Fear and Loathing in the USA-

June 24, 2015

Dear Reader-

On Father’s Day, my family and I saw the movie Inside Out, and it served as antidote for a rough week preceding. Nothing bad happened to me personally, but once again Americans had to face an ugly scene of more lives lost, this time of middle aged and elderly black people to a young white supremacist. Once again, friends gathered round the Internet water cooler to shake their heads and talk about what could have caused this horror: racism, lack of gun control, poverty, lack of mental health care, psychotropic drugs, food additives…the list ranged from the reasonable to the ridiculous, with wildly divergent opinions on which was which.

I’m going to propose a root cause: fear. Fear is a vital emotion that keeps us safe when we’re in real danger. Ages ago, fear would prompt some ancestors…

Luck Be the Lady in the Locker Room

June 10, 2015

Dear A,

You’re lucky, and you’re grateful to whatever accident of fate made it so. A sign of your luck, or perhaps an outcome of it, is that you have never felt the need to pretend to be someone else to satisfy an expectation of society.

The movement to extend human rights to the LGBT community has gotten you thinking, though. You have friends and neighbors who have married someone of the same sex, and your daughter attends a school where many kids have “two mommies” or “two daddies.” Again, you’re lucky to live in a community where these families are unremarkable. But there are also people in your circle who face daily struggles between their inner and outer lives. Even in this era of acceptance, you know gay people who pretend to be straight. And then there’s the…