Suppressing grief, fear, and shame is a powerful, enabling factor for patriarchal-warrior culture. I too was taught to believe it’s weak for a man to weep. Not much has changed, and these days, some men are spiraling down further towards embracing this trope. In truth, “becoming strong” means learning to feel, deal, and metabolize the emotional pain that haunts our shadows. Thanks for listening and sharing with others.

Produced, arranged, recorded, and performed by me. Please consider supporting my music by listening to other original music and then buying me a latte at my bandcamp page.

i don’t know how to cry
(david edward walker)

When I find my broken heart
Hidden, silent and alone,
Carrying this grief of ages,
All the tears I’ve never shown,

I can’t find a way to weep
Except in dreams when I’m asleep,
Then, just to face another day,
I will laugh it all away.

There’s no rose without a thorn,
I know by pain I’ll be reborn,
But long ago, my father said,
“Sorrow’s poems are best unread.”
From time to time, I will still try,
But I don’t know how to cry.

(these boys and men who don’t know… how to cry)

I’ve said goodbye to many friends,
Seen hopes dashed in bitter ends,
Without shoes walked stony roads,
Watched all I love implode,

Been mistreated and refused,
Witnessed innocence abused,
Prayed to God to help me heal,
If only by the hurt I feel.

Then like the rising of the tide,
I’ll sense an ocean surge inside,
But long ago, my mother said,
“Grief is safer left unfed.”
There are times I wonder why,
But I still don’t know how to cry.

(these boys and men who don’t know… how to cry)

Secret sadness rules my world,
A darkened shell contains a pearl,
This salty brine will not release
Its treasure held to bring me peace.
At most I might bring forth a sigh,
But I don’t know how to cry.

(these boys and men who don’t know… how to cry)

©2026, david edward walker, thoughtful publishing (BMI)

Therefore, how shall we live?

This song is my musical way of staring into the eye of Death’s Mystery to try to learn how to best live my life.

I wrote The Great Unknown way back in the mid-1990s when I was an ambitious young singer-songwriter.

It took me thirty years to find the adequate means of recording, producing, and mixing this song in the way I first heard it in my head.

Here it is for you. Pretty much for free (see below).

Not being wealthy, I found royalty-free clips to create the video so as to enhance the listener experience, finishing and posting it to my YouTube channel in 2024.

Like so many indie musicians, I spent many hours trying to get it all just right.

I then added the audio file for the song for streaming, download, and purchase to my bandcamp site.

It’s still possible to find many of the original songs I’ve worked so hard on on Spotify, Pandora, YouTubeMusic, Apple Music, and even Shazam . . . but not this one!

This is because I forgot to set up The Great Unknown as a “single release” through CDBaby, which sends songs uploaded by indie artists to all those streaming platforms and tracks streaming.

Do you think I should do this?

At 70 years old, I’d totally appreciate the irony of achieving a “viral” song as a singer-songwriter that is about Death. Very cool.

But would it be worth it when people like me stand to make about .0001 cent per stream?

Just as a reminder, the guts were ripped out of the singer-songwriter’s revenue stream by big business long ago now. I watched it happen. I was there.

This is why we pay so much for concerts now. Most people who write songs and record and sing them don’t make any money streaming. Unless they’re already very famous . . . and you generally need to be very good-looking too.

This is the direction the art of the troubadour has taken. i.

I’ve fully accepted my anticipated appointment with fame and fortune as a performing songcatcher will never be made. My loved ones suggest I’m being kept safe from that kind of success, which can sometimes end in suicide.

Don’t worry; I’m okay; I’m quite reconciled with it all.

But as a result, whatever discipline I ever had as music self-marketer has collapsed.

So, please and thank you in advance, if you’d like to become a new subscriber or customer of my music anywhere anytime at any of the various online sites I’ve mentioned where my songs are hiding out (above).

And for the price of a mere latte, you might even consider intervening in my worn-out artistic self-concept.

This is the round of substack musical sharing in which I’m sending out my very own existential rock anthem - proof positive that I refuse to be pigeon-holed as “just another folkie”and can even offer a psychedelic guitar solo. Channeling Pete Townsend here-and-there who often made demos for The Who where he played all the instruments.

The Great Unknown is my conversation with Death Itself like the knight in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

I notice you, Death, and I do respect you. Very much.

I have many questions, Death, now that You and I are getting closer.

What the answers will be I’m still not quite sure.

That’s The Great Unknown.

A few technical notes:

Decent headphones because it’s a pretty good mix for a home studio dude.

The music: Recorded with Logic Pro 11 at Moss Grove Mini Studio. Vocals and backing vocals using a Warm U47 clone mike through matching preamp. Interlude: 2024 Romanian-made Irish bouzouki. Spoken word interlude through royalty-compensating tech program shifting my voice to an Irish female voice. Guitars in order of appearance: 1995 Larivee Maple OM-9 6-string acoustic, Kala Fretless Ebony bass ukulele, Dan Electro, late 90s Korean electric 12-string, 2023 Fender Aerodyne Stratocaster. Keyboard: Nord Electro 4. Drum samples using Logic Session Player.

The video: All royalty-free clips organized to loosely match lyrical themes. The interlude female matching the spoken word is a royalty-free clip of a translator at the Nuremberg trials in 1946.

Your Daily Challenge: What’s so very bizarre about those people walking through town?

Lyrics: 

the great unknown
(david edward walker)
 
Thirteen apostles on a dark afternoon,
I’ve been following you
Sliced with a scythe before I finish my tune
You’ve been after me too
 
Feeling the ground and the light in my eyes
Hearing the sound in the words of the wise
How could I surrender to these whispered goodbyes   
And walk into your fields of stone?
 
Clinging to life
Like a fruit on the vine
Before I fall into the great unknown
 
A team of black horses and a big wooden box
I’ve seen you walking through town
Widows and orphans face the holiday pox
That has been making the rounds
 
Watching the sun as it travels the sky
Lost in the notes of the mourning dove’s sigh 
Wondering when and then wondering why
The last walk is always alone
 
Turning to find
That a new day has dawned
Just outside of the great unknown
 
(you are living as if nothing matters at all, but the coins that are tossed in your bowl you eat three meals a day never pausing to nourish your soul
and forgiving the fact you won’t answer my call until finally naked, alone,
 you are begging me go away, hoping your death might be stalled
 all of the opportune moments you’ve had, heedless how close I have been,
 lost in the liminal middle of Eden and ignorant bliss,
 love is the reason that I let you breathe, love is your breathing continued,
 love is what takes you beyond here to where freedom is,
when I come from the east and the land of the dead, 
I will ask you what good you have done
 have an answer to offer and know that I won’t be misled)
 
No matter how brave the hero becomes
There’s inner hesitation about the prize to be won
No matter how strong or fast you can run
The question is how much you’ve grown
 
Nobody knows when the race is all done
Because the answer’s in the great unknown

copyright 2024, david edward walker/thoughtful publishing (BMI) 
all rights reserved

Thanks very much for listening and sharing with others…

www.davidedwardwalker.com

Swainson’s thrush sings
The sunset down 

Sleep lands soundly
Punctuated by murmured
Breath

Blue skies greet and
Arch with orange white 
Streaks at sunrise 

A grey squirrel 
Forages in the early light

The trees bow to the day
Their greenest splendor

The ferry glides quietly
Across the calm

The seal dives silently
And begins to play again

The train doors open soft
As riders ease down gently

In their seats, not speaking,
In contemplative moods

Notice

Nothing yet
Gone wrong

This time 
Remains unwritten

Whatever hardships
Or pain in life awaits
Slumbers in a momentary ease

So gather peace
And stuff it in each pocket
Of your being

The storms will
Come and so
Now feed your heart

The gifts of heaven
Which surround you
Are abundant and

Whatever doubts 
You hold about
The meaning of it all

You can believe in this 

Omnia bene erunt, 
Etiam si non est. 

Everything will be okay, 
Even if it’s not. 

arrowhead and bullet round
succumb beneath the mulch 
of concrete tombs and
false epitaphs

condemned, outflanked, 
drowned out
inside the battle’s 
last drawn breath 

gasping still, 
suffocated in a sadness
not yet petrified 

a battlefield 
forgotten 

this consecrated place, 
where hope once yielded
before the setting sun

now blows the dust of bones
across the razor grass,
a parade of silent muster

amid the anguished
cries of soldiers,
widows, widowers, 
orphans whispering,

beware, beware, 
this lust for
gold and land and glory 

left sharpened 
by swords and rifles 

and stories that are

no more than fairy tales

our truth 
thereby obscured

and so few remain
amongst the living 
who will tell it

only you 
to hear and warn

the drumbeat's rising
up again
 
our terror, despair,
made invisible again
for sake of gain and power

only you
to magnify 
and make our losses
sacrosanct

you are
the only souls 
who matter now, and

we here
lying maimed in 
these memorial hills
you wander

are once again betrayed
together with our longing 
to erase 
this battle’s legacy

and the stories 
you still lionize

we’d stop from seeping up
between the trampled stones 

of our shattered hearts  

and speak through yours
what’s left unsaid 

about the truth of war

we tried in our parched letters
left unsigned, 
unread, 
cut off mid-sentence

and our true intentions 
are still tended by the willows
weeping above our graves

and so, you must know who
we once were, you are still now,
right through your very skin,

that our ancestral longing  
may not be left 
another passing breeze
unnoticed but

finally understood, 
the last echoes 
of our squelched humanity

this one great chorus
exclaiming

we are being murdered 
once again 

not only by the wars
you justify and prosecute 

but by the ignorant 
you sanction and appoint
who steadfastly  
refuse to listen

and then by your apathy
on days like this you set aside

and knowing this

how dare you seek to
honor and remember us
unless you will make peace
wherever we could not?

(In Memory of Thomas Jerome Fisher)

Once in a dreamtime
Just you and me trying to
Walk along the edge of the world
Nepali, where the big waves unfurl.
 
We lived in-between rhyme
Drumming in odd time 
“I can only read backwards,” you said,
So I tried to find your rhythm instead
 
Of you finding mine
Oh, the jamming was fine
 
But why did the music
End so suddenly?
 
Did you drop the beat
Or are you finally flying free?
 
Everything here’s fine, but
With truth and you both dying, the
Fascists are now holding the ball,
The rest of us go along with it all.
 
“Told you so,” you’ll say,
“It’s a billionaire’s play day…”
My optimism never wanted to see,  
Now I admit that I will have to agree
 
But let’s play on while the ship goes down
Even if the band must drown
 
And brother from another
Mother, I’ll remember you
 
The John-Cage-sense
Arrangements,
That we played tight through
 
And I still dream of you
I still dream of you
 
Crossover paradiddle
No one can hold the middle
Neon Nero plays the fiddle 
At the death of a nation
 
Double-stroke polyrhythm
Nobody can heal the schism
Rising Christian Nationalism
Mixed with blind adulation
 
Way back in the day,
We skitched together,
Gripped tight the bumper,
Like friends forever
In the packed-down good sliding weather    
Of a Christmas vacation   
 
When you were here
We had no fear
The cigarettes and boutique beer
You pushed the gas and let me steer
Past any crisis situation
 
And I still dream of you
I still dream of you
I still dream of you…
 
You played Johnny B’s set
In ways I won’t forget
And in time, we had to go separate ways,
But I still call you family today
 
Remember E-Wing john
And your Huntington Woods lawn
And taking our kids for a swim
In the villa as the sun became dim
 
I drive slow down Humphrey Street,
Past the basement where we’d all meet,
 
But brother from another mother,
I must let go now

And I know with all my heart
You’ll hear this song somehow
 
And I still dream of you
I still dream of you
 
Copyright, 2025, Thoughtful Publishing (BMI), David Edward Walker. All rights reserved.

“Brother from Another Mother” is my music video tribute to Thomas Jerome Fisher, 1955 - 2024, one of my oldest friends and my brother-in-law for 25 years.

I like to say “Tom and I were juvenile delinquents together,” but we were more like brothers who were very close but argued sometimes.

I first saw Tom at a church coffeehouse playing drums in a jam session. He was fifteen years old, and I was fourteen. I watched in awe as he performed crossover paradiddles like Ginger Baker, the drummer for Cream.

I desperately wanted to play music with him. I had brought along my very cheap Teisco Del Rey electric guitar, and we improvised on a blues progression. This was the first time I ever played guitar with anyone else, let alone a fantastic drummer like Tom. We played music together from then on for decades.

I would walk several miles, sometimes hitchhike, just to hang out at his house and listen with him and his brothers to the latest Moody Blues, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and then later on, more and more progressive rock and jazz.

With several cherished high school buddies, we formed a purposely-bizarre, prog-jazz-rock instrumental band called Argos after several of us participated as volunteers in a concert of John Cage music with the composer himself on hand.

We were into stretching the boundaries of musical art. Argos emphasized unusual melodies and time signatures, chasing a version of King Crimson mixed with Sun Ra. We took ourselves very seriously, jamming in a basement on Humphrey Street in Birmingham, Michigan throughout 1974 and 1975.

Tom and I were planning on becoming famous together. . . And we tried quite hard too.

The Leaden-Eyed

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world’s one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are oxlike, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly;
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap;
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve;
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

~ Vachel Lindsay

Across four decades, we married sisters, raised beautiful children, and were incredibly fortunate to travel to extended family gatherings all over the U.S., Canada, and even Italy.

We often took challenging hikes including our near-death, ‘somewhat’ amusing hike on Nepali Coast Trail on Kauai Island, when we were silly enough to wear tennis shoes instead of hiking boots.

This is one of the ‘most dangerous’ hikes in North America, and we paid dearly for our naïveté. I’ll never forget the woozy, dizziness of dehydration, checking repeatedly on one another in 95 degree heat and 95 percent humidity, stumbling along by cliff edges, and trying to keep an eye on our father-in-law who got so overheated, he cut the legs off right of his jeans.

We always talked music whenever we met. We saw Little Feat and Weather Report in the early 1970s, Split Enz and Tom Russell Band in the 1980s, and Bill Frisell together in 2010.

I last saw Tom about 8 years ago. I am sad to mention he backed up from our friendship for a while.

Back then, we were talking about Donald Trump and his then-administration, and Tom was on passionate doomsday theme.

I was skeptical of Trump, of course, but took a more optimistic view overall. Tom felt I was being naive.

We Brothers from Another Mother got into a bit of an argument.

This song is a means of saying sorry, I think I got it wrong.

In June 2024, Tom pulled away from his home in Pontiac, Michigan on a simple trip to get gas at Costco. A police chase ensued nearby, and as he came over a hill on a residential street, his pickup was struck by a drug dealer being pursued at over 80 miles an hour. He died shortly thereafter.

It took about three months before I could even let myself feel the loss of Tom. Then this song arrived, built around an unfinished conversation.

“Once in a Dreamtime, just you and me tryin’ to walk along the edge of the world…” - refers to our Nepali Coast hike. As I get older and friends walk on from this physical plane, I feel even more poignantly my journey along the edge of the world.

What is it we may truly wish to say or do in the world before we walk through the door to somewhere else?

Tom dropped out of high school, despite being an intelligent and thoughtful person. As we aged, I suspected he had undetected dyslexia which left him uncertain of himself. As a musician and as a human being, I was often trying to match his extraordinary rhythm and energy.

At one point, Tom bought a drum set from Argos sound engineer (and also talented drummer) Jeff Sharpe that was formerly owned by Johnny ‘Bee’ Bandanjek, drummer for Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.

This is still the loudest drum set I’ve ever heard.

“E-Wing John” was the high school locale where we smoked cigs and had many talks about life and the future. I remember getting into a major giggle festival with Tom there when we were both tripping on acid in 1971.

“Skitching” is a Midwest U.S. tradition among teenage risk-takers - grabbing old shoes with smooth soles and the rear bumper of a car to slide behind, ie. “skitch” along snowy roads. I doubt young folks risk their lives in this way anymore. We skitched together on numerous Michigan winter days.

During our idyllic trip to Italy, we ended an exhausting day in a pool at a beautiful villa with our kids. He loved them both dearly.

My songs are often more folk-oriented. But this tribute song insisted upon being arranged and performed in a 70s/80s style prog jazz-rock to reflect Tom’s love of Steely Dan, Gentle Giant, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, The Who, and whatever rocks hard.

At the very end, you’ll hear Tom playing Johnny Bee’s monster set in a drum-booth recording backing one of my songs from 1989.

As he thunderously fades into other realms of the Great Mystery, I bow and send prayers to my brother from another mother for a successful journey.

Thanks for listening!

Wow. This labor of love and grief took 10 months and many hours of creative labor. I’m so grateful for the help of others in making it real.

I hope you’ll help me too by downloading it (for a mere pittance) and/or contributing to future projects and/or offsetting literally decades of . . . umm. . . shall we say, very mixed musical success and/or just having a personal listening session to any or all my songs at my bandcamp site.

Personnel:

david edward walker (”Mountain,” former Argosian): vocals, Gary Smith’s Fender Telecaster, keyboards and synthesis, Irish bouzouki, penny whistle, harmonica

Kit Walker (honorary Argosian): keyboards, synthesis, synthesizer solos, synth bass, drum synthesis

“Snake” Jerry Bazil (former Argosian): drums

“Big Lung” Jim Adams (former Argosian): clarinet

Treasured additional assistance from former Argos chief engineer Jeff Sharpe.

A deep bow and many thanks for the video clips to my family and friends and for the incredible light imagery offered by anonymous digital visual artists contributing to open source ProjectMilkSyphon.

Composed, performed, engineered, and produced by david edward walker. Digital imagery selected and arranged by D.E.W.

We hope to
Know about what 
Kind of wall to make, 
If we must make walls.

Not raised
Along our borderlands
With steel and concrete,
But out of broken hearts
And grass grown thin
By wandering ancestors
Who, like us, once
Huddled, hid, and
Considered needs 
Of everyone back long ago,
And so we ask them:

“How do we build our wall, 
If we must, for all our children
To survive and thrive?”

And feel their answer
Rise into our bones:

“Make this wall
Inside yourselves,
By vowing 
To be kind to 
Every living thing
Down to 
The Gates of Hell,
And then 
Conscientiously
Extend the wall
From inward, out
Into the world 
So seamlessly as to render
No distinction between
The Source of Life itself
And You, then Death
Becomes your servant,
Mere transformation, 
And not an end, so 
Thwart all fear, 
You are the wall, 
Sustained to shield
The vulnerable:

Build it this way,
No matter what occurs. 

You will be tempted 
To build this wall
With rage, even a longing
To destroy, and who
Then do you become? 
Life’s preservation may
Sometimes even bring
A desperate need, but
Even if instinct should
Arise to create
A horrid necessity,
It tarnishes forever
The beauty of 
A human soul to be
Burdened with having
Had to kill or maim,
And is no victory at all, 
As you must realize
And nothing ever 
Gets resolved this way.
It being most human
To move alongside life, 
To be fully alive to it
And never against,
And so, the inner vow 
You’ve made
Of kindness to all life
When fearlessly sustained 
Is the strongest wall of all.

These emperors, pharaohs, 
Kings and queens,
Aristocrats and autocrats,
Their warriors, soldiers, thugs, 
Greedy merchants 
And their bureaucrats,
Cannot possess your wall, 
Or build it or even 
Know about it.
Despite being ready
To destroy you 
Or anyone opposing them
Materially, they are
But soon hungry ghosts
So invested first by us, 
Your ancestors,
And now sustained by you, 
Our shadows until
You prove yourselves
Unlimited by our hard-won past,
And create something new:
This wall you build inside.

You already know 
This to be true.

You are
The Only Medicine, 
And the Only Wall
To hold back
Such Monsters, 
And this prescription
Is your discipline
To work on each and
Every moment to
Clearly separate 
Domination’s violence, 
Delusion, and 
Its bitter fruits,
Activated easily 
Within you too,
From the nourishment 
Of this vow to love’s 
Sustaining flame 
You enact through
Every kindly deed.

We’ve longed to
Teach you what we
Learned in hindsight,
Just as we 
Wished to leave
A better world behind,
To assuage your fear
Of what lurked 
Beneath your bed 
When you were children
Hid inside closets too, 
But we believed it all 
Imaginary,
Our fatal mistake, 
And now, the Monsters 
Are emboldened
In their blacked-out 
Vehicles, behind masks, 
By flash grenades, 
But more than all 
These put together,
The assault they mount 
Upon your tender Spirit
To wrestle down 
With hopelessness
Your armchair 
Clickbait grief
And apathy. 

There is no technology
Or outrage strong 
Enough to save you.

You must build 
This wall within, you see,
In memory of us, and
For the seventh 
Generation yet to be, 
Or die in trying.

We have left 
The ancient stone for you
Stored within all poetry 
And every wisdom
Your intuition
Brings you to,
Just to help you,
Our beloved children, 
Because we always longed 
To help you, and still wish
To guide you free
From the hatred 
And brutality arising
That we too suffered by.

This is not our human nature;
This is against our human nature.

Now, go find those 
Who’d help you
Build this wall
Inside your Self,
Who’ll bring along 
Their glimmers of light
To dazzle you, and 
Sustain the vow together,
Attending every 
Injured heart,
Even the horrific loss
Undeniably
Within the face 
Of your worst enemy.

The light will 
Thereby grow much
Brighter, reach
Far beyond you, and
Long after
You have gone,
Soon outshine all
Malice and corruption,
Your vow of lovingkindness 
Now becomes a portion of what
Will make Life whole again
When the day we long for comes .

So be the Child 
Of the Half-Light
And let this wall 
Become your legacy:
The only wall
You’ll ever need to build.”

Christmas Eve came and
Turned off the electricity,

This gift delivered 
By an old cedar
Falling with exhaustion
Onto a bed of maple leaves,

Power lines, too long stretched taut,
Bowing down in gratitude and
Relaxing along the dirt road,

The hidden gift emerging everywhere
To delight in the silence,

The saturated earth embracing
The cedar’s body, thanking her,
Promising to absorb her completely,

The doe and fawn out from the forest
Onto the road and grazing safely
Upon the thimble berries.

Sitting in the dark or walking
To a window, we strain our eyes
At fading day and wonder what
To do to fill it now. 

For a time, the scramble 
After candles, flashlights, batteries,
Any source of light or energy.

The screens we hold so dear
Becoming thoroughly embarrassed,
Nonfunctional and purposeless, 
Weighty chunks of metal and plastic.

We perform circular rituals outside,
Holding them to sky,
Seeking outage maps or media
To tell us what we already know and see.

We do this for an hour or so.

By then, a couple candles,
Several flashlights, and a smartphone
Reduced to enlightening the bathroom,
The grace of fire in our hearth,
Radiating furiously with
Chunks of cedar, maple,
Alder, and pine, hungry to
Warm the blankets
Enfolding us.

We watch and do not speak
For a long while. 

Later on, the wind blows off the rain,
And I get up to find more wood,
And you step outside 
And eventually call out to me.

The snapping cold and pitch black dark,
Man-made lights extinguished, then
Stars sing out the spell above to
Make us stay completely still, and
Bring us back to sensing
This, being borne from
Whatever magic energy sustains both
Them and us right now.

And it is getting late,
And we are now absorbed
By fire outside and inside,
But cannot sleep, recalling
Struggles of our ancestors
Who brought us to this very place,

The many families, relatives, then and now
Without fires, stars, or enough to eat, 
Despised, reviled, maligned,
Terrified, running, hiding, 
Seeking only this same peace
And warmth and ease
That’s ours right here to hold.

It becomes our responsibility
To all who remain left out
To make room
At every in. 

You search up the dusty dictionary
To clarify for both of us a manger
Is a trough from which the livestock feed.

And many are still hungry for 
Such Great Teachings
Brought by Many the World Over, 
Including One Lone Rabbi long ago,
Humbly borne, softly spoken, soon
Co-opted, still commodified, and
As yet ever-skewered 
Upon the Cross of Empire
Just for saying:

Tend and feed the poor, the stranger, 
Love one another, and make great deeds, 
Not words, demonstrate your faith,
And bow down with meekness before
The majesty of Life and Universe
And whatever Awe you may call God,
Knowing You are as much
Created as Creating
And Find This Kingdom Lying Within You.

Then, the loss of power
And the slacking of taut lines
Surrounds us,
And the taking in and loving of the fallen,
And the receiving of the hidden gift
Emerging everywhere
In the delight of silence.

Nothing in life
Defeats you
Believe it
Or be defeated

Convictions are
Like precious flowers
Born of your own truth yet
Pressed quickly in a book
And placed upon a shelf

Let’s take them down
Dust them off
Hold them close and
Revisit them:

Be kind
Go gently
Listen well
Stay pure
Have less to say

When lost
In a routine or
Distracted by waves of
Want and despair
There are several paths
Back home:

Surrender everything
You possess
To your beloved’s desire

Etch your woundedness
Into a block of wood
And burn it for fuel

Write a letter or sound notes
With tears of  joy or sorrow
Doesn’t matter which

Paint a picture
Of stars moving across the sky

Build a bridge
Between souls
And then cross over
Wondering
Who came, who went

Comfort the lost child
Within you, and then
Any other little one 
You find lost nearby

Listen to the wind
Through trees
For a long while

Relearn what you 
Want to teach others and
Be sure to prank the teacher

Approach each new day like
A mystery to be solved

Radiate your own light
While sitting down
To contemplate a sunset

Test the river’s strength
Before trying to ride the current

Stillness within movement
Movement within stillness

Love what you’re given
Even pain, especially
When it makes you stronger

Attend upward
When being held down

Attend downward
When being held up

Balance on time’s staircase, then

Fall forward

Please visit my website at davidedwardwalker.com and check out my music on youtube: @anisahoni.

At night, we lean back 
And watch the paths of stars
Innumerably flowing in all directions,
Defying our wish for patterns,
And familiar constellations.

The light opens 
Much wider than we
Could ever have imagined 
To the great Milky Way, 
Speaking to our bones.

You are made from Me
And I from you, 
Every element of you
Is intertwined with Me.

In your elemental being,
You continually rise and fall
Within Me, you are here before,
Then there again, soon back again, and
Awed each time you discern
Your own place in infinity.

The sudden howl
Of coyote brings us closer
To this full realization,
And the hair on our arms
And necks rises,
So we stand up tall
Right then and there, to honor 
The pitch dark soliloquy emerging
In tandem with the sky
And the story of which we are part 
That lies beyond 
Any words that have ever been spoken.

How vast and unthinkable
We then became,
Don’t you remember?

Standing beneath 
The night sky outside Sedona and
Finding ourselves
Inside all This, and doing 
Nothing at all about it except
Lighting a clump 
Of dried sage
Inside an abalone shell
To bless ourselves
And give thanks 
For the gift of seeing 
And for the gift of not seeing too
Because how ever could such a vast vision
Emerge except out of our utter blindness?

In this way, we were reminded of 
Our immeasurable gratitude,
So deep as to be still with us
In just a moment’s remembrance,
And so, let us be thankful again,
For seeing 
And for being seen
By All that is far too often 
Left unseen.

Perhaps appropriately, I recorded it this past Friday on an old guitar - a 1961 Harmony 12-string - lovingly restored by Indianola luthier Mark Tossman.

For you guitar pickers, it’s in DADGAD tuning. Here are the lyrics:

indian lake
(david edward walker)

sitting next to indian lake
i can hear your voice
"come walk with me,
and we can talk a while"
and whispered words
from long ago now
linger with the noise
of the hummingbird
and the loon and all that's wild

we had moved so far apart
our love was tried by anger
but walked in both our hearts
upon a firm foundation
misfortune could not break
now cooled by gentle wind
over indian lake
that catches us
and forces us awake

well, i dreamed i was a blind man
and i could not see my dream,
so i heard and smelled and touched
what i desired
and i woke to find you breathing
with your scent inside my hand
and found that my own dream
was unrequired

once pushed and shoved and struggling
with tears and fears gone by
oh, how we fought each other
how we made each other cry
and every day being a battle
with affection at the stake

until this breeze
over indian lake
came to blow the smoke back
and the anguish we might make
to reveal a deeper love
we might forsake

time cannot bring back
the yesterday we had
that concealed this need
no, we hang on to our line,
throw our bread upon the water,
we're going to gather
what we feed

and just like this lake
we're going to change
with every season

i'll give more than i'll take
so that you might find a reason
to come back

to come back


sitting next to indian lake
i can hear your voice
"come walk with me,
and we can talk a while"
the whispered words
from long ago now
they linger with the noise
of the hummingbird
and the loon and all that's wild

of the hummingbird
and the loon and all that's wild

(david edward walker, creative commons, n.c., 1995, thoughtful publishing, BMI)

Before we were born,
A sparkling mystery
Built affinity into our potential
And magnetized energy into
Glue to set these elemental strings
Within our being vibrating
From plans laid 
Behind a veil yet
Right next to you and me.

Before we fully came to be,
Our molecular selves 
Thoroughly divined
This string connection
Beneath our seeming separation
And with our birth,
Began the lifelong struggle 
Against the illusion 
Of inner constituency

Our ego maniacal selves

To nourish instead a firmer grasp
Upon the love and kinship 
These string ties sustain between
Each and everyone of us
And everything.

But like a dream, 
we forget the details

Except when momentarily enlivened 
By some hidden will or longing
Extending from our broken hearts
Into the Universe and back
Down to the earth’s deep core,
Emanating from verdant trees
Or inside the sudden surprise of
Wild birds and animals,
Deep blue waters,
The scent of sage,
Mountain ranges
Or desert cacti
Still surviving.

And what do we aspire towards?

This nightmare’s hopeless hammering
Of oil-fed consumption? 

This murderous march
Of white men parading tailored suits?

This life in flux,
Sheep in stalls, 
Obtuse and blindly flinging our meat 
From slaughterhouse to garbage dump, 
Desperately convinced
Of our own powerlessness? 

Born to the promise 
And tragedy
Of these strings binding us 
To this time  

Please press your fingertips
Into whatever soil lies nearby
As eagles cry above to meet you,
As refugees fight red river mud
To flee past empty hopes
And find love’s distant delta,
Or simply try to rest upon a dusty 
City bench or ponder our golden
Nicknacks through shop windows
In despair.

Then, for once,
Become a Buddha seeking
Earth’s help to
Arrange their rescue,
Self-denying and exhausted,
Hand turned downward 
To touch the ground,
Facing off with
Mara and his daughters:
Tanhā, lustful desire, 
Arati, rage and discontent, 
and Rāga, longing and attachment.

Find this power awaiting you
Within this residue of stars that 
Nature adheres your blood and bones
Into with gravity and physics just to
Repurpose the inestimable beauty
By which you’re made,
And continually renew you,
Situated as you are
Uniquely among all beings 

Right here, right now,
Animate, inanimate, 
You, an extension of 
The Earth herself,
Created to create, 
Anticipate, investigate
And then to act toward preservation,
Opposing the annihilation 
Of what must always endure,
Or to step aside to 
Make room for 
What will soon be born.

You are really this important.

We are the same strings
From which all of “This” is made.
Something-much-more
In-between 
Within, behind, or well beyond 
These futile words I write
Arises with a calm 
And ancient certainty
Enveloping and surrounding you and me 
And never ceasing 
To whisper repeatedly:
 
Know the value of this life you’re given
Know the value of every life, and
Trust, protect, and ally with all life.

And from there, 
Perturb complacency and apathy,
Grow harder, tougher fibers and
Become wiser, speak directly,
Entwining much more
Sternly, deliberately, 
A blooming flower 
Encouraging the bloom of others, and
Preparing to meet the downpour
Because it’s coming, 
And you know what you know, so
Trust yourself and
Find your strength 
Arising through the roots
We all share, the strings themselves,
And in this way, 
Get ready to 
Face down lightening’s 
Flash and thunder.

Your purpose being
To reseed 
Justice, 
Love, and
Peace,
Nothing more, 
Nothing less.
 
We flowers come and go,
And we are the appointed stewards of our garden
And our children’s
And their children’s,
Beyond the earth and sky.

Here lies the path of the heart:
Your promise to channel this Infinite Love, 
And send it soaring high above this dreary overcast, and

I hope we may do this work together.

Feed the starving
Literally, 
Figuratively, 
Generously,
No matter how prosperous or
Deprived,
And no matter how 
Preposterous
We’re judged to be in what
We believe and do

It feels so much better to
Eschew attachment
To useless and ephemeral things, 
To abandon fake privileges
Behind which injustice and brutality
Lurk and sneak and hide

Then step up beside the oppressed and
Meet adversity alongside them,
The displaced and the fugitive,
And find there some place from which to see and
Better treat this deadly dis-ease
Afflicting all of us

Like Vimalakirti,
Prince of inexhaustible kindness,
Open up your palace gates
To whoever needs hiding,
Help, shelter, food,
Home, furniture, compassion, music,
Unending love and protection
Without “concern for my own safety”
When the safety of everyone has been upended.

To reach for this,
We first simplify our selves, 
And then simplify our lives,
Keeping in mind how we arise,
And so soon, begin to fade, so
Walk the path of moderation,
In what we buy and eat
And where we go 
We make offerings with
Equanimity, humility, tolerance,
Cultivating fearlessness,
Through awareness of our temporary nature,
And our always imminent transition. 

With practice, 
No one 
And no thing 
Can truly harm us.

With practice,
We need not be so often afraid

(Although life preserves itself,
And strings long to adhere beyond their given time,
And we may feel at times so afraid,
We need not be alone in our fears.)

Continually bearing in mind
Our fleeting nature
Alongside our deeply felt responsibility,
And so to feel grateful 
Even when rattled by death’s chains,
Like idealistic freedom riders in 1961,
Like the longshoremen in San Francisco in 1934
Or peaceful picketers against Republic Steel in 1937,
All walking together through tears of demolition,
Like those laying down on tracks
Blocking the trains in India while soldiers
Beat them with clubs,
Their stalwart non-violent resistance.

How did these humans come by such courage?
Remembering how many others before
Willingly made such sacrifices
For sake of the lives of others must’ve
Strengthened their resolve,
If it could mean the end of 
Suffering that should not 
Survive one moment longer, and 
Has already so often nearly destroyed us,
And all life:

This resurgent hatred,
Its sick, fanatical disregard 
For our wider family 
All our relatives,
This Earth, 
This land, and its beauty,
This malice seeping repeatedly
From behind the curtain 
Of our own shadows,
So long intent upon breaking
The binding vow we’ve made
Implicit or explicit with
Our children, 
Our ancestors, 
And our Source 
And Noble Origin.

Now let us retake this vow 
To oppose hatred 
With our own lives
And thwart its every attempt 
To invade and further dominate 
Our hearts, minds, and souls.

Love is the essence 
Of this string theory,
The glue by which these strings are made

And a hidden but great blessing lies
In being alive right now, 
At such a time
As this, and to have the chance,
To establish the ascendancy
Once and for all of

The sacredness of all life

And in making this effort,
To be tested 
Again and again 

By the trivial concerns
Of a dying age,
Already past tense.

We are here to make the next one.

Not by quieting griefs
And worries that awaken us at night
But through the pain of rebirth itself, 
Inspiring whatever righteous words 
And fervent actions,
Will finally mix a balm to ease 
The fear and dread of everyone
And bring a lasting Great Peace
Well beyond this time.

Hardship and heroic struggle, 
What else is new 
In being a real human being?

This pregnant pause in sustenance
Awaits us, outside the fortress of our fears,
Deprivation, illness, perhaps demise,
Unwarranted, unnecessary, unbidden, yes,
This storm of our own making
We must now endure it together
On the way to Something Better.

How then shall we live?
What shall we live for?
And what is worth dying for?

Our ancestors knew such times 
Arriving in so many disguises but always the same,
The chaotic, time-worn, constant churn of tyranny,
Portending dissolution, and
Always fortuitously placed beside

The blessed gift of conscious human agency

But not quite like this one, not quite like now,
Converging here on every living person’s destiny

No, hesitation has been canceled this time,
And not choosing is a choice itself.

This being the theory I suggest by which
We should look harder now at all that’s happening
Between the weaving of the strings being reaffirmed
And the imminent unraveling of abundance
That so far preserves even our possibility

To decide and to act.

Yes, we now face fascism in America . . . and elsewhere. Not rising, but already here; not an exaggeration, but a reality. Yet when “We the People” show up and push back, like the 2500 to 3000 folks we walked with through the small town of Poulsbo, Washington (population 13,000), that’s the real parade happening all over this country.

Fascists, take note. Thirty-one Nobel Prize winners, and 400 academics (including experts in the history of fascism) have now called you out in an open letter commemorating the same public act by intellectuals against the Mussolini regime a century ago.

War, fascism, and hegemonic masculinity have always been close associates. In 1922, the Italian fascist monthly, Gerarchia, called its emergent brutal authoritarian ideology, “the child of war.” The glorification and normalizing of militarism stands out in the fascist game plan as clearly as the $16 million grind of Washington, DC streets left behind by $45 million in armor and shock troops parading before His Majesty. We see it; we know what it is; we’ve seen it before and ain’t nothing patriotic about it.

Consider too the uninvited Marines deployed by a centralized, autocracy to “benevolently liberate” Los Angeles by trumping (sorry) state sovereignty. The embedded macho symbolism is nostalgic in the extreme. During WWI, “Marines promoted a style of manliness . . . [emphasizing] honor, courage, selflessness, self-control, hard work, and strength,” a doctoral researcher at U of Alabama notes. See now how these values are completely perverted by the twisted, self-glorifying emotional hunger of an insatiable narcissist who will never be satisfied.

His Kingship refers to Los Angeles protesters as “animals,” “a foreign enemy,” from which the city must be “liberated,” so as to “make it free, clean, and safe again.” An interesting concept in which a dirty, corrupt, lying, felonious, misogynist takes on the task of cleaning anything up. Meanwhile, morale sucks among the soldiers, many of whom feel manipulated and politically exploited. Experts and veterans alike express deep concern about this erosion of posse comitatus, the restrictions of the U.S. military from acting in domestic matters. And there are signs soldiers inside the ranks get it and are questioning whether their activation and deployment constitutes an “unlawful order” they have an obligation to resist and defy in order to protect the U.S. Constitution.

And we have to see this entry into the streets, this “unrest,” and “destabilization” as encouraging. Awareness and resistance is growing; those who’d extinguish the fire in our burning house are coming forward.

However, we have to remain highly vigilant, persistent, and very brave for this to really go anywhere. Those signs are front and center too.

Vigilant because only two days ago a U.S. senator, duly-elected and representing the People (Alex Padilla, D, California), was slammed to the ground, handcuffed, and removed from a Homeland Security press conference simply for asking a question.

Vigilant because this very morning Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were murdered by an assassin dressed as a police officer, who then shot and gravely wounded State senator John Hoffman, a Democrat, and his wife, Yvette, who are now hopefully moving into the clear after emergency surgery.

Notice that this man wore a vest, carried a taser, and drove a “police-type vehicle” with flashers. He made sure he was fully militarized, and I can only conclude he had to be an enraged, hegemonic masculine guy. I’d like to say he’s just some madman who totally lost his shit, but my friends, what if he’s at the point of a spear?

Inside his car was a list that included other Democrats such as Minnesota governor Tim Walz, U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, U.S. Senator Tina Smith and state Attorney General Keith Ellison. He clearly wanted to kill many people. He had No Kings flyers in his car.

According to NPR, authorities cautioned the public in Minnesota about attending No Kings marches like we had today. There’s another more crucial logic, however, which says keep marching despite such fears because cowering and remaining silent right now will create even greater dangers. It’ll say violence and intimidation works.

Right here, in today’s vicious killings in Minnesota, we taste the bitter fruit of tolerating the militarization of hegemonic masculinity.

“The militarization of any nationalist movement occurs through the gendered workings of power,” wrote political theorist and feminist writer Cynthia Enloe in 1993. . . .and these prescient words are now fully activated before our eyes.

Even some women are caught up in enacting this militarist masculinity: “Masculinities are prized in political and military leadership, even when that leadership is performed by women,” Enloe wrote in 2010.

Then in 2018, this same distinguished feminist researcher asked a compelling question we need to bring to everyone’s attention right now:

“To what extent are anxieties about masculinities simply being vacuumed up into a right-wing movement . . . ? Or, to what extent are they not just vacuumed up, if you will, but fueling it—at the beginning, in the middle, and at the later stages?” (emphasis mine)

Having briefed you in Parts I and II of Big Boys Don’t Cry on my early boyhood bedwetting and the painful events of my 14th year - I hope you’ll now note the same bullshit version of “maleness” from which I and so many others have suffered permeating not only the motives of people sending armed Marines to Los Angeles to intimidate but also certain protesters throwing stones and burning the flag to antagonize them. Both polarities are toxic to the cause of restoring freedom and democracy and taking back power from U.S. fascists.

To close this three-part series, I’ll invite you once more into personal history, in fact, right back to the very same shitstorm of my age 14 era. One glimmer in that same dark year was having enough sense to walk out of school - alongside four million other students in colleges, universities, and high schools - to participate in the 1970 Nationwide Student Strike Against the Vietnam War.

There are some things that happened back then that you need to know about.

Richard Nixon had lied boldface and publicly about his promised drawdown of U.S. forces and been publicly exposed for his secret invasion of Cambodia. Forty-seven out of 50 states still had the “age of majority” at 21 years old, but an older teenage boy could nonetheless fret very much about being drafted at age 18, 19 or 20 and forced to burn down Vietnamese villages or execute innocent people. We couldn’t vote about a war we might be forced to fight despite personal opposition. The choice was between prison or illegally emigrating to Canada. Thank you, Canada.

The only other route a young man had against this injustice was to “hit the streets” . . . much like today.

The National Student Strike took place from May 1st to May 8th, 1970. In that spread lies a critical and tragic moment in U.S. history (May 4th) when four unarmed Kent State University protesters were murdered by National Guardsmen. Like so many others back then, I was horrified, outraged, and longed to protest this act of heinous, militarized violence against fellow citizens.

The assassinations in Minnesota today remind me of that time.

Our local march took place along Woodward Avenue and Maple Road on May 6th in Birmingham, Michigan at the very height of tensions over the war and the Kent State murders. The same day, a small protest at the nearby Royal Oak draft board became violent and five protesters were arrested. A cop and three protesters were injured.

While we marched, we were warned to cover our faces from photographers, and I didn’t understand why. I was told the march was being actively surveilled by the “Red Squad,” a Michigan State Police and Detroit Police collaboration to monitor dissidents and protesters that continued until 1976 when the scheme was exposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and shut down in the courts.

By then, Detroit Police had recorded the names of 1.4 million potential “subversives,” and MI State Police had 50,000 case files. Even more shocking is the sharing of this information with local car manufacturers as a means of harassing and blocking the careers of their employees.

Are you a subversive? Are you a dissident to be monitored and sanctioned for protesting this government we have now? Are you a person with the kind of belief system or look or ethnicity or gender or sexuality requiring a U.S. military presence to keep you in line?

This is a long time before the internet and today’s digital surveillance. But it’s a way of demonstrating that this shit is still with us right now. This is not new. And I never learned if I made the cut with the Red Squad but have always hoped so.

Local “unrest” (as it was also called then) grew as more angry youth from these two affluent suburbs began gathering at Memorial Park at 13 Mile Road and Woodward. In August 1970, the Memorial Park Riot of 2000 young people resulted in the arrest of 754.

Here’s what’s different now:

I foresee militarized violence as inevitably and purposely aimed at sparking protester violence. This administration clearly intends to provoke public resistance in order to attack it, whereas police back in 1970 were instead using covert surveillance, career sabotage, and harassment. This is because overt militarized violence against protesters - as had happened throughout the Civil Rights struggle as well as the recent 1968 police riot at the Democratic Convention in Chicago - was condemned by the majority of American society.

Today, the public’s guard has gone down. Now there’s an obvious empowerment of cops and soldiers toward violence as a legitimized response to protester provocation. This is why I, like many others, believe those in power in the U.S. hope to purposely stimulate protester violence so as to crush resistance.

We need to turn the Tao of resistance to this strategy into water instead of fire. Water quenches. Water moves around threat and wears it down.

Permitting hegemonic masculine violence by protesters will only throw more gasoline on our burning house.

I too feel my own desire to “fight” as a lizard-brain response, but we humans are blessed with the capacity to reason, plan, and consider our choices morally and pragmatically.

I remain very concerned about people who feel that provoking or taunting of thuggish cops or soldiers represents a viable strategy for dealing with people sanctioned by the state to knock the shit out of you and yours and are armed to the teeth to do so. These folks are just as much a threat to the cause of restoring freedom and democracy as any paid provocateur.

Please heed this warning: violence towards cops or military or provocateurs or even one another plays right into the hands of the corrupt - who have very already schemed to create this very scenario.

Let’s briefly discuss the reactivity we wish to calm and subdue in ourselves. The very presence of an overbearing, weight-trained cop or soldier sheathed in protective gear, mace, baton, taser, and weapon should make anyone edgy - it’s supposed to do so.

Heart rate escalates, breathing shortens, we secrete norepinephrine (adrenalin), and we are prepped to fight or run. Now add to the mix this radioactive sociocultural toxicity - hegemonic masculinity - and there are people wanting to fight back, either protectively or aggressively. I’m not distinguishing here between Anti-Fa and Proud Boys any more than a peaceful left-leaning protester or a peaceful right-leaning cop. I’m saying this algebra for violence is in place, locked, and loaded in all of us, and we all need to be aware and working preventatively, or we’re going to have the long hot summer of 1967 all over again and then some. For the record, I’d say “women are different, especially feminists,” except the suffragettes bombed, the Weathermen had Weatherwomen, and there are Anti-Fa ladies who’d love to knock out Mothers for Liberty.

As soon as circumstances come to trading blows, we all lose. I’m prepared to fall down like a dead weight on the ground and get dragged away rather than hit or injure anybody. Or get the hell back and away. But I’m not going to fight or provoke cops, soldiers, or assholes, especially those who’d love to be provoked.

You see, I was at Kent State campus for its 30th anniversary commemoration of the murder of those four students in 2000. I’d come to the annual conference of the Society for Intercultural Education, Training, and Research (SIETAR). By far, this was the rock star of all professional conferences I was ever privileged to attend, and there’s been many. It’s no exaggeration to say that those three days changed my life in positive ways.

I’m sure many of you might stop reading here, but if I’m fortunate enough to have you with me to this point, this is where this post really begins as I reach out to share with you some wisdom I received in my heart from three inspiring speakers at that conference.

Each of them was a living example of being incredibly vigilant, persistent, and very brave - without being violent. Together, they represent a pathway toward how to live as an antidote to hegemonic masculinity.

I hope you’ll click the links on their names, take the time to ponder their teachings, and share them with others.

Arun Ghandi (1934-2023), grandson of Mahatma Ghandi, and South African activist against apartheid. You could’ve heard a pin drop when he spoke. He told of growing up in South Africa and getting beaten up continually for being “too brown for the white kids, and too white for the black kids.” His misbehavior and defiance led to his overwhelmed parents sending him to live as a teen with his grandfather for two years - who mentored him in the path of non-violence, Ahimsa.

Giandomenico Picco (1948-2024), Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs, who I believe was a married new father when he permitted himself to be repeatedly abducted and kidnapped so as to negotiate the release of eleven hostages held by terrorists in Lebanon, including Anglican reverend Terry Waite and journalist Terry Anderson.

I’m most grateful for getting to sit and have a soft drink and rich conversation with a woman who witnessed her own father’s assassination and suffered so greatly in her life from violence yet chose to dedicate herself to the cause of peace, justice and intercultural understanding, Camelia Anwar Sadat (1945-2019).

Just her and me sat together for about an hour - and it only happened because we were the only ones in the break room, and she invited me to sit down. Within two years of this impromptu meetup, this marvel of a human being would go through a terrible decline, one that reminds me now of the very dark side of the American immigrant story and what we stand to lose as this administration deepens its racist savagery in all directions.

Contemplating the lives and teachings of these three people, each of who experienced extremes of violence and chose to live differently, is one small way I can remind myself and others how to live vigilantly, persistently, and very bravely - but without violence - as we band together to defeat American fascism.

In the best situations, anger only gets activated when rationalization and intellectualization fail. Badger a man with the brittleness of his own excuses, his logical fallacies, his efforts to explain away hurtful mistakes, insensitivities, and ineptness, and he’ll begin by getting angry, even furious, before he crumbles. That is, if he can even let his guardian rest.

Don’t ever crumble. F^$& you if you make me crumble. Because when we crumble, we’re no longer men, right?

My father’s hidden shame leaked all over me as anger. Did yours? In a rare moment of vulnerability, he remembered for me being a little boy getting bullied and coming into the house to retreat. His dad, my Grandpa Verwin, the traumatized WWI regimental runner I’ve mentioned before, didn’t hug or comfort him. No, he turned him around and told him to get right back out there and fight that bully. And don’t come inside the house until you’ve won or lost.

Dad remembered how he cried, “but I went and fought the bully, and I hit him in the nose with everything I had.” He reveled in this victory. It seem to have pleased his father.

In the early 1930s when Dad was a kid, there was a lot of focus on the “diminished role” of the father in the U.S. “As he keeps the pocketbook replenished, he is regarded as having met his obligations,” opined family researcher Ernest Groves in 1928, the year my father was born. It was about then that fledgling social scientists started asserting fathers should be “more involved” in the raising of their children in U.S. society “writ large,” or perhaps, more accurately, writ “white” because people of color or marginalized people were virtually invisible in such “research.”

Consider this development alongside a massive vocational shift prior to the turn of the 20th century during which a majority of white sons no longer took on or apprenticed in the occupation of their fathers, which until then was mostly farming. Increased urbanization meant these fathers no longer walked “out” of the fields to join their families nor could they be visited there by children anymore. Instead, they were separated by their work, and moved back and forth to a factory, store, or office. Inside the sustained white patriarchy of those times, a new problem of “mother domination” emerged, and experts wanted to help these fathers reestablish themselves, especially with their sons. It was all good and well for daughters to have close access to mothers, but sons had lost contact with fatherly guidance.

The general feeling was that too much maternal-only involvement would lead to an “unbalanced” young man. This concern generated a kind of informal New Fatherhood movement with concerns about raising sons capable of competing and fighting with one another to achieve and succeed in a capitalist society. Robert L. Griswold’s 1993 well-researched and dense tome, Fatherhood in America, which I’m relying upon, includes a section on the nationally syndicated newspaper advice column, “Our Children,” helmed by respected junior high school educator and principal, Angelo Patri, who received inquiries from all over the U.S. into the early 1930s.

Among the letters Patri received were those from fathers writing urgently about sons who “would rather play with the girls than the boys” or are “looked upon as a sissy” or who should be able to “stand right up to other kids and be able to ‘sock ‘em in the nose’” because if they turn out “too polite or self-effacing,” they’d be “stepped on” for not being “tough and aggressive.” And so we see how Grandpa Verwin wasn’t so out of sync with the socialization of boys of this time when he made Dad fight the bully.

I believe this experience deeply influenced my father because it was so very rare for Grandpa Verwin to get involved in fathering his two sons anyway. I actually think Dad looked back on his dad forcing him back “into battle” as a kind of rare and precious thing.

A son needs to be groomed into the kind of man who will face his fears and fight for position in a dog-eat-dog world. This was the message to me - always - and he spoke it to be many times - “The world’s a tough place, and I’m going to get you ready for it.”

Which brings to my own 14th year on the planet, a year filled with significance regarding my developing manhood, and it’s a picture that’s not at all pretty. I can’t be certain of the exact chronology, but I’ll do my best.

My 14th birthday was in June, 1970, and at some point thereafter, Dad proposed that I could paint the trim on our brick ranch house for $3 dollars an hour. This was very good teen wages, so I was totally on board. I could sense from him that this was an opportunity to save money while teaching me about doing good work.

The big moment came on a sunny early afternoon when I heard the buzzing in a corner I was supposed to paint and saw those yellow jackets. I went inside and told Dad I couldn’t possibly paint anywhere near there because I was scared of them.

“Nonsense,” he told me, I must learn to face my fears, and he’d help me do so. He brought me back outside, connected the garden hose to a nozzle, turned it on, and handed it to me.

I was terrified as Dad began scolding me to get in close on the yellow jackets and turn the hose on and spray out their nest.

How could such an idea be successful in any way?

It wasn’t. When I finally turned the nozzle on the nest, the yellow jackets immediately began flying out toward me. I dropped the hose and ran for the hills, possibly screaming.

I’d failed. When I finally got the nerve to go back inside, Dad was disgusted.

“What the hell’s wrong with you??” he demanded. I wept with shame as he declared he’d have to finish this painting job himself.

Why? Because I was too much of a coward to face my fears. What an utter disappointment of a son.

As I now entered my last year of junior high school - 9th grade in our district - I ran into yet another test of my fragile masculinity. A boy who lived down the street named Bob was about a head taller than me, and he’d decided to bully me. I never understood why, but he didn’t seem to like me at all.

Bob was muscular and well-liked by other kids. The teacher in our music class was sadly incompetent, and Bob would pick on me severely there.

I despised even going to this class. One day, he hit me in the ear with astounding accuracy with a piece of broken chalk. It really stung and made my ear turn red.

I’d had enough. For once, I had to be a man.

“F@#$ you, Bob,” I muttered as I jumped from my school desk with much gravitas to face him.

“You think you can take me on, Walker? You got the balls, huh?”

He taunted me openly in front of the teacher who did nothing as the entire class jeered.

“Meet me by the water tower,” I challenged.

It was on.

The water tower behind the school was where all the fights between boys happened. I was so terrified, I could hardly breathe or swallow for the rest of the day. The walk there was like going to my own execution. When you’re a teen boy facing a beat-down, it’s like that. I didn’t really know how to fight.

“What the hell’s wrong with me?” I thought to myself.

Well, Bob didn’t show up. What an incredible relief. And how weird. I mean, how could he possibly be scared of skinny-me?

Days passed, and I saw him here and there. I deluded myself into thinking a kind of detente had emerged. I was sorely mistaken.

We were waiting for the bus back to our neighborhood to appear. I didn’t see him coming. He and another boy, his good friend, they snuck up on me. They grabbed me and picked me up and threw me into a bush filled with prickers.

This was so humiliating, right? I had to pull prickers out of my calves and arms. I had scratches on my face.

Finally on the bus, Bob and his buddy were laughing all the way back to our stop.

“What a pussy . . .” Bob chuckled to his friend.

Again, I’d had enough. I mean, I was supposed to stand up for myself if I’m going to be a man, right?

“I’m not as much a pussy as you, Bob,” I proclaimed, “You never showed up at the water tower.”

“I had other things to do that day, Walker. I’ll fight you anytime anywhere.”

And so it was arranged.

Bob - with his buddy as his second - came walking down the street to my house. The battle between us would happen in my own front yard.

As I peered out my parents’ bedroom window on the appointed afternoon, I saw them walking towards me. Again, this dry mouth and the problems breathing. Panic. Terror. Bob was a very big kid and strong. I was neither of those things.

How could I be so stupid? My father and grandfather’s generational script of fearless, war-ready masculinity had taken me into this helpless moment.

Bob had gloves on. Ugh. This must mean he doesn’t want to hurt his knuckles.

“You can have the first punch,” he offered as we stood facing each other.

“No thanks,” I said.

Errol Flynn, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Shane. The Lone Ranger. No thanks, I’m man enough.

He hit me in the face and knocked me down to the ground. I’d never been hit like that.

I got up and ran at him. I was able to exploit his one vulnerability - his height. I got my foot behind his calf and tripped him - into the pricker bush in our front garden!

This was a victory lasting only milliseconds.

He got up and charged me like a raging bull. His weight alone was far too much for me. He had me down on the ground in seconds and mounted over me with his knees pinning down my arms.

I don’t like to remember my sense of powerlessness back then. I couldn’t move at all.

Bob pounded my face - back and forth, hitting me with his gloved fists, protecting his knuckles, beating me in the face. I flexed, stretched, kicked. I couldn’t stop him. I could do nothing.

“Say ‘uncle’!” He shouted.

I wouldn’t. More beating.

“Say ‘uncle’!” Again.

No.

Again and again.

And then, finally, “Uncle.”

He stopped immediately. And I got up and ran into the house.

I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror. I was bleeding, but I felt worse than I looked. When Mom got home from teaching, she took one look at me and burst into tears. She said she was going to call the police. I absolutely forbade her from doing so.

The next day was really hard because I had to go to the bus stop with bruises on my face, an open read to anyone of my defeat.

Plus, I’d see Bob.

Very strangely, Bob and his friend were both nice to me. They nodded in the way boys signal equality and acceptance. I surmised that maybe Bob felt badly about beating me up. In years to come, I suspected his own dad beat up his mom on a regular basis. But I could never be sure.

From there, Bob became my good friend. It was advantageous, too; most of the girls loved him. He was very tall, muscular, and attractive. They’d start with me in order to be his girlfriend. I had countless two-week long relationships making out with great-looking girls on their way to Bob.

Bob and I became good buddies and smoked a lot of cannabis together. He never said he was sorry for giving me the worst beating of my life, and I never asked. I just wanted to fit in with him and his crowd. I wanted to be popular like Bob.

“Identification with the aggressor,” some Freudian somewhere may say. I could find no other way to be viewed “as a man” than try to be friends with this guy who thoroughly kicked my ass.

How true might this be for other guys? What is a male hero-leader to men but the guy who’s big, strong, and kind of an asshole on the way to being your friend? Am I imagining this kind of protocol? Because I’ve seen it in many tough-guy movies.

By this point, I had very little left inside to tell me I was a competent or good young man myself. I was getting more into dope - pills, acid, downers - on top of cannabis.

I really hated gym and pool class. Long-haired freaks like me were the target of the instructors. Mr. Johnstone literally socked me in the stomach and made me double-over during water polo.

But he was a leader, the basketball coach. An asshole on the way to being my friend. All I had to do was cut my hair and become a “jock.” No athletic potential here. Instead, I’d let my freak flag fly. More dope. More sedation, please.

One morning, I stood bleary-eyed as Mr. Johnstone handed out towels outside the locker room as opposed to inside, which was the routine. Eight a.m. pool class was always rough to wake up to for me, and I began drying myself off. Bob was behind me, and we were talking. I pulled my swimsuit down and continued toweling off.

I thought I was inside the locker room. A simple mistake.

Bob, pointing at me, loudly yelling: “What the hell are you doing!??”

Slow motion from there. Trying to pull up wet Speedos, and they’re tangled. Boys still inside the pool are turning around to see, pointing, and laughing. The girls aquabelle team is still setting up their evening show on the other side.

I can’t get these goddamn Speedos pulled all the way up. Some of the girls are turning around and seeing what’s happening.

Full frontal nudity before my entire class, the culmination of my 14th year.

My entire body turned beat red. Mr. Johnstone chuckled and shook his head as I ran into the locker room. Other boys were overwhelmed with amusement and derision.

By the time I made it to Mrs. Rennels’ English class at third hour, my favorite, I could only put my head down and weep. She stroked my hair. She didn’t ask me what was wrong. I think she already knew. God bless Mrs. Rennels wherever she is.

My parents minimized it all. “This too shall pass,” said Mom. Dad said, “Don’t worry about it.” I knew I’d only offered him further evidence of my male incompetence.

They were wrong, of course. Other guys brought my 9th grade blunder up to me as their own amusing memory of my trauma well into my twenties. Interestingly, this happened to me several times while standing at the urinal.

My 14th year on this planet still makes me cringe 54 years later. Strangely, or perhaps not, the adversity of it all makes me braver now, whereas it made me cower and withdraw into drugs and alcohol when I was young.

I’m still trying to be brave but in an entirely different way. I don’t seem to give a shit if anyone out there feels I might be oversharing all this. I’m telling you about my experiences on behalf of the boys and men who still must keep what they go through a secret.

All these things happened to me in one year when I was a teen boy - my father’s rejection, the yellow jackets, getting thoroughly beaten up and then making friends with the bully, and finally, accidentally dropping my drawers in front of my 9th grade class, including a bunch of girls, and having to deal with the humiliation and ridicule for years afterwards.

No wonder I’m shy about going to class reunions. Not much for me there.

The bullying I experienced really started with my dad, then Bob, and then it became part of my own inner conversation. I thought I truly sucked and struggled with wanting to die at 16 years old.

For years since then, I’ve tried to permit my own fear, grief, and shame into my awareness before my anger’s primacy. Anger comes first far too often, unfortunately, and I’ve hurt people I love - including myself - by letting it lead.

But as I’ve said, anger is often the guardian of the fear, grief, and shame for men. And it’s the only emotional expression sanctioned within these ugly ideals of “hegemonic masculinity.”

As I’ve mentioned before, this “hegemonic masculinity” is enjoying a resurgence. According to gender researchers Nicole Rosen and Stacy Nofziger, this deeply-embedded, toxic “way of men” reflects “social and physical power . . . culturally tied to wealth, race and strength . . . namely economically stable, tall and muscular, white men, [who] are better able to achieve this rigid definition of masculinity.”

How does this dominant, garbage view of “being a man” contribute to the kind of bullying I knew as a young teen that still goes on? How is it experienced by the boys who are bullied? Permit me to briefly break it down by summarizing Rosen and Nofziger’s excellent 2019 research study of 275 middle school boys from various backgrounds ethnically and socioeconomically in the United States:

• Heteronormativity - Experiencing homophobic slurs, being teased based on one’s real or perceived sexual orientation, sexual behavior or gender presentation, including enduring physical assaults to their genitalia…

• Physical dominance - Being choked, punched, kicked, threatened physically, being ridiculed for not reflecting “traits” of strength and aggressiveness, “acting like a victim” or being unwilling to participate in the dominance or bullying of others.

• Acceptance of Violence - Feeling the need to normalize bullying violence suffered by oneself and others so as to restore and preserve the sense of being strong and brave, to recapture power after being victimized or seeing their friends victimized by shrugging off the hurt and damage, hanging tough and not acting in any way bothered.

• Social Location - Physical attractiveness and strength are key attributes of ideal hegemonic masculinity. Boys who can’t ‘measure up’ are often teased and taunted due to their appearance (short, ugly, acne), religion, race or ethnicity, socioeconomic or disability status.

Rosen and Nofziger say “bullying in childhood results in a wide range of adverse physical and mental health effects. Being victims or offenders of bullying is linked to both suicide and criminal behavior . . .” They didn’t cover every boy bullied in their study, by the way - just to be included in their sample, a boy student had to report experiencing bullying at least 2–3 times over the past month.

Fifty-one percent of these boys reported moderate to severe negative effects on their lives, and an additional 8 percent felt these effects as “very severe.” Ten percent felt alienated and estranged, that is, no longer part of their school community; 23 percent felt no longer valued and respected, and 22 percent felt they could no longer count on adults at school. Many reported feeling anger or attempting to retaliate was the best way to restore a sense of being strong and brave, that is, to some degree of face-saving in hegemonic masculinity.

Anger is the guardian of fear, grief, and shame in men. Let’s leave off here by mentioning the “psychological autopsies” of men who’ve killed themselves and the stories of men who’ve tried.

Sociologists like Scourfield have suggested a “public/private split” wherein suicide becomes a means of honorably expressing masculinity publicly, while in notes left behind, they privately express “shame and rage.” In comprehensive life history interviews with 18 men who’d made serious suicide attempts, sociologists Jo Rivers and Michael Flood found all of these men had childhoods in which expressing fear, distress, sadness, or grief openly threatened their status as men. Furthermore, most (14) of these men had strategies for concealing these kinds of emotions through either anger or not expressing emotions at all because they’d be perceived as “weak.”

Anger is the guardian. . .

I’m no victim of hegemonic masculinity; I’m a survivor. I can never move completely beyond its contamination of my spirit or its shadowy, sometimes shocking effects on my wellbeing and that of others.

Yet every time I do transcend its effects on me - as in the very writing of this post itself - I know I’ve located healing not just for myself but for my father and grandfather, and possibly some other guy.

Pursuing such a quest requires an entirely different kind of bravery and independence from other men who remain stuck or lost in these toxic tropes, one I too must continually try to draw myself out of as I support the same in other men - the courage to become vulnerable to one’s own pain and suffering as a real and complex human being.

When I succeed in this deliberate practice, it helps me feel like a better man, and a better husband and father. When I don’t, I feel a disappointment. Ah, there you are again, Dad. I know you felt the same and never even got this far.

So please try to remember the boys and men who don’t yet know how to live and practice being a real human in this way because we so need them all in the world as it is right now. Thank you.

The only advance explanation I received about this procedure was that the “doctors are going to try to figure out why you wet the bed.” I sure didn’t know myself, and I wished I didn’t do so because it meant I was considerably less of a “big boy.” I couldn’t be trusted to go on overnight Cub Scout outings or sleepovers with friends.

Thus, I was a willing patient and not particularly scared going in. If the doctors could fix me, I’d be glad. The room at the hospital outpatient clinic was very cold, likely sterile, and my mom was not allowed to come inside. My dad was at work, and my sisters were probably with a babysitter. I’d been brought in by a male nurse - I don’t think he was a doctor - and he told me to take all my clothes off and put on a hospital gown he handed to me. He then left me alone in the room.

Soon, a female nurse came in with a huge styrofoam cup. She seemed very friendly and invited me to sit down in a chair. She asked if I liked Vernors soda, a popular beverage originating in nearby Detroit. I’m sure I said something like, “sort of,” because Vernors was very carbonated, and the ginger ingredients burned my nose. I didn’t really like it.

But I agreed to try to drink the Vernors she’d brought me. As I did so, I wanted to less and less. The nurse kept prodding me; “You need to drink this all up, Davy.” This was a hell of a lot of Vernors. The typical amount required for the hydration phase of a pediatric IVU protocol was one to two liters. The point was to distend the child’s bladder to its fullest in order to obtain an x-ray with contrast.

She kept refilling the styrofoam cup, and I drank - and drank - and started to worry and tell her I couldn’t drink anymore. She continued to insist I must finish all the Vernors. I got panicky and wanted to see my mom.

“It’s okay,” the nurse reassured me, “She’s still here. But she’s just going to tell you to drink all this Vernors too.”

I suspected she was right, and this was long before any time when a nurse sitting with a panicky little boy would resort to going to get his mom. She’d won; I was forced to comply and drink Vernors until I drowned in the stuff.

I finally finished, but I had to pee. The nurse then told me I “must” hold my pee until they’d finished. She then instructed me to climb onto the x-ray platform and lie down. She told me someone would be coming in soon and left the room.

I really had to pee, but I had to hold it. This was my mantra at that moment. Don’t pee, don’t wet your pants. Well, gown.

From up on top of the platform, I spotted a metal cart next to another x-ray platform with the largest syringe I could ever imagine. It had three round plunger handles on it. I remember thinking how sorry I felt for whoever the hospital patient was who would have to have a shot like that. After all, no one had said anything about a shot. And I’d been told even though we were going to the hospital, I wouldn’t be staying in it.

The male nurse returned. He wasn’t unkind. “I’ll bet you have to pee, so let’s hurry and get this all done,” he smiled. I said okay, and as I lay there, he tugged out a kind of sliding board from beneath the platform and told me to rest my arm on it. He then began using medical tape to restrain my arm to the board. He glanced across the room at the tray.

It was about then that I started to realize this big shot was for me. Not only that, but I’d be getting the shot into the inside of my arm, an experience I’d never had before. I started panicking again, and the male nurse noticed.

“Davy, it’s going to be okay. But it’d be best if you close your eyes before I give you this injection.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, and my heart rate shot up as I grimaced. These days, I’d say I was definitely in a fight-flight state physiologically and emotionally, but all I knew then was that I might die from this one shot.

The prick did hurt a lot, and I began to tear up.

“Almost done,” he said.

Big boys don’t cry - this was doctrine in raising boys then, of course. I dutifully pushed my tears back hard because I didn’t want this male nurse to see me cry. After all, I already had this “weak bladder” thing and felt ashamed - why add to it?

Nowadays, we know suppression of tears disrupts the release of endorphins and other proactive, stress-mitigating physiological responses. We also know pressuring boys not to cry pushes them deeper into a toxic trope of the stoic, emotionless man who won’t feel intensely. That is, until he’s enraged, violent, self-destructive, or depressively withdrawn. But this kind of understanding of the traumatic, negative effects of emotional suppression on the wellbeing of boys and men wasn’t in anybody’s minds when I was seven and had my IVU.

Nor do we live in a time of any greater enlightenment now. I’ll pause to note that I strongly suspect the effects of toxic “manosphere” bullshit (excuse my French) is a major factor behind 57 percent of registered U.S. male voters under age 30 voting for the current president, and along with it, his regime’s support for the “male ideals” of Christian Nationalism. These young men are being reached and exploited in droves by twisted, thoroughly broken, and willfully ignorant male influencers and podcasters via their loneliness, resentment, pain, and terrible confusion about what it means to “be a man.” That’s not a new problem.

I want to help in taking that phenomenon on. For my next several posts, I want to surface for you and yours some explanations as well as what we might do about “all that’s gone horribly wrong” - and continues to go wrong - in the dysfunctional socialization, resulting confusion, and violent chaos of boys and men.

I fervently believe current male emotional problems are a leading-edge barrier to any social progress in dealing effectively with the global metacrisis of rising autocracy, climate collapse and species extinction denial, misogyny and the oppression of women, racism and intolerance, economic inequality, and technological disruption among so many other interdependent issues. Left unaddressed, insidious and historically-resistant “male emotional problems” are going to lead us to another world war well before we can do anything meaningful about the rest of these major problems.

It’s far too big a task for a blog, I admit, but I’ll suggest references, resources, and solutions for those wanting more, and leave the key points for those of you wanting only the cliff notes.

Turning back to how my bedwetting was finally explained to my seven year old self, well, I was told the findings of the IVU showed that there was nothing “physical” wrong with me. Therefore, the pediatrician told Mom, my bedwetting was primarily a psychological issue. Perhaps my resentful rivalry as the oldest with two newly-arrived younger sisters could explain its onset. My wet bed sheets were diaper-substitutes for wanting to be her baby again. My “over-involvement” with a “neurotic” mother and my relationship with an ambivalent and competitive father might be the culprits behind why I peed the bed at night.

No, no, these were not what mom told me at age seven - but they were some of the crazy explanations she reported being given when I asked her in her elder years. At age seven, she only told me it was “nothing physical,” which meant to me that my bedwetting was my fault. This conclusion was reinforced by the new requirement that I strip my own bed of wet sheets, which I didn’t really mind except feeling it to be an intentional punishment for being such an ongoing disappointment.

Additionally, on rare mornings when my bed remained unsullied, I’d now have responsibility for making it. I don’t think I understood this part, and I acted up. I got spanked rather severely for purposely peeing on the top sheet one day in order to not have to make the bed, but the scolding hurt much more, and I never did it again. Such were the failed devices of a seven-year-old boy trying to avoid a new chore loaded with emotional significance.

We know now that nighttime enuresis results from some combination of making too much urine while you sleep, reduced bladder capacity, and difficulty waking up. It’s got a genetic component, affects about 7 percent of kids worldwide, and is about twice as prevalent among boys as girls after the age of five years. There are medical approaches that can help a lot, and none of them are psychological.

No such explanations existed in my own childhood, and I slept through the newest behavior-mod innovation of an alarm going off on a special wetness sensor sheet. I still recall Mom’s anger at being awoken instead of me to an instant need for a change of sheets in the middle of the night.

This approach was quickly abandoned, and I finally outgrew bedwetting at nine years old.

I can hardly bear to add to the mix how my self-hatred was exacerbated by my thumb-sucking habit at night. I felt even then that I must be some sort of “big baby” but finally “cured” myself by tying my hand to the bedpost for three consecutive nights at age twelve. The first two nights, I awoke with my thumb in my mouth asleep against the bedpost.

The clarity of my memory for the IVU procedure still impresses me. Today, putting a child through such a medical experience would be considered abusive and unethical. The long-abandoned routine intravenous (IVU) protocol of the early 1960s has many elements known to evoke what’s been labeled as Pediatric Medical Traumatic Stress (PMTS), a kind of childhood PTSD. Fortunately, I don’t suffer flashbacks of triple-plunger syringes or coercive nurses making me drink gallons of Vernors and not letting me urinate.

Instead, I carry the wounds of disinformation about what it meant to be a man. The toxic messages of those days are having a resurgence.

The messages are the same now as back then, and I feel them deeply. They involve running face first into a visceral aloneness and emotional scarring, a profound sadness at being a disappointing little boy and the ways in which my natural exuberance and sensitivity could be murdered in a single moment, a sense of unworthiness that became the best explanation for my father’s distance and preferences for excluding me in favor of his solitary activities. There this boy still exists - activated by these grotesque resurgent messages to young men and boys of this generation - still inside me like a ring in a tree trunk, depicting my very young self, head hung down, enraged, forcing himself to stop crying, standing alone in his bedroom, having flung a plastic airplane model at the wall and then stomped it to pieces for not knowing how to make it all by himself.

Age eight years, I think. One year post-IVU.

Make it by yourself and stop crying. That’s the message for boys and men, and the flipside of male privilege - the twin-note doctrine of radical individualism, the roots of American male asshole-ism, selfishness, greed, and “why should I give a shit about you? Or them?”

I entered puberty already knowing I’d never become the “man” I was supposed to be. I didn’t have it in me. Sure, I no longer wet the bed or sucked my thumb, but there was nothing else to support emerging manhood except my very skinny physicality and smooth, un-bristled cheeks. Standing in the kitchen with Mom and Dad at age fifteen, experimenting with “joining in” intellectually about some controversial topic, I unconsciously held my hand in front of my chest while I spoke. In the midst of my own fledgling assertions, Dad suddenly shouted - “David, put your hand down - you look like a faggot!” I overdosed on prescription sedatives I’d bought from friends at school about six months later.

There it is - I’d already drunk the Kool-Aid well before Dad served it. Don’t cross your legs; don’t hold your hand in front of your chest. It’s back in vogue. And by the way, God bless my queer kindred for enduring for generations - and continuing to endure - their own maligning as “repulsive other” on behalf of instilling this kind of self-hatred in hetero-boys like me for their own sensitivity and open-heartedness in the world.

To today’s young men seduced by the newly twisted, thoroughly broken influencers preaching make America into shit again via toxic maleness, I know exactly what it feels like to believe you’ll “never be man enough,” and I also know these guys telling you this crap originate in the “willfully ignorant” crowd. Be careful who you let tell you who you are.

In coming posts, I’m going to expose this ignorance, describe some potential means of opposing and intervening in it, and hopefully, offer in the process some ways for all of us to help boys and men grow into better men.

I thought I saw a green meadow
when we were long apart
and I searched to 
find the sunlight of your smile

I’d still be looking for you
through this opening in my heart
but life has made us strangers for awhile

and there were still a few sides
you did not know of me
nor I of you
lost inside the wind

I know that you believe 
that we will never meet again 
but I am always going to be 
your friend

remember how the thunder sounded
like a midnight train
and be waving as the wheels go rolling past

one of us is traveling
one standing in the rain
in the downpour
where we’ll meet again at last

may you dream of flying
silent meadows through the night
and I will dream of freight trains
moving fast

your eyes shine like waterdrops
yet you will shed no tears
not knowing if you are sad or mad

and words, our sweet communion,
cannot heal the thousand fears
that have come to haunt the wishes we once had

Still, I will wait for you
among queen’s lace and juniper
which charm and bring
these passions to an end

so do not call farewell
instead say “we will meet again”
and know that this strange stillness
holds a friend

I thought I saw a green meadow
when we were long apart
and I searched to 
find the sunlight of your smile

I’d still be looking for you
through this opening in my heart
but life has made us strangers for awhile . . .

“Ms. Feiner’s treatment raises concerns about the silencing of citizens and the targeting of professionals who are committed to speaking out on behalf of vulnerable communities. . . We call for transparency and a renewed commitment to protecting the rights of all individuals to participate in the democratic process without fear of intimidation or removal.” ~ National Association of Social Work-New York City/New York State

Not If, but When. It’s not a matter of if you’ll be willing to take a public stand against injustice like 64-year-old New York social worker Emily Feiner (and so many like her) but when you will feel you must do so.

I know this moment personally, and you may as well. It’s filled with visceral fear, even terror, when the senses bring a deep call to speak up right now for justice - loudly - and in public before detractors and naysayers.

I first experimented with this degree of chutzpah - albeit cautiously, diplomatically, hesitantly - at meetings with fellow clinical staff members at the U.S. Indian Health Service twenty-five years ago. My boldness emerged alongside a growing reluctance to support rampant psychiatric labeling and prescribing of psychiatric drugs, especially to Native children on the reservation where we worked.

As misgivings grew, so did my audacity, and at one point, colleagues responded to my vehemence by calling me “the biggest threat to the wellbeing of children on the reservation.” Ultimately, they were proved quite wrong, of course, and instead, science continues to support my skepticism. But back then, it was a hard road.

Inside the moment of one of several group tongue-lashings, my heart rate escalated, my palms began to sweat, and I noticed I was trembling. For weeks afterward, my sleep was fitful, agitated, and broken up by obsessive rumination - that is, continuous mulling over of the details and ramifications of having spoken my own truth. Such was the effect of this team on me who otherwise were supposed to support the “mental health” of people.

Portions of these experiences are highlighted in my most recent book, Coyote’s Swing: A Memoir & Critique of Mental Hygiene in Native America (Washington State University Press, 2023), but I don’t intend to promote it here (although I just did!), just offer some thoughts about the proverbial experience of “speaking truth to power.”

My novels, Tessa’s Dance, and its sequel, Signal Peak, all my presentations, lay and professional articles, and of course, seven years of solitary work investigating the U.S. mental health system in Indian Country that went into Coyote’s Swing - all of it fits loosely under the heading of speaking truth publicly on behalf of justice.

This intense disposition I seem to have for promoting and defending social justice (a dirty phrase to alleged powers-that-be), to speaking out “no matter what happens,” sometimes exhausts me so much I can only find solace through long solo hikes. This troublemaking pattern had no name until my fellow dissident psychologist-brother Bruce Levine wrote Resisting Illegitimate Authority, and described my dilemma more eloquently. I have little doubt that the views and behavior of Ms. Emily Feiner of New York State (who I now presume to call “Emily”) are informed by a similar disposition toward those “in charge.”

Speak Freely. The right to free speech - under constant threat and currently rapidly eroding - can only be sustained by our felt duty to exercise it.

I’ll try you out a bit. The so-called “woke speech” of a facile-minded liberal academia who’ve naively believed that “making people speak and write differently changes their intolerant minds” has been sabotaged by its devout critics so completely as to subvert and pollute the concept. Don’t put professors in charge, please. I’ve been one and can only say there is no more political being than an academic. The critics and followers reaching for their low hanging fruit easily expanded their hatred of an overplayed, overstated focus upon “woke categories” into a vigorous denial and suppression of any of the daily realities of ongoing injustice, racism, violence, and intolerance. That’s what made it such a breeze for the current administration to kill diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (which I refuse to call D.E.I.): Elite academics tsk-tsking and browbeating the ignorant. Now, please admit it, and let’s move on to better strategies. So-called “woke speech” never woke anybody up at all, but it did further alienate and empower the “unwoke.” More on their willful ignorance in a moment.

Being a person who does not always express himself quite so forcefully, I am hoping you are still with me, and will say whatever you like in the comments or chat on this or any matter you like. We are different people and can only benefit via the clashing sparks flying between shared ideas and beliefs, especially those with which we disagree. All I ask is that we maintain mutual respect. Beyond this, speak your mind and heart.

Free Speech as Duty. Despite having my own ideas about what is meant by “social justice,” I was not accustomed to engaging in defense of free speech as a duty until after I came to work in Native America. If I ever did anything at all along such lines, I likely confined it to songs or poems I felt inspired to compose.

I could be assertive - but prefer enthusiastic - and to speak as a professional psychologist directly against ideological beliefs strongly held by my supervisors and colleagues felt both rude and intimidating. I was more ready to just get along.

Then I ran face first into a brick wall as I entered a new kind of workplace. It took me at least a year to realize that the organizational culture of any U.S. Indian Health Service facility - including mine - has its basis in military medicine, hierarchy, and chain of command. Many military reserve medical officers continue to provide services through there now, and many uniformed U.S. Commissioned Corps officers remain in charge, wielding extraordinary power over the health and wellbeing of Native Americans.

I have nothing critical to say about these folks. I only note that IHS is not a Native but a military organizational culture, and this was something I didn’t realize when I first began working there in 2000. You see, I’ve already mentioned that I have issues with authority. I have to respect it first before I can get along with it. Even then, we’re going to work “on par.” I’m not very good at being somebody’s subordinate.

The Importance of Learning. I’m not going to use this post to detail the perils of psychiatric drugs or their side effects. I’ll only say that when I worked at IHS from 2000 to 2004, what is now well-established research regarding youth suicide risk exacerbated by so-called “antidepressants” was much more controversial. Additionally, problems with illicit trade and abuse of ADHD stimulant medications were only just emerging. The idea that older youth labeled with ADHD diagnosis and then prescribed stimulants would have heightened susceptibility to getting involved in cocaine or methamphetamine abuse would have been considered ridiculous. These were issues that concerned me back then (still do) and that I was bringing up to my colleagues, and my ideas and views were generally not well received at all.

These days, there are many more resources for consumers to investigate such kinds of issues for themselves, and I did somehow succeed in writing Coyote’s Swing so as to challenge the role of the U.S. mental health system in pacifying and sedating normative individual reactions to oppression, violence, and generational trauma.

Over the “course of my career,” if I can permit myself to call it that, I’ve asked directly for greater accountability from public officials and then received various forms of “ejection” that Emily Feiner experienced physically and literally. Since I’d like to encourage rather than discourage you when it’s your turn to go through stuff this this, I thought I’d offer a few caveats.

Prepare yourself. I work toward being a nice person, but my self-concept becomes questionable when I seek answers from someone who refuses to be accountable for their unjust behavior or assertions. I have had to force myself to differentiate their inherent value and worth as a fellow human being from negative, sometimes vicious reactions to being questioned or challenged. It’s a serious undertaking to speak out. I can only do so via a kind of “compartmentalizing” - I don’t go around calling out people all or most of the time or even once a month. It’s such a rare event because I’ve had to learn that it’s best undertaken intentionally, that is, when I feel I’m truly choosing to do so. And so I have to feel ready and prepared. Impulsiveness doesn’t ever work out well for me. I doubt it does for you either.

Once upon a rare but sweltering day touring Monet’s (gorgeous) gardens with my wife and sons, an irritable French waiter delivered us four small and astoundingly overpriced (10 euros each) beverages alleged to be “American milkshakes.” We were all very thirsty, and these drinks were all sour. My gentle wife scrutinized the waiter’s surly attitude (we hadn’t bought lunch and his resentment had already ripped placemats from beneath our elbows) alongside my own downturned expression. She then asked, “Are you planning on saying something?”

And she already knew the answer and easily swept the children toward more promising festivities. After they’d departed, I finally caught the waiter’s attention, and told him in broken French that I refused to pay the bill. His expression soured further than the milkshakes. I then asked to speak to the manager. “Pourquois?” he wondered without moving an inch. Thus, I had to get up and go find this person. Interestingly, “sour” in English sounds like “soeur” (sister) in French, so communicating about sour milkshakes to the boss was nearly as confusing as accidentally telling a French pharmacist during the same trip that I suffered from “being a pain in the neck.” There’s probably some truth to the misstatement anyway.

I’m suggesting it’s unlikely that Emily seldom announces “I’m not leaving” to people she’s offended. Most of us willingly leave the scene if we’ve created offense. The exception is very rare. I believe Emily knew she had to take a stand in that moment knowing that she deserved to have her question answered. She knew it would be unjust to cooperate with leaving. It took grit to just sit there and say “I’m not leaving.”

If you are someone not so accustomed to speaking up to others who may be put off by what you are saying or asking as well as your noncompliance in being ejected, you’ll need to “soak yourself in pickle brine.” This means developing a tougher skin like Emily’s or others you may also admire, while not surrendering your beautiful and sensitive heart. I assure you that this only takes a little practice and “exposure therapy” to tolerate the discomfort involved.

Consider this kind of hardening an aim toward being anti-fragile like I described in a recent post about my mom when she got her dander up. I remember being 17 years old and walking with her down an urban street when a “roving TV reporter” stopped us to ask her about the new draft lottery and my apparent eligibility for going to the Vietnam War. “That won’t be happening,” she assured him. “I’ll take him to Canada before he fights in that stupid war.” Straight up, no ketchup or mustard.

What does this kind of behavior really entail? To clarify what may be obvious to your mind but not as much to your heart - brave doesn’t mean not being afraid. Compelling yourself to act alongside fear, that is true bravery. Let your voice vibrate - but speak. You should expect to feel uncomfortable when speaking about what you truly believe or don’t before others because people can be judgmental or critical. That is, they shouldn’t be, but they often are, and that’s if they choose to listen. So let them have the benefit of your wisdom, even if you don’t feel sure of yourself. I’m often somebody who truly wants to hear more from those who hesitate to speak.

Three feet back. It’s helpful emotionally to stay “three feet back” from passionately-held beliefs whenever you state or defend them. Pursuing qualities of equanimity and detachment regarding your own beliefs means you don’t so overidentify with them that you yourself become unable or unwilling to hear the perspectives of others. Ideas, even those deeply-held, should always be open to revision in light of new learning. Impressively, some people aren’t much interested in or don’t know about this concept.

Sometimes the best resource for stepping forward is stepping back - into a greater awareness and recognition of who you might be trying to speak out for - that is, who’s not allowed to be present or even permitted to speak. This crew is growing exponentially now, and anyone retaining some degree of privilege should feel a sacred duty to try to at least represent and bear witness by asserting what they know about injustice. Whether or not it’s being asked for, in my opinion.

I remember a neighbor who wanted to tell me a joke about “camel jockeys,” unaware that I was at that very moment working on a dissertation on the emotional stereotyping of immigrants, including those from Bedouin Arab backgrounds. I shut him down with a furrowed brow and a serious tone, saying “I don’t care for racist humor,” and it embarrassed him, I’m sure. He never spoke to me again. His bad, not mine.

Connecting more fully with the current predicaments of marginalized and invisible communities of people, restricted, imprisoned, endangered, afraid, or just too overwhelmed or otherwise disenfranchised helps prepare one with a newfound capacity to speak what must be spoken and is now being suppressed, censored, and punished. Doing so entails learning all you can from those living under increased oppression right now, and then contemplating what you understand morally, philosophically, and factually.

Be prepared to challenge willful ignorance. By “willful ignorance,” I’m proposing that, in this day and age, sizable numbers of privileged people in are openly resistant to learning and educating themselves regarding whatever truths run contrary to their opinions. There are many jokes about this, but it’s not really a laughing matter. It’s not funny at all. This is not “simple ignorance” either, that is, a lack of access to knowledge, but a highly privileged and often arrogant refusal to know and learn about the plights and difficulties of people all around you and the world itself.

I’m all done making excuses for willful ignorance. Let’s counter with strong reasoning and reliable knowledge. Feel confident that you’ve purposely investigated all sides before taking any stand public or private with others. You must know how to evaluate knowledge, think critically, and debate even against your own views in order to take on the falsehoods, misinformation, propaganda, and injustice you’ll be met with.

When I don’t know about a given issue, I cease talking and listen closely. I’d do it anyway, but it’s the opposite of what I sometimes see others doing. Lots of folks seem ready to offer an opinion based upon incomplete information. When I run across this kind of situation, I have to make a decision as to whether I might be persuasive in casually offering some resources or contrasting information. I might decide not to speak. But like Emily, there are going to be times when I will feel I have to take a stand with someone. Perhaps an admonishment. Maybe a cautionary remark. An expressed desire that they rethink what they’ve said. I might even say something that causes their rationale to collapse. Sometimes it works, most times it doesn’t. The point is that sometimes I have to speak on behalf of justice whether the other party appreciates it or not.

The path of opposing willful ignorance is open to nearly everyone still. What will it mean when that opportunity disappears? Right now, portals to human knowledge about any subject are still available to nearly everyone. But this access is aLos under attack. Make smart and open debate fashionable again. Speak justice often.

Thus, my inward counsel has shifted in light of recent events. I’m feeling much less tolerant of stupidity and ignorance. I want to be better at refuting it. I feel it’s imperative that I hallenge how things are and how they’re becoming much worse very rapidly. I do notice not everyone is going to be as into cultivating this kind of discipline. I understand, but there are perils to sliding into the same dirty pool with the willfully ignorant.

At IHS, I first began asking questions, and my questions were minimized or ignored. This was off-putting, but it contributed to me researching, learning, and progressing. It’s very strange to consider how denial, and eventually, derision and ridicule, inspired me to research more so that I felt more certain and confident. Please try this.

Demand Answers. And here’s another place where I resonate a great deal with Emily, this dedicated social worker - a self-declared moderate who voted Republican in the past - someone with whom I’d likely disagree on several topics - who simply asked a question of U.S. Representative Mike Lawler at a town hall meeting on May 5th, 2025.

“Given all the unconstitutional acts by this administration, did he have a red line, and what was it?” she recollected.

According to witnesses, “Lawler did not directly answer the question, and instead started talking about the appropriations process.”

Emily, noting his shift, then stood up, and became “louder,” shouting, “Answer the question! Answer the question!”

She later said: “What is much more important to me is that they are pursuing a playbook that is reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s — that this is what they do with dissent; that they have no problem carrying a 64-year-old woman out of a town hall that was being held by my publicly elected congressional representative …”

Emily knew what she believed and why before she decided to act. It’s important to note that she did not violate any federal, state or local law, but exercised her Constitutional right as a U.S. citizen to engage in the public expression of dissent and free speech. With respect to any potential exceptions to her First Amendment rights, she never engaged in obscenity, fraud, child pornography, illegal conduct, incitement to riot or lawlessness, violation of intellectual property rights, threats, false statements of fact, hate speech, defamation, or slander.

No, Emily simply shouted “Answer the question!” repeatedly toward her own governmental representative, which is something many of us might wish to do. By her insistence, she evidently broke “Town Hall Rules” to which she’d been compelled to verbally consent and then provide picture identification twice before being permitted to even enter this allegedly-democratic forum. Among the rules was “no shouting, screaming, yelling, or standing,” which leaves one wondering what Patrick Henry might have experienced yelling, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” like he did in 1775, or James Madison, in shouting, “I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations!” as he did at the Virginia Ratifying Convention for the U.S. Constitution in 1788.

By then refusing to leave, Emily found herself forcibly carried out of the Town Hall by four state troopers. Speaking to Mother Jones’ reporter, Julianne Ames, she reflected, “I think this says that they will not tolerate us being active participants in our democracy—they want an autocracy, and they’re using state actors to enforce that.”

So Choose Your Battles Carefully. It was not until I witnessed how reductionistic psychiatric ideologies - pseudo-scientific “perspectives” about now-debunked brain science pertaining to “mental disorders” - were endangering and harming people that I too became “louder” in ways akin to Emily Feiner.

First, a young client told me she’d been threatened with forced psychiatric hospitalization if she refused to consume her prescribed psychiatric drug, which made her feel “funny” and “jittery.” She asked me what her options were. I didn’t actually know, but I sure thought there should be some, and tried to find out.

When I subsequently learned that methylphenidate and other stimulants on the reservation where I worked sold for “10 bucks for 4 hits,” I began investigating this issue too. Using in-clinic software, I discerned several entire families - living in abject poverty- had developed a cottage industry by having every household member diagnosed with ADHD and then selling their IHS prescriptions to others. Four or five hundred dollars more each month makes a real difference when unemployment can be as high as eighty percent.

Then, a horrific “cluster suicide” of numerous youth occurred over just a few months , and I was asked by several elders to please look into the matter in my “professional capacity.” I cross-referenced the medical information at IHS with emergent scientific evidence that for some young people popular SSRI “anti-depressant” drugs might “induce,” ie. cause, suicidal behavior. This was years before the FDA instituted its black box warning to that effect. For my trouble, I was eventually placed on a PIP (“performance improvement plan”) for stepping over artificial boundaries invoked by my superiors.

Such experiences made me very angry. As a psychologist specializing in substance abuse and trauma, I was now trying to help people in desperate situations created by my own employer. But anger is not as important and can get in the way when trying to speak up. The insights from my research were what inspired me to write several internal memos to IHS supervisors detailing “concerns.” I still held hope that I could change these minds and hearts. The first of those memos proposed greater medical oversight on prescribing of controlled substances by nurses - an idea which I now see as not nearly enough.

Hope can be a dangerous thing. This initial memo became central to the most infamous staff meeting of my career, occurring - ironically - on the afternoon of September 11th, 2001. It was a battleground, a shouting match, likely fueled by the morning’s events, and I’d never experienced anything like it in my life before. Despite the vitriol, I was nonetheless shocked at “colleagues” uniting in their hostility against me. I was astounded when people literally turned their backs on me, refused to look at or speak to me, and could be overheard as I walked by their open office doors in conversations about “what to do” about me. Such talks contributed to middle-school behaviors like reaching into my mailbox and tossing client messages into the wastebasket, backbiting me toward people I’d never met (who awkwardly later confided what’d been said), and lodging false “official complaints”about me.

Soon, medical staff by-laws for the clinic were being rewritten to make it impossible for somebody in-house like me to get away with researching and critiquing the given psychiatric ideology I disputed. I was asked to review these by-laws and agree with them in writing as an employee.

Like Emily, I was told I must consent to a list of rules I considered unjust if I wanted to still “be remain in the room” of the clinic as a psychologist and continue my own employment.

I did not consent. But no bother - with the passing of the Patriot Act in 2001, the tenure of any federal employee was now tied to refraining from any public criticism of the policies of any federal agency due to being reconstrued as a possible “threat to national security.”

It was the President of the United States who finally shut me down. As to the continued bullying and misdeeds of my colleagues, I realized I’d chosen much more than I’d realized in simply speaking up. I’d been naive. There are very real risks to speaking assertively about what you believe. There are gradations to these risks - and it’s important to consider them in advance.

But you must speak, nonetheless.

Social Support Helps. It’s pretty hard to speak up alone. You’re more likely to suffer the “shoot the messenger” scenario most of us know about without at least some tacit support from others. Singled out, you’re more likely to be ridiculed, dismissed, bullied, or even physically assaulted. I almost got into a fistfight at IHS after a mental health colleague intentionally pulled my hair. No, I’m not kidding.

Others who are with you don’t have to speak themselves. Please remember this if you feel too intimidated or there’s too much at stake in your own life to risk speaking out. Being present and accounted for when others are taking the risk helps everyone involved. You have a spokesperson. They have an ally. There’s power in numbers.

If you’re the one speaking, knowing others in the room are with you - even if it’s only one person - makes a real difference. I had this experience when I was asked to speak at a huge meeting of state employees with federal auditors regarding the “mental health” of Native youth. I told the regional state administrator who invited me that I planned on speaking truthfully and “pulling no punches.” Surprisingly, he smiled and told me this was why he’d invited me. He couldn’t speak as truthfully as I could from inside his state position.

So I won’t pull any punches with you either. There will come a time in your life when you, too, are the one person with no one present to back you up, who must speak out what you know to be right on behalf of justice for the sake of others or for yourself.

How might you bolster your own strength and even “be your own ally”? I have been in this very place - yes, a painful and scary one - and I came upon a method of imagining others who - with growing awareness of the issues I was trying to address - would soon move alongside me. These “future allies” were all I had, and they did eventually emerge from the shadows.

Please know if you hold to speaking your truth long enough, you’ll eventually find you’re never truly alone.

Find Empathy and Think Strategically. Concerning my memos in-house at IHS, and the major heartburn they stirred up, I almost quit my job. But I felt overjoyed to receive the support of the Native community, and this helped me stay. It was my last strategy, my hope and intention to try to elicit their support, and they gave it readily.

It’s very important to be able to speak from one’s heart in Native America. I guess I believe this same adage should be true just about everywhere. By the time I’d been beaten up several times by IHS, many community members already knew I was swimming upstream there. I’d also already worked with Native young people who’d lost their lives. They understood that I too was deeply affected by such tragedies.

At first, I declared I didn’t have ready-made answers, but I was trying to learn all I could to be a good helper. I asked if I could join them at gatherings. Under these conditions, I began sharing more from my heart, mind, and spirit. I’d been quite humbled by my IHS experiences, but I still had no grasp at all on the vast number of cultural teachings that were surrounding me.

As people understood more about what I’d been up against, several encouraged me to back off “trying to rehabilitate the agency” and to get more involved in the community’s own efforts toward wellness and balance. They brought me to sweatlodge and ceremonies and longhouse meetings. I was invited to funerals too. Certain wonderful elders began teaching me.

I soon came to accept that I was no longer an expert but the one who needed to be taught, and this shift became life-changing and liberating. No matter what I might write here or my occasional assertiveness, I’m still no longer an expert and very glad of it.

Instead, I’ve been a co-collaborator for many years now. Nowadays, if I feel called upon to speak on behalf of justice, alone or alongside others, I feel stronger and more centered. How can this be? I’m just not very intimidated about it anymore. I don’t have to be an expert. I just own my truth to the best of my ability and speak it.

You can too. Things are changing very rapidly, and you already know there’s far too much at stake in not speaking out. We all need to try. I vow to try to make my words and ideas as palatable and persuasive as I’m able while I try alongside you.

It’s about speaking up now, even if it’s against the rules, like Emily Feiner and so many others across history. If you can’t quite bring yourself to doing so yet, go to meetings where speaking up will matter and just be present and willing to stand or sit alongside anyone who dares to hold forth about justice. If you can’t be present, then find some way to let others know what you believe and why, and explain it to them, so they can understand what’s at stake and can agree to go to such gatherings on your behalf.

Look to your own days ahead, and those well beyond to be lived by our children. If you don’t have kids, please feel free to consider mine as yours. We’re all relatives. Standing up and speaking up matters now.

Prepare yourself now, and be brave, become knowledgable and disciplined, ready to oppose willful ignorance and to educate anyone who’d seek to learn, use your empathy to connect with them alongside your fierceness to question and challenge any and every injustice, stand up against tyranny, oppression and cruelty - be ready to do so down to the gates of hell because that’s where we’re heading.

Let’s think strategically and take deliberate action, always seeking to protect the future. This is the path of the heart I’m so grateful to have learned about and now invite you toward. This is the crooked journey toward becoming anti-fragile.

I’ll end this post where every typist in the English language should …

Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country.

And also the world itself…

Yes, let’s aspire to be like Emily - ready to be carried out of the building - either literally or figuratively - in defense of justice and freedom.

“The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me, and neglect it not that I may confide in thee. By its aid thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor. Ponder this in thy heart; how it behooveth thee to be. Verily justice is My gift to thee and the sign of My loving-kindness. Set it then before thine eyes.” ~ Bahá’u'lláh, The Hidden Words

“The founders of the league, therefore, proposed and expounded as the requisite basis of all good government three broad ‘double’ doctrines or principles. The names of these principles in the Native tongues vary dialectically, but these three notable terms are expressed in Onondaga as follows:

(1) Ne’Ske´no˘n, meaning, first, sanity of mind and the health of the body; and, second, peace between individuals and between organized bodies or groups of persons.

(2) Ne’´Gaii‘hwiyo‘, meaning, first, righteousness in conduct and its advocacy in thought and speech; and, second, equity or justice, the adjustment of rights and obligations.

(3) Ne’Ga˘’s‘hasda‘´sä’, meaning, first, physical strength or power, as in military force or civil authority; and, second, the orenda [the mystical power within all life] or magic power of the people or of their institutions and rituals, having mythic and religious implications.” ~ Translator’s note re: The Great Law of Peace by Deganawida, the Peacemaker, which formed the Iroquois Confederacy of the Haudenosaunee (inspiring the U.S. Constitution) as recited in Odondaga by Seneca Chief John Arthur Gibson to J.A.R. Hewitt, 1899

“The just are so set on justice that were God not just they would not care a fig for God; they are so staunch to right, so perfectly indifferent to self, they reek not of the pains of hell nor of the joys of heaven nor anything whatever. Were all the pangs of those in hell and all the pain borne or to bear on earth to be the fruits of justice, they would not mind one jot…To the just human nothing gives more pain, there is no greater hardship, than what is contrary to justness …” ~Meister Eckhart

Born into school 
With Mother Earth,

My heart contained 
A seed at birth.

And when it burst, 
My heart broke too.

Heartbreak is 
The way I grew.

My hands grasp up, 
The sun leans back.

I’m nourished by 
What I long for, lack.

I flex to rise up
While pulled down.

My stature’s made 
By force of ground.

I’ve flowered with 
The rain that fell,

Where it came from,
I hope to dwell.

Here, cracked open, 
I fall apart,
And bleed in patterns, 

I must be art.

Some of my traces, 
I leave behind.
They may be followed, 

I must be sign.

These days, I tilt 
With arcs of sky,
While grief pursues, 

Saying “you too must die.”

A strange relief,
Yet sad to go,

This want to leave
Still longs to know,

Who or What 
Put seed in me?

Which is better, 
To act or be?

When I depart, 
Do I return?

Do I recall 
All that I’ve learned?

Will you be near me 
Wherever I go?

Is it not enough 
To love and grow,

And to dream to learn why,
Made so tall,

We, like snowflakes,
Melt where we fall?

I imagine we’re sitting in a circle together, some of you I know well, and others I’ve never met but hope to one day. We have been invited to speak one at a time about how we’re doing these days.

In the circle way I’ve been taught, each of us may speak as long as needed or not speak at all in response to this question. There is no scrolling or shifting attention away to other things that continually distract us. We have one another’s effortful attention and are willing participants in mutual careful listening.

How I wish I had heard from each of you first. But alas, this is a reverie, and I can only imagine what I might share from my heart and spirit in response to yours.

Your eyes are on me, and I meet them for a moment, knowing it’s my turn. I then speak to the center of our circle … just as you have done.

I, too, am experiencing many painful emotions regarding what is happening in our world right now.

Idiomatic idiocy, oblivious brutality, cannibalistic consumerism, hyper-hypocrisy. I am a lover of words, and I catch myself playing with them.

Stupidity and cruelty are being combined, and deprived and enraged children tear apart our house, as they do all they can to resist growing forward. Materially, this means they are trying to take down pubic media, charge tariffs on movies made internationally, declare open season on public libraries, destroy the Civil Rights Act, dismantle health care for the poor and disabled… and much, much more to say here.

Yet I nonetheless continue to fervently believe, they are not the only ones who’ve set the house on fire.

The fire of our burning house has been fed continually by everyone, all of us, from ancient times. Whoever has attempted to extinguish it at any particular time, including this one, steps up behind generations of ancestors who’ve failed.

Now the stakes behind these failures have skyrocketed. We are entirely responsible to create proactive change or to allow what is occurring to grow and fester into annihilation.

Efforts to stop our house from finally burning down once and for all will most certainly be countered by our own human family’s ignorance and fear. These relatives who once bristled at characterizations of their ideologies as “deplorable,” now fund and champion the re-empowering of racism, xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, and eugenics, alongside the ascendancy of Christian Nationalism, the single greatest threat to freedom and democracy I’ve seen in my lifetime.

Simultaneously, these relatives have taken down the funding of science responding to beyond-urgent issues like climate collapse and species extinction, erased initiatives seeking to strengthen equality and inclusion for all Americans, terminated services for the poor and disabled, turned off long-term funding to aid starving children and their families without warning, and cozied up to autocrats and dictators who imprison and assassinate their opponents, while mouthing and mimicking some of their same threats.

What here is not deplorable? In sum, these family relatives first embraced and now literally orchestrate an extinction threat to humanity. They are in this circle with us, despite what one might feel about it.

If I were to let my emotions prevail, I would mirror their behavior but from an opposing direction. I’d try to burn down what they seek to build just as they are doing to nearly all I believe in. This would be retaliatory, of course, which cues me to the insight that their destructive actions upon my desires likely have a similar origin. A deep desire to wrestle and fight against all they’re doing remains inside me, but with an exception - in their hatred, their antipathy, they don’t see me as related to them while I see them as related to me. If I give in to my own rage at what they believe and what they are trying to accomplish, I simply trade places with them. I, too, then become someone who acts in the world from a position of hate and malice.

I find some hope in realizing that it’s ignorance against which I’m truly struggling, but hope feels dangerous when ignorance looms so large. What I genuinely seek, whether within my immediate relationships or around the world, is unlikely to be achieved in my lifetime. If we seek to share in a responsibility for one another and for all life, both while we live and as a legacy after we die, then it really is impossible for someone who believes this way to feel abidingly comfortable or happy now.

I thoroughly condemn the propaganda that’s sullied “woke” as an undesirable quality when the core meaning of this concept is the sustaining of sensitivity, empathy, and compassion toward all people. And if you too are “awake,” you’ll realize the only means available for feeling “happy” now is obliviousness and a denial of reality - that is, asleep. As one officially-licensed to supposedly discern what’s needed to lessen personal suffering in this time, I assure you that neither the so-called mental health system nor its relevant philosophies hold any genuine solutions except waking up, understanding, and taking action in the world for oneself and others.

The mental health system worldwide is contaminated by the same pollutants of materialism, greed, selfishness, and radical individualism that exacerbate the suffering it’s supposed to mitigate. The biggest lie of the “human potential” movement - to which privileged and liberally-minded people often turn - is that psychotherapy and counseling, inspiring experiential immersion, drugs, or a yoga vacation in Bali will somehow deliver a sustained emotional state transcending the enhanced public visibility of human suffering. This is like Siddhartha before he left the palace to see the world for the first time. It’s the very height of contemporary naïveté. No, if you’re awake, you must see suffering, and if you are not awake, you simply don’t want to see or know.

Lessons bearing upon witnessing suffering and then understanding and acting to alleviate it have been offered for millennia by uniquely gifted Teachers emerging at many times and places and within all cultures.

Verily, we admonish the servants in these days wherein the face of justice has become clouded with dust, the cheeks of ignorance brightened and illumined, the shame of the mind manifested, repose and faithfulness have disappeared, while calamities and afflictions have prevailed, covenants have been violated and promises broken. In these days people have become ignorant, unable to distinguish between that which opens their eyes, and that which blinds them, that which leads them astray, and that which guides them into the right path. ~ Bahá'í Faith, Bahá’u’lláh, Tablet of Wisdom

For some years now, when I get up in the morning, I spend whatever time I’m able before starting my work studying the teachings of many spiritual traditions. As a Bahá'í, this is a “suggested” practice, but I did this often before I formally joined my faith. And lately, if I’m unable to do this for some reason, I feel lost throughout the day.

It appears this has become my own best medicine for these times, and I now recommend it to you.

As to the goal of such a discipline, I’m no longer interested in achieving happiness, or even contentment (which was my second choice), when my eyes are now wide open to the suffering of others. How could it be possible when I see what I see? I am instead interested in understanding and taking action and doing what I can to help while obtaining some capacity for retaining balance and calm as we live into the chaos that is now growing.

Sorrow is better than laughter; when the face is sad, the heart grows wise. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of merriment. ~ Judaism/Christianity, Ecclesiastes

I also feel I’m trying to adjust to what Vietnam veterans first referred to as a “moral injury.” Yes, of course, this moral injury I feel is much milder than that inflicted upon someone ordered to shoot anything that moves. But I do feel this type of injury growing in me by degrees each day - like death by a thousand cuts - witnessing the destruction of what little progress was ever made prior to now toward a just society from a position of relative privilege.

I also feel complicit if I don’t respond, which is a significant motive in having created this substack blog. And I feel anyone who believes in trying to take concerted action can expect to be targeted for disrespect, social diminishment, and potentially much worse by those in power. But such an experience teaches me something visceral about what others less privileged than me have felt far more intensely for centuries, and I’m all the more impressed by their self-control as my own encounters with my “lower self” are continually evoked by current events.

This “lower self” I distinguish in me has nothing to do with some presumed “animal nature” - an everyday English-language analogy - people behaving like animals, acting like rats, bitches or dogs, people acting like sheep or snakes or lizards, etc.

I consider this kind of vernacular an insult to animals.

We are brothers and sisters with all living things on this earth. All the animals and fish and birds have red blood just like we do, they breathe the same air that we breathe, they drink the same water that we drink. That’s why we call them our relatives. ~ Allen Pinkham (Nez Perce)

Animals don’t try to annihilate one another. Mother bear doesn’t sleep in her own sewage or permit her cubs to do so. A female lion won’t kill a mother lion’s young, even if a male might kill a young male to enhance his mating opportunity.

It does, however, appear that while those in power are willing to abandon a national weather service, a mother dog truly will nurse six pups through a snow storm. And rats do, apparently, value empathy significantly more than Christian Nationalists. Animals also don’t create tools to threaten, wound, or kill one another or take one another’s territory or destroy their food source, habitat, or future survival.

Despite ongoing debate about human free will and agency versus a (greatly flawed) mechanistic, reductionist view that our behavior is predetermined by instincts, chemistry, and neural firing, most of us may at least admit we have far more capacity to reason and choose what happens within and to us and all life in this world than do our animal relatives. This is a unique gift, and perhaps also a curse, in being human.

And yet recent events only further demonstrate how we continually blow up our reasoning and choose to burn our house down instead. And where might we turn?

Many human beings have grown jaded, suspicious, and often refuse to listen to and to implement in their lives the wisdom of our Most Inspiring Teachers from throughout history. This is understandable given the twisting and perversion human beings have often undertaken with such teachings so as to serve their “lower selves.” But it is also a tragedy. . .

This earth is the honey of all beings, and all beings are honey for this earth… Truth is the honey of all beings, and all beings are honey for truth… Humanity is the honey of all beings, and all beings are honey for humanity… The Self is the honey of all beings, and all beings are honey for the Self… This Self is indeed the Lord of all contingent beings… It is tens and thousands, many and infinite. This is Brahman, without an earlier or a later, without inside or outside. This Self is Brahman, all-experiencing. Such is the teaching. ~ Hindu Faith, Brithadaranyaka Upanishad

I conceive of evil, inequity, injustice, and oppression simply as the Absence-of-the-Good. They have been resurgent throughout time, and we are responsible for their flux. They are like a dis-ease vacillating from dormancy to virulence over and over due to our ongoing refusal to benefit from received Teachings, and to learn and act to ameliorate our own ignorance and replace it with justice.

By way of example, here we are now in 2025, and Israel is attempting to starve the people of Gaza so as to compel Hamas into submitting to its ceasefire demands. Palestinian civilian deaths at Gaza have now reached 50,000. Yet we can rewind to 1973, and witness Henry Kissinger ordering the last of 3875 “carpet bombings” of Cambodia (“anything that flies, anything that moves, you got that?”) so as to kill enough people to force the North Vietnamese to reengage at the Paris peace table. Cambodian civilian deaths were estimated at 150,000 back then.

Behind these contrasts, an undeniable war monger nation appears as the United States . . . and so the ongoing struggle in our national politics certainly has meaning - but it is also contrived and spun- forcefed into a box of “left” versus “right” instead of into its proper position as a moral injury shared by anyone horrified at the mass murder of sacred human beings.

There are many other nations with similar leadership proclivities that make life cheap. The UK, for example, continues to support Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame, who, through the Rwandan Patritiotic Front (RPF), “manufactured the rebellion” of the First Congo War that led to the deaths of six (6) million people by 2006. That’s a war tragedy that has too much blackness to draw the Western media, but these are the same sacred lives. In his rigging of elections, imprisonment of opponents, and assassinations, Kagame bears much resemblance to Vladimir Putin - for whom he’s supplied mercenaries - while nonetheless being considered a “go-to” for supplying the United Nations’ “peacekeepers.”

There’s clearly enough hypocrisy to go around. Despite its tacit support of Ukraine and an embargo against Russian oil imports, a loophole remains active for the UK’s indirect funding of Russian warmaking by purchasing aviation fuel that’s refined in third nations. And a similar strategy is happening all across the European Union as well. Xi stands by, Taiwan in his sights.

Rather than a national affliction, then, isn’t it, more precisely, a mentality, a perversity, an infection of moral reasoning and accountability to which many groups of humans become susceptible when provided with the reigns of great power, especially the power to dominate others?

One who, while himself seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other beings who also desire happiness, will not attain happiness hereafter. ~ Buddha, Dharmapada

If, in some grandiose fantasy, I were to try to persuade adherents of Christian Nationalism as to the evil within their works on grounds of their selected spiritual teachings, it’d be futile because it isn’t some version of Christianity I’m challenging. It is instead the death of love, strangled by a sociopathic ideology using the word “Christian” alongside the intoxication of power, hate, and a rejection of human life and value.

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. ~ Christianity, John 4:8

But this too is not new. Use of the word “Christian” as a rallying cry to mask violent domination and murder around the world has been at play since Jesus was first nailed to the cross - as my colleague and good friend, Steven Newcomb (Shawnee-Lenape), has so astutely demonstrated.

Neither in the sky nor in mid-ocean, nor by entering into mountain clefts, nowhere in the world is there a place where one may escape from the results of evil deeds. ~ Buddha, Dharmapada

Thus, we humans have made this a world obviously far more interdependent than ever before, but within which amoral leaders beholding mostly to obscenely wealthy interests will violently resist attending to wider human needs for basic survival, let alone human thriving.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, concretizing rageful impulses into violent revolution against such leaders risks a massive increase in suffering while playing into a game they better understand and for which they possess vastly more resources.

Yet history doesn’t only teach dark lessons. Empires have crumbled and societies have been reborn in better directions in response to the proliferation of wise spiritual teachings.

Unfortunately, the process has typically included war, oppression, domination, and injustice in the same mix. Witness the obvious in the Roman Empire incorporating the influence of Christianity, Islam’s effects on the Arab Caliphates, Buddhism entering the Indian subcontinent, Tang Dynasty, and Mongol Empire, Protestantism and the Holy Roman Church, and Shinto and the Meiji Restoration.

On this continent, among the Maya, accommodation of Toltec belief systems radically altered cultural behavior and increased cohesion. Similarly, the Incas instituting of worship of Inti, the Sun God, increased cultural unity and created expansion. But such eras have not occurred typically without a degree of social upheaval, oppression, death, and suffering.

I believe we now live in far different times, times wherein we must unify the people of the world intentionally, nonviolently, consultatively, through consensus and shared will - rather than by coercion to imposed fanatical doctrines - if we are to survive as a species the meta-crisis of climate change, species extinction, autocracy, wealth inequality, pandemics, racism and land injustice.

Toward such a monumental task of like-minded communities of people, Bahá'ís are taught to offer certain spiritual ideas and solutions. And so this offering about my own contemplation shared inside our imagined circle now comes to a close with quotations from several traditions and the fervent hope that you may ponder them in a manner that deepens the unity of our hearts and spirits.

I begin with a metaphor from my own faith’s teachings within which the Earth challenges us to consider her humility as superior to our own:

I am to be preferred above you. For witness, how patient I am in bearing the burden which the husbandman layeth upon me. I am the instrument that continually imparteth unto all beings the blessings with which He Who is the Source of all grace hath entrusted me. Notwithstanding the honor conferred upon me, and the unnumbered evidences of my wealth, a wealth that supplieth the needs of all creation, behold the measure of my humility, witness with what absolute submissiveness I allow myself to be trodden beneath the feet of men . . . ~ Bahá'í Faith, Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh

I’m so aware that this sort of teaching isn’t “owned” by followers of my particular faith …

God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it. ~ Judaism/Christianity, Genesis 2:15

The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it. ~ Judaism/Christianity, Psalm 24:1

And while we may not jibe on being “fallen” from some long lost Paradise, we likely concur about egoistic self-concerns distracting us from our true purpose.

Those of low estate are but a breath; those of high estate are a delusion; in the balances they go up; they are together lighter than a breath. ~ Judaism/Christianity Psalms 62:9

As to trying to find some balance with the adversities and cruelties of our times, I leave you with these other beautiful Teachings to meditate on in your own time and your own way.

Those who see all creatures within themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no fear.
Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no grief.
How can the multiplicity of life
Delude the one who sees its unity?
~ Hindu Faith, Isha Upanishad

Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. ~ Judaism/Christianity, Ephesians 5: 15-16

For those who live magnanimously the entire world constitutes but a family. Therefore, resort to a status free from all considerations of empirical life, beyond old age and death, which are all mental constructions and are extinguished and where no attachments can be lodged and sustained. ~ Hindu Faith, Maha Upanishad

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of your Creator, what is good and acceptable and perfect. ~ Christianity, Romans 12:2

Kupotea njia ndio kujua njia - “To get lost is to find the way” ~ Swahili Proverb.

Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, and please the widow’s cause… ~ Judaism/Christianity Isaiah 1:17

Do not make light of your failings,
Saying, “What are they to me?”
A jug fills drop by drop.
So the fool becomes brimful of folly.
Do not belittle your virtues,
Saying, “They are nothing.”
A jug fills drop by drop.
So the wise one becomes brimful of virtue.
~ Buddha, Dhammapada

The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. ~ Christianity, Luke 17:21

Do no mischief on the earth, after it hath been set in order, but call on Allah with fear and longing (in your hearts): for the Mercy of Allah is (always) near to those who do good. ~ Islam, The Quran

Now in turn, the other, my third saying, ‘Now it is arriving, the Peace,’ this means that everyone will become related, men and also women, and also the young people and the children, and when all are relatives, every nation, then there will be peace as they roam about by day and also by night. Now, also, it will become possible for them to assemble in meetings. Then there will be truthfulness, and they will uphold hope and charity, so that it is peace that will unite all the people, indeed, it will be as though they have but one mind, and they are a single person with only one body and one head and one life, which means that there will be unity. Moreover, and most importantly, one is going to assembly in meetings where it will be announced that all of mankind will repent of their sins, even evil people, and in the future, they will be kind to one another, one and all. When they are functioning, the Good Message and also the Power and the Peace, moreover, these will be the principal things everybody will live by; these will be the great values among the people. ~Deganawida, The Peacemaker (Haudenasaunee), The Great Law of Peace

Be generous in prosperity, and thankful in adversity. Be worthy of the trust of thy neighbor, and look upon him with a bright and friendly face. Be a treasure to the poor, an admonisher to the rich, an answerer of the cry of the needy, a preserver of the sanctity of thy pledge. Be fair in thy judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be unjust to no man, and show all meekness to all men. Be as a lamp unto them that walk in darkness, a joy to the sorrowful, a sea for the thirsty, a haven for the distressed, an upholder and defender of the victim of oppression. Let integrity and uprightness distinguish all thine acts. Be a home for the stranger, a balm to the suffering, a tower of strength for the fugitive. Be eyes to the blind, and a guiding light unto the feet of the erring. Be an ornament to the countenance of truth, a crown to the brow of fidelity, a pillar of the temple of righteousness, a breath of life to the body of mankind, an ensign of the hosts of justice, a luminary above the horizon of virtue, a dew to the soil of the human heart, an ark on the ocean of knowledge, a sun in the heaven of bounty, a gem on the diadem of wisdom, a shining light in the firmament of thy generation, a fruit upon the tree of humility. ~ Bahá'í Faith, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh

T H E  S U B S T A N T I A L  P R E S E N C E  T E S T

(a poem using words of
the U.S. federal government and 
the foundation of heritage 
except for a few words
in parentheses added for clarity . . . 

this poem is meant 
to be read with authority and 
with emphasis included 
while standing preferably 
with right hand over heart and
before persons who are
at the least substantially present)

“TO BE CLEAR: 

If you are an

ALIEN, 

BEING 

In the United States 
Is a privilege,
Not a right.”

(an ICE official
said, coldly)

AND AN 

ALIEN 

Is an INDIVIDUAL 

Who is NOT 

A U.S. CITIZEN

AND is NOT 

A U.S. NATIONAL

AND A U.S. NATIONAL 

Is an INDIVIDUAL 

who is NOT A U.S. CITIZEN

BUT WHO 

OWES permanent allegiance 

To the United States OF AMERICA.

And ONE

WHO owes a permanent allegiance 

To the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

I   S.   A. 

P   E   R   S   O   N. 

WHO HAS TAKEN 

AN OATH OF NATURALIZATION

(which says)

I hereby declare, 

On oath, 

That I absolutely and entirely 

Renounce and abjure 

All allegiance and fidelity 

To any foreign prince, 
Potentate, state, or sovereignty, 
Of whom or which I have 
Heretofore been a subject or citizen.

That I will support and defend 

THE CONSTITUTION

and LAWS of 

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Against all enemies, 
foreign and domestic 

that I will bear true faith 
and allegiance to the same

that I will bear arms on behalf 
of the United States 

When required by the law.

that I will perform 
noncombatant service 
in the Armed Forces of the United States 

When required by the law.

that I will perform work of 
National Importance 

Under Civilian Direction 

When required by the LAW.

And that I take this 

Obligation 

Freely, 

Without 

Any mental reservation 

Or purpose of evasion

So HELP ME

GOD.

(and)

(The FOUNDATION
Of heritage says)

U N 
A L I E N 
A B L E

R I G H T S

(Include)

the freedom to practice 
any religion you choose, 
to speak your mind, 
to petition the government 
to change the law, 
to be free from unreasonable 
searches and seizures, 
to bear arms, 
to have a fair trial, 
and to be free from 
cruel and unusual punishments 

(and)

The Bill of Rights guarantees 
those rights for 
each and every individual, 
EVEN IF 
the government 
or a majority of the people 
might wish to deny 
those rights 
to Someone.

(and)

(the foundation of
HERITAGE declares
that States should 
make a law
that says)

No agency
department
county
city
unit of local government
or political subdivision 
of this state may 
use or allocate 
any funds
or provide 
any other form 
of assistance
to any legal defense fund 
for the representation of 

A L I E N S 

unlawfully 

present in the United States

(and the federal government
proclaims that)

A nonresident ALIEN 

either has NOT passed 

The Substantial Presence Test 

Or does NOT have a Green Card.

(while)

A resident ALIEN has a Green Card 

Or has passed 

The Substantial Presence Test.

(And here is)

:THE SUBSTANTIAL PRESENCE TEST:

If you are present in the U.S. for 31 consecutive days 

In this calendar year 

AND you were present in the U.S. 

For 183 days over the last three years 

(and) 

You were present at least one-third of those days 

In the year prior to this calendar year

(and)

You were present one-sixth of the days 

In the year two years prior to this calendar year . . . 

You have MET

THE SUBSTANTIAL PRESENCE TEST . . .

(unless. . .)

You are an EXEMPT INDIVIDUAL 

Such as:

A foreign 
government-related 
individual 

Under an A or G visa (but) not an A-3 or G-5 class visa

A teacher or teacher-trainee under a J or K visa 

Who is 

SUBSTANTIALLY

Complying with the terms of your visa.

A student under a F, J, Q or M visa who is

SUBSTANTIALLY

Complying with your visa terms.

(OR)

A professional athlete in the U.S. to play at 

A CHARITABLE SPORTS EVENT.

(and)

If you are an EXEMPT INDIVIDUAL

YOU MAY NOT COUNT THE DAYS 

YOU WERE EXEMPT 

TOWARDS THE DAYS 

YOU ARE COUNTING FOR

THE   SUBSTANTIAL   PRESENCE   TEST

AND

IF YOU DO NOT

HAVE A GREEN CARD

OR HAVE 

NOT PASSED

T H E   
S U B S T A N T I A L   
P R E S E N C E   
T E S T

YOU ARE 

A   L   I   E   N

(notwithstanding you are
tired, hungry, or huddled)