t following yet.

I was born and raised in a small Oklahoma town with no blacks in sight. My father was a Baptist deacon and lay minister, and a dominating man. I never disagreed with him – out loud. He did not hate blacks – really, he didn’t. He expected to see many of them in heaven. He did think they had their place, ordained by God, and they would be happy if they only kept to it. He considered Martin Luther King an agitator and an evil man.

I agreed with his views of God and man when I was very young, but by my teen years I was beginning to question both. Silently question, that is. There was no discussion in our house, only my father’s statements ex cathedra and our silent nods. My final conversion away from his thinking on race came when black marchers were washed down the street by fire hoses in Selma and elsewhere.

This Sunday is the anniversary of the March on Washington, and Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. When it happened, it passed me by. At the time, I was wrestling with my father’s views on God. My change of view on race was a couple of years in my future.

In our house, it was just another speech by that self-serving agitator King.

When I was doing research for posts earlier this year, I became aware of Philip Randolph, who orchestrated the March on Washington. Shamefully, I had never heard of him. At that time I said that I would find out more about him, and I did. His story is worth telling, but it isn’t mine to tell. I had planned a post detailing the March, but that isn’t my story, either. I’ve decided to leave both to those who fought the battles while I was still coming to realize that there was a war.

The story of the March on Washington isn’t mine to tell, but it changed my life, as it changed all of our lives, even if I didn’t know it at the time.